Racism and Oppression course

[gettingschooled]

The program I'm in seems to think our Racism and Oppression class should grant 3 credit units for speaking about our opinion on topics like the Oscars.

There's absolutely no structure to the course besides the assigned readings which we NEVER discuss. The professor starts the class with a question on what we thought of a video we had to watch for the week and then the conversation goes off tangent from there on. 

Is this what your typical equivalent course is, or does my program just suck? 

[anothercoffeeplease]

Is the professor perhaps expecting that responses tie in the assigned reading? 

[rising_star]

Do the students in the class have any background on how to have constructive conversations about race and oppression? Have they learned about the history of racism in the US and its inextricable connections to an array of social policies? I've found that unless you start with a common set of notions/ideas/readings/videos around how entrenched racism is in American society, conversations are unproductive.

[gettingschooled]

@anothercoffeeplease No - the first day, the teacher told us she wouldn't expect us to do all the reading and that she would be lenient given the fact that people have busy schedules.  No one ever gives any notion that they've looked at the reading. 

@rising_star We only use the videos we are assigned for the week, which can be from 15-60 minutes long. But when we talk about the videos most students are sort of pandering - "Oh my gosh I can't believe what I heard in that video. It was so enlightening. I just can't believe it." Half of these videos give an in-depth history of racism, and the other half features people having conversations about racism in an insightful way. However, our 90 minute classroom sessions are just so pointless I want to rip my hair out. People bring up what they see on the news- the Black Lives Matter movement, the Oscars, Beyonce, etc - I have no problem with this but there is a serious lack of depth to the conversations. We could bring up the existing research on police brutality to black populations but instead it's more like "yeah this is happening, can you believe it?" 

[rising_star]

*sigh* This sounds like a very poorly run course. There should be substantive conversation of the history of racism, background readings to flesh out what is in the videos, and a real conversation about how the issues we see today can be traced back to the history of racism. I suppose that you may be SOL if the professor isn't intervening to force these kinds of discussions to occur.