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Al Black's Home Page |
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| Al Black's Course List Page |
| Instructor: | Professor Albert W. Black Jr. |
| Office Phone: | 685-7284 (no answering machine) |
| Department Phone: | 543-5882 (messages only) |
These are the major issues we examine in this course. It is important
that you note that this course has a social problem focus. In the past,
some students have felt
that a course such as this should focus on the accomplishments of African
Americans and not their problems. I suppose there are a number of ways to
teach such a course. In the past for example I have taught the course
from a combined focus, social problems and accomplishments. Today however
I am very concerned about the social problems that we face, and the extent
to which we have become interracially fratricidal. So, again, this year
the course will be taught primarily from a social problem perspective.
Supplemental issues covered:
We start with Professor Jacqueline Jones' brilliant treatise, Labor of
Love, Labor of Sorrow, which allows us to investigate the effects of
racial preference in the labor market as well as the process of
urbanization on African kinship systems, the African American family, and
the African
American community. The major cause of the social and economic problems
that African Americans experience today has been the systematic denial of
equal access to the labor market. Very often in order to know the answer
to a contemporary social issue, we must ask sociological questions about
the past. Affirmative action is such an issue. As the debate concerning
Affirmative Action rages; as propositions such as 209 in California and
initiatives such as 200 in the State of Washington are passed and/or
debated, the key question is, what responsibility does a nation have when
it systematically denies a significant segment of its population, equal
opportunity and equal access. Equal opportunity and equal access that is,
to the two key areas of the society that allow for individual growth and
achievement, the labor market and preparatory institutions?
In order to answer this question, we must analyze the way in which the
socio-political system has structured the relationship between the
dominant and subordinate racial groups. We will use Professor Joseph
Scott's analysis in his book The Black Revolts for this purpose.
And then we will briefly
review the work of professor Troy Duster, Paul Burstein and the
relatively recent reports of the State of Washington's Commission on
African American Affairs, as well as recent articles, letters to the
editor and editorials published in the popular media and in the University
of Washington Daily. Affirmative action and its analysis represents the
second topic of this course. The reading material for this segment of
the course can be purchased from the copy center in the basement of the
Communications Building.
A relatively recent analysis of the present tragic circumstances of the
African American underclass has been published, namely Wilson's new book,
When Work Disappears. When Work Disappears is an extension
and up-to-date analysis of what Wilson argued in his earlier book,
Truly Disadvantaged.
Our task will be to determine the extent to which this analysis correctly
captures the reasons for the present social dislocations in the African
American community. This is the third topic for us as we attempt to
understand the sociology of Black Americans.
The fourth topic for the course is one that has become timely and
according to some scholars and activists represents a threat to the very
survival of African Americans: the topic of gender versus race. Jones
in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow comments on this issue, but it
would seem reasonable to argue that in order to address the issue we would
need more information concerning the historical role that white women have
played in the oppression of black women and their families, the
involvement of white women in Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations, and
the historical relationship between black women, their organizations and
the organizations of white women. We will use Paula Giddings' historical
treatment of the history of African American women in her book When and
Where I Enter as well as the work of belle hooks and Vivien Gordon in
order to investigate these issues.
The fifth topic for this course represents one that I have only recently
begun to target, the historical and contemporary status of the African
American middle class. What has been the history of this group? What is
its present status? Has its history and is its present status been
significantly different from that of the black underclass? The primary
work that we will use in order to answer
these questions is that of Bart Landry's, specifically his monograph
entitled The New Black Middle Class. However, I will suplement his
work with more contemporary analyses.
The sixth and final topic for the course is in related to the second and
third topics: what are the solutions to the problems that African
Americans face in American society? Recall that in the second segment of
the course we addressed the issue of Affirmative Action. We analyze this
issue again in this segment but this time from the point of view of black
conservatives.
The primary source that we use to investigate this issue will be the new
edited work of Stan Faryna, Brad Stetson, and Joseph G. Confi entitled
Black and Right: the Bold New Voice
of Black Conservatives in America. We will also discuss the
arguments of Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell. Also recall that Wilson
had some ideas concerning the solution to the problems that African
Americans face in America, specifically the underclass. We will review
Wilson's proposals and seriously consider the issue of reparations also.
You are to go out and observe some aspect of the Black experience whether
it is:
You must hand in your fieldnotes! No paper will be accepted without
fieldnotes! Your paper must be 5-8 pages in length (not including
fieldnotes).
Along with the topics I have suggested above, I need to inform you that
there is a relatively new entity on campus called the Edward E. Carlson
Leadership and Public Service Office. The purpose of this office is to
provide the student with the opportunity to volunteer, or to work on
internships that are local, national, and international in character.
