When asked to reflect on her own experiences as a political prisoner in relationship to her work as a “prison abolitionist” with Critical Resistance, Angela Davis comments, “The most important lessons emanating from those campaigns, we thought, demonstrate the need to examine the overall role of the prison system, especially its class and racial character. There was a relationship, as George Jackson had insisted, between the rising numbers of political prisoners, and the imprisonment of increasing numbers of poor people of color. If prison was the state-sanctioned destination for activists such as myself, it was also used as a surrogate solution to social problems associated with poverty and racism.” While speaking very directly to the prison system, her critical connections on an institution we commonly accept as a logical destination for those deemed as “criminal” offers a guiding framework for our survey course on “racial and ethnic groups in the United States.” As we think comparatively about the experiences of racial and ethnic groups, through themes relevant to the historical development of America (settler colonialism, slavery, immigration, labor, politics, community formation…) we seek to ask the type of questions demonstrated by Davis in her reflections on the prison in U.S. society. Instead of simply accepting institutions and ideologies as given, or the only ways to do things, the driving question of a course like ours is how can we learn from the movements that created Ethnic Studies (liberation movements of the 1960s) and envision a different reality.

This course provides students with the tools and historical background needed to engage in meaningful and informed debates about race, gender, legal status, crime and punishment. Central to this learning and analysis is the question, ‘how might we forge an abolition pedagogy’, and how has/can such pedagogy be formed in antiracist and feminist scholarship, grounded in domestic and transnational grassroots social movements? In addressing these, the course intimately links the community and the academy as sites of organizing and analysis in critical prison studies and abolition movements through a comparative racial-ethnic analysis.