Final Exam description

ENG 101 Final Writing Assignment

Justin Rogers-Cooper

Learning Community Cluster: Race and Culture

Assignment Goal

The goal of this assignment is for students to write a 500-word reflection comparing the racial project of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto with the chapters we read from The New Jim Crow. Students will offer a reflection that reconciles the different visions of urban black culture in these two texts. 

Assignment Description

For this assignment students may use the two texts in question, as well as any notes relevant to them from class discussion or their readings. They will offer an organizing statement in their introduction – we might call it a ‘soft thesis’ – that does the following:

·         Summarizes the main elements of each text’s racial project

·         Provides a statement providing their own opinion of the racial projects of the two texts

For the rest of the reflection, students will use examples from the text and their notes to support the opinion they give. To the best of their ability, they will offer topic sentence claims to support this view. Since these two texts offer differing perspectives on what main elements of the urban African-American experience, students will have to navigate between the two and pay special attention to the ideas and keywords that they believe might point toward the ‘truth’ of the contemporary relationship between the US racial state and black Americans.