AFA3930 (29901) Special Topics: Race, Inequality, and Urban Education and Housing Policy
Spring 2023
T Period 8-9 (3:00 – 4:55), R Period 8 (3:00 – 3:50 PM)
Riché J. Daniel Barnes, Ph.D. Associate Professor
Anthropology, African American Studies, and Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies
In the United States of America, a child’s address, more than any other factor, often determines what kind of public education he or she will receive. A complex set of historical forces including local and federal housing policies, mortgage lending practices, highway construction, and school districting have channeled particular economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups into particular neighborhoods, where many remain today. And, because public schools are funded by local property taxes and influenced by neighborhood boundaries, they often reproduce a narrative of inequality. New urban renewal policies have called for the demolition of public housing complexes, once again displacing various racial and ethnic communities under the guise of mixed-income communities. In recent years, these policies, instead of creating greater access to opportunity for lower-income and poor people, they open the door to gentrification and the introduction of charter schools which further encroach upon and reproduce inequality.
This course blends urban history with educational and housing policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped opportunity since the groundbreaking supreme court decision, Brown V. Board of Education. It will investigate a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The course looks at several cities as case studies considering how race, cities, schools, and space have been differently understood over time. We will also utilize speakers and pre-recorded events to aid in our comparative analysis as well as discussions of the application of theory through praxis. This course will be of particular interest to students interested in law, sociology, public policy, education, community studies, urban studies, and social justice.
Course Readings:
A combination of books and shorter readings and documents will be available via electronic course tools.
*Love, Bettina L. 2019. We Want to do More Than Survive. Boston: Beacon Press
* Sanders, Raynard, David Stovall, and Terrenda White. 2018. Twenty-First Century Jim Crow Schools: The Impact of Charters on Public Education. Boston: Beacon Press.
*Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press
*Shedd, Carla. 2015. Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
*Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2019. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill: UNC Chapel Hill Press.