First Year Seminar 186
On Prejudice
Fall Semester 1999
Instructor: Maurice L. Wade
Office: McCook 318
Office Hours: Wednesdays 2:00 - 4:00 and Thursdays 2:00 - 4:00
and by appointment. (I am on campus virtually every weekday from
about 10:00 until 6:00)
Campus Phone Number: 2417
Mentor: Denis Petrov
As you read through this syllabus you will notice that I am
requiring a lot of work of you. Indeed, all First Year Seminar
instructors are told that their seminars should be very, very
challenging. You should though be able to do all of the work for
this course and all of your other courses successfully, if you
manage your time well. Think of your education here at Trinity as
a full-time job to which you must devote an average of 40 - 50
hours per week. That may seem like an awful lot, but for folks
who get 8 hours of sleep each night, that leave 62 - 72 waking
hours for other pursuits. You are being asked to spend less than
have of your waking hours devoted to your education. That is not
at all an unreasonable burden to place upon you.
Required Texts
White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White
Supremacist Discourse by Jessie Daniels.
A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to
the Ivy League by Ron Suskind.
Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past by Martin
Gilbert.
Maus I & Maus II by Art Spiegelman.
Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who
Discovered He was Black by Gregory Howard Williams.
When Nickels Were Indians: An Urban, Mixed-Blood Story by
Patricia Penn Hilden.
Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian: A Literary Anthology by
Bennett L. Singer.
Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America by Mel
White.
All of these texts are available for purchase at the College
Bookstore in the Mather Campus Center.
Additional readings in photocopied form will be handed out in
class from time to time during the course of the semester.
Videos
In addition to your required reading assignments, you will be
required to view a substantial number of videos from the College
library’s collection. These viewings, unless otherwise
specified, will take place outside class and each video should be
viewed prior to the class meeting for which it has been assigned.
Videos for this class are on reserve on the 3rd floor of the
College library and can be viewed in the viewing facilities
there. (Perhaps you will be able to prevail upon your mentor to
arrange group showings of the videos. Otherwise you should view
them in the viewing room on the 3rd floor of the College library.
Websites
Along with the required readings and video views, you will also
be required to explore a variety of websites which have some
relevance to the topics and issues that the seminar will take up
over the course of the semester. Don’t just take a cursory
glance at these sites. You are expected to explore them carefully
and become as fully apprised of their contents as possible.
Writing Assignments
1. The Trinity YAPP Forum is an electronic bulletin board that
you will use to record your assessments of the videos that you
will be required to view and of the websites that you will be
required to visit. What kinds of responses should you record?
Websites and videos are made in order to communicate something to
an audience. Every creator of a website or video intends for her
creation to be experienced by other people and she wants her
audience(s) to come away from the experience(s) of her creation
with something--information, emotion, belief, desire, etc. When
viewing a video or exploring a website, keep this in mind. Ask
yourself, what is the creator of this website or video trying to
get across to me? Is she trying to evoke a particular emotional
response? Is she trying to motivate me to do something? Is she
attempting to induce me to believe something? Is she trying to
inform me about something? If so, why does she want me to know
this? Is she describing something? If so, why? Was the effort at
communication embodied in a website or video a success (partial
or complete) or a failure (partial or complete)? What made it
successful, if it succeeded? What flaws caused it to fail, if it
was a failure? Questions of this kind should be before your mind
as you view the videos and explore the websites. The responses
that you record via YAPP should be critical assessments of the
videos and websites based upon your answers to these sorts of
questions. Indeed, treat these questions as a kind of checklist
that you should go through before making your YAPP entry. Your
entries will be graded on a pass/fail basis. Both Denis and I
will regularly monitor the YAPP space that has been designated
for our class. If you do not do this writing for each and every
video and website that your are required to view and explore
respectively, then quite simply you will fail the course no
matter how well you perform on any or all of the other elements
of the course. If either Denis or I judge that your entries into
YAPP are not serious efforts, you will be warned to improve your
performance. Failure to heed that warning will result in a
failing grade for the course.
I also encourage you to use YAPP not only to record your own
responses to the videos and websites but also to respond to the
assessments made by your fellow seminar members. If you want to
express your agreement or disagreement with someone else’s
response(s), then do so? Indeed, if you find that you are not the
first person to enter a response into YAPP concerning a
particular video or website, then you might express your response
to that video or website as a reply to one of your
classmate’s responses.
