Meetings: Mondays 18:00-20:00 in Periods C and D (once every 2 weeks)
Place: Padualaan 97, classroom to be announced
Teacher: Tomas Pollard, tomas.pollard@hu.nl
Adding to a series of studies on systematic and institutional racism, The Sum of Us (2021) by Heather McGhee provides an in-depth look at the economic damage and other losses caused by racism due to underdeveloped talent and potential jobs and industries that could have been created in a racially just society. McGhee’s work combines social history with demographic data to produce a more textured look at racism in the US economy. After a look at the past, McGhee sketches a new racially aware and appreciative future of multiracial solidarity that creates more wealth and opportunity for all.
Here are some questions that will be explored during the course:
- What are the social and economic costs of racism? How can these costs and the potential benefits of a more racially just society be measured?
- How is racial identity connected to class and educational and economic opportunity in the US?
- Why does the US economy and government often fail Black Americans?
- What is the value of racial identity, and how have thinkers discussed racial visibility and invisibility? Should we aim to be racially blind or racially aware?
- Can cities and societies be set up to limit opportunity by race? Can social and legal obstacles be located and undone to include everyone fairly?
- What does a racially just society look like? What are the signs that it is appearing or disappearing?
Materials: The Sum of Us: What Racism costs Everyone and how we can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee. One copy in library.
Testing: You will ask a few questions about race in America and try to answer them using academic and government sources. You will explore one or more issues in a 10-to-15 minute presentation, a 1000-1500 word research paper, or another agreed-upon product.
For more info, email Tomas Pollard, tomas.pollard@hu.nl.
Sign up for Research Topics in American Studies (OHON-RTAS-18) for the test in period D to take this course.
The course description is on Osiris in English and Dutch.
Quotes on Race in America
Barrack Obama in “A More Perfect Union” in 2008:
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible….
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 speech to Southern Christian Leadership Conference:
“One day we must ask the question, “What are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.”
Jay Caspian Kang in “School Inequality isn’t always just Black and White”,
New York Times editorial, March 2022:
“A public school district that provides an equal opportunity for education for all its children is an unassailable goal that requires communal buy-in. Everyone wants to believe that education shouldn’t be a zero-sum game, but as with so many instances of constrained resources, this is the reality. If every frustrated parent can find a charter school… to take his or her child, is a robust, equitable school system possible?
I believe that integrated schools are the key to an egalitarian society and should be the top priority of any progressive politics. Nearly 70 years have passed since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and we still have schools like [the underperforming] Westlake [in Oakland with mostly minority students] sitting less than two miles away from schools like [the high quality] Wildwood [in Piedmont with mostly white students]. This is not lost on many of Piedmont’s more liberal residents who support the integration plan. But if any gains in Piedmont lead to losses in Oakland, is partial integration, however admirable in its intentions, really a worthwhile goal?”