description of your final paper topic and your two organizations.

This course is designed to encourage you to explore the contemporary challenges and opportunities organizations must face as they work to realize racial equity/racial justice.

To that end, I expect you to identify two organizations—one historical and one contemporary organization—and write a 12-15 pp research paper that explores how both organizations tackled an issue related to racial equity or racial justice. However, this paper has a caveat: you must select an issue that requires a racial equity/racial justice solution that many may consider socially marginal, politically impossible, or legally confounding. By that, I mean, you can select an racial injustice issue like extralegal violence, voter disenfranchisement, high black maternal mortality rates, police brutality, racial profiling, gentrification, then you need to select and review one historical and one contemporary organization’s attempt to advance a far-reaching (and perhaps, controversial) racial justice/racial equity solution (e.g., reparations, socialism, communes/cooperatives, prison abolition, etc.). Once, you have determined the issue, solution and organizations, please email me a paragraph (or two!) detailing this information by September 29th, 2020.

For this research paper, you must historicize the racial inequity/racial injustice issue you are reviewing in both organizations. For example, if you select two organizations that worked against sexual violence, you must detail how sexual violence impacted African Americans. In your historicization of these issues, I expect you to identify at least two academic sources in addition to two classroom readings. To identify how these two organizations envisioned racial justice/racial equity, I expect you to conduct research—that is, you must identify at least one primary source (e.g., diaries, journals, speeches, interviews, videos, congressional testimonies) for each organization to inform your analysis.

*Note: if you have identified a community organization locally that you would like to observe or volunteer with to collect primary source material, you are welcome to do so. But you must discuss your organizational selection with me and secure written permission from said organization.

For your research paper, you will analysis why this issue continues to endure and shape organizational work. For example, if you select National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Freedom, Inc. to explore how both organizations dealt with and organized against anti-black sexual violence, you would need to how both organizations defined sexual violence as well as identify who these organizations are in conversation with theoretically. For example, is Freedom Inc. and NAACP’s definition and organizing praxis regarding sexual violence in conversation with Beth Richie’s work on sexual violence? Also, I want to know if there was a counter-response or counter-campaign these organizations had to deal with.

Based on your historical analysis of these respective organizations, I expect you to proffer what these different organizations’ vision of racial justice/racial equity was for your selected issue. I want you to provide a critical analysis of the obstacles these organizations face(d) in trying to implement these solutions (e.g., conservative backlash, interest group fragmentation). Then, I want you to articulate how this racial justice or racial equity solution could be implemented. This is the section where you dream big—or even suggest ways this racial justice or racial equity solution can be implemented to redress the issue of racial inequity. In your thought-experiment, I want you to be sure to cite at least one classroom reading and tie this solution to existing black political thought? For example, if you are analyzing how to implement steps toward prison abolition, then please reference and describe Angela Davis’ discussion of de-incarceration. Lastly, I want you to conclude with a reflection on whether this alternative visioning changed your understanding of this issue.

In short, your final paper must address these questions:

Why did you select these two organizations?
What racial inequity or racial injustice issue did these two organizations work on?
Were there similarities or differences in how these organizations approached this issue?
Are these organizations in conversation with scholars discussed in this class?
What are the potentially controversial racial justice/racial equity solutions these organizations propose to redress the issue?
What are the (potential) obstacles these organizations face(d) in trying to realize their solutions?
Regarding their racial justice or racial equity vision, which scholars are these organizations in conversation?
What are the ways these organizations’ visions can be implemented? Remember to dream big.
Post-visioning, have you changed your understanding of this issue?
Your paper must address all of these questions. But be sure to remember that you will also be graded on how well you present and define your main thesis; how well you articulate and historicize your organizations’ approaches to addressing a particular issue related to racial justice/equity; how well you communicate why particular scholars/strain of black political thought informed your analysis and visioning. And you will be graded on how well you integrate classroom readings and additional academic sources into your supporting arguments and how well you integrate a counter-response.