Duke's UNIV 101 course, The Invention and Consequences of Race, gathers momentum. We learn about the sociology of race and "immigrant whiteness," and how whiteness isn't a color, it's a social status that can be aspired to. Different groups, for example, both become and stop being white. How whiteness has a lot more to do with politics than skin color. And how the professors and the students feel the class is going, and how they chose to discuss or not discuss things.
Transcript of Episode 2
ACTUALITY
210831-000 2:36
I want you to take out your phones and text them, “Do you believe Pluto is a planet?”
[under]
TRACK
University101, the Invention and Consequences of Race, is back in session, and students are listening to Duke professor of Cultural Anthropology Lee Baker, telling them about what he calls the Anthropology of Race.
ACTUALITY
210831-000 0:54
look at sort of some of the ironies between race racism and democracy, particularly in sort of colonial, for former colonial countries that believe in equality, believe in justice, and believe, and, like freedom, but consistently articulate inequality, lack of freedom, and, and the like, and kind of as an anthropologist, looking at those contradictions, you can explain a lot about what is going on in a particular culture.
[UNDER]
TRACK
Baker explains what a social construct is. Like, for example, whether Pluto is a planet. Pluto is an object zipping through space, with mass and trajectory and velocity, that’s just fact. But whether it’s a planet? Like, versus an asteroid or a meteor or a comet? That’s invented: a planet is an invented notion. Like race. Or, say, civilization. European settlers deemed both African slaves and Native Americans “uncivilized,” which allowed the settlers basically to do anything they liked with them.
ACTUALITY
210831-000
102:21
So be part of their argument that we are civilized. They call themselves the five Civilized Tribes is they had a constitution. They were Christians, and they had slaves. So we’re as assimilated as anyone we should stay.
TRACK
If you can believe it, the European settlers didn’t think the Native Americans’ civilization meant they ought to be able to remain in their Southeastern homelands.
ACTUALITY
And they were like, No, it’s better for you. You’re not you savages. It’s better for you to be moved. So that was the good the rationalization both for slavery and Indian removal. There was this rationalization that because you’re savages being in contact with white people for slaves lifts you up and being removed, white people let you just do your thing, if you’re Native Americans.
TRACK
Useful things, these social constructs.
ACTUALITY
210831-000 9:42
social constructs also have to be durable, and believable. Right. And when I say durable, it’s sort of like it’s not just a fad or something went viral one time it has to be sort of grounded in history and there has to be sort of a genealogy to it, it has to be rooted in something.
TRACK
But defining civilization gets into the weeds, and Pluto is kind of distant. To further clarify a social construct professor Baker stays in the sky but shifts to something much more ordinary than Pluto.
ACTUALITY
210831-000 10;13
And this is one of my favorite examples because even though we know it’s not true, we still believe …when you are walking on the beach… and you’re taking a picture or your Facebook page, you’re not saying this is us as the Earth turns and goes into the shadow of the Earth, it will just say it’s the sunset, and they believe it’s a sunset and you’re not doing that third, fourth leap saying, Oh, the sun isn’t really setting the earth is turning.
it’s just easier. It’s less of a cognitive load. It’s what everyone says they kind of see it setting in kind of, like, you know, it’s not setting, but it kind of looks like it’s setting. So you just gonna like say sunset. And as part of the culture, right. So that is not that this is a type of social construct. I think that’s a beautiful example of it, because we all do it.
TRACK
If you look closely, even the sunset is a social construct. Helps put race into perspective.
MUSIC UP THEN UNDER
TRACK
Hi. you’re listening to The Race Course, a podcast from Duke Magazine. I’m senior writer Scott Huler. And we sat in all term on University101: The Invention and Consequences of Race, the class Duke created as part of its commitment to antiracism. This is episode 2, where we address what we learned in episode one:
ACTUALITY
210824-003
00:39
How many of you thought of race as something made up before this course? How many of you thought of it as something that was made up?
