African American Studies 101 is a multidisciplinary course that embodies the empirical study of history, politics, culture, religion and other areas within the social sciences. The essential focus is on the life experiences of peoples of African descent in the United States and globally. The course integrates the works of scholars of ancient African civilization, New World enslavement of African Americans, economics, literature, arts, race, women studies, government and sport studies. Furthermore, through the interdisciplinary lifeline of African American Studies, this course will give special attention to black athleticism.

This unit introduces instructional moves for how teachers can use their classroom libraries for deep critical thinking on issues of race, racism, and inequality. This unit uses a middle school level novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Taylor, 1976), but the content objectives, teaching strategies, and activities are applicable to any novel study. Building upon how classroom libraries function as resources for thought provoking literature and discussions from the 2019 Yale Teachers Institute Seminar Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines, this unit primarily explores the historical context of the novel primarily using the language of music to analyze characters. Students will develop interpretations about how these conditions influenced characters’ traits, roles, or conflicts and construct a central thesis on a character of their choice. It incorporates pedagogical tools and resources expanding curricular strategies and provides a framework for student discussion beyond the text on issues about race, racism, and forms of inequality.

Teaching multicultural literature is happily a big part of the modern conversation about English classes. However, a question that is less often asked is, what is the root of the need for it? Many Americans shuffle about their lives oblivious to the structural racism that permeates much of our society and culture. Those who choose “not to see color” or race are proliferating opportunities for a dominant culture to continue and even expand, thereby limiting opportunities for others. Through utilization of two important concepts – Critical Race Theory and Colorblind Racial Ideology – we can improve humanities instruction by scrutinizing the much bigger, and often ignored, picture of modern racism. Combining this with instruction on the art of Afrofuturism – specifically the work of Octavia Bulter, Sun Ra, and Jean Michel Basquiat among others – we can also fill a similar gap in the modern American imagination.

This course examines the role of science and medicine in the origins and evolution of concepts of race, sex, and gender from the 17th century to the present. We analyze biological, medical, and anthropological studies and how they intersect with historical, social, political, and cultural ideas about racial, sexual, and gender differences. The course follows lecture/discussion format.

Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience (Second Edition) gives instructors, students, and general readers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework. It offers sound interdisciplinary analysis of selected historical and contemporary issues surrounding the origins and manifestations of White supremacy in the United States. By placing race at the center of the work, the book offers significant lessons for understanding the institutional marginalization of Blacks in contemporary America and their historical resistance and perseverance.