Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/CUNY, Baruch College/The Evolution and Expressions of Racism (Fall 2014)/Course description

From the Baruch Undergraduate Bulletin: A multidimensional course approaching racism from a historical, political, economic, and sociological point of view. The nature of prejudice will be discussed with regard to prejudice against Southern European, Mexican-American, Jewish, and Puerto Rican groups. Emphasis will be placed upon the effects of racism on Black people in the United States. The study will be discussed with regard to the effects of racism on the perpetrators and their victims. This course will be offered if there is sufficient demand.

Additional information from Dr. Treitler: Along with many (but not all) of the ideas noted in the paragraph preceding this one, this course will provide you with an introduction to the concepts of race, ethnicity, and racism. The professor’s first goal is to have students understand the idea of the “sociological construct.” What that means, basically, is that although we behave sometimes as if the way we understand our social world is based on “scientific fact,” the truth is that we have simply made up rules that indicate the way we understand the world around us. This set of rules and definitions that guide our understanding is the sociological construct. Her second goal is to have students be conscious of race and ethnicity as social constructions (yes, we simply made them up). Third, students will learn that racism is a set of thoughts and behaviors that emerges from the meanings we have given to the racial and ethnic categories we fabricated. At the end of this course, students will (ideally) be able to use evidence from U.S. and international history (e.g., studying the racial paradigms and experience of Brazil and/or South Africa as compared to the U.S., and examining the colonial experience of Ireland, Africa and Latin America) to justify the need for more anti-racist human interactions.

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