Black Studies 239 - Segregated America

(Offered as BLST 239 [US] and HIST 239 [US]).  This course will examine the practices, cultures, and consequences of racial segregation in the modern United States.  Beginning with the Jim Crow South, students will learn to interpret segregation not simply as a system of racial separation but as a critical site of political, economic, and psychological investment.  Two questions will animate this class:  how did segregation work and for whom, historically, did it work? In attempting to answer these questions, students will learn to see the ways in which a supposedly bygone institution has continued to profoundly shape the nature and distribution of power in the United States.  Students will, for instance, ponder connections between the color line in the South and the history of red-lining in the urban North.  In doing so, this class will ask students to consider the ways in which southern history might be understood as national history, and the ways in which the presence of segregation remains central to the persistence of inequality in American life. 

Spring semester.  Visiting Lecturer Hickmott.