The Githii Honors Program takes seriously the importance of the undergraduate experience as a chance to engage what political theorist Hannah Arendt referred to as “the life of the mind.” Arendt, often considered a political philosopher, wrote about the nature of power, authority and democracy.
At Spelman College, we speak often of the importance of critical questioning and intellectual engagement as the path to agency, another word for power. We connect our program reading history to Phillis Wheatley on to Frederick Douglass then to W.E.B. DuBois and Anna Julia Cooper, to one of our most literate American presidents, Mr. Barack Obama, and to the possibility of equal democracy.
What We’re Reading
Bryan Stevenson is the self-effacing author of this terrific book about the legal war he has waged against cruel, unjust sentencing practices in this country for over three decades now. His history of founding and working for the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, is told through real case histories of real people who were […] Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time […] A fresh and bold argument for revamping our standards of “merit” and a clear blueprint for creating collaborative education models that strengthen our democracy rather than privileging individual elites In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor and author Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture’s perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe’s own mid-life journey to lock his hair. Ashe […]
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America by Lani Guinier
Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles by Bert Ashe
