Sparked off by the acquittal of four officers in the Rodney King police brutality case, the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest took place over several days and led to rioting and destruction of the city. The unrest represented a boiling point of underlying issues including systemic racism, police brutality, failure of the criminal justice system, economic disparities between communities of color, and racial tensions. The perceived racial tensions between Korean and Black Americans, further complicated by the shooting of Latasha Harlins by a Korean storeowner, led to some targeting of Korean American neighborhoods/businesses for violence and looting. Students will explore the history, conditions, and tensions that led to the 1992 civil unrest in L.A.

2021 Social Science Standards Integrated with Ethnic Studies:
Civics and Government: 5.1, 6.4, 7.5, 8.6, 8.8, 8.9, HS.2, HS.9, HS.11
Economics: 7.8
Geography: 5.13, HS.42, HS.51
Historical Knowledge: 5.22, 6.20, 6.21, 8.22, 8.25, HS.52, HS.53, HS.61, HS.64, HS.65
Historical Thinking: 5.25, 6.23, 7.25, 8.30, 8.31, 8.32, HS.68
Social Science Analysis: 5.26, 5.27, 5.28, 6.24, 6.26, 6.27, 7.27, 7.29, 8.33, 8.34, 8.36, HS.72, HS.73, HS.74, HS.75, HS.76, HS.78

Students will examine and interpret a population chart published in 1898 — depicting changes in the makeup of the United States across time in three categories, “foreign stock,” “native stock,” and “colored” — as well as an 1893 political cartoon about immigration. Students will also explain the causes and effects of population change in the late 19th century.

This course aims to familiarize students with major concepts and theories related to the study of the African Diaspora primarily, though not exclusively, in the Americas (North, South, and Central). This course links, compares, and contextualizes the historical experiences of African descendants in the U.S., the Caribbean, South America, and Africa within global processes of enslavement, colonialism, and systematic oppression. The course treats the African Diaspora as 1) historical phenomenon 2) a current condition of social, economic, and political life and 3) a way of imagining the future. We will explore theories of slavery, race, and capitalism; black resistance; post-emancipation economies and current-day neoliberalism; theories of gender; environmental justice in the African Diaspora; and theories of the black digital sphere.

In this class, we will explore America's diversity through questions of immigration, race, gender/sexuality and class--some of the major ways our culture is organized. It is comprised of 9 lessons based on online resources, plus 2 auto-ethnography assignments. This class was originally taught by Huma Mohibullah at Renton Technical College. 

This course considers how, despite its immense diversity, Africa continues to hold purchase as both a geographical entity and meaningful knowledge category. It examines the relationship between articulations of "Africa" and projects like European imperialism, developments in the biological sciences, African de-colonization and state-building, and the imagining of the planet's future. Readings in anthropology and history are organized around five themes: space and place, race, representation, self-determination, and time.

This course explores the experiences and understandings of class among Americans positioned at different points along the U.S. social spectrum. It considers a variety of classic frameworks for analyzing social class and uses memoirs, novels, and ethnographies to gain a sense of how class is experienced in daily life and how it intersects with other forms of social difference such as race and gender.

Students who migrated to the USA from Mexico or any other country when they were kids are the learner audience. However, this lesson series can be adapted for other types of learners. Each lesson will take up to 30 minutes. The topic of lesson #1 is social stratification and the American dream. The students will learn about these two concepts. The goals of lesson #2 are to learn how to create charts and graphs in a PowerPoint after collecting data through interviews and compare/ contrast results with National Survey 2005 NY Times. Lesson #3’s topic is about race as ascribed characteristics and its influence on social mobility. Students will integrate and evaluate information they collected and present their own ideas in discussions. Lesson #4’s topic is how gender can affect people’s ability to climb the economic ladder. During lesson #5 students will present their findings in class and reflect on their experience learning about the topic of the American dream and whether it is achievable or not.

This course examines the social, cultural, political, and economic history of the United States, from the Civil War to the present. It uses secondary analysis and primary documents, such as court cases, personal accounts, photographs, and films, to examine some of the key issues in the shaping of modern America, including industrialization and urbanization, immigration, the rise of a mass consumer society, the emergence of the US as a global power, and the development of civil rights activism and other major social movements.

By analyzing Dear Abby's rant about bad grammar usage, students become aware that attitudes about race, social class, moral and ethical character, and "proper" language use are intertwined.

