A Lesson About Power, Privilege, and Inequity in A Political Science Class (2024)
Meagan Carmack
Identify how power, privilege, and inequity are or have been reinforced and challenged at individual, institutional, and systemic levels.
Assignment 1: Voter Disenfranchisement as a Product of Political Institutions
I teach voter disenfranchisement as a product of systems reinforcing inequality in Unit 4: Elections and the Public in my class. One Canvas discussion my class works on (below) might be helpful for anyone discussing ways the law can perpetuate injustice.
While there are many ways legislators can disenfranchise voters, here are some mechanisms of disenfranchisement that have recently been in the news:
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- 1. Voter Registration Restrictions (Kansas)
- 2. Gerrymandering (South Carolina)
- 3. Criminalization of the Ballot Box (Georgia)
- 4. Felony Disenfranchisement (Florida)
- 5. Voter roll purges (Texas)
- 6. Voter ID laws (Arkansas)
Discuss an example of voter disenfranchisement listed above and explain why this is an example of voter disenfranchisement (Min: 300 words). (Hint: a helpful resource to assist you in why each of these instances qualifies as voter disenfranchisement, ACLU’s Analysis on Block the Vote 2020, is found here: https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-voter-suppression-in-2020)
Next, explain why the state legislature chose to enact laws that disenfranchise voters. Who would be impacted by these laws? Do these people tend to vote for the party in power or an opposition party? What are the institutional incentives for politicians to enact these laws? Why do some legislatures choose different mechanisms of voter disenfranchisement over others?
Assignment 2: Racial Gerrymandering and Non-Progressive Court Outcomes
This is part of Unit 2: Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in my course starting in Fall 2024 and follows a Canvas discussion on Brown v. Board of Educations and the ways in which it demonstrates strengths and weaknesses of the Supreme Court and legal mobilization.
Analyze the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, which legally permits racial gerrymandering. First, read the facts of the case and legal question of the case on Oyez.Links to an external site. Then, consider how you would answer the legal question at hand. Does the South Carolina legislature’s redistricting map, which has the effect of moving tens of thousands of Black voters to a different district, constitute an impermissible racial gerrymander, even if the legislators’ purported intent was merely a political gerrymander?
- Would you rule in favor of the plantiff (Alexander) or defendant (NAACP)? If you rule in favor of Alexander, do you agree with the Court’s opinion? If so, why? If not, why not?
- If you agree with the NAACP, why? Why do you think the Court chose to rule in favor of Alexander?
- Finally, discuss the legal, social and political implications of this decision. What role would this decision play in continuing to perpetuate racial inequality in political representation?
Identify specific ways in which individuals and social and artistic movements attempted to disrupt systems of power, privilege, and inequity.
(I’ve shared this one previously, but I think it fits here as well. This is from my civil rights and civil liberties unit and is done as a group class assignment.)
Assignment 1: Interviewing Social Rights Figures
Take a minute to read over your assigned person’s biography.
- Then, get into groups of four to six.
- Interview your partners using the Class Activity sheet
Next, discuss and the following questions:
- Why were people willing to risk their lives to vote?
- Why do you think some of the people you met today are not mentioned in textbooks?
- How did the activity change your perception of who made up the Civil Rights Movement?
- What were the different ways that the status quo (white privilege, white supremacy, Jim Crow Laws, Black Codes) was maintained leading up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965?
- How similar or different are the conditions for people of color today with respect to civil and human rights?
- People used creative approaches to challenging injustice — for example, promoting voting rights at Boynton’s funeral. What are some other examples, big and small, of how “ordinary”people contributed to the movement?
Assignment 2: The Environmental Justice Movement
I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Bullard this quarter (I’m a serious fangirl) and one thing I try to squeeze in on the last day of class if we have time is a short reading from him, “Environmental Justice for All”Links to an external site., which details the history and strategies employed by the EJ movement. Questions I pose to the class are as follows:
- What is environmental racism?
- Why do we see instances of environmental racism at higher rates in the American South?
- In what ways has the environmental justice movement “won”? How did they achieve these victories?
- In what ways has the movement not succeeded?
- How has legal mobilization impacted this social movement? Why have they chosen to employ this strategy?
- What does Dr. Bullard say that we can learn from past social movements and apply to the EJ movement?