In order to access YAPP, you need to open a web browser such as
Netscape or Internet Explorer and go to this address:
http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/cc/acad/. This will take you to the
Academic Information Resources page. There you will find the
On-line Class Conferences heading under which is the link that
will get you to the YAPP Forum. That link will take you to the
Welcome page of YAPP. In order to enter YAPP, you must open the
Enter the Conference link which will prompt you to enter your
e-mail username and your e-mail password. Before doing this
though, you should open the YAPP Help Page link and familiarize
yourself with the information given there.
Your YAPP entries for this kind of assignment should all take the
heading--Video Assessment or Website Assessment depending,
obviously, upon whether the assessment is of a video or of a
website.
2. For the remainder of the semester, you will also be required
to make at least one prejudice awareness entry into our YAPP
forum. This entry should discuss some instance or aspect of
prejudice that you have come into contact with in your
environment. The relevant environment includes everything from
the passing thoughts that run through your own mind to your dorm
to your classes to the city of Hartford to the world as a whole.
Your contact with instances or aspects of prejudice might be
directly personal. You might actually witness or hear something.
Or you contact might be indirect. That is, you might, for
instance, read about something or have something reported to you
by someone else. Of course, if you read newspapers, news
magazines, and/or watch news shows, then you will come into
plenty of contact with instances and aspects of prejudice. In
your entries, you should do at least two things. First, make
clear just what the instance or aspect of prejudice is that you
are recording. Second, express your own personal response to that
instance or aspect of prejudice. Your entries for this sort of
assignment should all take the heading--Prejudice Awareness. Each
Monday morning I will read your entry for the week before. Again,
if Denis and/or I find that you are not doing these entries, you
will fail the course. Also, if you appear not to be taking them
seriously, you will be warned to improve your performance and if
you do not do so, you will fail the course.
3. For the first few weeks of the semester you will be required
to do a somewhat more formal kind of writing, certainly more
formal than your journal entries or your YAPP contributions.
These will be your critical reflection papers. These papers
should be no less than two and no more than three typed,
double-spaced pages with standard margins. They are labeled
critical reflection papers because they are to contain your
critical reflections upon the assigned readings. As I noted
above, creators of videos and websites are attempting to
communicate something by means of their creators. This is no less
true of the authors of the works that you will be assigned to
read over the course of the term. Each author of each piece, no
matter what its genre or its length, wants her reader(s) to take
something away from reading her work. Accordingly, you should
read these pieces with the same questions in mind that you were
advised above to keep in mind in viewing and exploring the videos
and websites. Your answers to those questions will provide the
bases for writing your critical reflection essays. After reading
each piece with the appropriate questions in mind and taking
relevant notes along the way, you should try to articulate your
reflections on some one or more of the pieces.
These essays should not be summaries. We will all have done the
reading and summaries will therefore be unnecessary. Rather your
essays are attempts to express what you got out of the assigned
reading. Were you convinced of something by some particular chunk
of assigned reading? If so, then express what you were convinced
of and what convinced you. If you believe that an author was
attempting to convince you of something but failed, then make
your essay an expression and exploration of that. What made the
piece ineffective? What did it need to do that it did not do in
order to convince you? Was an author trying to induce a
particular emotion or feeling in you? If so, use your essay to
express that emotion or feeling, to explain how the piece was
able to get you to feel whatever you felt, to communicate your
views as to why the author wanted to move you to some particular
emotional state? Maybe an author wanted to be sure that you
became cognizant of certain facts. Think about why the author
wanted to you to know these facts. Writers of factual essays
don’t communicate facts simply to communicate facts. They
believe that the facts about which they write are important in
some respect, that once one knows those facts, at least in the
light in which they are presented by the writer, one knows
something worth knowing. You can use your critical reflection
essays to address this sort of matter as well. Here too you
should treat these questions as a kind of check list when you do
your reflection essays.
Each essay is due in class--not after class.
