introduction

Race is a complicated and provocative concept, perhaps especially in the United States. It means many things to many people, evoking hundreds of years of inequality and oppression, systematic enslavement and violence, as well as the ongoing reality of everyday assumptions that some kinds of people are inferior, or more suspicious, than others. As a result, “race” inspires strong, highly personal—and visceral—reactions and emotions. 

But the problem with race—and the power of race—is that, even with all its complexity and controversy and history, it can be, and often is, reduced and simplified to a series of simple-seeming oppositions, including black/white, rich/poor, hardworking/lazy, non-European/European, etc. We learn these “opposites” at a young age—we see the same stories told again and again in Hollywood movies—and in the end, we think we somehow “get” race:  we “get” that we shouldn’t be racist; that “everyone is equal”; and we often come to believe that we aren’t really racist, but we might also believe that everyone is (a little bit) racist. We may even think that racism is inevitable, in one form or another.

This class intends to challenge much of what we have learned until now, whether through films about slavery; or high school classes about Martin Luther King; or from parents who told us that some races and ethnicities are harder working than others. It intends to provide historical context and studies of current national and global social contexts in order to deepen our understandings of what race is and how it works, in order widen our perspectives.

This class will argue that racism has, for decades, no longer only been predicated on violence, overt oppression, or discrimination based solely on skin color. Rather, racism today is much less obvious, taking a variety of elusive forms and pathways that allow us to believe and act as if “things are different today.” Our task in this course will be to think about what is often referred to as “new racism,” which identifies how enduring inequalities based on reductive assumptions about the meaning of outward signs of difference continue and proliferate. This class intends to demonstrate that racism is a still-powerful system of systematic discrimination, deprivation, and routinized disrespect, but which today is differently masked, unseen, or overlooked—hardly taking overt forms such as separate “white” and “colored” water fountains—but, in its more covert and diffuse forms and logics, every bit as powerful.

To get us to move beyond our grade-school and high-school assumptions about what race is and how it works, this course turns to the tools and research of anthropologists and allied human sciences. Most broadly defined, anthropology is the study of humans. In the first half of the course, we focus on biological anthropology and the “science” of race before moving to consider how unscientific ideas about race and evolution came to exist and take hold over the past few hundred years. The second half of the course focuses on cultural anthropologists who have conducted ethnographic fieldwork research in various areas of the world in order to understand how everyday people, in a variety of cultural contexts, grapple with human variations in physical appearance and outward signs of social difference.

By looking closely and comparatively at anthropological accounts of social life in Japan, Brazil, France, and the United States, we seek to grapple, fundamentally, with how humans conceive of and negotiate apparent sameness and difference—and why “race” remains such a slippery, powerful set of ideas—ones that extend well beyond skin color and which are, indeed, made to seem natural, inevitable, or invisible—keeping some people in positions of power and others power-less.

course description

From slavery both ancient and modern to “Islamic extremism,” from Nazi propaganda films to foreign-accented Disney villains, Western societies have repeatedly represented some group(s) of people as threats to civilization. This course will examine a wide range of representations of people and cultures in film, literature, scientific and legal writings, popular culture and artistic expression. What is behind this impulse to divide the world into "us" and "them"? How is it bound up with our understanding of race and racial difference? How are racism and racialization perpetuated through particular cultural and biological representations? And how are forms of race and racism shifting in the 21st century?

general education area learning goals: race & diversity

This course fulfills the Race & Diversity (GD) requirement for students under GenEd and Studies in Race (RS) for students under Core. Race & Diversity courses develop a sophisticated understanding of race and racism as dynamic concepts, pointing to the ways in which race intersects with other group identifications such as gender, class, ethnicity, religion, age, sexual orientation or disability.

Race & Diversity GenEd courses are intended, broadly, to teach students how to:

1) Recognize the ways in which race intersects with other group identifications or ascriptions: gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, disability, age

2) Understand the relationships among diversity, justice and power

3) Explore what it means for individuals and institutions to exist in a multi-racial, multicultural world

4) Investigate the various forms race and racism have taken in different paths and times

5) Discuss race matters with diverse others in relation to personal experience.

The Representing Race GenEd course is intended, specifically, to teach students how to:

1) Acquire an interdisciplinary framework for reading and understanding a multi-racial and multi-cultural world.

2) Recognize the inscription of racial stereotypes and assumptions in a variety of textual and visual representations.

3) Recognize mechanisms of othering, and understand their significance in Western constructions of selfhood.

4) Understand the interests and centers of power that are served by the construction of racial boundaries and racial hierarchies.

5) Understand the significance and implications of representing race as a biological phenomenon.

6) Develop an historical understanding of how discourses of race have changed over time.

7) Develop a comparative understanding of discourses of race in different cultures and geographical spaces.

8) Examine the ways in which racial categorization intersects with and reinforces other categories, such as gender, religion, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.

9) Demonstrate the ability to develop a sophisticated analysis of a variety of texts, and construct a sustained argument in writing.

10) Acquire the tools for a critical engagement with visual culture.

11) Gain skills and practice in conversation, and in both formal and informal oral presentations. 12) Develop familiarity with the scholarly and academic resources available to students at Temple, including contact with distinguished faculty.

