About This Resource

Lehman College, The City University of New York · Department of Sociology

SOC 250: Racial and Ethnic Communities in the United States

Fall 2026 — Online Asynchronous

This is an instructor-facing Open Educational Resource (OER) syllabus for SOC 250: Racial and Ethnic Communities in the United States, taught at Lehman College, CUNY, in Fall 2026 as an online asynchronous course. The Fall edition organizes the course around a settler-colonial and carceral analytic: it revisits the origins, ideologies, materialities, and geographies of race and racism in the United States through the linked histories of conquest, dispossession, and surveillance. The fifteen thematic weeks move from Sovereignty and Slavery through Property, Reparation, and Solidarity, each opening with an epigraph from an anchor text that pairs recent scholarship (2022–2026) with foundational sources.

Writing is positioned as the central practice of the course. Three assessments structure student engagement: weekly analytical discussion posts, a midterm reflective essay, and a final documentary analysis project.

Adoption Notes for Instructors

• The syllabus is fully adaptable. The single-word thematic weeks (Sovereignty through Solidarity) are a scaffold; weeks and readings can be substituted while preserving the course's through-line from conquest and dispossession to surveillance, property, and repair.
• Each week opens with an epigraph pairing a recent anchor text with a foundational source. Swapping the anchor is the quickest way to reframe a week for your own emphasis.
• The assessment architecture — weekly analytical discussion posts (ten of thirteen discussion weeks), a midterm metacognitive reflective essay, and a final documentary analysis project — scaffolds writing from low-stakes to formal across the term.
• The generous late-work policy (a seven-day grace window) and the strict no-AI stance are deliberate design choices; both are stated plainly for students and can be adjusted to your own context.
• Course materials are no-cost and accessible via Brightspace; readings under copyright are referenced (not reproduced), and no textbook is required.
• A Spring 2026 (15-week, WAC-annotated) edition and a Summer 2026 (6-week) edition of this syllabus are also available as complementary OERs.
• Accessibility: the source HTML version of this syllabus is structured for WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, with semantic headings, list structure, and descriptive link text for screen readers and keyboard navigation.

Course Information

Term: Fall 2026

Credit Hours: 3 Units

Class Dates: 08/28/2026 – 12/21/2026

Instruction Mode: Online Asynchronous

Instructor: Hart M. Zhang

Course Description

Catalog Description: Sociological description and analysis of a specific racial or ethnic community.

Welcome to SOC 250!

This course revisits the foundations of race and racism in the United States — their origins, ideologies, materialities, and geographies — in the contexts of conquest and development. More specifically, it explores the relationship between historical processes of racial exclusion in the U.S. and the creation of mechanisms for dispossessing the land and displacing the people who inhabit it. By examining the roots of racism in the doctrine of settlement, "progressive" goals in the pursuit of modernity, and the practice of surveillance in the promise of security, it also seeks to help students engage with theoretical frameworks for understanding the tensions and opportunities within the continuities that sociological concepts and practices draw between the past and present.

Course Format, Access, and Technology

This is an online and asynchronous course, so you can move through each week's materials at your own pace, as long as you meet the deadlines. All course materials, activities, and assignments are hosted on CUNY Brightspace, where you can view course announcements, access the readings, post in the discussion forums, and submit your assignments. A PDF reader and word processing software, such as Microsoft Office, are also helpful — especially for taking notes and drafting assignments on your own computer or device. If you have questions about your Lehman email or run into trouble accessing Brightspace, contact the Lehman IT Help Desk at (718) 960-1111 or visit the Lehman IT website. If you need a laptop or tablet, you can request one through the device request form, a program offered by Office of Digital Inclusion.

Course Materials

No textbook is required. All course materials are available to you at no cost through Brightspace. If you have trouble accessing any of the materials, or need them in an alternative format, please reach out to the instructor.

