2016-17 Academic Catalog

Numerous questions surround the Black Lives Matter movement. These include questions about its legitimacy as a movement and its “leaderlessness” and complaints about its tactics--for example, in a town-hall-like event in London on April 23, 2016, even President Obama, who has articulated support of the movement, complained that BLM “can’t just keep on yelling.” To answer some of these questions, in this course we will contextualize BLM in light of a series of tensions we find in African American political thought from the Civil Rights era (especially Black Power) to the present.