AMST 203 - Race, Ethnicity and Politics

This intermediate course offers an analysis of racial and ethnic factors and their implications for political processes and public policy. We begin by exploring the political history of whiteness. Our point of departure will be David R. Roediger’s text (2005), “Working Toward Whiteness, How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs.” We will examine how “race” has been at the core of civic assimilation. This course will focus on post-1960 American and the Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow Power Movements. We will end with an analysis of conservative people of color and their counterparts in the dominant culture, and their movement to resist identity politics in the 1990s and the turn of the 21st Century. Alternate years. (4 Credits)