Oct 08, 2024  
2023-2024 University Bulletin 
    
2023-2024 University Bulletin [ARCHIVED BULLETIN]

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LAS 407 - The Good Life: Caste and its Antidotes

3 Credit Hours
Isabel Wilkerson, in her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, describes “caste” as an embedded infrastructure in human societies and cultures, a fixed ranking of human value that sets a presumed superiority of one group over against a presumed inferiority of other groups. This course will engage Wilkerson’s argument and focus on two of her main examples of caste, manifested as institutionalized racism: in Nazi Germany, and in the United States from the slave trade through segregation through today. These studies will be placed into conversation with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where analyses of moral and intellectual virtues may offer potential “antidotes” to caste, as may other more recent studies of Holocaust “rescuers,” and of antiracism work in the United States during the civil rights movement and today.

Prerequisite(s): Senior standing.



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