In the face of a spate of executive orders about education and what we can and cannot teach about the United States, particularly with regard to race, I’m posting here the course description for my American Political Theory class that I’m teaching this term. It’s high time that those of us, particularly with tenure, who teach American history or American politics or American political thought or anything in that realm, stand up and speak out on behalf of what we teach. Not in a defensive or apologetic crouch, but proudly and loudly, affirming that we offer students an in-depth approach to central problems of the American experience. My course opens with readings from Aristotle and the Hebrew Bible on slavery, […]
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Categories
Economies, Education, Race
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Tags abolition, Alexander Hamilton, Aristotle, capitalism, Frederick Douglass, Jim Crow, slavery, Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. Du Bois
Every once in a while I teach constitutional law, and when I do, I pose to my students the following question: What if the Senate apportioned votes not on the basis of states but on the basis of race? That is, rather than each state getting two votes in the Senate, what if each racial or ethnic group listed in the US Census got two votes instead? Regardless of race, almost all of the students freak out at the suggestion. It’s undemocratic, they cry! When I point out that the Senate is already undemocratic—the vote of any Wyomian is worth vastly more than the vote of each New Yorker—they say, yeah, but that’s different: small states need protection from large […]
Two weeks ago I wrote, “When Steven Spielberg makes a movie about the Holocaust, he focuses on a German. When he makes a movie about abolition, he focuses on a white man. Say what you will, he’s consistent.” My comment was inspired by historian Kate Masur’s excellent New York Times op-ed, which argued that Spielberg’s film Lincoln had essentially left African Americans offstage or in the gallery. In Spielberg’s hands, blacks see themselves get rescued by a savior who belongs to the very group that has ravaged and ruined them. Just as Jews do in Schindler’s List. The difference is that in the case of emancipation, blacks—both free and slave—were actually far more central to the process of their own […]
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Categories
Media
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Tags Aaron Bady, Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Freddie DeBoer, Frederick Douglass, Guns and Money, Jim Crow, Kate Masur, Lawyers, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner