HIST1917: Racism, Anti-Racism, and the American Dream

Is racism integral, or antithetical, to the American dream? To what degree has its promise of freedom and prosperity rested on the exclusion of Indigenous, Black and other People of Color from those opportunities? Have white Americans achieved its promise of freedom and prosperity at the expense of others? Or, has the dream been perverted by the exclusion of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to what Martin Luther King described as "a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity"? Moreover, to what extent have Americans resisted their exclusion or the exclusion of others from the promise of the Dream? Given that in the contemporary moment, inequality in the US has surpassed that of the Great Depression, what do these fractures and contestations in the American Dream mean for a larger society experiencing rampant precarity writ large? This pair of seminars (ANTH 1917 and HIST 1917) explores these questions in dialogue, occasionally meeting together and with a larger group of seminars connected to the College of Liberal Arts's Living and Learning in the Land of 10,000 Perspectives? Civic Readiness Initiative. We believe that this cross-fertilization is critical because the fault-lines of inequality have precisely cohered to these structural formations and categories of analysis, i.e. race and racism. Moreover, an interdisciplinary approach (through anthropology and history) is crucial for examining the contested nature, historical contexts, and contemporary investments of the American Dream.

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