In this course, we will excavate how racial difference and identity is constructed, negotiated, relayed, and contested by the design, use, and (de)valuation of things in the context of Euro-North American society from the nineteenth century to the present. The class will collectively visit museums and public spaces, view films, study objects, and discuss texts. Students will be introduced to both canonical and cutting-edge scholarship from Black, indigenous, latin(x) studies and more; they will leave with the observational and intellectual tools needed to interrogate material practices with a racial lens. Individual classes will dig into curatorial practices, blackness in fine art, branding and popular culture, the entanglement of leisure and luxury with empire, and how robots and AI relay anti-blackness, and more. Students will curate a show, give an object lesson, design a zine or other object, and devise other creative ways to engage with race and material culture.