Race & Enterprise II: How are people innovating?
Thu, Dec 01
You have no new assignments or readings due today. Instead, prepare for an extended class period in which we screen Radha Blank's 2020 film The Forty-Year-Old Version followed by dinner and dialogue. We will meet from 3:30 until 8 p.m. Location to be announced during class. We will not meet in our normal classroom.
Learning Goals - By the end of this session you will:
- Form a definition of "enterprise" based on Radha Blank's example
- List the stereotyping Blank faces (and from whom) as she shapes her career
- Reflect on where you relate to Blank's story and where you're witnessing something unfamiliar to you personally
Do This:
- Submit Dialogues II. You can submit the Dialogue II assignment here.
- Begin work on Dialogues III. Review the full prompt on the Assignments page. Then access the template for Dialogues III: Future Lesson Plan (also on the Assignments page) and start working on your lesson plan.
Watch This:
Part of our discussion of Blank's The Forty-Year-Old Version will involve comparing it to the representations of Black enterprise in Childish Gambino's "This is America" (2018) and the Carters' "APESHIT" (2018). We ask that you watch the videos before you come to class for two reasons:
- You can reflect upon similarities or differences in their tone in advance
- You can encounter the graphic violence in "This is America" on your own terms. There is too long a history of white people treating violence against Black bodies as a spectacle, and we don't want to risk perpetuating that history by showing the video in the classroom.