Course Learning Objectives

• Use sociological concepts to examine how the identities of a specific racial and ethnic community in the United States are shaped and contested within systems of power and inequality.
• Develop critical thinking and quantitative reasoning skills by analyzing empirical evidence on a specific racial and ethnic community in the United States.
• Discuss histories of policies and practices of institutions and their impact on a specific racial and ethnic community in the United States.
• Identify key sociological figures and engage with changing perspectives over time in the context of theorizing a specific racial and ethnic community in the United States.
• Describe the roles of social movements in shaping the experiences of a specific racial and ethnic community in the United States.
• Evaluate how a specific racial and ethnic community has shaped the development of the United States.

Grading Policy

Your final grade is based on three assignments: weekly discussion posts (60%), a midterm reflective essay (15%), and a final documentary analysis project (25%). Each is introduced briefly below; full instructions, prompts, and guidelines for all assignments are posted on Brightspace. Final grades are calculated and posted on CUNYfirst using the following scale:

Discussion Posts (60%)

Due: Every Sunday at 10:00 PM

Each week, you'll write a short post (about 200–250 words) in the Brightspace discussion forums, responding analytically to that week's readings or to a peer. For example, you might consider what questions the readings raise for you and whether you find their arguments convincing. Optional prompts are posted each week to help you get started.

Full credit requires 10 satisfactory posts across the 13 discussion weeks, one per week. You'll receive feedback each week, and points may be reduced if a post is mostly summary rather than your own analysis and perspective. Guides and examples are available on Brightspace.

Midterm Reflective Essay (15%)

Due: Sunday, 10/25 at 10:00 PM

At the midpoint of the course, this short reflective essay asks you to take stock of how your understanding has evolved — reflecting on your own learning rather than summarizing content, and noting the moments, readings, or discussions that shifted your thinking about race and racism in the United States. The full prompt and instructions are posted on Brightspace.

Final Project: Documentary Analysis (25%)

Due: Monday, 12/21 at 10 PM. No late work will be accepted.

For the final project, you'll apply the course's key concepts to a documentary of your choice from the syllabus by completing a guided analysis worksheet. The worksheet and full instructions are posted on Brightspace. Plan ahead to avoid a last-minute rush.

Extra Credit

Throughout the semester, the instructor may offer extra-credit opportunities, such as attending a research colloquium, book talk, or other scholarly event related to the course's themes. When available, these are announced on Brightspace.

Deadlines and Late Work

Deadlines help us stay on track and keep a steady pace. For up to one week (7 calendar days) after each deadline, you can still submit your work for full credit, particularly when holidays overlap with deadlines. After that, late submissions may lose a few points — less to penalize anyone than to recognize those who submit on time. If you need more than a week because of extenuating circumstances, please reach out to the instructor directly, as early as possible.

If several assignments are missing, the instructor may reach out for a brief check-in. Submitting all of your late work in the final week, without checking in first, may result in a failing grade. No late work is accepted for the final project, so please plan ahead and reach out early if you think you might miss that deadline.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy

In short: No AI tools should be used to produce any course assignment or task, whether individually or in a group, though you're welcome to experiment with them at your leisure, outside this course.

Writing is at the core of this course — a practice that calls for our own reasoning, refining, and reflecting. No one here is pressured or expected to produce flawless work, so there's no need to reach for generative AI in pursuit of it. Our class activities and assignments are meant to cultivate our sensibility, creativity, and responsibility in writing, speech, and analysis. Generative AI tools such as Claude or ChatGPT only distract from the very exercises that keep us grounded in developing our own ideas and improving our work.

Email and Communications

Course announcements are posted on Brightspace and emailed to your Lehman or preferred CUNYfirst address. Check Brightspace and your email weekly so you don't miss anything.

Email is the best way to reach the instructor with any questions or concerns, or to set up office hours. Replies usually come within 48 hours — a little longer over weekends and holidays.

Course Policies and Student Resources

Verification of Enrollment (VOE)

CUNY's VOE requires you to complete at least one academically related activity — such as submitting an assignment or emailing the instructor a course-related question — within the first three weeks. Simply logging into an online class doesn't count, and missing this requirement may result in an administrative withdrawal (WN grade) and loss of financial aid eligibility.

