JC
An article from In Higher Ed explores the growing Ethnic Studies field. It’s nice to see that professors are expanding their students’ ideas about race and ethnicity. It’s no longer about discussing things in such finite terms. Mixed race literature is being utilized in the classroom, and professors are pushing the idea that racial classifications are “not unchanging.”

AnaLouise Keating, an associate professor of women’s studies at Texas Woman’s University, says that a major challenge for her is getting students beyond a “monolithic, pseudoscientific” sense that racial categories are precise and unchanging. She wants students to realize that the status associated with various races is not unchanging — and she wants to do this in a way that makes white students truly examine themselves, but not just engage in “non-productive, navel-gazing guilt.”

One way she does this is through her reading selections for classes. For example, she teaches Kindred, by Octavia Butler, in part because the race of the protagonist, Dana, is unclear at the beginning of the novel, and the race of Dana’s husband also surprises her student readers. Similarly, she teaches novels from the Harlem Renaissance that explored racial “passing” or the experience of middle- or upper-class black people.

Jay also said that he was using literature to fight the concept of unchanging racial categories. He recently started a course called “Fictions of the Color Line,” featuring all authors of mixed race or ethnicity. He called it “liberating” to move beyond unitary definitions of race.

Extra plug for Octavia Butler: She is an amazing author!!! I read Lilith’s Brood with the SwirlNYC book club. Definitely check it (and her other books) out!!