Identity is complicated, and changes depending on who you are and where you are. In our country, identity is directly tied to power and some are afforded privileges and others have disadvantages. This course will study identity as a social construct, and will go into further depth on race. Students will study the complications and nuances that go into the formation of identity and race, historical injustices and responses tied to it. We will study redlining, and a specific chapter of history, the South Bronx in the 1960’s. Rap music is currently the most successful music genre, even having small ripples in the country music world. Its origins, often overlooked due to the multi-faceted nature of the music, is a culture with a rich history rooted in social justice, giving a voice to the voices that were silenced. Its origins in the South Bronx, and its usage as a platform in response to social inequity, is often overlooked. Rap is a platform used worldwide to express a specific message. However, its role in academia, and in music in general, is often polarizing. We will do a specific study in rap as a form of response to systemic racism. By interacting with this curriculum, students engage in ethical reflection, in a safe space, finding a platform for their voice, learning content that’s relevant to current day. They will engage in informed conversations about race and equity, producing creative and analytical writing, while significantly improving their analytical reading and writing skills.

In this activity, students will examine documents from the FBI case file about Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. They will answer questions to show understanding of the events that took place, and how the spread of information about Selma impacted the Civil Rights Movement. They will also be asked to think about whether the Federal Government would have acted differently if the FBI knew that the public may be able to see their files — the Government was not required to release records like this until the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gave the public the right to request Federal agency records in 1966.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander explores complex questions about the criminal justice system and the history of race and racial justice in the United States.

AMH 2091 is an introductory-level survey course that provides an overview of the major events and developments in African American history, from Africa to the present. At its core, the history of African Americans has been connected to attempts to gain freedom. Starting with the West African empires, the course traces African Americans’ quest for freedom through the Slave Trade, Slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, World War I, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and World War II. It then examines key political, social, and cultural developments of the post-war period focusing on social movements such as the Long Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, and Women’s Rights Movement. There will be an emphasis on learning the basic chronology and topics of African-American history, analyzing a range of primary and secondary sources, and practicing writing interpretive essays, using primary and secondary sources to support a clear argument.  Students can expect to dedicate 4 – 5 hours a week to writing. 

Students will engage in viewing and researching videos and artifacts about thriving black communities that developed in the early 20th century amidst the violence of Jim Crow. The dominant narrative about US History from the end of Reconstruction to the mid-20th century has often portrayed Black people as hopeless and destitute. In reality, many Black people left the south, moved north or Midwest to establish flourishing communities. Black communities in Tulsa, Knoxville and Chicago were making great progress in the first two decades of the 20th century. But during the Red Summer of 1919, the aforementioned communities and others were burned down by white mobs and never rebuilt. One community was burned down and filled in with water, later becoming a lake. These mobs murdered blacks, decimated their townships, and then attempted to conceal this history, often erasing it entirely from history books.

Students’ culminating project is research, documentation, and presentation of their findings through a student-led Community Action Event.

Video by Art21. Where does a painter find her subject matter? With a process that takes her from the streets of Harlem to her studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn, artist Jordan Casteel paints vibrant large scale portraits, making visible the often unrepresented humanity of Black men. At first struggling to find subject matter that could speak to the political realities of police violence and implicit bias, Casteel drew inspiration from her twin brother. "People follow me like I’m a threat," the artist remembers her brother saying, "but they don’t know anything about me." Together Casteel's paintings illustrate the multiplicity of Black male experience; she began with nudes in domestic interiors before expanding to men on the sidewalk, the color and compositions celebrating the visual texture of her Harlem neighborhood. Casteel's work is probing in its tender depiction of Black men who, although often strangers to the artist, gaze directly and intimately out at the viewer. Jordan Casteel (b. in 1989, Denver, Colorado) lives and works in New York. Learn more about the artist at: https://art21.org/artist/jordan-casteel/

An Excel booklist created by Multnomah County Library to support the Ethnic Studies Integrated 2021 Social Science Standards. The file is organized with tabs for Japanese American Internment, Holocaust, Indigenous Peoples, Genocides, Prejudice, Refugees, Misinformation, and Cultural Diversity.