Accommodating Disabilities

Lehman College is committed to providing access to all programs and curricula for all students. Students with disabilities who may need classroom accommodations are encouraged to register with the Office of Student Disability Services, Shuster Hall, Room 238, at (718) 960-8441. Additionally, CUNY Accommodate is a CUNY-wide platform available for all students to initiate accommodation requests.

Religious Accommodations

Consistent with New York State Education Law Section 224-a, students who are absent from school because of a religious belief will be given the equivalent opportunity, without any additional fee charged, to register for classes or make up any examination, study, or work requirements missed because of such absence on any particular day or days. Students requesting such accommodations should contact the Office for Student Affairs at the College or unit in which they are enrolled.

Academic Integrity and Plagiarism

Your academic work should reflect your own thoughts and understanding of course material. It must be original and created specifically for the current course. You are expected to cite all sources properly, whether quoted or paraphrased. Additionally, you must write all work yourself and not use online sites that create or share content, nor submit work completed by others. For the full statement, see CUNY's Academic Integrity Policy.

Additional Student Support Resources

For additional student resources related to academic success, student life, and technology and accessibility — such as the Instructional Support Services Program (ISSP), Counseling Center, the Library, and the food pantry — please visit the Lehman College website.

Course Agenda

Important note. To reflect current events and developments, any changes or updates to the schedule will be posted on Brightspace and communicated by email in advance.

Orientation

• Course Syllabus, Study Guides, and Brightspace Walkthrough
• Olivier, Clair, and Denis, "Racism" (2019)
• Akanegbu, "From Plantations to Platforms: Examining AI's Relationship to Race and Labor" (2026)

Week 1: Sovereignty

How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world's most exemplary democracy? This question haunts America, as it does other settler nations. Among historians, silence, rather than engagement, has been the most common response, together with a continued unwillingness to see America's diversity from the vantage point of those most impacted by the expansion of the United States.

— Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America (2023)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday, 09/06 at 10:00 PM)

• Díaz and Rivera-Rideau, P FKN R (2026), Introduction
• Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America (2023), Introduction
• Podcast: "The Theory of Water," Speaking Out of Place (2025)
• Supplementary (optional): Native Land Digital (interactive map)

Week 2: Slavery

Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they'd been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire ... It was the relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the financial capital of the world.

— Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Democracy," The 1619 Project (2019)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday, 09/13 at 10:00 PM)

• Rockman, Plantation Goods (2024), Introduction
• Hannah-Jones, "Democracy," The 1619 Project (2019)
• Documentary: Slavery by Another Name (PBS, 2012)
• Supplementary (optional): Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (online database)

Week 3: Abolition

Free (and partially free) Black children occupied an essential place in early abolitionist strategies. Abolition could only be attained, activists reasoned, by first disproving racist claims that African Americans were inherently inferior and therefore unfit for freedom ... Black children, if adequately educated, would become knowledgeable, virtuous citizens worthy of being incorporated into the body politic. This, in turn, would lead to a weakening of racial prejudice and a gradual end to slavery.

— Michaël Roy, Young Abolitionists (2024)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday 09/20 at 10:00 PM)

• Roy, Young Abolitionists (2024), Chapter 1
• Du Bois, "The General Strike," Black Reconstruction (1935)
• The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship (Library of Congress)
• Supplementary (optional): "Du Bois's Infographics of African American Life" (1900)

Week 4: Eugenics

Every modern era has had a science of race ... Science is the most effective tool for giving claims about human difference, the stamp of legitimacy. And once scientists were committed to understanding human beings as divided into races, they believed that human biology could not be studied without attention to race.

— Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention (2011)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday 09/27 at 10:00 PM)

• "Eugenics and Scientific Racism," National Human Genome Research Institute
• Roberts, Fatal Invention (2011), Chapter 2
• Documentary: The Eugenics Crusade (PBS, 2018)
• Supplementary (optional): Eugenics Archives (online archive)

Week 5: Whiteness

Healing does not become pigeonholed to just the white girls who were infantilized and desexualized by purity culture, but it extends to the queer kids, the Black and Brown boys and girls, and the nonbinary young people (among others) upon whom harm was inflicted. It takes seriously all the ways young people have been hurt by purity culture as a mechanism of normative white supremacy while acknowledging that young people have always had choices in how to act, even if those choices were constrained.

