"Our task must be to widen our circle of compassion." Albert Einstein

 The primary purpose of this course is to study how the interconnections of race, class, and gender shape the structure of U.S. society. The course begins by with examining race, class, and gender as sociological concepts, with the purpose of using this framework to analyze and interpret contemporary social problems. After establishing a conceptual and sociological framework for understanding race, class, and gender and how they intersect in social structure, students will learn to use this framework to interpret the race, class, and gender dimensions of contemporary social issues. At the same time, the course introduces students to the experiences of diverse groups in the United States and shows how race, class, and gender together shape these experiences.

Books for Purchase:

Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins. 2004. Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, 5^th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co. *BE SURE TO GET THE FIFTH EDITION!   

Sharon Hays. 2003. Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Annette Lareau. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.  

Khaled Hosseini. 2003. The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead Books.

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Grades and Expectations: Grades will be based on two exams (in class; each worth 20% of final grade), one group presentation (25%), and one final research paper (25%). Class participation is also an important part of the final grade (10%); class participation includes periodic written ungraded assignments, contributions to class discussions, and attendance.  

Students must also complete all reading before coming to class and be prepared to discuss the reading. There is substantial reading for this course, especially in the first 2/3 of the semester. There is less reading in the last third to provide more time for the research and preparation for your presentation and paper. While reading, you should take notes, including questions and comments that the reading inspires.  

Including class participation in your grade is not meant to intimate those who are reluctant to speak, nor to only reward those who do so with ease. Participation includes careful listening, as well as sharing ideas and questions. I expect all students to create an environment that encourages the participation of everyone in the group. I also encourage you to discuss your ideas, reading, and written work with other students outside of class.  

I do not discuss grades over e-mail; if you have a concern about your grade, you must see me in person.

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Due Dates:

 First Exam: October 10. This exam covers all material from September 12- October 3. 

Second Exam: November 7. This exam covers all material from October 10-October 31. 

Group Presentations: November 14, November 21, December 5  

Final Paper

Topic Statement due: October 3
Outline and bibliography due: October 31
First draft due: November 21
Final Paper due: December 7 

Instructions for Group Work and Papers:

 Group Presentations: An important part of preparing for careers beyond college is demonstrating successful experience in working with groups. By working as a team, students will benefit from the diverse experiences and perspectives of others in the class, as well as the benefit from the multiple talents of students in the class. Your group projects will be the basis for an in-class presentation; topics and instructions for group presentations will be discussed in class. Students will receive individual grades for group work and for the final papers that are based on group projects. Students will also be asked to evaluate each other's contributions to the group project and these evaluations will be one component of each student's grade. You will be given time in class for your groups to meet, although you may find it necessary to meet outside of class to plan your presentation. 

Final Paper: Students will be asked work on one of the topics chosen for group presentations and to write a research paper on some dimension of this topic. Students will be expected to identify their topic by October 3 and submit an outline and bibliography on October 31. First drafts of papers are due on November 21. Final papers are due on December 7 no later than 5pm. You should submit your first draft with the final paper. Further instructions about the final paper will be given in class. Late papers are penalized by one grade for every day they are late. 

Class Information: Please note that announcements and other information related to the course will be posted on e-mail; please check regularly for such information. If you do not read e-mail on a regular basis, be sure to check on Monday morning for any important announcements. 

Class Policies:  

Academic Honesty: University policies on academic honesty apply to all work done in this class. For more information, see http://www.udel.edu/judicialaffairs/policyref.html 

Class Attendance: Required except for excused absences, as per University policy. See: http://www.udel.edu/provost/fachb/III-1-l-attendance.html  If you have an emergency, please notify the professor as soon as reasonably possible. Students are responsible for any missed work. 

Late Work: All work must be submitted on time. Late work is penalized by one grade for every day it is late.  

Course Schedule:

PART I. Conceptualizing Race, Class, and Gender 

We begin this course by placing groups that have traditionally been considered “other” at the center of our thinking. One of the questions I want students to think about is how shifting the center of knowledge alters our habits of thinking. How does it change sociological thinking to have those who have been defined as “other” define themselves? The introductory autobiographical essays should be a reference point for your thinking in the remainder of the semester. We will discuss the concepts of race, class, and gender as they have been developed in sociological research and will analyze how these systems of social relations intersect—not just as concepts, but as features of the experiences of diverse groups in the United States. 

September 12: Introduction: The Significance of Race, Class and Gender 

"Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in circles and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and health people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished."

Black Elk 

Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, "Introduction” and "Shifting the Center and Reconstructing Knowledge"
Arturo Madrid, “Missing People and Others” (in Andersen and Collins)
Cherrie Moraga, “La Güera” (in Andersen and Collins)
June Jordan, “Report from the Bahamas” (in Andersen and Collins)
Paula Gunn Allen, “Angry Women are Building” (in Andersen and Collins)
Marilyn Frye, “Oppression” (in Andersen and Collins)
Ronald Takaki, “A Different Mirror” (in Andersen and Collins)
Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” (in Andersen and Collins) 

September 19: Race and Racism 

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."

 W. E. B. Du Bois 

Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, "Conceptualizing Race, Class, and Gender"
Gloria Yamato, “Something about the Subject Makes it Hard to Name” (in Andersen and Collins)
Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege” (in Andersen and Collins)
Patricia Williams, "Of Race and Risk" (in Andersen and Collins)
Elizabeth Martinez, “Seeing More than Black and White” (in Andersen and Collins)
Abby Ferber, "What White Supremacists Taught a Jewish Scholar about Identity" (in Andersen and Collins)
Cornel West, “Race Matters” (in Andersen and Collins)
Mary Waters, “Optional Ethnicities: For Whites Only?” (in Andersen and Collins)
Almas Sayeed, “Chappals and Gym Shorts: An Indian Muslim Woman in the Land of Oz” (In Andersen and Collins)
Brent Staples, “Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders His Power” (in Andersen and Collins)
C. Matthew Snipp, “The First Americans” (in Andersen and Collins)
Lillian Rubin, “Is This a White Country or What?” (in Andersen and Collins) 

September 26: The Social Structure of Gender and Sexuality 

"Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?"