This Latinx History curriculum outlines a yearlong course, one which can be taught on its own, but which is being conceived as part of a course that will integrate both African American and Latinx history. The curriculum begins by naming the problematic dominant narratives that one may internalize or reproduce when learning about or teaching Latinx history, along with the counter narratives that tell a more accurate, complete, and political history. The five units covered in this curriculum begin with an analysis of the various terms used for Latinx people, and a history of them, concluding with a debate that asks: Are these terms more helpful or harmful to the community they claim to serve? Following this unit, the course takes on a chronological format, beginning with the history of the indigenous people of Latin America and their resistance to Spanish colonization. Next, the unit follows the independence and revolutionary movements across Latin America in the 1800s and early 1900s, followed by U.S. imperialism and changing borders throughout the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century. The curriculum concludes with a unit on the intersectional Latinx movements of the 20th century, with an emphasis on culture as a tool of resistance and survival.

Malcolm X argued that America was too racist in its institutions and people to offer hope to blacks. In contrast with Malcolm X's black separatism, Martin Luther King, Jr. offered what he considered "the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest" as a means of building an integrated community of blacks and whites in America. This lesson will contrast the respective aims and means of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to evaluate the possibilities for black American progress in the 1960s.

In 1957, Little Rock African Americans made their city the most significant test case for the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 and 1955 Brown v. Board of Education rulings.

Students will display their understanding of the symbolism and references that Dr. King used to enrich his famous speech on August 28, 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by constructing a "jackdaw," a collection of documents and objects.

This kit explores the ways in which King and his legacy have been portrayed in various media forms. The first lesson follows a chronology of King's life through interactive decoding of rich media documents (comic books, billboards, songs, music videos, etc.). The following lessons use excerpts of Dr. King's speeches from 1963, 1967 and 1968 to examine his views on social change; explore the portrayal of King in magazine covers, advertisements, Web sites, film clips and monuments; and use letters to the editor about celebrating King to explore challenges to change.

This is a sample syllabus of the course I offered for Merritt College in Spring 2022. 

In this lesson, created in partnership with the Association for Cultural Equity, students discover how the banjo and music making more generally among slaves contributed to debates on the ethics of slavery. They listen to slave narratives, examine statistics, and read primary sources to better understand how slavery was conceptualized and lived through in the 18th and 19th centuries. Throughout the lesson, students return to videos created by Alan Lomax of pre-blues banjo player Dink Roberts as a way to imagine what music among slaves in the United States may have sounded like.

This lesson traces the long history of how African Americans have used music as a vehicle for communicating beliefs, aspirations, observations, joys, despair, resistance, and more across U.S. history.

A selection of Library of Congress primary sources exploring the history and civil rights legacy of the NAACP. This set also includes a Teacher s Guide with historical context and teaching suggestions.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Negro League Baseball. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

The purpose of this unit is to analyze the different ways that race and law have operated over the course of American history. The unit is designed to be implemented in a United States History course, but can also be used in a Civics classroom as a way of understanding the function of the law. The unit compromises of three main case studies 1) Racial Formation of Legal Code in Colonial America with the specific focus on the aims and goals of the Naturalization Law of 1790 2) The Prerequisite Cases of the 1920s and finally, 3)Anti-Miscegenation Cases and Racial Categories at the time of the Eugenics Movement in the 1930s and 40s. The purpose of weaving these different historical time periods together is to help students reshape the ways in which they look at the law and more importantly understand how race and law have worked together to shape the world in which we live. The different case studies can be introduced individually or used in a thematic manner.

The book is an introduction or primer to ethnic studies and is not a complete or comprehensive review of the literature. Content focuses on major concepts, theories, perspectives, and voices in ethnic studies with research from anthropology, history, political science, psychology, and sociology to offer an inclusive approach for critical inquiry. Modules include learning objectives, a list of key terms and concepts, applications (exercises), biological reflections (stories), summary, and review questions.

The book addresses the five student learning outcomes and core competencies for Ethnic Studies graduation requirement approved by the California State University Council on Ethnic Studies (GE Area F), and explores the four major underrepresented groups in the U.S. including Native American, African American, Asian American, and Latinx American communities.

Our Lives: An Ethnic Studies Primer is available in three online formats:

PDF version
https://www.hancockcollege.edu/ccecho/documents/Our%20Lives%20An%20Ethnic%20Studies%20Primer%20v3%20FINAL.pdf

Pressbooks version
https://ourlives.pressbooks.com/

LibreTexts version
https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Sandboxes/admin/Our_Lives_-_An_Ethnic_Studies_Primer_(Kennedy_and_Bermio)