Black Political Thought.

Catalog description

What is “freedom”? What is “justice”? What role do politics, law, economics, faith, and ethics play in securing freedom and justice? How do the interrelated nature of social identities such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality reflect important elements in calls for freedom and justice? In this course, we will seriously consider—from a distinctly Christian perspective—how key authors like Douglass, Jacobs, Wells, Washington, DuBois, and Davis (among others) have answered these questions and the degree to which we might find these arguments persuasive (or not) as they bear both on Christian faith/practice as well as on the world. Through dialogue and writing, students will develop their ability to compare and critically (though charitably) assess disparate articulations of the relationship between domination, freedom, and justice in the history of black political thought, from the 18th century to the present. In so doing, students will cultivate a nuanced view of Black diasporic thought—both within and outside of the global church—as well as formulate their own political and philosophical opinions on the varied, and often contradicting, visions for how politics might secure conditions of freedom and justice in the modern world.