Reading & Composition

The questions that we’ll take up in this R1A course are: what do we gain from learning about white privilege and experience from the perspective of both ethnic-minority and white writers and thinkers? What do these different perspectives reveal about racial privilege in the contemporary United States, as simultaneously lived and structural, explicit and implicit? Scholars consider these questions from many different disciplinary perspectives: history, sociology, ethnic studies, and education, to name just a few. We will spend a lot of time reading about whiteness in these different fields, and considering the questions they attempt to answer. How did the idea of a white race even come to exist, when “whites” are a group of people from many different ethnicities and social classes? How and why do people continue to identify as “white”? How do People of Color experience whiteness, and how do whites of different backgrounds experience their relationship to People of Color? Last but not least, how can educators and activists challenge the power that whiteness continues to hold as a social category?

Because ours is an English course, we will also examine how several works of literature and film confront whiteness. How is it represented? Do these works of art reinforce or challenge the privileged place that whites occupy in our culture? Does literature have a particular role to play in exposing the socially constructed nature of whiteness? In imagining ways to overcome it?

This is an R&C, writing-and-reading-intensive course, whose major goals are to improve
students’ skills in close reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing, and to explore the relationships between the three skills. A substantial amount of time will be devoted to writing workshops and instruction as we develop our critical reading and analytical writing skills. Students will be required to actively participate in class discussion, read (and reread) carefully, and write papers with revisions.