They
will make a presentation in class and provide a listing of the
opportunities available. Any student in this class may choose a related
opportunity, inform me, and write a participant observation paper on this
topic. In addition we will be visited by representatives of community
programs during the first few weeks of class. They will also provide
opportunities to work in the field with an assortment of populations
including gang members.
I can also provide you the opportunity to work at "Juvi," as the kids call
it, that is the King County Juvenile Detention Center on 12th and Alder.
Again, you will have to keep a journal, i.e., field notes and prepare a 5
to 8 page paper on the basis of your experience.
Another opportunity that I can provide you in this course, indeed
probably the one I am most proud of, is an opportunity to tutor and mentor
in an actual classroom at Franklin or Garfield high schools, Madrona and
Meany middle schools, and John Muir Elementary School. Again you would
have to keep a journal and write a 5 to 8 page paper based on your
experience.
Compare and contrast the primary issues addressed by black men and women
in the Million Man March and the Million Women March. The tape of the
march will be made available in the undergraduate library. Use the tape
to determine what the major concerns of the participants in the March
were, including Minister Louis Farrahkan. Contrast these views and
concerns with those of the black women in their more recent march.
These two options represent two of the topics of this
class the last time I taught it. I consider these topics to be very
important though I will not cover them in any thorough way this academic
year, however I will provide you with the
opportunity to investigate and write your termpaper on either of these
topics if you have an interest in them. I preserved them in their
original language from the syllabus of Winter, 1997. The requirements are
the same for these two options in terms of the length of the papers.
African American people have had to cope with a
society that in many ways has defined them as pariahs; a society that has
denied them
equal access to crucial developmental and performance opportunities both
by custom and statute. The coping strategy of African American people
has led to various cultural adaptations, and we use the work of Joseph
White, The Psychology of Blacks, to examine what he describes as
the
"distinctive, coherent, and persistent Afro-American psychological
perspective, frame of reference, world view, or cultural ethos." White
also includes a brilliant primer on the problems associated with educating
Black youth in a predominantly White educational setting. We will also
read Ogbu and Baratz and Baratz on the status of Blacks in America's
educational system, our fourth topic. You will also have to supplement
your reading and paper with a recent sociological treatment of this topic.
One suggestion might be:
(4) Ford, Donna Y. Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black
Students. Teachers College Press: Williston, VT, 1996.
The fifth and final topic for the course will be the
proliferafion of racist groups on the far right. American minorities have
ignored these groups the past two decades. The assumption was that as
America became less racially conscious such
groups would die a natural death, but they haven't. Instead they have
grown and proliferated. They have also extended their tentacles into
other more militant groups, militias. Six months before the Oklahoma
bombing, Morris Dees, who is devoted to investigating and putting such
groups out of business, warned the U.S. Attorney General that these groups
were increasing in number and were successfully infiltrating other
movements, especially the militia movements. Not all militia groups have
been infiltrated, but there is a natural linkage between the militia's
opposition to the American government and the anger of right-wing racists
toward government minority policy. We will use James Ridgeway's book,
Blood in the Face, to analyze this topic. However, you will have
to use
more than one source. Ridgeway's book is one of the best descriptive
histories of right-wing racist groups but there are many others. I list
some of them below:
Along with the issue of providing a student with the opportunity to study
the actual expression of Black America outside the classroom, the required
paper also allows me to play a role in the development of students'
writing skills. Many students reach their senior year without becoming
competent writers. This deficiency affects them for the rest of their
professional lives. It will limit their horizons, and traumatize their
self-image and make professional self-actualization impossible. In my
opinion , it is a crime that we do not take this matter seriously enough
in the University. I do, and therefore I want to start you out with a
writing assignment. I will, with reason, help you to learn to revise your
written material and advise you to seek professional training if
necessary. In order for you to take advantage of this opportunity
however, you must turn your paper in two weeks before the end of the
quarter, therefore each and every student is encouraged to revise their
paper on the basis of our comments. The incentive is that the grade on
your second paper is likely to be higher and we will record the highest
grade.
Refer to the assignment schedule for exam dates. There will be no
make-ups! If you have a signed doctor's excuse, you will be requested to
write a book report covering the reading material for the exam you missed.
The book report must be approved by me beforehand and it will require
considerably more work than the exam. The report will be due one week
after the exam. Otherwise you will receive a "O" for that exam. This
option can only be exercised once.
The first will be scheduled for Wednesday, January 21, 1998 and the topic
will be "Should Colleges and Universities Have Affirmative Action
Admission Policies?"
The second will be scheduled for Wednesday, February 18, 1998 and the
topic will be "In what ways should the agenda of black women concerned
with feminist issues differ from that of white women?"