This class examines how anthropology and speculative fiction (SF) each explore ideas about culture and society, technology, morality, and life in "other" worlds. We investigate this convergence of interest through analysis of SF in print, film, and other media. Concepts include traditional and contemporary anthropological topics, including first contact; gift exchange; gender, marriage, and kinship; law, morality, and cultural relativism; religion; race and embodiment; politics, violence, and war; medicine, healing, and consciousness; technology and environment. Thematic questions addressed in the class include: what is an alien? What is "the human"? Could SF be possible without anthropology?

This course applies the tools of anthropology to examine biology in the age of genomics, biotechnological enterprise, biodiversity conservation, pharmaceutical bioprospecting, and synthetic biology. It examines such social concerns such as bioterrorism, genetic modification, and cloning. It offers an anthropological inquiry into how the substances and explanations of biology—ecological, organismic, cellular, molecular, genetic, informatic—are changing. It examines such artifacts as cell lines, biodiversity databases, and artificial life models, and using primary sources in biology, social studies of the life sciences, and literary and cinematic materials, and asks how we might answer Erwin Schrodinger’s 1944 question, “What Is Life?” today.

This module offers a communication studies perspective on anti-racism.Students who complete this module will 1) Think about how we ought to talk about race. 2) Learn about the social construction of race. 3) Listen to conversations about race. 4) Take part in conversations about race.[Title page image description: White, stenciled letters against a black background that appears to be smeared with white paint read, "STOP RACISM."]

This course introduces students to the spatial, legal, economic, social and political structures that created apartheid in South Africa, and to the factors that led to the collapse of the racist order. We will examine the many forms of Black oppression and, also, the various forms of resistance to apartheid. Some of the themes we will explore include industrialization and the formation of the Black working classes; the constructions of race, ethnicities, and sexualities; land alienation and rural struggles; township poverty and violence; Black education; the African National Congress; and the Black Consciousness Movement.

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.

The goal of this module is to explore White and Black Americans' attitudes about racial discrimination and racial inequality. Crosstabulation will be used.

The shift from apartheid to a constitutional democracy in South Africa brought with it a plethora of questions concerning ideas of nationhood, citizenship, and organisational transformation. Integrally caught up in the revolution, the South African Police Service (SAPS) faces transformative challenges on scales far larger than most other organisations in the country. From being the strong arm of the oppressive elite, it has had to restructure and rearticulate its function, while simultaneously attempting to maintain law and order. Like many other corporations and organisations, the SAPS has engaged in interventions aimed at aiding the fluidity of this process. This report is an analysis of one such intervention. It attempts to ascertain the extent to which members are changing as a result of particular diversity workshops conducted in a region of the Western Cape. The analysis focuses on members at one particular station.

Black feminist health science studies is a critical intervention into a number of intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism, including feminist health studies, contemporary medical curriculum reform conversations, and feminist technoscience studies. We argue towards a theory of Black feminist health science studies that builds on social justice science, which has as its focus the health and well-being of marginalized groups. Students will engage feminist science theories such as the linguistic metaphors of the immune system, the medicalization of race, and critiques of the sexual binary. We will use contemporary as well as historical moments to investigate the evolution of “scientific truth” and its impact on the U.S. cultural landscape.

Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. This course connects the experiences of African-Americans and of other American minorities, focusing on social, political, and cultural histories, and on linguistic patterns.

This lesson pairs with the book "Pancakes, Pancakes!" by Eric Carle. First read this story and then run the breakfast relay outlined in this lesson.

NGSS: K-ESS3-3

CCSS: SL.K.3

Social Sciences: K.10, K.17, 1.12, 3.12, 5.11, 4.18

Time: 30 minutes

Materials: "Pancakes, Pancakes!" by Eric Carle, food cards and bags labeled: earth, farm, store, factory.

This unit focuses on underreported stories of migration and the local history of everyday people of the City of Newark. From the global stories of women migrants on the move to the wards of the City of Newark, we will examine the experiences of the people who live and inhabit these places and spaces, and who also make history.

Far too often we solely focus on major reported stories related to migration from the point of view of the elite, those in power, or the victors who wrote down their version of history for posterity. This unit seeks to reclaim history for those who resisted, suffered, lost yet triumphed. Anchored by Pulitzer Center migration resources, this unit explores the intersection of the history of the City of Newark (aka Brick City) and global migration using a variety of historical documents, texts, and visuals in which everyday people and the disenfranchised occupy an important space of representation.