Have Black Lives Matter protests changed the curriculum?
In 1903 the African-American sociologist WEB Du Bois coined the term ‘double consciousness’. American racism, he said, forced African-Americans to see themselves two ways. Among themselves, they were wives, husbands, friends, children. At the same time, America’s racial apartheid, ‘Jim Crow’, forced African-Americans to measure themselves as White America did, that is, with “contempt”.
While discussing with African-American scholars how last spring’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests affected the curriculum in universities across North America, I was brought face to face with a latter-day version of ‘double consciousness’.
When speaking about how their teaching and assignments are designed to chip away at racism, the African-American professors Anthony Pinn of Rice University in Houston, Texas, and Ebony McGee of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, sounded much like Professor Alexandra Rut