As the debate over the Black Lives Matter movement raged across the country, Miami Law brought the discussion into the classroom last spring with “Race, Class, and Power: A University Course on Ferguson and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.”
With a fresh new syllabus and a second SEEDS award from the University, the course will again be offered to students campus wide in Spring 2018. SEEDS is a UM-wide program that covers all disciplines across all three of University of Miami campuses, supporting diversity and career development, and is gradually expanding its constituency.
“‘Black Lives Matter’ may have positioned race more visibly on a national stage, but matters of racial inequality and injustice have always been with us, shaping American law, politics, culture, and economic activity,” says Vice Dean and Professor Osamudia James, who came up with the idea for a course on the controversial movement.
“From Charlottesville to athlete activism and debates about who the American flag represents, it is clear that the issues animating the Movement are ever ripe for discussion and exploration.”
Convened by the School of Law, the 3-credit course explores race, class, and power against the backdrop of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The multiple lens through which the Movement will be explored includes race and identity, policing and criminal justice, theories of social movements, religion, education reform, urban politics, class and labor movements, child and family welfare, discrimination and empirics, healthcare and medicine, environmental justice, and other sub-disciplines in the humanities. The course is neither a defense nor a promotion of the #BlackLivesMatter, but rather a survey of the many issues animating and informing the Movement, with discussion ranging from healthcare disparities, to criminal justice inequality, to how artists use their work to express grief and outrage after police shootings.
The spring 2018 offering will include academic experts from across campus and disciplines as well as nationally recognized scholars, like University of Georgia Law Professor Mehrsa Baradaran, author of the new book, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.