13) Gain familiarity and experience with current scholarship in a particular field through contact with the producers of knowledge in that field.

expectations and assignments

At a minimum, students are asked

- to follow and complete class schedule/modules on Canvas

- to complete all reading assignments for the day they are assigned (approx. 2-3 hours/week)

- to avoid all cell phone use unless absolutely necessary while engaging with course material

This course asks students to consistently and closely engage with both written and audiovisual texts. You should plan to spend at least two hours a week on readings and assignments for this course. Midterm and final exams will test how closely you’ve consistently read, engaged with, and understood course texts. A short midterm paper and a 4-5 page final paper (on “trans-global representations of race”) will ask you to synthesize in a thesis-based way what we have learned across several weeks of readings. If you are unable to commit required time and effort for this course, you should consider dropping this class.

organization of the course

            This course is divided into two halves.  The first section provides an overview of histories and theories of race—an introduction to fundamental concepts and theoretical tools that we can use to think about what it means to argue that race is “culturally and socially constructed.” The second half of the course focuses on ethnography—anthropologists’ descriptions of everyday social contexts and how people interact in these places. We’ll read several excerpts from ethnographies that take up questions of race and other forms of outwardly signs of difference—and how people use these in making sense of themselves and others.  A last week will explore conclusions and provide review for the final exam.

students with disabilities

Students with disabilities should be in touch with Disability Resources and Services at Temple located at 100 Ritter Annex (004-03),
1301 Cecil B. Moore Avenue (www.temple.edu/studentaffairs/disability).  The Center can provide various accommodations for students, including for test taking.

writing center

If you think you may need extra help developing your writing this semester—or to improve your grades on the two papers—you should contact Temple’s Writing Center, located in the Tuttleman Learning Center, Suite 201.  You should be sure to get in touch with the Writing Center well before paper due dates.  For more on the Writing Center visit www.temple.edu/writingctr/

Plagiarism will absolutely not be tolerated and may result in failure of the course. For more on plagiarism please visit http://guides.temple.edu/content.php?pid=204288&sid=1731697

Regarding AI/chatGPT: This course is designed to prevent AI from being used in any substantial way. Although I cannot stop you from using chatGPT, papers will be scanned for AI. I will also compare your writing sample from week one to your later papers. If a paper is flagged for AI by scanning software, or papers do not reflect the original writing sample, I will ask that the student rewrite the paper, and may request that it be handwritten during class time. Other suspected instances of AI use will be considered on a case-by-case basis, but you use AI at the peril of my increased scrutiny of your work.

 

summary of grading

pre-reading responses (1.5 points x 10)                           15%

post-reading discussion responses (3 points x 10)          30%

midterm paper                                                                    10%

3 quizzes (3 points each)                                                   10%

2 video responses (2 x 10 points each)                            20%

final paper                                                                           15%

 

YOU CAN FIND ALL ARTICLES AND READINGS ON CANVAS.

PART I:  Foundations

In this section we seek to think about various definitions of “race”—how they have emerged historically and how racism continues to change.  We also mean to understand what it means to say that ideas about “race” are “socially constructed,”  “cultural” and “socialized,” as anthropologists use these words and concepts.

 

NOTE: readings listed are due on the DAY they are listed—in other words, if a reading is listed for Wednesday, August 29, you should have already read that assignment for discussion in class on that day.

 

Week 1:

Introductions

Tuesday, Jan. 14: 

• Welcome to the course
• Syllabus, mechanics, and requirements
• Initial (re)definitions of “race”: race isn’t real / race is real
• READING: Chapter 1, “Recognizing Race,” in J. Hartigan, Race in the 21^st Century (2010)
• Screening: Nina Jablonski TED lecture

 

Week 2:

Understanding why race is not a biological category or concept

• READING: “The Case Against Scientific Racism” from Rattansi, Ali, Racism: A Very Short Introduction (2007)
• READING: Chapter 3, “Race and Nature: Culture, Biology, and Genetics” in J. Hartigan, Race in the 21^st Century (2010)
• http://www.understandingrace.org/ especially the section “Human Variation”

 

Week 3:

The invention of race, part I:  The “backwards,” “simple,” and “primitive”

• READING: Tylor, Edward B. “The Science of Culture,” from Primitive Culture (1871)
• READING: Selections from the novel There There (2018)
• Screening: Cannibal Tours (Dennis O’Rourke, dir., 1988)

 

Week 4:

The invention of race, part II:  Colonialism

• READING: Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (1982): “Connections” and “Iberia”
• READING: Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (1982): “Slave Trade” and “Capitalism”

 

** MIDTERM PAPER ASSIGNED

 

Week 5:

The invention of race, part III:  Neo-colonialism and neoliberalism

• Chapters 1 and 2 from L. Kaifa Roland (2011). Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha
• Screening: Life and Debt (Stephanie Black,, 2001)

 

Week 6: 

 Structural racism

• Screening: Redlining video
• READING: Benjamin Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space: Concentrated Subprime Lending as Housing Discrimination,” in Race in an Era of Change
• Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?” in Race in an Era of Change