Course Description

This introductory course in Ethnic Studies is a critical inter/transdisciplinary examination of race, racism, and liberatory movements that centers the histories, experiences, cultures, and contemporary struggles of Native American, African American, Latinx/Chicanx, and Asian American populations, as well as other Communities of Color in the United States. Emerging from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) campus activism and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Ethnic Studies critically and comparatively analyzes how race and ethnicity intersect with class, gender, ability, and sexuality along with an interrogation of settler colonialism, White supremacy, patriarchy, classism, heterosexism, racism, Euro/Anglocentrism, and other systems of privilege and oppression. Central to the field is a racial justice orientation that draws from the cultural knowledge and activism of Communities of Color, critical race, transnational, intersectional feminist, and decolonial frameworks, and scholarship from the humanities and social sciences. Through culturally sustaining and community-engaged learning opportunities, this inter/transdisciplinary course is designed to cultivate students' self-awareness, cultural competency, and racial literacy, as well as critical thinking, research, and community advocacy skills for a socially just society. Community engagement activities and fieldwork with local organizations may also be assigned.