2:05
Well, what you thought about it before, you know, before, you saw this course, that said the invention? I mean, how many people said invented? Hey I thought it was real.
TRACK
But okay, if race was invented, if it’s a social construct as Prof. Baker says, well … why does everyone pay so much attention to something we just made up?
ACTUALITY
210921-001
7:39
We have spent many weeks talking about how race is not a biological given. It’s not in your DNA, it’s not in the known. It’s not in the climate in which you grew up, and so forth, and so on. It’s socially constructed, we’ve been putting into that message again. And again, I think you’ve got that now. But we need to also think about why race works in the way it does, and what kind of mythmaking it operated.
8:11
Just because it’s socially constructed, doesn’t mean that it’s not real, right? It has real life consequences, life and death consequences that are very much real. And so we also need to think about the specificity of the local and the historical context, the spatial context in which race is mobilized to do its thing, ideologically.
TRACK
That’s Amy Kwon, Associate Professor in the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies and one of the four coconveners of the course. And her point was simple: We pay attention to race because people believe in it, and because it accomplishes something some people want it to accomplish. Listen to Gunther Peck, associate professor of history and public policy, who lectured a couple weeks after Baker.
ACTUALITY
210914-000
12:49
if we think about the way we simultaneously deconstruct race, as a social construct, and as a history, it’s valuable, we get that, and then ratify its power to explain events. In an example, a good friend said, about a year ago, George Floyd was killed because he had black skin. He was not killed, because he had I would strongly dispute that. He was killed because of a systemic racist policy. And because a racist person killed him.
TRACK
That is, George Floyd’s problem wasn’t that he had black skin. His problem was that racist people believed the things racists claim about people with black skin. People believe in that social construct of race. And they act on those beliefs. Not skin color: racism. Where Baker addressed the nature of social constructs, Peck talked about how the social construct of race affected things like people’s actions: personal, like the racist murder of George Floyd, and political, like U.S. immigration policy — Peck spoke on what he called Immigrant Whiteness. And he focused, again, not on skin color but on the series of invented beliefs that people assign to it.
ACTUALITY
210914-000
13:35
Why does that matter? If you think that skin color itself authorizes race and racism, you’re naturalizing racism. You’re saying that in effect, the skin color is what creates the thinking, and the way of habits of mind and thought and the practices that are unjust, that are connected to racism. And that is …. It’s understandable because in fact, that is the world we live in, that there are consequences to skin color. And I would share with you that when we think about the origins of race, especially immigrant whiteness, that it was not lightly complected skin that creates it
TRACK
Peck noted that one immigrant group that had a hard time being treated as though they were white in the United States was Finnish people.
ACTUALITY
210914-000
14:33
the most the fairest skinned immigrants in US history I’ll come to this giveaway now are probably the Finnish American community. And they were not white by law in 1900. The blonde hair blue eyes, why would that happen? Census takers refused to put them in as white. The reason being they were farther left than any immigrant grew up in US history up to that point. It was syndicalists. It believed in one big union. They were communists in effect before the Russian Revolution. And they were viewed as dangerous to this nation to what its founding creed is. Therefore, they were not considered white, which meant they could not naturalize quite the same way to get done.
TRACK
The United States government finding a way to treat the fairest-skinned people in the world as nonwhite helped clarify just how arbitrary both race and its consequences are. This led both Baker and Peck to ask not the what or how of race, but the why. Here’s Baker:
ACTUALITY
210831-000
39:02
So I want you to think as I go through this lecture, what function does race have in a society that believes in equality, justice, freedom and liberty, right, what function does it have? And some of the functions include managing population expenditure, cheap land and labor, for the dominant group, stay on top economic lien culturally, as well as politically and then it reconciles persistent inequality, with individualism, liberty and justice for all. So it kind of keeps ideas a meritocracy keeps ideas and democracy and keeps ideas American Dream sort of alive and well through this sort of rationalization process.
