Source: MT Readings and Buckets Overview
Tags: ethnic studies, racial formation, comparative race, UC Berkeley, prison abolition, spatial imaginary, citizenship, resistance, convict leasing, social death, Third World Liberation Front, TWLF
This course examines how racial and ethnic groups in the United States have been shaped by overlapping systems of confinement, spatial control, and legal exclusion, and how those same communities have resisted. Six thematic "buckets" organise the material: resistance and activist scholarship, spatial imaginaries, ancestral trauma and restorative justice, the racial state and convict leasing, citizenship and racialised foreignness, and collective mobilisation from segregation to congregation.
Abolition democracy
The idea, drawn from W.E.B. Du Bois, that merely abolishing an institution (slavery, prisons) is insufficient without building democratic alternatives in its place. Central to Angela Davis's framework.
Spatial imaginary
The way racial meaning is inscribed onto physical space, and how spatial arrangements in turn produce racial hierarchies. George Lipsitz's phrase "racialization of space and spatialization of race" captures the reciprocal process.
Social death
Orlando Patterson's concept, extended by Joshua Price: the condition of being socially excluded from kinship, community, and legal personhood. Applied to both enslaved people and contemporary prisoners.
Convict leasing
The post-Civil War system in which imprisoned (predominantly Black) people were leased to private employers, effectively re-institutionalising forced labour under the guise of criminal punishment.
Third World Liberation Front (TWLF)
Student coalition at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State that led strikes in 1968–69, demanding the creation of Ethnic Studies departments. Foundational to the discipline.
Panopticism
Michel Foucault's concept from Discipline and Punish: a mode of surveillance and disciplinary power modelled on Bentham's Panopticon, where the possibility of being watched produces self-regulation.
Heteropatriarchy
Andrea Smith's term for the interlocking of heterosexism and patriarchy as structural pillars of white supremacy, alongside slavery/capitalism and genocide/colonialism.
Intercommunalism
Huey P. Newton's theory that nation-states had been superseded by a global empire, and that liberation required solidarity across communities worldwide rather than nationalist frameworks.
The course organises its readings into six overlapping thematic clusters. Each bucket draws on multiple weeks of material.
Bucket 1 – Resistance: The System Constantly Resisted
Action produces consciousness (praxis before theory)
Activist scholarship as method
Du Bois and abolition democracy
Bucket 2 – Spatial Imaginary
Who occupies which places, and how value is assigned
Lipsitz on the racialization of space and spatialization of race
Bucket 3 – Ancestral Trauma in the Present-Day Community / Soul Wound
Restorative justice frameworks
Intergenerational trauma, particularly in Native American contexts
Alternatives to punitive justice: rehabilitation centres
Bucket 4 – Black Codes and Convict Leasing: The Racial State
Slavery re-institutionalised through the "neoslave body" and convict lease systems
Social death and natal alienation
Arc from Radical Reconstruction to the Second Reconstruction (Civil Rights Movement)
Bucket 5 – Citizenship: Looking Like the Enemy
From Orientalism (targeting Asian and Japanese Americans) to Islamophobia
Naturalization timeline: 1790 whites eligible, 1870 Black people eligible
Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind
Racialisation as perpetual foreignness
Bucket 6 – From Segregation to Congregation / Social Disorder and Resistances
Black Panther Party: "Deniggeralization of America," self-determination, sovereignty
BPP survival programs (serve the people)
Crime control as movement control
Week | Primary Themes | Key Authors |
|---|---|---|
2 | Foundations of Ethnic Studies, prison-industrial complex | Davis, Butler, Prashad, Levine, Maskovsky |
3 | Abolition democracy, heteropatriarchy, pillars of white supremacy | Davis, Lipsitz, Smith |
4 | Reparations, panopticism, spatial racism, grassroots planning | Coates, Foucault, Lloyd, Lipsitz, Gilmore, Woods |
5 | Slavery-to-prison pipeline, social death, convict leasing | Burnham, Price, Davis, Childs, Foner, Coates |
6 | Native American criminalisation, boarding schools, soul wound | Million, Ross, Hooks & Smith, Andrea Smith |
7 | Asian American exclusion, internment, Islamophobia, citizenship | Peffer, Ngai, Bazian, Bayoumi, Volpp |
8 | Third Worldism, BPP, revolutionary movements, COINTELPRO | Habal, Aguirre & Lio, Ferreira, Bazian, Major |
⚠️ The six buckets are the course's organising framework. Exam questions are likely to ask you to place a reading within one or more buckets and explain how it connects.
⚠️ Several authors appear across multiple weeks (Angela Davis, George Lipsitz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hatem Bazian). Expect exam questions that ask you to trace a single author's argument across readings.
⚠️ The course moves chronologically through racialised groups (Black Americans in Weeks 2–5, Native Americans in Week 6, Asian Americans in Week 7, coalitional movements in Week 8) but the buckets cut across these groupings. Being able to draw connections across racial categories is key.
⚠️ "Action creates thoughts, not the other way around" (Bucket 1) is a foundational methodological claim for the course. It reframes scholarship as something that emerges from struggle.
Q: What are the six thematic buckets that organise this course, and what does each address?
A: (1) Resistance – how action produces consciousness and the role of activist scholarship; (2) Spatial Imaginary – how race is mapped onto space and space onto race; (3) Ancestral Trauma / Soul Wound – intergenerational trauma and restorative justice alternatives; (4) Black Codes and Convict Leasing – the racial state and slavery's continuation through the carceral system; (5) Citizenship: Looking Like the Enemy – racialised foreignness from Orientalism to Islamophobia; (6) From Segregation to Congregation – collective resistance movements, including the BPP and Third Worldism.
Q: How does the course connect the prison system to the history of slavery?
A: Through Bucket 4 (The Racial State), the course traces how slavery was re-institutionalised via Black Codes and convict leasing after the Civil War, creating what Dennis Childs calls the "neoslave body." Angela Davis (Chapters 1 and 2 of Are Prisons Obsolete?) and Joshua Price (social death) extend this analysis to show how contemporary imprisonment reproduces conditions of natal alienation and social death that characterised chattel slavery.
Q: What does George Lipsitz mean by "the racialization of space and the spatialization of race"?
A: Lipsitz argues that racial hierarchies are physically inscribed into the built environment (through redlining, urban renewal, highway placement, zoning), while at the same time, spatial arrangements actively produce and reproduce racial categories. The process is reciprocal: race shapes space, and space shapes race.
Q: Why does the course move from Black incarceration (Weeks 2–5) to Native American criminalisation (Week 6) to Asian exclusion (Week 7)?
A: The structure demonstrates that racial control operates through different but structurally related mechanisms across groups: incarceration and convict leasing for Black Americans, colonial policing and boarding schools for Native Americans, immigration exclusion and internment for Asian Americans. The thematic buckets (especially Buckets 4 and 5) show these are variations on a shared logic of the racial state.
ethnic studies, comparative race studies, prison abolition, prison-industrial complex, abolition democracy, Du Bois, Angela Davis, spatial racism, racialization of space, George Lipsitz, convict leasing, Black Codes, social death, natal alienation, Orlando Patterson, Joshua Price, Foucault panopticism, heteropatriarchy, Andrea Smith, three pillars of white supremacy, TWLF, Third World Liberation Front, Orientalism, Islamophobia, Ozawa v. United States, Thind, naturalization law, Black Panther Party, BPP survival programs, intercommunalism, Huey Newton, COINTELPRO, restorative justice, soul wound, intergenerational trauma