CHIC1915: What is Ethnic Studies? Decolonizing Ideas, History and Our Schools

This course seeks to act as a site in which open honest dialogue can take place regarding our shared stake in a multiracial society. This course will study race and ethnicity in order to rethink foundational ideas, histories, and movements in United States society and beyond. An overriding theme of the course will be an examination of how power relations are constructed through racism and its tie to colonialism; and conversely, how racialized communities--particularly African American, Latin@/e, Asian American, and American Indian--are sites of survival and resistance. Therefore, a guiding question that we will explore and discuss collectively will be what role has/does race play in re-creating unequal and hierarchical social arrangements in U.S. society?Understanding that the practice of race is not a series of isolated events, but an institutional phenomenon that works on a societal level, we will ask further, what purposes has/is race used for? To what ends has race been applied to ascertain who has access to resources, who works where, and who is a legitimate member of U.S. society?Indeed, a number of scholars agree that race has been and continues to be used to maintain or reconstruct an unequal society, for the benefit of particular interests, in the form of systematic oppression, but Ethnic Studies scholars have also ascertained that Black, Indigenous, and brown communities have also responded to racial oppression in a myriad of ways and a diversity of peoples have challenged institutional and everyday racism. In light of this we will also ask, how have colonized people and their allies challenged, resisted, and accommodated racial oppression in U.S. society?In particular, the class will close out considering the movement for Ethnic Studies in the K-12 school system across the U.S. and the ways in which it does not only seek to add new voices and perspectives, but to rethink the approach to education generally as a transformative process. All in all, this course will analyze race and ethnicity to question and collectively address the limits and possibilities of a democratic society and seek to propose alternative practices that might make our society more democratic and egalitarian. Indeed, another emphasis of this course in regards to the larger inquire of democratic practice will be how racial and ethnic identities and social forces intersect with other categories such as class, gender, sexuality, and nationality. In these ways it is in the hope that students use these themes as a window into thinking critically about our society so that we might determine our own position in order to contribute to on-going struggles for a better world.

View on University Catalog