"Teachable Moments: Race, Media, and Visual Culture"
2009 University of Chicago Humanities Day
October 24, 2009
W.J.T. Mitchell
Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor
I am teaching a new course on "Race, Media, and Visual Culture" in the fall of 2009. It is difficult to say at this point exactly what will be covered in this session, but we will surely take up the famous episode of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates by a Cambridge policeman in the summer of 2009, and the subsequent "beer summit" at the White House. I would like to think about this moment in relation to other "teachable moments" in the history of race and racism (e.g. the Rodney King video; Spike Lee's film, "Bamboozled"; the election of Barack Obama). In short, almost anything could come up!
