Reading Group on Racial Literacy for Racial Justice: The Message

This course will operate as a reading group discussing the content and materials within Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message. The Message is Coates’ most recent novel focusing on how stories from around the globe can inform our understanding of race and contemporary geopolitical issues. This course will empower students to think critically about how racial identity shapes the lived experience of different groups, and how those groups are externally perceived. Students also will be asked to think of connections between experiences of others globally and modern issues of racialized caste in the United States. The central purpose of this reading group is to foster racial literacy amongst students and help further students’ understanding of their own conceptions of how race influences the structure of the world today.