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.