The final talk show will be scheduled for March 2, 1998 and you the
student will pick the topic. We will discuss the procedure in class and
the choice will be made democratically.
Essentially then we will have "Our Own Homegrown Talk Show." I hope to be
able to have each talk show recorded and make the recordings available to
you at your own expense. You are encouraged to collect newspaper articles
on the topics for discussion to share during the talk shows.
Participation in a talk show will be considered EXTRA CREDIT and worth .2
of a grade.
In most classes the reading assignment is the independent responsibility
of the student. The student presumably reads the material and then asks
questions concerning it. If this happens at all, most of the questions
are about comprehending the content of the material. In this class, I
will review the content for you and with you and attempt through
redundancy to situate this material in you. The exam techniques dovetail
with this pedagogical approach. I will be very interested in your
thoughtful evaluation of this form of pedagogy at the end of this course.
I started using this particular pedagogical style approximately five years
ago. The technique accomplished exactly what should be accomplished in a
classroom, namely learning and comprehending specific content. Some
students start out believing that the
technique is undesirable, but end up stating that they "have never
learned so much, so well."
There has been a consistent complaint however. The complaint has been
that going through the reading section by section and sometimes page by
page is boring. I propose that we do thirty-five minutes of "the fifty
minute academic hour" on the actual review of the reading, and that
roughly
fifteen minutes be used for the purpose of more general discussion of the
readings. This can be done by setting fifteen minutes aside at the end of
the class or possibly by integrating the particular and general discussion
as the class discussion proceeds. Second, in order to tie the course
material to the real world, the student should review TV programs,
newspapers, popular periodicals, such as Newsweek and Time magazines
daily in order to maintain the connection between scholarship and
important and contemporary events and issues.
Most histories of Black Americans have not
adequately captured the history of Black women and Black families. In the
initial segment of this course, therefore, we will read Jones' Labor of
Love, Labor of Sorrow. This book is about the history of Black women
as
laborers and in my opinion is one of the most important books written in
the last decade. Jones' analysis is critical for a beginning student in
the area of race and ethnicity to understand. Scholars, because of the work
of Gutman, have come to question the universally accepted argument
that slavery destroyed Afiican kinship systems, i.e., the Black family.
If not slavery, then what? Jones' answer, urbanization and labor market
discrimination. The implication is that the process is relatively recent
and started in the 19th century rather than the 17th. Further
destabilization was an urban northern process as opposed to a rural
southern one.
One of the key questions today is why haven't
African Americans after having lived in what some refer to as "the
greatest country on earth," done as well as white Americans? Professor
Scott attempts to answer this question by examining the structural
relationship between blacks and whites in this country. The key
explanatory concept he insists is the idea of political class or estate.
He maintains that since 1660, or for more than 300 years, whites and
blacks have constitutedd "two separate racial estates." The concepts of
political class or estate he says, refers to a set of legal-political and
socioeconomic groupings of persons to whom are ascribed superior and
inferior statuses or ranks by law. With the use of law (legal statutes)
the polity is able to make racial status legally hereditary, he continues,
and as a result "white advantages and black disadvantages, unearned and
undeserved, become involuntary and unchangeable." Having legally bound
blacks to indeterminable servitude by law, the rest of the racial history
of this country represents the consolidation of white power along with the
perpetuation of white economic and political advantages and privileges,
according to Professor Scott. During this segment of the course we will
analyze and study Professor Scott's argument more thoroughly and attempt
to determine its significance with regard to the issue of Affirmative
Action. Purchase reading package from Communications Building,
Basement Copy Center.
It has become apparent to a variety of
observers including scholars, and policy makers that the changes made in
public policy and at the statutory level of race relations in this country
have not led to an improvement in the economic, occupational, and
educational status of a considerable proportion of African Americans. The
question is why. Wilson argues that the answer is complex and includes
such factors as historical discrimination, the flow of and competition
between African American migrants and Eastern and Southern European
immigrants, the age profiles of various racial and ethnic communities, the
impact of economic changes, the affects of social isolation, the
increasing concentration of poverty and the loss of vertical class
integration. Massey & Denton disagree and argue that given the importance
of economic changes the issue, the course of African Americans present
depressed status is their spatial distribution, i.e., the fact they are
segregated. Segregation they argue, is not a neutral fact, but is
responsible for a multiplicity of problems in Black communities.
Included among them are those that follow:
As a result of a set of experiences that I
had with some of my TA's relatively recently, I have become aware of a
very important issue that confronts the black community, specifically
black women. The issue is feminism or more precisely, the tension that
exists between one's concern about gender versus one's commitment to race.
I was also surprised to learn that an orthodoxy had developed around the
issue of feminism that denied me the right as a male to ask critical
questions concerning gender issues. I was very surprised that any
graduate student in sociology would have such a point of view.
