This course explores significant historical and contemporary issues as they relate to how race is formed through ideologies, structures, institutions, discourse, and representations in the United States. We will analyze theories, laws, lived experiences, statistics, and popular culture. We’ll analyze the process of racialization in a U.S. context – though subjugation, exclusion, forcible inclusion and well as movements for resistance, self-determination, and decolonization. During this course, we will take a relational and comparative approach, exploring how the experiences of various groups are mutually constitutive while being distinct from one another.

Students will be asked to contribute to an existing Wiki page (adding citations, adding a few sentences, or adding a new subsection). They will select a page based on a topic of their choosing as it relates to racial relations, how race is formed, or the experiences of communities of color in the U.S.