Teaching in an Uprising: Readings on Race and Democracy

Since March, I’ve been teaching an introductory social sciences seminar which has the thematic focus of “race and democracy.” We began the quarter by contrasting Alexis de Tocqueville’s claim that “the great privilege of Americans is to be able to make reparable mistakes,” with Ta-Nehisi Coate’s 2014 article, “The Case for Reparations,” where he writes that “we must imagine a new country,” because “reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.” From this starting point, students grappled with challenging questions about the character of American democracy when you take seriously Black thinkers and political theorists. Students progressed through the course reading texts like W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, the Combahee River Collective Statement, the report of the Reparations at the University of Chicago Working Group, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, speeches and essays from Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Bayard Rustin, and others. Voting, it became clear, was necessary but insufficient to create a democratic society. So how, then, do we know if we live in a democracy? What would it take to make the United States a truly democratic, just, and equitable society? What are the conditions under which reparations would be possible?

In this coming week, our last week of class, I had assigned readings to help us imagine democracy as a contested future—Ruth Wilson Gilmore on prison abolition, Charlene Carruthers queer, Black feminist reimagining of the Black radical tradition, the conclusion from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Naomi Klein’s “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World.” In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by four police officers, we’ll still read these texts, but understanding our discussions would be informed by events through which my students were living—and, likely, participating in—I wanted to offer some contemporary contextual readings by historians and other social scientists to guide us. I also wanted to make clear to my students that the uprisings weren’t “unknowable” events—as the media often portrays them—but important subjects for inquiry, with a wide range of scholars already thinking about them, and so much more work to do.

After curating a short list for my own students, I tweeted asking for other recommendations (my students always ask for more!) and the response was incredible. I’m sharing in the hope that, although driven by the particular arc of this course I’ve described above, this list and the larger set of resources in the replies to this tweet can help a wide range of educators facilitate discussions in their own classrooms in the coming days and weeks. To meet the demands of the compressed timescale, I focused on essays and op-eds which are easier to move into a lesson plan quickly, and which are more widely accessible. In sending the list to students, I wrote a brief bio of each author below the link which included titles of their most recent and/or relevant work so students could read more if they chose. Christine H. Whyte has also created a public Zotero group with these and other resources.

Minnesota in Context

• Keisha N. Blain, “Violence in Minneapolis is rooted in the history of racist policing in America,”  Washington Post, Made by History (May 30, 2020).
• Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., “George Floyd’s Murder Shows Once More that we Cannot Wait for White America to End Racism,” Time (May 29, 2020).
• Robert Greene II, “We Are Living in a Red Spring,” Jacobin (May 31, 2020).
• Kali Nicole Gross, “By Remembering Our Sisters, We Challenge Police Violence Against Black Women and Legacies that Eclipse these Injustices,” Association of Black Women Historians (May 31, 2020).
• Elizabeth Hinton, “The Minneapolis Uprising in Context,” Boston Review (May 29, 2020).
• Kellie Carter Jackson, “The Double-Standard of the American Riot,” The Atlantic (June 1, 2020)
• Ibram X. Kendi, “The American Nightmare,” The Atlantic (June 1, 2020).
• August H. Nimtz, Jr., “It’s a big deal that the outrage expressed over George Floyd’s death was massive and multiracial,” MinnPost (May 28, 2020).
• Melvin Rogers, “We Should Be Afraid, But Not of Protesters,” Boston Review (May 30, 2020).
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Of Course There Are Protests. The State is Failing Black People,” New York Times (May 29, 2020).

Broader Context, Commentary, and Resources

• Simon Balto, “Why Police Cheered Trump’s Dark Speech,” Washington Post, Made by History (July 31, 2017).
• Marcia Chatelain, “Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus,” Dissent (November 28, 2014).
• Ashley M. Howard, “Why Ferguson Isn’t the Tale of Two Protests,” The Black Scholar (August 18, 2014).
• Walter Johnson, “Ferguson’s Fortune 500 Company,” The Atlantic (April 26, 2015).
• Austin McCoy, “When Whites Riot, Humanity is a Given,” Nursing Clio (October 30, 2014).
• Allissa V. Richardson, “Why cell phone videos of black people’s deaths should be considered sacred, like lynching photographs,” The Conversation (May 28, 2020).
• Stuart Schraeder, “An Empire of Patrolmen,” Jacobin (October 18, 2019).
• Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain, #CharlestonSyllabus, African American Intellectual History Society.