TRACK
Race does work. It keeps the down races down and not only keeps the up race up but tells it that it’s up because it belongs there.
Baker discussed the various tools people have used to enforce racism. He laid out the case of Elizabeth Keye, an enslaved biracial woman in the mid-1600s who successfully sued in Virginia colonial court for her own freedom and that of her son. Under British common law the status of the father determined the child, and the Christianity of Key and her son also helped. You can guess the result.
ACTUALITY
210831-000
43:30
So the Virginia assembly got quick. By 1662, they had a law that said children born Negro Women are either free or slave depending on their mother’s status. The baptism of slaves as Christians does not alter the status of slaves, right? That’s those two are directly in response to the Keye case.
TRACK
A hundred years later, in 1775, as the notion of race caught on, German physician and anthropologist Johan Blumenbach categorized the entire world into five seemingly scientific racial categories. And surprise!
ACTUALITY
210831-000
51:42
So he believes that people from the Caucasus and Georgia in particular have the most cute were the most beautiful people in the world.
TRACK
Though they were based on the fiction of race, even the categories weren’t the problem. The problem was the categories were hierarchical.
ACTUALITY
210831-000
52:43
So it explicitly was an explicit hierarchal position, which was very significant. And he also says this is the varieties of mankind according to the truth of nature. He was the only one who could discern this, but nevertheless, and
TRACK
With, naturally, the white race on top. Modern biologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould, whom the class read for this discussion,
ACTUALITY
210831-000
53:02
argues the shift from a geographic to hierarchical ordering of human diversity must stand as one of the most fateful transitions in the history of western civilization, for what, short of railroads and nuclear bombs, has had more practical impact, in this case almost entirely negative, upon our collective lives? That’s a LOT. Is that hyperbole? Is he a little over the top? Is he making the point or is that true? Once you put races in a hierarchy?
TRACK
He’s not over the top; it’s not hyperbole. Hierarchically ranking races in a seemingly scientific way has had devastating consequences
ACTUALITY
210831-000
54:46
Because you do you bring science in but you also bring in state violence, power, all this bureaucracy, all this machinery and really, with force enforcing these hierarchies … So it is, you know, it was a big deal, but it took time to evolve, we use the case of the woman who fought for freedom. And that will could’ve gone either way. 100 years later, though, it’s locked and loaded. And we have hereditary slavery with ideas of inferiority.
TRACK
The point is simple: in the United States,
ACTUALITY
210831-000
56:00
at least by 1776. You’ve got big time, hereditary slavery, ideas of inferiority, and the power bureaucracy and force to enforce it. So that’s a pretty big difference in a hundred years.
TRACK
Baker described the gyrations the new country underwent to remove Native Americans from the South.
ACTUALITY
210831-000
1:05:30
moving the Indians out of cotton country and the Indian country all at the same time. This was total disruption of families, of people from their lands. … So that was very culturally disruptive, nor the same agriculture, whatever, and also for families, because so much of that selling them down the river or that domestic slavery was breaking up families, and it was used as a tool to oppress people. So if you did not comply, we will sell your daughter. And it was a tool of real misery and real violence against kinship. And so these two things in the 1830s I think works so much to bring race as we know it today, just the total disregard for family structures, just selling pieces of people’s families down the river to the sea, and at the same time, removing the Indians from Prime cotton land. This is not an accident. This was coordinated.
TRACK
And in a subsequent class Peck went into detail about how the nation used laws to resist immigrant groups it didn’t like …
ACTUALITY
210914-001
4:31
It begins with Chinese exclusion in 1882. That’s the first one the first exclusionary apps the first time that we actually begin to have a border that excludes rather than welcomes or creates conditions for inclusion. And that Act authorizes a whole set of other types of detention that come into being in the Angel Island of California, and then later, right after that, Ellis Island North America a bunch of the way that immigration exclusion occurs in around questions of public health, very relevant for the current moment.
