Through an interdisciplinary engagement with historical and contemporary scholarship on race and ethnicity, this course considers the following questions: How do race and ethnicity organize the social world? What are the historical conditions under which the various definitions of racial and ethnic difference emerge? What is at stake in the institutional recognition of race and ethnicity, particularly as these categories come to be defined in relation to other nodes of difference such as gender and social class? How do individuals utilize labels of racial and ethnic difference(s) to develop an understanding of the self in relation to the social and political worlds they inhabit? What are the ways in which racial and ethnic difference(s) inform architectural design as well as the organization of urban, suburban, and rural communities? Finally, what impact will the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to upend Affirmative Action have on further disregarding the social realities of discrimination and inequality for people of color in higher education? As an introductory course to the curricular area in Race and Ethnicity Studies, the class seeks to provide an overview of different and overlapping themes, such as land and settler colonialism, the racial state, colonialism, property, genocide, (im)migration and diaspora, labor, law, identity(ies), gender, sexuality(ies), discourse and media representation(s), the body, Affirmative Action, etc. within this complex field, and they constitute different communities and fields, including Latina/o/x/e Studies, African-American Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Whiteness Studies.