Is Barack Obama an African American?

Your Anderson and Stewart text opens Chapter Three with a generous and insightful quote from historian Robert Harris: "Afro-American historiography, with its own conceptual and methodological concerns, is now poised to illuminate the Afro-American past in a manner that will broaden and deepen our knowledge of black people in this country. The writing of Afro-American history is no longer undertaken principally to revise the work of wrongheaded White historians, to discern divine providence, to show black participation in the nation's growth and development, to prove the inevitability of black equality, or to demonstrate the inexorable progress made by Afro-Americans. It is conducted as a distinct area of inquiry, within the discipline of history, with black people as its primary focus to reveal their thought and activities over time and place (43)." How do you see this idea of black people's thought and activities as the focus of black history in parallel with the discussion of self-naming and racial identification that begins in Chapter One? Is there some kind of relationship between the contemporary debates over categories of racial identification, and the historical legacy that defines people of African descent/black Americans/African Americans as a group? And how does this problem of self-naming look differently when we consider someone with a background and a personal history like our President's? What does African American history mean for African American studies?

The HistoryMakers

"Black feminist thought and practice respond to a fundamental contradiction of U.S. society. On the one hand, democratic promises of individual freedom, equality under the law, and social justice are made to all American citizens. Yet on the other hand, the reality of differential group treatment based on race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship persists. Groups organized around race, class, and gender in and of themselves are not inherently a problem. However, when African-Americans, poor people, women, and other groups discriminated against see little hope for group-based advancement, this situation constitutes social injustice." Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (2000), page 23

In fact, the group identity, and the awareness of shared history, leads to discussion and organization around shared solutions; by contrast, the rhetoric of color blindness has the negative effect of making the social inequalities themselves invisible, if we are unable to talk about the ways in which different treatment affects groups differently. What we seek in recognizing this history of racial and gender discrimination is understanding of the ways in which both forms are entrenched in American society, and interlocking in their effects. The problems themselves cannot simply disappear, or be wished away, without some difficult examination, without some challenging confrontations with the status quo.

In examining the HistoryMakers database, you will hear many stories of the ways in which black women and men experience a different reality, but you will also hear stories about how these individuals came to commit themselves to changing this reality. What are some of those transformative situations and encounters that the subjects talk about in their interviews? You should continue your research in the database by finding and analyzing some of these stories.

What is the White Mainstream?

What does it mean to identify certain cultural norms and values as white (and middle class)? When do values stop being white (and/or middle class and/or Western) and start becoming human?

Tell Me More

What do you hope to learn from this class, and how might this new knowledge apply to your (prospective) major and/or professional life?

Beginning Considerations--Starting the Blog, Starting the Course

Now that you have finished reading Chapters 1 and 2 in Anderson and Stewart, and Chapter 1 in Hill-Collins, take some time to reflect on their significance. What does reading this material make you want to know more about? List three facts presented in these chapters that surprised you, and list 3 questions about the assigned chapters that I and your classmates can respond to further.

Introductions, For Real, Y'all

Tell me: your major, your place of birth, your class standing. Identify and describe your campus or larger community memberships, and your future goals (Are the two connected in some way?)

Introducing Yourselves

Once you have created your gmail account and your blog, you should make sure that you send me a link to the blog. I need this to communicate to your classmates where they can find your blog and subscribe to it as readers and commenters.

On my blog, I will post directions for each of the posts you should be writing, so be sure to check it regularly by becoming a follower. I will expect one blog posting for each day the class is scheduled to meet, whether or not we actually meet on any given day; you are encouraged to post as much and as often as you would like! With your blog, you want to provide me with some assurance that you are keeping up with your reading assignments, and making some effort to do some preliminary analysis in the form of a question or meaningful comment. You should take advantage of the structure of daily writing to begin to really wrestle with the content of the course, the meanings of the readings, and to prepare yourself to contribute constructively to the class discussion.

Take some time to complete your profile so that I and your classmates can get to know each other better. Also make sure that you follow your classmates' blogs by following the links I will provide you and subscribe to each one so that you can read and comment on them regularly. Think of these linked blogs as an ongoing electronic discussion that supplements and compliments what we do in the classroom; your blogs can help you think more concretely about the assigned reading materials, and you can begin to productively shape your assignments by asking the kinds of questions that lead to research topics and engaging presentations in your podcasts.

Finally, be sure to send me your individual gmail addresses if you have not already done so; I need to add you to my contacts to make sure no one gets left out of the communication loop