SOCI 423 - Seminar: Invisibility and Hypervisibility - Native and Black Structural Inequality from Colonization to Over-Incarceration

FC SSCI CD

4 credits
This seminar provides an overview of the key Western settler colonial power structures, institutional norms, and societal practices that institutionalize and perpetuate structural racialized inequality experienced by Black and Native people in the U.S. Readings and discussion place emphasis on the role of law and popular representations in reifying and perpetuating racialized structural inequality. This course looks at the foundation and functioning of structural racism in the U.S. since Western European colonization: from Indigenous genocide, forced relocation, and assimilation and the institutionalization of African slavery and Jim Crow up to and including the contemporary era of racialized overincarceration. This course examines the interdependence between Indigenous erasure (invisibility) and Black hypervisibility in the North American settler colonial structure of racialized inequality and their relationship to economic inequality. In discussing contemporary racialized stratification, this course also examines the shift to “colorblind” racism and its role in veiling and perpetuating racialized structural inequality.