4. After the first weeks of the semester have elapsed, we will
abandon the weekly critical reflection papers and you will be
assigned a couple of short essays. I will designate the topics of
these essays. You will be divided into groups and each group will
be given a topic. Each group will then meet to discuss the topic
and to plan a research strategy. Each group should then meet
again to discuss the results of their research. Each member of
the group should decide what he or she is going to write on his
or her own. In other words, the group process stops at the
writing of the essay itself. I may also have the members of each
group engage in some peer reviewing of the essays of the other
members of their groups.
5. Your final writing assignment of the term will be a longer
paper due during the final exam period. A hand-out detailing this
essay will be provided later in the term.
Other Matters
The following things should go without saying but long experience
has taught me that I must address them. First, class attendance
is required. Every missed class will lower your final grade.
Exceptions will be made only in cases of genuine emergencies and
you will bear the burden of giving me convincing evidence of such
emergencies. A substantial part of your overall course grade will
be based on your contributions in class. And, you can not
contribute if you are not present. Second, contribution does not
mean simply talking off the top of your head. It means responding
thoughtfully to the reflection papers of your classmates. It
means drawing upon the readings, the videos, the websites, your
prejudice awareness entries, etc to make useful comments and to
pose meaningful questions. Third, for some reason, folks your
age(s) have in recent years apparently developed small bladders
and so many seem to need to leave class. You should be able to
sit through a 75 minute class without requiring a bathroom trip
unless you are ill. Please refrain as much as possible from the
practice of leaving class to attend to these and other such
needs.
Schedule of Assigned Readings and Other Assignments
9/7
Read chapter 3, “Prejudice” of Race, Ethnicity, Gender,
and Class (photocopies distributed in class).
9/9
Read chapter 4, “Prejudice in the 1990s: Is It
Declining?,” of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender (photocopies
distributed in class). Also view the video, Understanding Our
Biases and Assumptions before class. (Unless otherwise noted, all
videos are available for viewing in the Music and Media Services
section located on the third floor of the College library.) This
video is to be the subject of your first YAPP Video Assessment.
9/14
Read “‘Race’ and the Construction of Human
Identity” by Audrey Smedly. (This piece will be distributed
in class in photocopied form.) Also view the video, A Class
Divided before class. This too is to be the subject of a YAPP
Video Assessment. (Half of the class will be responsible for
turning up at class on this date with a reflection paper based on
the readings upon which class discussion will be based. Check
your e-mail to determine if you are in this group which goes
first in the reflection paper assignment.)
9/16
Your reading assignment for this class is wholly drawn for the
World Wide Web. View the website, Skinheads of the Racial Holy
War (at http://www.rahowa.com/skinheads.htm). View the website,
World Church of the Creator Headquarters (at
http://209.143.158.42/frames.html). Although everyone should
explore these website carefully, half of the class (the half that
did not do a reflection paper on 9/14) should based their
reflection papers on these sites. Everyone should do a YAPP Video
Assessment on the video, Blue Eyed.
9/21
Read chapters 1, 2, and 3 of White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and
Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse by Jessie Daniels. Do a
YAPP Website Assessment on the website, The Occidental Crusader:
Uniting People of European Origin (at
http://www.crusader.net/index.html).
9/23
Read the remainder of White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and
Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse by Jessie Daniels. Do a
YAPP Video Assessment on Blood in the Face.
9/28
Read “The Only Good Indian is a Dean Indian: History and
Meaning of a Proverbial Stereotype.” (This essay was
downloaded from the website, First Nations Site Index (at
http://www.dickshovel.com/www.html). Also read the material in
the Native American’s photocopy packet to be handed out in
class.
9/30
Read Chapters 1 and 2 of When Nickels Were Indians. Do a YAPP
Video Assessment on Columbus Didn’t Discover Us and a Yapp
Website Assessment on the website, End Racial Bigotry Now (at
http://www.tdi.net/ISHGOODA/RACIAL/).
10/5
Read Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of When Nickels Were Indians. Do a YAPP
Video Review on In the White Man’s Image.
10/7
Read Chapters 6, 7, and 8 of When Nickels Were Indians. Do a Yapp
Website Assessment of the website, Redskin: A Hate Word Defined
(at http://www.iwchildren.org/redskinhate.htm).
10/11 - 10/15
Midsession. Check your e-mail for an account the web project that
you are to complete during Midsession.
