Student Work

The work collected here was written by students of SOC 250: Racial and Ethnic Communities in the United States at Lehman College, CUNY — the course on which The Making of Race is built. Each piece is a real submission, shared voluntarily and published as an individual work with its author's consent.

These authors are contributors to this OER in their own right. Their work is published independently and is not covered by the project's Creative Commons license, but in sharing it for public use they take part in the same open work the project is built on — showing what students actually create when they meet these readings, documentaries, and assignments in a working classroom, which no course material can show on its own.

The collection is organized by semester, and each group names the assignment its work responds to. Every page carries its own context — links to the assignment prompt and to the syllabus for that session — so instructors can follow the full arc from course design to student writing, and adapt any part of it for their own teaching. As described in License and Rights, you may read, assign, and cite student work as you would any published work, using the suggested citation each page provides.

Summer 2026 · Documentary Analysis Worksheet

The work in this group was completed during the six-week online summer session, as final projects responding to the Documentary Analysis Worksheet, under the SOC 250 Summer 2026 syllabus. Students selected one documentary from the course and developed a three-part analysis: situating the film sociologically, closely analyzing a pivotal scene, and drawing implications for racial equity.

• Documentary Analysis: The Five Demands — Kelvin Reinoso. Reads the 1969 Black and Puerto Rican student movement at City College through racial formation and collective resistance, and weighs what the documentary's evidence shows about institutional change.
• Documentary Analysis: Tulsa Race Massacre — Mary Alaké Wilson. Connects racial capitalism, structural violence, and Black wealth in the destruction of Greenwood, and assesses the documentary's case for reparations.

Upcoming

Student work from other sessions will join this collection as authors give their consent.

Contribute Your Work

If you have taken SOC 250: Racial and Ethnic Communities in the United States at Lehman College, CUNY (Fall 2024 to present) and would like your coursework featured on this page, please fill out the Student Contribution Form. The form explains the agreement in plain terms: what you would be sharing, how it will be used, and the rights you keep as an author. Sharing is voluntary, and takes about two minutes. Contributions are welcome on a rolling basis.