I enjoyed this class because the material was super interesting, but the assignments weren't my favorite. We began with the idea of race itself, its social construction, and what it exactly it has come to mean and all of the implications associated with it. We then moved into things like housing segregation, gentrification, affirmative action etc. Grades consisted of weekly reading memos, a midterm paper, and a final paper. The weekly reading memos were the only easy thing. It was a 1-page single spaced summary about one reading of your choice from that given week. You also had to point out something that you found interesting. My TA, Jahneille Cunningham, was kind and approachable. She also understood that some of the readings could be dense and wordy so she helped breakdown whatever the author was talking about in a way that us as students could better understand. The midterm and final paper prompts were definitely challenging because Robinson set them up in a way that made it hard for us to figure out how to approach them. There were 3 different questions (basically prompts) and you had to answer all 3 of them within the page limit of 6-8 pages. The questions were confusing and I found myself struggling to make connections between the authors in order to answer them. I really didn't like the way they were set up.

You won't learn much but you will have to analyze very confusing readings every week which you have to write memos about, the TAs graded the memos very harshly and it hurt my grade. The midterm and finals are 6-8 page essays which are not that tough and I found they were graded more easily than the memos. All readings are posted online and free which is nice! Lecture honestly is not necessary to do well (I never went) but TAs take role in discussion.

The class was eh. Didn't really learn much in this class. The midterm was not good and a lot of people complained that the prompt was confusing. There is no extra credit and both TAs were harsh, unforgiving graders. I thought this class would be interesting, but i prefer you take it with another professor.