PublicBooks.org Trump Syllabus: Week 03 - Blackness and Right-Wing Multiculturalism

[Arthaey]

From the PublicBooks Trump syllabus and AAIHS's suggested assignments to accompany PublicBooks.org's list.


Books

- Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Unesco, 1980).

- Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (South End Press, 1983).

- Ian Haney Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford University Press, 2014).

- Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton University Press, 2015).

- Angela Davis, Frank Barat, and Cornel West, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket, 2016).

- James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” in The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963).

- The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954-1990, edited by Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine (Penguin, 1991).


Online

- Ben Smith and Byron Tau, “Birtherism: Where it All Began,” Politico, April 22, 2011.

- Race: the Power of An Illusion. Directed by Christine Herbes-Sommers, Tracy Heather Strain, and Llewellyn M. Smith (California Newsreel, 2003).


Assignments

- Ask students to read SCOTUS decisions in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) and compare to Donald Trump’s attacks on Obama’s citizenship. [contributed by Julie Greene]

- Create a scavenger hunt in which students search historical primary sources for dog whistles (political messages employing coded language). Ask them to draw connections between these dog whistles to Trump’s non-coded race baiting. [contributed by Elizabeth Cohen]