Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Michigan/Black Journalism (Winter '25)
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- Course name
- Black Journalism
- Institution
- University of Michigan
- Instructor
- David Porter
- Wikipedia Expert
- Brianda (Wiki Ed)
- Subject
- English
- Course dates
- 2025-01-08 00:00:00 UTC – 2025-05-01 23:59:59 UTC
- Approximate number of student editors
- 30
Over the past two centuries, generations of Black journalists have played a central role in shaping literary and political discourse in the United States. This course will explore the history, theory, and methods of Black journalistic writing in the US, with a special emphasis on works we might characterize as literary journalism, an increasingly popular form of artful nonfiction writing characterized by immersive investigations of the social landscape. We will survey exemplary works by acclaimed Black writers while attending carefully to the distinctive--and constantly evolving--characteristics of the distinctive journalistic tradition they have forged, its connections with other strands of Black literary history, and the features that have made it so effective as a catalyst of community cohesion and social change.
Famously central to the works of Hughes, Baldwin, Faucet, Coates, Smith, Hannah-Jones and other writers we’ll consider are explicit, hard-hitting discussions of the meaning of race and racism and of the consequences of the resulting forms of structural inequality in the United States. These writers tap deep wells of personal experience of being Black in America in rendering – and reflecting on – the dynamics of race in social experience, resulting in a highly celebrated body of work integral to the evolution of racial justice movements in the US.
Additional topics we’ll consider include the boundaries between fact and fiction in subjective narration, the ethical issues that arise in writing about other people’s lives, and the deep history of hierarchies that assign more prestige to fiction than nonfiction stories–and more to writers of certain backgrounds than to those of others. While not designed as a writing workshop or a “how-to” course, the class will provide opportunities for aspiring journalists to experiment with techniques and practice skills essential to the craft and possibly also to partner, through the course’s connection with the Detroit River Story Lab, with regional Black-run news organizations to develop and pitch story ideas of potential interest to local communities.
Reading assignments will consist primarily of medium-length essays that will be made available at no cost to students in digital form.