Race Matters in the Classroom
Wabash Center Blog Series: "Race Matters in the Classroom"
Posts from 2014 to 2017
This blog was started in response to the need for a forum on race and teaching theology and religion in the wake of the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent protests and police response in Ferguson, Missouri. We have purposively framed the blog more broadly than this single incident.
Teaching for racial and social justice, dismantling the structures of white privilege in academia, and diversifying the faculty, the students, and the canon, are abiding concerns of the Wabash Center and many of our colleagues in the WabashNation.
See as well: "Race Matters Teaching Tactics" -- Published by ARTS Online
Nine contributors to the Wabash Center's “Race Matters” blog contribute short teaching tactics they have used to help students engage difference in meaningful ways.
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Posts
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Lived Realities of Race
Blog Series: Race Matters in the Classroom
November 20, 2014
Tags: racism | anti-racism | white privilege
Three stories capture my take on how race matters. Story #1 opens in a grocery parking lot. I park my car and open the door. Trying to remember what I need to buy, I do not notice the pick-up truck beside me as I step out. Then, I hear a male ...
It’s About The How, Not Just The What
Blog Series: Race Matters in the Classroom
November 13, 2014
Tags: power and privilege | racism | engaged teaching | anti-racism
If there is one thing I’ve learned from my 20 students in a new course, “Religion and Racism in America” this semester it’s this: how we go about engaging racism in the classroom may be just as important, if not more, than what sources we use to do so. ...
Race Matters Outside the Classroom
Blog Series: Race Matters in the Classroom
November 10, 2014
Tags: anti-racism | social justice | Holocaust | service learning
The time: November 9–10, 1938. The place: Germany. The casualties: More than 7,000 Jewish shops along with 1,574 synagogues damaged or destroyed. One hundred Jews murdered; 30,000 imprisoned in concentration camps. They were the first victims of a racial purge that went on to claim more than 6 million lives. Now, 76 years after Kristallnacht, I am ...
Teaching Race—A Sisyphean Task?
Blog Series: Race Matters in the Classroom
November 06, 2014
Tags: racism | anti-racism | white privilege
Teaching race is a boulder. And up the mountain I push it. When I teach race, I feel like Sisyphus because I never seem to get anywhere. The questions repeat and the anxieties recur each semester. It’s always the same: I know what parts of assigned texts will provoke ...
Segregation distorts all human personality. Yes, even white people
Blog Series: Race Matters in the Classroom
November 03, 2014
Tags: power and privilege | racism | anti-racism
I have heard much talk about Ferguson and racial segregation in my personal life, as well as in the classroom. Conversations about Ferguson abound in my Civil Rights class this semester as well as in the broader university community. It could hardly be otherwise. We are just fifteen miles away ...