Consequently, and of course refusing to accept any such denial (as is my
way), I have begun to investigate the issue of gender/race. It occurs to
me that if African American women are going to consider joining existing
feminist organizations, which are led and dominated by white women and
their agendas, they might to look into the issue of the historical
relationship between white women and black women and their families, as
well as the relationships between black and white women's organizations.
Apparently, it is not well known but the Ku Klux Klan had special chapters
just for women in which a sizable number of white women participated. We
will also briefly investigate this relationship.
There is a sizable group of African Americans
who are caught up in tragic consequences. This group is primarily made up
of members of the underclass, though given some of the more recent
complaints of the African American middle class concerning
glass-ceilings, there is reason to believe that the denial of access is
still a significant issue in America. What are the solutions to the
problems of African Americans? Wilson has some ideas, so do Massey &
Denton. More recently however, a group of political pundits and scholars
who refer to themselves as black conservatives have joined the debate.
The two most interesting ones intellectually speaking are Thomas Sowell
and Shelby Steele, we will review their key arguments briefly.
In addition we will use an edited volume that just appeared in the
bookstores entitled, Black and Right: The Bold New Voice of Black
Conservatives in America. This reader is composed primarily of brief
statements critical of the black statist position as well as an attempt to
define the position of black conservatives. From the point of view of
sociology, Black & Right represents data which will allow us to develop a
portrait of the philosophy of black conservatism.
COURSE DESCRIPTION AND GENERAL COURSE
REQUIREMENTS:
There are many issues associated with the sociology of African Americans.
However, none are more important than:
COURSE WRITING REQUIREMENT:
To have a reasonable understanding of the Black experience, one has to do
more than confront it in the literature and in a classroom. The second
major requirement for this course, therefore, is a paper based on
observations on the Black experience. Though I prefer that you choose to
do field research, I also provide opportunities for students who cannot
to prepare a traditional term paper. In my opinion one of the most
important skills that you must attain in your university education is the
skill of expressing yourself effectively and competently in writing.
Consequently, no matter how much work is involved in helping you to learn
to write effectively, we (the TA's and I) will aid you in that process.
We will provide the opportunity to turn your papers in at an earlier date
for comments and suggested revisions.
The possibilities are endless. When you observe anything from a
sociological perspective, you will first be exploratory. On the basis of
the exploration, you must decide on a specific focus - for example,
conflict resolution or the exercise of authority
among Black young people at a particular playground. You must observe
for at least ten hours per paper. Once you decide on your focus, act as
if you are a data collection device (a video tape recorder, for example)
and capture your focus in as much descriptive detail as possible.
Finally, see if your data allows you to make any generalizations. Be
careful, do not over-generalize.
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EXAMS:
Five exams will be given in this course, approximately one every two
weeks, depending upon the reading. The exams will vary in format from
essay to objective. When essay exams are planned the essay questions will
be provided to students before the exam.
OUR OWN HOMEGROWN TALK SHOW (AN ATTITUDINAL SURVEY
COLLECTING DATA):
A limited number of students will get the opportunity to participate in a
classroom talk show. Only 21 students will have this opportunity, 7 per
talk show, one moderator and three proponents and opponents for each
discussion. Since the topic of race seems to generate hotly debated
issues, we will provide an opportunity for constructive debate in the
lecture hall. There will be three such opportunities. We will pick two
of the topics and you as students will determine what the other two
topics will be. Each talk show will begin a unit.
THE CLASSROOM:
I will lecture on the topics and reading assignments for the week on
Monday-Wednesday-Friday unless otherwise stipulated. You must bring your
reading materials to the classroom, underlined and with notes in the
margins, prepared to review and when appropriate to comment. Much of
what we do in a course like this is to begin the process of becoming
familiar with the literature. The primary issue with regard to leaming at
this stage of your development is to "come to know' and "to come to know
precisely." Attendance and intellectual participation are mandatory.
Generally, every other Friday or so, is set aside for exams.
A NOTE ON PEDAGOGY:
My classroom strategy is based on a series of assumptions about
efficacious pedagogy. The reading assignments constitute the basic
content of the field and therefore we will spend most of the class time
reviewing, manipulating and analyzing this material . This is a
nontraditional approach to the classroom.
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Back to TopWEEKLY READING AND DISCUSSION ASSIGNMENTS:
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Are Massey & Denton correct? What are the implications of their
arguments? What about the implications of Wilson's? What are Wilson's
proposed solufions? In a very recent publication entitled When Work
Disappears Wilson has extended his analysis. We will analyze this
work in the context of Wilson's initial argument in the Truly
Disadvantaged, and with Massey & Denton's analysis in mind.