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
Robin D. G. Kelley Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the […] Nella Larsen Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage,and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to “pass” as a white woman. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within […] Octavia Butler When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, […] Safiya Umoja Noble In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status […]
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Passing
Parable of the Sower
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
