Dartmouth Will Offer A #BlackLivesMatter Course
By Brian Carey, February 6, 2015.
This spring, Dartmouth College will offer a course entitled “10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter.”
They could have at least shortened the title.
The point of the course is examine “structural violence against communities of color.” It’s a response to the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island New York. Both of those men were killed by police officers and in both cases a grand jury refused to indict them.
Whether or not the course will mention that Eric Garner’s widow, his mother, and his daughter all said that race had nothing to do with his death is another matter.
Participants in the course will come from 10 different academic departments, including anthropology, history, women’s and gender studies, mathematics and English.
We are not quite how they are going to work mathematics into this course. Maybe mention that black people were once considered 3/5 of a person according to the U.S. Constitution?
Aimee Bahng is an English professor at Dartmouth. She says that the objective of the course is to put the killings in Ferguson and around the country in context.
“We want to bring this moment into conversation with a historical trajectory,” says Bahng.
She also says that the course will study what she calls “structural forms of violence,” including housing discrimination, redlining, and the prison-industrial complex.
Whether or not abortion will be covered as a “structural” form of violence is not clear at this time.
http://downtrend.com/brian-carey/dartmouth-will-offer-a-blacklivesmatter-course
