This course explores some of the ways that gender, race, and ethnicity interact with each other. Since the 1970s, participants in political movements, politicians, and courts have been asking the question: what difference does it make if you're, say, Mexican American and a woman? A woman and Mexican-American? Looking at it from the point of view of social forces, law, and policy, in other words, can you be the subject of both racism and sexism? Although the common sense answer to that question is clearly yes, oddly enough, there have been lots of ways U.S. society has denied the possibility. For example, if you believe you were discriminated against in hiring or promotion, you can file a complaint or lawsuit, but first you have to decide whether you were discriminated against as a woman OR as a member of a racial minority group. If you're both--and you think you were discriminated against because of the way these two things come together--there's no complaint you can file that says that. Another example: how often have we heard words to the effect that some policy is bad for "women and Blacks"? If you're an African-American woman, a sentence like that seems to suggest that the policy is bad for both the woman part of you and the Black part of you. But since none of us experiences ourselves as split into parts by race and by gender, this is a hard thought to work out. We're more likely to think that policies about "welfare mothers," for example, stereotype and stigmatize some people AS Black women.

This course explores the history of the politics of how race, gender, and ethnicity come together in the United States. It starts with present-day examples, and works backwards historically to the eighteenth century.