TRACK
… and how immigrant groups, though mistrusted and excluded, could nonetheless aspire to that imaginary, socially constructed whiteness, and with it a step up on the cultural ladder. Whiteness is a thing an immigrant can acquire.
ACTUALITY
210914-000
18:42
we see immigrant whiteness for what it is, which is an ideology, and a political strategy that has been contested from its origins, and not something that’s authorized naturalized by the color. There’s no way to make sense of white supremacy in the United States without understanding some of those starting points.
TRACK
Expanding on that notion, Aimee Kwon spent her lecture reminding the class that race and racism are not exclusively North American problems.
ACTUALITY
210921-001 08:40
I also want to in this class to try to broaden the conversation from largely us race relations focus to a more global focus. And as you have seen in the earlier lectures, even when we focus on the US, it’s never just about the US. We talk about immigration, we talk about biological science, the development of eugenics, and so forth. These are all global phenomenon. And so I encourage you, not only in this class, but in whatever you do in your other classes, your majors, you know, like your line of work and so forth, really trying to think about crossing these divides and going across borders.
TRACK
To outline matters sharply:
ACTUALITY
210921-001
15:53
by 1900 15%, of Euro, American powers … subjugated 85% of the world’s people and territories, primarily in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, wrap your head around that 85% of the world were subjugated as colonies or informal colonies by this time.
18:04
by 1900. White, Euro-American powers colonized every inhabited continent. And this was the making of the world divide that took four or 500 years. So do you think it’s just gonna disappear in 1945 9047, with independence movement, we’re still living with these legacies.
TRACK
And with that legacy of colonization Kwon notes that though the United States has scrupulously avoided the word, by the late 1800s it was an empire, at the same time Japan, the other late-arrival to world colonialism, was also ramping up its efforts.
ACTUALITY
210921-001
29:07
by this time, imperialism, and the word colony, the C word was actually becoming taboo, was not something that people were exhibiting proudly. And so we tried to avoid the C word. And so this idea of an anti colonial imperialism was the new name of the game. But if you look at the various territories, so we call them territories instead of colonies, the different areas that we went into Hawaii, the native lands, Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, US Virgin Islands, all of this new territory was acquired around the same time that Japan was also expanding. Here is But, in fact, during the time that contemporaneously in 1890s, when America was expanding its territories, it was actually obvious to everyone what what it was doing. But in history, we actually have forgotten but similar legacy
TRACK
And that reminds people studying American racism that you can’t focus just on United States racism against Black people, or Irish or Italian or Chinese immigrants, or for that matter those Finns. All those laws, all those rules, they all fit together.
ACTUALITY
210921-001
34:07
it’s really important for us to think about these histories in a triangulated and connected way. Rather than thinking about what happens one group of people versus another and another as a separate history, which is oftentimes how we were taught these histories.
TRACK
They’re connected, of course, by the notion that European Americans — white people — are better. She showed a political cartoon of Uncle Sam forcing highly racialized children, representing island nations like Cuba and the Philippines, to read a book on self-government.
ACTUALITY
210921-001 (PROBABLY YOU ASSHOLE)
…30:27
This idea that these other people in other territories have different color, different race, were less civilized than you. Now, children, you’ve got to learn these lessons, whether you want to or not.
TRACK
Race was arbitrarily created, and arbitrarily used by the white power structure to justify whatever it wanted to do. When the railroads needed labor, Chinese immigrants were good; when it came time for citizenship, not so much. The “race” of immigrants, like all race, is a shifting, changing thing.
ACTUALITY
210921-001
47:45
So this idea of a reversible, interchangeable relation to the nation state, this place of inbetweeners of never fully belonging, and always being tagged as perpetual foreigners. And so depending on our foreign policy of the moments, we all we think about the good Asian versus the bad asian, and then you become the good Asian again, and you see this, it’s not just a fixed place, once you once you attain your citizenship, and your sense of belonging is an ideal. No, it’s actually a constant battle.
TRACK
As professor Kwon finished her lecture, one student raised a question.
