The course will examine the development of an intellectual group in African American life from the 18th century to the present. Implicit in the examination is consideration of the social and cultural roles, writers, scholars, artists, and other thinkers have played in American and African American culture.

Identity cleavages, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, religion, language, caste, or some other social grouping, form the most visible and durable fissures in human societies. Although the most salient cleavage differs from society to society (caste being more salient in India, and the Catholic/Protestant divide in Northern Ireland, to take two examples), virtually every known human society is fractured or starkly divided across identity boundaries. Many societies are divided upon multiple dimensions of difference. This course explores this problem, denoted as “othering,” the processes that engender inter-group inequality, group-based marginalization, dehumanization, stigmatization and prejudice. Although typically addressed as distinct concerns, this course connects social group identity formation to these broader processes of othering. This leads to many counter-intuitive propositions that will be advanced and developed throughout this course, including the contention that social group identities are a byproduct of othering processes, and that stigma and prejudice are a byproduct -- rather than the cause -- of othering. In some ways the opposite is true, that othering is the by product of belonging. The implications of these claims are profound in terms of remediation, intervention, and policy.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.