Race, Law, and College Admissions

Catalog description

This course explores the intersection of race and racism with legal precedent and its impact on college admissions practices today. The course introduces the social construct of race, particularly in the Black/White binary as it relates to African-descended people and how American policies and laws were shaped to embrace this social construct and maintain the economic benefit of chattel slavery. The course examines several landmark U.S. Supreme court cases that have interpreted the status and rights of African descended people in the context of equal protection and the evolution of the Court's jurisprudence as it tracked with the sociopolitical waves of the time. The course also explores how the Court's jurisprudence pivoted from the concepts of affirmative action, which was designed to redress the impact of legal oppression and the denial of equal protection for African-descended people, to a jurisprudence of diversity.