Afro-American Studies 293B - S-African Diaspora & War/Drugs

This course explores the decades-long drug prohibition campaign popularly known as the "War on Drugs." With the U.S. federal government regularly appropriating more than $50 million to this campaign, African Americans continue to find themselves disproportionately impacted by this regime of drug prohibition. Rather than remaining confined to the borders of the United States, this campaign, and its increasingly militarized operations, has over the past several decades spread throughout the Western hemisphere and, in doing so, directly impacted people of African descent throughout the Americas. By drawing on historical, biographical, and journalistic accounts of Black peoples' lived experiences, this course examines the elaboration of this campaign's military, institutional, legal and policy frameworks. It will consider various activities - including, but not limited to drug production, trafficking and consumption, as well as community organizing, human rights advocacy, and social movement building - by Black people not only in the U.S., but across North, Central, and South America, as well as the Caribbean basin. The Reagan era Drug Wars and the ongoing Opioid epidemic will be critical to this course, as they best highlight divergent strategies of law enforcement and public health responses to issues of drug use and addiction, as well as the roles of race, class, and gender in shaping these divergent responses. From here, this course will also explore various approaches to bringing about an end to the Drug Wars and remedying their impacts.