Race, Law, and the Built Environment

Catalog description

This course examines the relationship between space, race, and law in American history. In the process, it folds familiar events including the police shootings of the twenty-first century, Jim Crow schools and neighborhoods in the twentieth century, and the brutal slave order that preceded them into a larger story about how we created and defined the spaces of America. In order to tell this story, we will interpret space broadly, as the built environment, as landscapes, as city spaces, as county, state and national geographies. We will interpret race as Black or African American, as persons of African descent. Finally, we will interpret law as cases and statutes, but also as policy and as popular action ranging from the violence perpetrated by mobs to the exclusion enacted by individuals. We will read court cases, primary accounts, and historical overviews that will help to frame critical questions about mobility and settlement, neighborhoods and housing, and city life and civil rights that deepen our understanding of the relationship between race, law, and the spaces of America. While this class deals with critical issues about race and the built environment, it also engages fundamental questions about law, and invites students to think about the relationship between law and society, how legal principles play out in everyday life, the source of law, and the power to enforce law. Finally, it asks us to visit our own values and contradictions, to question how we build and occupy cities, and to examine why our commitments to inclusion and our practices of racial separation are so out of line with each other.