Featured Course: Black Women: Cross-Cultural Perspectives

 

By Anjali DasSarma

“No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women… When black people are talked about, the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.”

– Gloria Jean Watkins

From the Black Lives Matter movement and the call for representation in the media (see #OscarsTooWhite) to the police brutality conflicts in cities across the country to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, racial politics have been ever-present in American culture. UMBC’s Africana Studies Department and Gender and Women’s Studies Department have teamed up to offer AFST/GWST 370 Black Women: Cross-Cultural Perspectives – a comparative and interdisciplinary examination of the lives of women of African descent throughout the diaspora.

“We have to reach out to younger audiences. They need to see how they can see themselves as black women.”

– Linda Johnson Rice

AFST/GWST 370 is a hybrid class offered during summer session II that analyzes black women’s activism and their fight for social justice, global presence, and influence over racial and sexual politics. AFST/GWST 370 requires online and classroom time, and reliable access to internet and completion of assignments to deadlines.

This course fulfills the Culture and Social Sciences GEP.

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Tammy Henderson is Lecturer of Africana Studies with a specialty in African American women’s history and public policy. Prior to joining the UMBC faculty in 2011, she was an instructor in African American Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park, and the Academic Program Coordinator for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in Washington D.C. Dr. Henderson earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park in American Studies, along with a Certificate in Women’s Studies. Her teaching and research interests include Maternity, Race, and Public Policy, Black Feminist Thought, Black Families, and Black Popular Culture.