ACTUALITY
210921-001
1:04:47
one of the reasons I took this class is just to learn more about the construction of race, but more specifically, how like that racialized legacy has applied to duke. And I liked that you ended on this slide in particular, I was just Wondering if we’ll be talking more about Dukes like legacy with racism.
TRACK
Because the class took place in a lecture hall, with students masked and distanced, student questions and comments often came out like that, muffled and hard to hear.
As it happens, that question came from Elizabeth Loschiavo, who had expressed the same question to me, earlier:
ACTUALITY
210831-001
0:17
I have done a lot of like investigative work for creative projects in the past through my major and through extracurriculars that have like, kind of looked at Dukes historical relationship with race, looking at like, work from local 77, like the workers union. Try to think of some other stuff. I did a creative project on Julian Abel last semester, for example. And just the ways Duke has the shortcomings that Duke has had in addressing racism on campus. And so the main reason for taking this class was other than I’m interested in the topic is I really wanted to like, I don’t know, see how well or how thoroughly Duke was kind of like, interrogating this.
1:54
t’s it’s much different, I think, to talk about like race in the abstract and like, in an academic sense, but to actually like analyze what how the, like our institutions, like roles been in upholding this social construct in a discriminatory way, you know, and like to this day, the ways that you still do
TRACK
The large room, the masks, and the separation could make such discussion difficult. Kwon reminded Loschiavo that the class was a first try:
ACTUALITY
210921-001
1:05:05
this is our first iteration. And you guys are the pioneers, basically, coming on this journey with us. And as I said, you know, not all of us agree on the content of the course, and who’s gonna, you know, be lecturing, and the topics and the disciplines and so forth. And so, you know, my hope is that this is just one of many, this is not a one and done.
210921-001
55:36
And also, as you’re taking this class, and listening to some of the lectures, ask yourself, what about this history? What about the background have I known about? And what about this history is completely new to me, you know, as students at Duke University, after a lifetime of an education system, and so I hope that will guide you in thinking about pursuing other colleges and other connections and other ways of forming solidarity.
56:50
And so I would encourage you to also think about the place of university and the solidarity movements and community building across aisles. So just don’t hang out with the people that you know, look like you make an effort. Because this has been done before. A lot of those movements, actually, some of them ended up having success, but many of them failed, and often through great state violence. But I want to encourage you to think about this particular moment in the post George Floyd moment. And with Black Lives Matter going viral again, globally, and the reckoning of history of which this his classes apart for you to really take an active role in pushing this conversation forward. Thank you.
TRACK
Regarding pushing the conversation forward. The four coconvening professors had discussed whether the class ought to have discussion sessions to facilitate the conversations that Kwon thought ought to happen. Kwon had been in favor of such sessions, but the group had decided against them.
KWON211116-000
14:02
I would have loved to have a discussion section. …
15:00
discussion sections, we couldn’t quite put that together. And there are some differing debate about whether that would be, you know, good for a course like this or not, who would actually, you know, leave those discussion sections, some of the faculty felt that, you know, some graduate students might not be as well trained or equipped to deal with some of these sensitive topics. Others of us think that, you know, these are precisely the reasons why we do have to have these small group discussions and so forth. And, you know, you can train graduate students along the way, and so forth
TRACK
Professor Kerry Haynie disagreed.
HAYNIEGMT20211104-230441
10:52
So the difficulty with discussion such as, and I was one of the ones who was opposed to that
TRACK
He describes teaching lecture courses with discussion sessions led by Teaching Assistants, but those were established courses, whose TAs had taken similar courses and could easily lead students through the material. In this class the material was new, TAs were untrained, and the material itself could be not only challenging but upsetting.
