Race, Place, and Space

Catalog description

In this course, our collective aims are to understand race as a dynamic social and political construct that evolves through time and space and to recognize how race as a social construct relates to social stratification, intergroup and intragroup relations, and economic and political hierarchies within U.S. society. The general purpose of this course is to introduce you to the study of race within the contemporary U.S. context and to provide a better understanding of how and why race continues to be such a powerful stratifying agent. We will explore the enduring persistence of racism and discrimination across Space and Place and how race as an ascribed, master status remains a key organizing principle in American society. We will focus on the power of Place as intrinsically linked to the social significance of race, racial identity, and racism for several underrepresented racial minority groups including Blacks, Indigenous Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans; we will study how race affects these groups in different ways based on their historical and present-day positions within the racial hierarchy. For the purposes of this class, Place is defined as the permanent physical locations we inhabit throughout the life course and become socialized within including the family, school, neighborhood, and work. We will also explore in-depth the power of Space as those indefinite, liminal locations individuals construct and traverse daily based on their racial vantage points and interpretations of race as a significant factor in their upbringing, attitudes, worldview, and experiences as social and numerical minorities. To that end, we will explore how race and competing intersectional social identities such as gender, sexuality, social class, nativity, skin color and generational status affect individuals’ worldviews, racial consciousness, and self-concept, as well as their…