Skip to main content
table of contents
An index of case studies across the modules
About This Collection
The case studies of The Making of Race are standalone texts: focused, learner-facing exercises built around primary and secondary sources, each anchored to one of the project's units. This page gathers all of them in one place — an index for browsing what exists across the six modules without opening each unit. Case studies are listed under the unit they accompany, and every title links to the case study's own text. Each can be read on its own; its home unit supplies the readings and concepts the exercise draws on.
Module 1: Origins of Race and (Un-)Belonging
Unit 1.1: The Idea of Race, Ideal Categories, and Sociological Inquiry
- Case Study: "What Census Calls Us" — A Historical Timeline of Racial Categories
- Case Study: Lived Experience and the Making of Hispanic — An Exercise Drawn from NPR Code Switch
Unit 1.2: Eugenics, Biopolitics, and the Making of Citizens
- Case Study: The Contested Legacy of Margaret Sanger
- Case Study: Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization
Unit 1.3: Migration, Borders, and the Politics of Exclusion
- Case Study: Drawing Deportation — Reading Children's Art as Ethnographic Evidence
- Case Study: The Long Arc of U.S. Immigration Law — Comparing Three Institutional Timelines
Unit 1.4: Race, Education, and Nation-Building
- Case Study: The Black Teacher Archive and the Practice of Fugitive Pedagogy
- Case Study: Affirmative Action from Origins to SFFA v. Harvard
Module 2: Theories on Race and Ethnicity
Unit 2.1: Identity Politics, Intersectionality, and Critical Race Theory
- Case Study: Tracking the Anti-"CRT" Wave — A Policy-Analysis Activity
- Case Study: The "Intersectionality Wars" — Tracing a Concept from Scholarship to Slogan
Unit 2.2: Double-Consciousness, the Veil, and the Color Line
- Case Study: Visualizing the Color Line — Du Bois's Paris Exposition Data Portraits
- Case Study: The African American Odyssey — A Quest for Full Citizenship
Unit 2.3: Whiteness, Hegemony, and Histories from Below
- Case Study: Settled Expectations on Trial — The Voting Rights Act after Louisiana v. Callais
- Case Study: The 'Model Minority' — Hegemony as Compliment
Unit 2.4: Body, Embodiment, and Cultural Production
- Case Study: The CROWN Act — Race, Hair, and Workplace Discrimination
- Case Study: Stonewall Forever — Memory, Movement, and the Queer of Color Archive
Module 3: Systemic Racism and the Myth of a Post-Racial America
Unit 3.1: Colorblind Ideologies, Silence, and Racism of Omission
- Case Study: The Removed Exhibit — Public History and the Racism of Omission
- Case Study: Saying Everything, Changing Nothing — Corporate Racial Statements, 2020–2026
Unit 3.2: Policing, Prisons, and Racialized Surveillance
- Case Study: Visualizing Abolition — Reading Public Art Against the Carceral State
- Case Study: Counting the Carceral State — A Data-Analysis Activity
Unit 3.3: Property, Law, and Dispossession
- Case Study: Returning Bruce's Beach — Dispossession and Its Remedies
- Case Study: Predatory Governance in Detroit — The Property Tax Foreclosure Crisis
Unit 3.4: Machine Biases, Innovation, and Technology
- Case Study: The Coded Gaze on Trial — Gender Shades and the Wrongful Arrests
- Case Study: COMPAS and the Fairness Wars — Auditing the Algorithm Yourself
Module 4: Black Geographies and Racial Capitalism
Unit 4.1: Neighborhood, Gentrification, and Placemaking
- Case Study: Mapping Gentrification in Your Own Backyard — Reading the New York Typology Against Lived Experience
- Case Study: The Manifesto as Instrument — Auditing and Reimagining a Plan with BlackSpace
Unit 4.2: Food Justice, Labor, and Sustainability
- Case Study: Food Apartheid and the Bronx — Karen Washington's Borough
- Case Study: The Fair Food Program — Can Workers Govern a Supply Chain?
Unit 4.3: Disaster, Disparity, and Displacement
- Case Study: Katrina at Twenty — The Disaster That Is Still Happening
- Case Study: Hurricane María and the Politics of Counting the Dead
Unit 4.4: Segregation, Homeownership, and Housing Equity
- Case Study: Reading the Red Lines — A Gallery Walk Through Mapping Inequality
- Case Study: Testing the Market — Long Island Divided and the Appraisal-Gap Cases
Module 5: Movements and Resistance
Unit 5.1: Police Violence, the Courts, and Urban Uprising
- Case Study: Los Angeles, 1992 — Anatomy of an Uprising
- Case Study: Five Years After George Floyd — The Reform Ledger
Unit 5.2: Performance, Indigeneity, and Sovereignty
- Case Study: P FKN R at the Super Bowl — Language, Colony, and the Halftime Stage
- Case Study: Indians Everywhere — A Virtual Gallery Walk
Unit 5.3: The Tulsa Race Massacre, Black Wall Street, and Reparations
- Case Study: The Road to Repair — Evaluating Tulsa's Reparations, 2024–2026
- Case Study: Reparations Toolkits in Practice — Comparing Frameworks
Unit 5.4: The 1619 Project, Backlash, and Abolitionist Futures
- Case Study: The Backlash in Documents — From the Historians' Letter to the Gag Orders
- Case Study: Writing Themselves In — The Colored Conventions and the Power of Storytelling
Module 6: Archives, Racial Temporalities, and Beyond
Unit 6.1: Silence, Access, and Epistemic Justice
- Case Study: The Silence You Can Date — The 1890 Census
- Case Study: Rewriting the Finding Aid — A Reparative Description Audit
Unit 6.2: Shadow Archives, Fragments, and the Practice of Diaspora
- Case Study: Ashley's Sack — An Object Reads Three Generations
- Case Study: Reading the Runaway Ad — Along and Against the Grain
Unit 6.3: Storytelling, Empowerment, and Collective Memory
- Case Study: The Five Demands at Fifty-Plus — A Movement in Its Own Archive
- Case Study: Record One Story — An Oral History Practicum
Unit 6.4: Chronopolitics, Racial Time, and the Critique of American Progress
Annotate
Case Studies