ACTUALITY
HAYNIEGMT20211104-230441
UNDER
[… I had a class of almost 400 students, the introduction to American government, and I had six or seven TAs. And it’s one thing you have one instructor and a group of TAs who are university trained do the subject matter of an Intro to American Government course. And of course, a race where you have interdisciplinary you have students pulling from, you know,]
UP
11:31
you have to have TAs who are competent to lead a discussion section, or it’s not much use to have a discussion session, and I thought we couldn’t certainly not in the amount of time we had, I thought build some sections where we had TAs who were competent enough to to lead discussion sessions. And the other complication, right? We didn’t know what the guest speakers were going to say, right? We knew we had to readings, and that’s one thing, but then their lectures, the big things they bring up from the readings or different things they would bring in, and mostly abroad things other than the reader student lectures, and having TAs who, again, not specialists, to contend with that in discussions sessions was I thought was not a good pedagogical way to proceed But it’s possible with some lead time, and getting a sense, we could have TAs who were trained, and we worked with them for some period of time to get up to see what we could do to.
TRACK
Understandable. But the students? The students wanted to talk.
ACTUALITY
210921-002Group1
10:28
I would say yes. And that’s just because everybody’s coming with different backgrounds. So I’m like a military brat. So when you’re talking about like military conquest and the effect that the military has had on race, that was something that I would have loved to be able to talk more about, and like, learn from other people’s perspectives. So it’s in situations where you have like a very specific or personal view on some of these topics. It’s kind of disappointing that we don’t get to talk about it with one another. But being able to chat with each other in class or after class or chatting with professors can kind of help fill that that area. But I’m hoping that in the future as the course progresses, and that we stick with it, and we can open it up to more discussion. And just, I think when we do open to discussions of the difficulty is going to be making sure every conversation staying respectful, and that we’re still learning from one another while we’re talking about such sensitive issues and conversations.
TRACK
That’s freshman Eliza Moore. Freshman Joshua Pickett felt the same.
ACTUALITY
210921-002Group1
11:59
Yeah, I definitely think discussion would be good, based off of what she said, like learning from different people and their different backgrounds and stuff like that. And also being able to like, kind of break down the material, because I definitely find the material to be a little Yeah dense sometimes? So yeah, I think a discussion would be would be a good idea for sure. I definitely find it helpful in my psych class. So I think it’d be good in here too
TRACK
Picket recognized that discussion could yield not just uncomfortable but even offensive comments, but he thought that would actually be helpful.
ACTUALITY
210921-002Group1
13:06
I think it might be a proper way to like, confront it for sure. Like, I guess, yeah, it can be sometimes like a tough topic to discuss and can be controversial. But I think there’s a weight that can be confronted, like with more, like, I guess, I guess, an educated response really, just to correct somebody, I mean, not coming at them, but just kind of like coming lightly at him and telling them this or that, like, maybe you should have said this this way, or just kind of doing that in a way where they can understand, for sure.
[SONIA GREEN BEGINS]
And I also think that we’re like bound to come into contact with those types of people throughout our journey at Duke, just because it is just different identities all coming together. And so I think that like being able to kind of, at least for me, is like a first year being it. If it wasn’t a discussion, and that did come up, I think it would actually be very helpful to kind of learn how to handle the situations, and more like a controlled setting with maybe you know, we have an adult present, or I guess we’re all adults, but I still feel like a kid, where we have like a professor to kind of help guide. You know, how we handle that, versus just kind of being I don’t know, like the dining hall and someone says that and you’re just like, I don’t know what to say to this. So I think yeah, exactly.
TRACK
That was freshman Sonia Green. Junior Quinn Smith agreed.
ACTUALITY
210921-002Group1
Yeah, I think it would be easier to deal with those cases of micro aggressions in discussion because cyber Remember, there was a time where one student asked a question that essentially compared colorblind racism to sock preference. And then because we were to sock preference. Yeah, a pair
of socks, the socks that you want to wear it, it’s not like, that’s just how you want it.
