About This Module

Where Module 1 examined how institutions make race, Module 2 assembled the theories for analyzing it, Module 3 traced systemic racism through ostensibly race-neutral systems, and Module 4 turned to the ground on which the racial order stands, Module 5 turns to the people who move against it. The module examines movements and resistance across four sites where the racial order has been openly contested: the street and the courtroom, where police violence has repeatedly ignited urban rebellion; the occupied island and the encampment, where Indigenous nations have performed a sovereignty the settler state prefers to treat as extinguished; Greenwood, where the demand for repair has outlived a massacre by a century; and the classroom and the page, where the nation's origin story and its carceral future are being fought over at once. Across the four units the module builds a shared vocabulary — legal violence and legal estrangement, rebellion, refusal and the politics of recognition, Land Back, reparations and restorative justice, origin stories, non-reformist reforms, and abolition — for analyzing how racial orders are challenged and how they answer.

The module's organizing argument is that resistance fights on two fronts at once: against the harm, and against the story told about the harm. Every unit finds the pair. Uprisings are policed as "riots" and reframed as rebellions; a massacre was filed as a "riot" so that insurers would not pay, and renaming it became part of the repair; redface made "the Indian" legible so that nationhood could be erased, and sovereignty answered in performance; the 1619 Project's re-telling of the national origin drew a commission and then statutes in response. Movements, the module shows, understand this doubleness — which is why so much of their work is authorship: proclamations, syllabi, databases built where the state declined to count, conventions writing their delegates into a record that excluded them. And the direction of time runs both ways: Estes's water protectors act from the claim that "our history is the future," and Kelley's freedom dreamers are judged by what they dared to imagine. Read together, the units equip learners to analyze any movement by asking what it fights, what it tells, and what future its past makes available.

Module Objectives

By the end of this module, learners will be able to:

• Explain the module's central premise — that racial orders are contested on two fronts, material and narrative, so that movements fight both the harm and the story told about it — and articulate why naming itself (riot or rebellion, riot or massacre) is a site of struggle.
• Apply the module's core concepts — legal violence and legal estrangement, rebellion, refusal and the politics of recognition, Land Back, reparations frameworks, non-reformist reforms, and abolition as presence — to specific historical and contemporary cases.
• Trace how movements draw their programs from re-authored pasts across the module's four domains — rebellion's long tradition, sovereignty's unbroken claim, repair's century-long demand, and an origin story contested in the present.
• Evaluate a contemporary intervention — a police-reform measure, a recognition or land-return settlement, a reparations program, or a non-carceral safety experiment — against the frameworks the movements themselves supply.

The Four Units

The module unfolds across four units, each examining a site where the racial order is contested — and where the contest is fought over both conditions and narrative.

• Unit 5.1: Police Violence, the Courts, and Urban Uprising — Examines police violence against Black Americans as a recurring national crisis with a legal architecture. Works from Devon Carbado's account of Fourth Amendment doctrine — most police violence is legal violence — and Elizabeth Hinton's history of Black rebellion as politics, then follows the full circuit from doctrine through killing, verdict, and uprising to commission and reform, anchored by the Los Angeles uprising of 1992 and the reform ledger five years after George Floyd.
• Unit 5.2: Performance, Indigeneity, and Sovereignty — Examines how Indigenous movements have made sovereignty visible, from the Alcatraz occupation through Standing Rock to Land Back. Pairs Bethany Hughes's history of redface with the counter-archive of Native visual sovereignty, grounds both in Audra Simpson's refusal and Glen Coulthard's critique of recognition, and extends the frame to a kindred colonial case — Bad Bunny's Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime performance — with Tuck and Yang's warning that decolonization is not a metaphor as the guardrail for the comparison.
• Unit 5.3: The Tulsa Race Massacre, Black Wall Street, and Reparations — Examines the 1921 massacre, the Greenwood community destroyed and rebuilt, and the century of enforced silence — including the second destruction by urban renewal that Victor Luckerson's history refuses to let 1921 overshadow. The unit then follows the reparations question through its remedy attempts, from the 2001 state commission through the courts' dismissals and the first federal review to Tulsa's Road to Repair, set against the national frameworks of Coates and of Darity and Mullen.
• Unit 5.4: The 1619 Project, Backlash, and Abolitionist Futures — Closes the module by joining contested pasts to contested futures. Examines the 1619 Project, the substance of the scholarly debate, and the backlash — the 1776 Commission and the educational gag orders — as a study in who is licensed to tell the national story, then turns to the decade's abolitionist horizon: Ruth Wilson Gilmore's presence-not-absence, Mariame Kaba's organizing method, and the inventory of community safety experiments, with Robin D. G. Kelley's freedom dreams as the bridge between the two halves.

The four units map one phenomenon across four domains: movements that fight the harm and the story at once, drawing their programs from pasts they have had to re-author themselves. Together they equip learners to read any struggle — an uprising, an occupation, a reparations campaign, a curriculum fight — as a contest over both conditions and narrative, and to ask of any movement what it fights, what it tells, and what future its past makes available.