History: Interracial Activism in the US

Topics examining the experiences of Black people in the United States and/or its colonial antecedents. Representative topics: African-American History to 1865; African-American History since 1865. May be repeated for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Prerequisite: Three hours of History.

Prerequisite: three hours History PACE students by permission and override

On June 2, 2020, social media users were met with a sea of black boxes as they scrolled platforms like Instagram and Twitter. #BlackoutTuesday, initially started by Black women in the music industry, was meant to bring awareness to the horrific murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. However, the (mis)use of the campaign was met with criticism as the black boxes obscured important information needed by activists, organizers and demonstrators, and because merely posting a black box on social media allowed brands to signal allyship and solidarity with minimal risk to their image and brand. Since then, there has been fervent interest in understanding what allyship looks like in the ongoing movement for Black Freedom. But what does it actually look like to build alliances and work for racial justice across race and class? Are genuine, nonexploitative partnerships across differences even possible? This course uses history as a guide to examine the successes, failures, and ambivalent outcomes of interracial participation and collaboration in racial justice struggles in the United States. Gender and sexuality are essential components of the course as such identity markers and experiences have fostered and fractured interracial alliances over the past two centuries, particularly during the women’s suffrage movement with the passage of the 19th Amendment and Civil Rights struggles of the mid-twentieth century. Spanning from the Antislavery Movement to Black Lives Matter, the course will explore the possibilities and challenges of interracial activism and probe tensions of sympathy, empathy, and paternalism that plague interactions in racial and social justice work. Prerequisite: Three credits History Concentration: The Americas (HI05)