John Stuart Mill 

Maxine Baca Zinn, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Michael A. Messner, "Gender Through the Prism of Difference" (in Andersen and Collins)
Yen Le Espiritu, "Ideological Racism and Cultural Resistance" (in Andersen and Collins)
Julia Alvarez, “A White Woman of Color” (in Andersen and Collins)
Michael Messner, “Masculinities and Athletic Careers” (in Andersen and Collins)
Pepper Schwartz and Virginia Rutter, ”The Gender of Sexuality” (in Andersen and Collins)
Cornel West, “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject” (in Andersen and Collins)
Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed, “Where Has Gay Liberation Gone?” (in Andersen and Collins)
Jason Schultz, “Getting Off on Feminism” (in Andersen and Collins)
Judith Ortiz Cofer, “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” (in Andersen and Collins)
Julianne Malveaux. “Gladiators, Gazelles, and Groupies: Basketball Love and Loathing” (in Andersen and Collins)
Shani Jamila, “Can I Get a Witness: Testimony from a Hip Hop Feminist” (in Andersen and Collins)
Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods, Chs. 1-2 

October 3: Social Class, Wealth, and Inequality 

"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade, then neither persons nor property will be safe."

 Frederick Douglass 

Chuck Collins and Felice Veskel, “Economic Apartheid in America” (in Andersen and Collins)
Donna Langston, “Tired of Playing Monopoly” (in Andersen and Collins)
Dalton Conley, "Being Black, Living in the Red" (in Andersen and Collins)
Gregory Mantsios, “Media Magic: Making Class Invisible” (in Andersen and Collins)
Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods, Chs. 3-12 

October 10: First Exam 

PART II. Understanding the Race, Class, and Gender Dimensions of Social Issues 

In this section of the course we examine several contemporary social issues—work and economic restructuring, the influence of these economic changes of families, poverty and welfare, and access to education. The purpose of this section of the course is to teach students how to critically analyze social issues that are popularly represented as individualistic problems, using instead an analysis that accounts for how race, class, and gender together influence the development of these problems. By centering our thinking about such issues in an analysis of race, class, and gender, students will see how the sociological imagination creates a more complete understanding of contemporary social issues.

October 17: Work and Economic Restructuring 

"My only concern was to get home after a hard day's work."

                                                                                                Rosa Parks 

Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, "Rethinking Institutions"
Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei, “Race, Gender, and Women's Work" (in Andersen and Collins)
Kenneth Brown, “The Indignities of Unemployment” (in Andersen and Collins)
Philip Moss and Christ Tilly, “’Soft’ Skills and Race” (in Andersen and Collins)
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Doméstica” (in Andersen and Collins)
Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children, Chs. 1-2

October 24: Families, Teen Pregnancy and Reproduction

"We must muster the necessary will to make sure all of our children receive the healthy and fair and safe start in life they require and deserve."

Marian Wright Edelman

 Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Our Mothers’ Grief” (in Andersen and Collins)
Eleanor Palo Stoller and Rose Campbell Gibson, “The Diversity of American Families” (in Andersen and Collins)
Lynet Uttal, "Racial Safety and Cultural Maintenance: The Child Care Concerns of Employed Mothers of Color" (in Andersen and Collins)
Kath Weston, “Straight is to Gay as Family is to No Family” (in Andersen and Collins)
Loretta Ross et al., “”Just Choices: Women of Color, Reproductive Health, and Human Rights” (in Andersen and Collins)
Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children, Ch. 3 

October 31: Poverty and Welfare 

"The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and poor poorer."

                                    Jawaharlal Nehru 

Katherine Newman, “The Invisible Poor” (in Andersen and Collins)
James Jennings and Louis Kushnick, "Poverty as Race, Power, and Wealth" (in Andersen and Collins)
Linda Burnham, “Welfare Reform, Family Hardship and Women of Color” (in Andersen and Collins)
Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children, Chs. 4-8
 

November 7: Second Exam  

PART III. Understanding Social Issues and Working for Social Change 

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

                                                                                                Mahatma Gandhi

 November 14: Group Projects: Topics to be announced 

November 21: Group Projects: Topics to be announced 

November 28: War, Violence, and Inequality: A Global Perspective 

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner 

**Note: Because of the Thanksgiving break, there are no group presentations on November 28, but we will be discussing the novel, The Kite Runner. Students are expected to have completed reading the book prior to coming to class (you will be tested in class), so be sure to finish it over the Thanksgiving vacation. I promise that once you start reading, you will want to keep reading, but allow yourself the time to do so. 

December 5: Group Projects: Topics to be announced 

Additional Resources (links available via on-line syllabus):

 University of Delaware:

Academic Services Center
ADA Office (Americans with Disabilities)
Advisement Center, College of Arts & Science
Black American Studies Program
Center for Black Culture
Indian Student Association
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Student Union
Muslim Students' Association
Office of Affirmative Action and Multicultural Programs
Office of Women's Affairs
Women's Studies Program

Web sites: 
Annie E. Casey Foundation
American Sociological Association
American Indian History and Culture
Anti-Defamation League
Institute for Women's Policy Research
National MultiCultural Institute
U.S. Census Bureau

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