Teaching the History of Race on Zoom

Today I taught my last class of the semester in Temple’s GenEd Representing Race course. What did I learn from teaching this course?

–My view of race became more nuanced and global, though it still has a long way to go. Because of my training and interests, the African American experience is like a force-field shaping how and what I think about “race.” But this is distorting. We need to talk about race as a global phenomenon. In this class we discussed ideas of difference in the ancient world, medieval anti-semitism, whiteness in Barbados, European humanitarianism and genocide in Africa, global anti-immigrant policies in settler states, indigenous child removal in Australia, Nazism, decolonization, apartheid South Africa, and the Rwandan genocide. And yet, for all that, the course was still too American-focused. That’s just a reflection of my limitations at the moment.

–My view of what race is became clearer. I think I’ve known this for a long time, but having to do a whole semester on the history of racial representations compelled me to gain more theoretical and practical clarity on what this nebulous thing is. Suffice it to say, telling your students that race is “socially constructed” is basically pointless. I needed to show them race changing, not just tell them that it does. I hope this point came through to them (maybe I’ll find out when they hand in their finals!).

–My sense of how racial progress occurs became more concrete. This sensibility is reflected in this recent think piece. I think we focus too much on consciousness and not enough on material power. That said, I’m still an intellectual historian at heart so I think ideas are really really important!

–I also learned that the chat window in zoom is a wonderful feature that drastically lowers the barrier to entry for students to participate in whole-class discussion. I want to somehow replicate it when we’re finally back in physical classrooms.

What did my students learn? Here are some of their responses from today’s discussion (another benefit of zoom–these are actual quotes):

–“I learned that there’s so much that I don’t know.” (This is the best thing to learn).

–Another student agreed: “I was just thinking how much I actually don’t know about history itself when I thought when I was in high school I knew a decent amount history.”

–“I’m able to connect past events to current laws, regulations, or viewpoints….Instead of being like…’oh yeah, the past affects today’ versus being able to point out and make those connections. That definitely changed with this class for me.”

–“I remember you’re always talking about how things aren’t exactly inevitable…things have to happen for other things to happen…I was always thinking about that and it just kind of helped me immensely….contemplate kind of everything…A million things that have to happen for other things to happen and it’s just everything so intertwined and messy. And I feel like that’s why there’s also so many different perspectives within history and why, like the things we’re learning in high school and middle school and stuff kind of don’t exactly measure the world we learned here. I felt like I was in this one viewpoint. And now, like, my mind is kind of opened up to this whole other thing.”

–Another student said analyzing the movies we watched increased his enjoyment of movies in general. Shocking!

At the end of class one of my students (a senior!) said “this class probably was one of the better classes I’ve ever taken.” And in an online semester! Every teacher knows how good that feels.