Biased Professor: Elizabeth Boyd - American and Southern Studies

Required Readings

AMST 110: Intro to American and Southern Studies
Global Woman by Barbara Ehrenreich
Crossing the Boulevard by Warren Lehrer
Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically About Global Issues by Paula Rothenberg
The Impossible Will Take a Little While by Paul Rogat Loeb

AMST 226: Gender, Race, and Class
Where we Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race by Patricia Williams (race theory, leftist)
White Privilege by Paula Rothenberg (ideologically extreme; neo-marxist)
Race, Class, and Gender by Margaret Andersen
Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing up Working Class by Michelle Tea

From Publishers Weekly: The Impossible Will Take a Little While
In this uneven collection, Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time, gathers together over sixty poems, memoirs and essays tailored to buck up the spirits of a left-liberal audience depressed by the sorry state of the world. Although generally in favor of justice and democracy and against the "runaway global market," the selection of writers includes a wide range of environmentalists, civil rights crusaders, anti-poverty activists and dissidents against both fascism and communism. From these eclectic offerings some hopeful, albeit familiar themes assert themselves: ordinary people can make a difference, every little bit counts, in solidarity there is strength, a positive attitude is half the battle, the powers that be are unexpectedly vulnerable, and history is full of surprising victories of the weak over the strong. Not surprisingly, many of the pieces amount to motivational lectures, while others inflate the notion of hope into tiresome dilations on, for example, the links between information processing, daydreams and butterflies. But the articles that deal with concrete struggles and achievements—Nelson Mandela’s memoir of imprisonment on Robben Island, Vaclav Havel’s account of the ant-like construction of civil society and a dissident political culture in Communist Czechoslovakia, Bill McKibben’s homage to the urban planning triumphs of Curitiba, Brazil—deliver real inspiration.

Seeing a Color-Blind Future comprises five essays that author Patricia J. Williams presented at the highly prestigious Reith lectures in Britain. Erroneously perceived by some conservative British papers as a "militant black feminist" Williams proves in these highly readable and intelligent essays that she is an influential and important voice in race theory. Williams and other left law professionals theorize on "quiet racism." This is a racism that doesn't make newspaper headlines but occurs all the time. It is the taunting of black children by white children in the playground, it is being singled out in a crowd because you are black, it is not being viewed as the "norm." Williams asks, "How can it be that so many well meaning white people have never thought about race when so few blacks pass a single day without being reminded of it?" Reviewed by Cornel West, Gloria Steinem, Studs Terkel