The Certificate in Race, Racism, and Diversity seeks to respond to the emergence of both BLM in the streets and COVID-19 in our bodies today as part of the five-century long crisis of settler colonialism and white supremacy that has shaped Southeast Michigan as well as the rest of the country and the globe in ways that continue to do grave damage to the planet and its varied peoples. Race will be traced out as the modern rationale for extractive plunder and differential access to life opportunities and collective “goods” such as employment, housing, education, health care, and freedom from interdiction (policing, incarceration, forced displacement, etc.) across the globe and with particular focus in the formation of “Detroit.

The courses for this Certificate will elaborate the complex ways that notions of skin color have been coercively embedded in our institutional life and social interaction with each other with grave ramifications especially for the health and resilience of POC and the humanity of white-identified folk, as well as profile the deep histories of BIPOC-led resistance to such.