In Souls of the Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois famously observed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line" (xxx). A few of years before the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Michelle Alexander observed that "more African American adults are under correctional control today - in prison or jail, on probation or parole - than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began" (The New Jim Crow, 2010, 224).
Taking its cues from W.E.B. DuBois' and Alexander's observations, this seminar will examine legal, political, and cultural concepts that have defined "race" in the U.S. in the past; it will explore how these concepts continue to impact American culture and African American identity in contemporary U.S. culture and politics.
In this seminar we will research famous court cases and their media reports (such as the Rhinelander case, 1925, or Loving v. Virginia, 1967, People v. OJ Simpson, 1994, State of Florida v. George Zimmerman, 2012). We will look at famous historical incidents of black and white relationships (such as Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his slave Sally Hemings), we will examine contemporary cultural (mis)representations of multiracial identity (e.g. The Rachel Divide, 2018). When put in an international perspective, legal principles for racial classifications like the "one drop rule" and social phenomena like passing (for white) draw attention to the fact that white America's preoccupation with "miscegenation" and the fear of blurring racial boundaries are almost unique U.S. phenomena. We will thus also look at American notions of "race" from a transnational perspective by examining works from South Africa (e.g. Trevor Noah's Born a Crime, 2016), Germany (e.g. Mo Asumang's Mo und die Arier, 2016), and Great Britain (e.g. David Olusoga's Black and British, 2016). All course materials will be available on GRIPS.
Course requirement: oral presentation