In this course, students use intersectionality theories to critically analyze scholarly and activist writings that expose and interrogate the spectrum of legal and extralegal individual, collective, and institutional anti-black violence in the United States from slavery to the present. Students also investigate dominant narratives on blackness, whiteness, and white terrorist violence in print media, such as post-Civil War era lynching photographs and lynching advertisements, and eyewitness video footage and television news reports on police violence targeting blacks from the 1960s to 2016. The discourses of marginalized and traditionally unheard voices critique and challenge the implicitly and explicitly gendered, classed, and sexualized racist discourses that animate, perpetuate, and justify anti-black violence in particular, and intersecting structural racism in general. Students will leave the course with an understanding that racist violence is historical (or deeply rooted in the past), ongoing, ideologically-premised, institutionalized, and fundamentally enmeshed with multiple oppressions, including sexism, classism, heterosexism, and cissexism; therefore, effective antiracist activist responses to anti-black violence must be intersectional and inclusive. This course supports students’ work to become effective social work practitioners attentive to the ways in which the historical, convergent dynamics of race and racism, class and classism, sexuality and heterosexism, gender and cissexism, and violence might influence their engagement with the individuals, communities, and institutions they encounter in the field. The course also supports student efforts to integrate intersectional anti-racist politics into their clinical practices.
- Instructor: Leigh-Anne Francis