Dating preferences. Yeah,
yeah. And sorry, no, no, you’re but because it was a lecture. And they’re like we kind of, we couldn’t discuss it. So I think that would have been a lot easier to confront in a discussion section. And also, I agree that in some ways, I feel like we’re there’s an elephant in the room we’re not addressing and that’s Dukes, active participation, and being a residential school and being built by slave labor and those denied access to basic civil liberties. And if we had a discussion section, we might be able to sort of steer the course content a little bit more
TRACK
Smith introduced himself as a citizen of the CHickasaw Nation,
ACTUALITY
210921-002Group1
1:02
Yeah. Recently, the Duke Native American Student Alliance has been trying to advocate for more resources for Native students, because Duke was a residential school. And so this class I think, gives me the tools necessary to analyze the power relationships and these inequities. And like this class we had today, you can see these trends play out in any parts of the world and throughout history.
TRACK
Loschiavo was the student who would have liked to delve more deeply into Duke power relationships.
ACTUALITY
210921-002Group1
2:24
I like took a really awesome house course, run by the Mitchell WhiteHouse, which is the like black living and learning community on campus that was last fall. Two students like really dug deep into the history of Duke and racism, to learn about, like labor unions about the Allen, building, takeover, etc. And so I really wanted to see how this course would like, take on that history. I’m disappointed that it’s not. But I hope that I think this is a good foundation for like future iterations of the course to tackle that history.
TRACK
A good foundation for sure, and Haynie feels that’s exactly the point.
ACTUALITY
HAYNIEGMT20211104-230441
24:32
what I thought would happen, and I think it’s the best way to approach it is to do what we do as academics do evidence based course. And then when you start talking about it, Alec really take over. Now you have a context, when you can better understand those kinds of events, or to better discuss those kinds of events. But without knowing some basic foundational facts, and events about race and us, history and politics and stuff. If you can’t have, I think, you know, very good productive conversations about these sticky issues that come up with like a takeover or renaming of a building,
…
25:38
And I think that’s what you do, and then let people look at facts and information, and draw their own conclusions or enter into debate, having something to debate rather than, you know, issues that become political without any foundation. So I’m happy that the courses turned out that way.
TRACK
Pickett agreed.
ACTUALITY
210921-002Group1
4:00
I, like coming in, I expected to learn more about, like black history, but to learn more about like, other cultures and how their races were affected, and their cultures are affected is definitely interesting. And how some of them like connect together. I found very interested in so
TRACK
Graduate student Adrian Jones wondered whether concerns about fraught conversations in discussion groups was justified, given that any student taking this course had consciously opted in:
ACTUALITY
210921-002Group1
16:14
certainly there are concerning things that may be happening, or that could happen but I would also say we might be experiencing some selection effects too. I think people who chose to take this class did so because they’re interested in being here and they’re interested in learning. So I think that I’m kind of sharing and communal opportunity that you all would like to have really could be a great space for you to connect with one another.
TRACK
In fact, Jones felt she could have been learning more as a graduate student had she had the chance to shepherd students through those discussions. She enjoyed reading their written work, but
ACTUALITY
210921-002Group1
9:19
for someone like me, who aspires to be a professor one day, I’m also thinking about strategies to actually implement this information into courses that I teach, the best ways to engage with students had to really push their kind of critical thinking and their critical analysis in their writing skills. So I’m learning just as much from the students as they are from us and learning quite a lot about how to be in the classroom and the type of teacher I would like to be.
CONVERSATION UNDER
TRACK
The students asked about the material talked among themselves, moving along both their academic understanding of race and their capacity to discuss it. THeir discussions with me became almost a de facto discussion session, and their professors heard them. The second iteration of the course, running in fall 2022, meets biweekly — once for lecture, once for discussion.
Next week on The Race Course.
The students have discussed why they took this course. We take a moment to hear from the professors.
ACTUALITY
TAYLORinterviewGMT2..-14602_Recording.m4a
1:47
And so, honestly, I, part of why I agreed to join on is I don’t think it should only be, you know, people of color that say, studying race is important.
MUSIC UP THEN UNDER
TRACK
That’s next episode of the Race Course, from Duke Magazine.