— Lauren D. Sawyer, Growing Up Pure (2025)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday 10/04 at 10:00 PM)

• McDermott and Ferguson, "Sociology of Whiteness" (2022)
• Sawyer, Growing Up Pure (2025), Chapter 1
• Speech: Biewen, "Seeing White" (2017)
• Supplementary (optional): Seeing White, podcast series by John Biewen (2017)

Week 6: Knowledge

For (white) America to flourish and dominate, it must create conditions for its consolidation, expansion, and absolution. Blackness both bolstered (through slavery) and threatened (through miscegenation) that consolidation and expansion ... The burning question about Indians was not "How do we keep them in their place?" but "Why are they still here?" ... Because of this, redface denies the perpetuity of Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty, two things that stand in the way of American expansion and absolution.

— Bethany Hughes, Redface (2024)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday 10/11 at 10:00 PM)

• Givens, American Grammar (2025), Chapter 3
• Hughes, Redface (2024), Introduction
• Interview: "Speaking Freely," with bell hooks (2002)
• Supplementary (optional): "Black Education Timeline," The Black Teacher Archive

Week 7: Un/Belonging

The law plays a powerful role in shaping society because the law reflects and reinforces the values, beliefs and power dynamics of the people who create and enforce the law ... Social norms are turned into laws that define the parameters of membership and belonging and the privileges afforded to those who belong. Racialized and xenophobic disinformation, when adopted as legislation and upheld by courts, becomes law that is perceived as neutral and constructs the parameters of what it means to belong in America. Left unchecked, disinformation will continue to reinforce and legitimize white supremacy, which is counter to the ethos in the United States that we are a nation of immigrants.

— Karla McKanders, "Politics of Belonging" (2024)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday 10/18 at 10:00 PM)

• Dreby, Surviving the ICE Age (2025), Chapter 1
• McKanders, "Politics of Belonging: Anti-Black Racism, Xenophobia, and Disinformation," Harvard Law Review (2024)
• Podcast: "Supreme Court Deals Another Blow to Voting Rights Act," NPR (2026)
• Supplementary (optional): "Voting Rights Act of 1965," Digital Public Library of America (2017)

Week 8: Midterm

Due: Sunday, 10/25 at 10:00 PM (No readings this week.)

Week 9: Property

Why has racial inequality remained such an enduring problem in America? What forces fuel its persistence? ... It is the story of those who exploited the machinery of local tax enforcement, and Black people's vulnerabilities and disadvantages as property owners, to amass wealth and property at their expense; of the riches they accumulated; and of the trail of destruction they left behind. It is the story of how Black Americans resisted exploitation, guarded against predation, fought for an equitable distribution of public goods and services, and fought to be recognized as taxpayers. And it is the story of how matters of local taxation and public spending shaped the struggle for racial inequality as a whole, made the America we live in today, and shaped the battle being waged over its future.

— Andrew Kahrl, The Black Tax (2024)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday, 11/01 at 10:00 PM)

• Park, "Race and Property Law," The Oxford Handbook of Race and Law in the United States (2022)
• Kahrl, The Black Tax (2024), Introduction
• Podcast: "Gentrifying Blackness with Dr. Brandi Summers," 1919 Radio (2021)
• Supplementary (optional): Mapping Inequality (interactive map)

Week 10: Intersectionality

Flesh is central to how we know blackness in the world, and with regard to matters of touch, it is the fleshly encounters that seem to matter most. Flesh is the predominant human surface for thinking through questions of touch. Operating as an unnatural physical order determining protocols of feeling, the appearance of the flesh has similarly been used to read histories of sufferings recorded on the Black body — the wounds imprinted on the fugitive from slavery. Even in illustration, flesh is held as central to claims of authenticity and to modes of depiction that reinstate or reinscribe discourses of power.

