W.E.B. Du Bois opened The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by saying “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” Despite the tremendous gains resulting from the Civil Rights Movement’s activism, the “problem of the color-line” remains in place at the turn of the first quarter of the 21st century. This course examines the contributions of major Black authors toward addressing the “problem of the color-line” from the 19th century to today, with a focus on how Black authors have sought dignity and pursuit of the common good within a society beset by racist attitudes and legal structures that lead to disproportionate outcomes. The course puts these authors into dialogues with mainstays from the Catholic Intellectual Tradition to reflect on the nature of human dignity and our pursuit of the common good, and it especially elevates the contributions of under-discussed Black Catholics. The warrant for focusing on Black experiences and anti-Black racism is because this form of racism most directly shapes the history of racism in the US. Students will have the opportunity to investigate other groups’ experiences of racism using the framework provided by our investigation of anti-Black racism.
The course begins with literary texts from the 19th and early 20th century alongside legal texts to help students recognize the varieties of racial prejudice and their effects. It utilizes the distinction in Catholic theology between original sin and actual sin to help articulate the distinction to be drawn between, on the one hand, racist acts, laws, and norms for which particular actors are guilty and, on the other hand, the lingering consequences of such acts, laws, and norms, for which all are responsible, regardless of individual guilt, if we are to promote the common good and the healing of the “hidden wound” (Berry) of racism. Thinkers to be treated in this part of the course are court cases (Plessy v. Ferguson) and fiction writers (Kate Chopin, Flannery O’Connor, C.S. Lewis), as well as short excerpts from the Catholic Intellectual Tradition on the notions of sin, guilt, responsibility, and the common good (e.g., Plato, Augustine).
The course then turns to a historical survey of major Black authors, focusing on their accounts of their own experiences and the philosophical and theoretical tools they develop to explain their experiences. This is the bulk of the course. Key figures are Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Black feminist authors, such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks, will also be included. Students will be prompted to see how the “racial contract” (as Charles Mills explains) can rewrite itself to accommodate shifting legal and social realities, such that racism persists (e.g., from slavery to Jim Crow, from Jim Crow to mass incarceration and police brutality, etc.). Major concepts and issues will include the role of literacy, the goal and function of education, the meaning of struggle, violent and non-violent resistance, the way that race hierarchy is a “fixed star” in white consciousness, double-consciousness, the Veil, oppression, and historically-minded sociological analysis.
The course then turns toward systematic questions in our contemporary moment, following the conclusion of Coates’s Between the World and Me. Integrating the key ideas and arguments from earlier figures, we ask what needs to change in our systems of education, law, norms, wealth distribution, etc. in order to promote Black dignity and heal the “hidden wound.” Special emphasis will be placed on the dignity of labor, using texts from Tocqueville, Marx, Wendell Berry, Hannah Arendt, and Catholic social teaching (e.g., Laborem exercens). Special emphasis will also be placed on the contributions of recent Black Catholics (e.g., Brian Massingale on the necessity for lamentation).
This class will serve to fulfill the Humanitistic Inquiry LAE requirement in that it will engage a number of historical and contemporary texts that raise important questions about how different groups of people engage one in another in American society, especially concerning race. It will prompt students to reflect on human nature, the nature of human dignity, and the nature of human community. The course will fulfill the Social and Global Awareness requirement by engaging with a number of social issues in US culture and their historical relations to experiences abroad (e.g., the treatment of Black GIs in WWII in Europe vs. in America, trips that each of the major figures covered took abroad and the different experiences they had there, etc.).