On Friday, 10/15, we will be joining Dan Lloyd’s First Year
Seminar for a trip to the Pequot Museum. Exact time of departure
will be forthcoming. The general plan is to get there in time to
have lunch. Then to have a guided tour of the museum and then to
explore the museum on our own before returning to campus in time
for dinner.
10/19
Read chapters 1 - 7 of Stranger at the Gate and do a YAPP Video
Assessment of Before Stonewall.
10/21
Read the remaining chapters of Stranger at the Gate and do a YAPP
Video Assessment of The Celluloid Closet.
10/26
Read pages 1 - 92 of Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian and do a
YAPP Website Assessment of !OutProud! (at
http://www.outproud.org/menu.html). Discussion leaders for this
class will be Emily and David. David has the responsibility of
getting the discussion started.
10/28
Read pages 93 - 183 of Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian and do a
YAPP Website Assessment of God Hates Fags (at
http://www.outproud.org/menu.html). Discussion leaders for this
class will be Christine and Jack. Christine has the reponsibility
of getting the discussion started.
11/2
Due in class. A 5 page paper in which you discuss homosexuality
and the WWW. Use only resources that you are able to find on the
WWW in writing this essay.
11/2
Read chapters 1 - 9 of Life on the Color Line and do a YAPP Video
Assessment of Just Black: Multi-racial Identity. Discussions
leaders for this class will be Laura and Tony. Laura will be
responsible for getting the discussion started.
11/4
Read the remaining chapters of Life on the Color Line and do a
YAPP Video Assessment of Politics of Love in Black and White.
Discussion leaders for this class will be Joe and Aziza. Joe will
be responsible for getting the discussion started.
11/9
Read the essays at the following web addresses:
1.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound//flashbks/blacked/lemann.htm
2.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound//flashbks/blacked/steele.htm
3.http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99aug/9908stereotype.htm;
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99aug/9908stereotype2.htm;
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99aug/9908stereotype3.htm (This
is a 3 part essay. Hence the 3 web addresses.)
4. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/race/fish.htm
Also do a YAPP Video Assessment of A Class Divided. (This is a
follow up to the video, Blue Eyed that you saw earlier in the
semester.)
Discussion leaders for this class will be Charlie and Eric.
Charlie has the responsibility of getting the discussion started.
11/11
Read chapters 1 - 7 of A Hope in the Unseen. Also read the essay,
“My Race Problem and Ours’ by Randall Kennedy. This
essay is located at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound//flashbks/blacked/steele.htm.
Discussion leaders for this class will be Shannon and Javier.
Shannon will be responsible for getting the discussion started.
11/16
Read the remainder of A Hope in the Unseen. Do a YAPP Video
Assessment of Pockets of A Question of Color. Also do a YAPP
website assessment of The Center for the Study of White American
Culture (http://www.euroamerican.org/). Discussion leaders for
this class will be Rebecca and Scott. Scott will be responsible
for getting the discussion started.
11/18
Our text for this class will be http://www.remember.org/educate/danger.html
and http://www.aish.edu/seminars/whythejews/.
The second of the these two sites has a lot of information about
anti-
semitism but it is also a site that is promoting Judaism. So it
is not a neutral or disinterested site. It's analysis of the
causes of anti-semitism is quite good. You will have to judge for
yourself
whether you find its answer to anti-semitism to be compelling. Do
a YAPP Video Assessment of Genocide. Discussion leaders for this
class will be Dan, Lisa, and Brian. Dan will get the
discussion started.
11/22 - 11/26
No class--Thankgiving
11/30
Texts for today's class are Maus I and the following website: http://www.adl.org/frames/front_holocaust_denial.html.
You don't have to do a YAPP entry on the site. Just read through
the materials
in it carefully. There are no designated discussion leaders but
everyone is expected to do the reading assignment and to come to
class with questions and comments.
12/2
Read Maus II and the essays at: http://www.holocaust-history.org/nazis-words/
and http://ddi.digital.net/~billw/HOLOCAUST/holocaust.html
.
No YAPP entry on this sites is required. Again, no one is
designated to be discussion leader but everyone is expected to do
the readings and to come to class prepared for discussion.
Additional reading and other assignments will be detailed in
additional handouts over the course of the term.