Interdepartmental 102 - Thinking Through Race

This course offers an interdisciplinary, historical, critical examination of race in the United
States. Although race is no longer held by scientists to have any biological reality, it has
obviously played a central role in the formation of legal codes (from segregation to affirmative
action), definitions of citizenship, economics (from slavery to discriminatory loan arrangements),
culture (music, dance, literature, fashion), and identities. Where did the concept of race come
from? How has it changed over time and across space? What pressures does it continue to exert
on our lives? How does it intersect with other registers of identity like class, gender, sexuality,
and disability? By bringing together faculty from a variety of programs and disciplines, and by
looking at a range of cultural texts, visual images, and historical events where racial distinctions
and identities have been deployed, constructed and contested, we hope to give students an
understanding of how and why race matt