— Jasmine N. Cobb, New Growth (2023)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday, 11/08 at 10:00 PM)

• Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (2019), Chapter 4
• Cobb, New Growth (2023), Introduction
• Talk: Crenshaw, "The Urgency of Intersectionality" (2016)
• Supplementary (optional): "The Combahee River Collective Statement" (1977)

Week 11: Carcerality

The question of whether the prison has become an obsolete institution has become especially urgent in light of the fact that more than two million people (out of a world total of nine million) now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facilities, and immigrant detention centers. Are we willing to relegate ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed communities to an isolated existence marked by authoritarian regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion that produce severe mental instability?

— Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday, 11/15 at 10:00 PM)

• Shelby, The Idea of Prison Abolition (2022), Chapter 4: "The Prison Industrial Complex: Profit, Privatization, and the Circumstances of Injustice"
• Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Introduction
• Documentary: 13th (Netflix, 2016)
• Supplementary (optional): Ng, "(Un)Forgetting Latinas in American Prisons: Addressing Rising Numbers and Reduction Strategies" (2024)

Week 12: Reparation

Today's racial wealth gap is perhaps the most glaring legacy of American slavery and the violent economic dispossession that followed ... Armed white people stormed prosperous majority-black Wilmington, N.C., in 1898 to murder dozens of black people, force 2,000 others off their property and overthrow the city government. In the Red Summer of 1919, at least 240 black people were murdered across the country. And in 1921, in one of the bloodiest racial attacks in United States history, Greenwood, a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., was burned and looted. It is estimated that as many as 300 black people were murdered and 10,000 were rendered homeless. Thirty-five square blocks were destroyed. No one was ever convicted in any of these acts of racist violence.

— Trymaine Lee, "Racial Wealth Gap," The 1619 Project (2019)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday, 11/22 at 10:00 PM)

• Birkmeyer, "The Nation's First Municipal Reparations Program, Grounded in Black History," Mellon Foundation (2024)
• Lee, "Racial Wealth Gap," The 1619 Project (2019)
• Documentary: Tulsa Race Massacre: 100 Years Later (PBS, 2021)
• Supplementary (optional): The California Reparations Report (2023)

Week 13: Thanksgiving Holiday

No readings this week. Happy Holiday!

Week 14: Temporality

That encounter saw capitalism more rigorously collude with racism and, correspondingly, produce the hierarchies, asymmetries, and inequalities that engender "racial time." To be sure, racial capitalism invents and imposes distinct time structures: it racializes who has the capacity to utilize time and determines who has access to certain kinds of time. Freedom time and leisure time are especially regulated in the system of racial capitalism which, as perfected in the modern West, depends on the exploitation and expropriation of the lives and labor of those deemed disposable by a white supremacist capitalist order.

— Wooden, Reclaiming Time (2025)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday, 12/06 at 10:00 PM)

• Wooden, Reclaiming Time (2025), Introduction
• Goffe, "Stolen Life, Stolen Time: Black Temporality, Speculation, and Racial Capitalism" (2022)
• Speech: Cooper, "The Racial Politics of Time" (2017)
• Supplementary (optional): Reclaiming My Time, online exhibit (National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2026)

Week 15: Solidarity

Cities are the crucial, contested sites where austerity policies first hit the ground, where citizens gather to rise up in response, and from which entire communities might look across borders to ask and learn from one another by answering: What is to be done? Can communities hold enough political power to hold sway after the next election? Will processes like PB [participatory budgeting] exist and will they be implemented in ways that hold public budgets accountable and center the needs of everyday residents? Will residents' lives feel less precarious? Will their life savings and livelihoods not be at the mercy of the next recession, epidemic, or wildfire or hurricane?

— Celina Su, Budget Justice (2025)

Readings and Discussion Post (Due Sunday, 12/13 at 10:00 PM)

• King, "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963)
• Su, Budget Justice (2025), Chapter 3
• Podcast: "'Sum of Us' Examines the Hidden Cost of Racism — For Everyone," NPR (2021)
• Supplementary (optional): Colored Conventions Project (digital archive)

Finals Week: Final Project

Due: Monday, 12/21 at 10 PM. No late work will be accepted.