Powerful Narratives of the Disempowered: January 10, 2018

Focus: What does it take to disempower a human?

1. Warming up with the Wednesday column of your virtue chart and a brief recap of yesterday's Empathy Quiz results :

• Consider adding an "empathy practice" to your virtue chart if you don't already have one, or use one to modify one of your virtue explanations).

• If you didn't get to read your "empathy quiz" results yesterday, have a look at "6 Habits of Highly Empathetic People."

2. Observing images of slavery

Inside your 2nd semester folder, make a folder that has the words "race" and "power" somewhere in the title.

Inside that folder, save the Google slide presentation above (images of slavery).

Peruse the images at your own speed. Underneath each one, make some notes on your specific observations of each image:

• What are you looking at in each one? What details strike you? What story is being told here?
• Which images surprise you/are new to you?
• What is your reaction to each one?
• What does each image reveal about the practice of slavery?
• What do the images reveal about specific ways in which slaves were disempowered?

3. Starting the first chapter of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

• Mark up lines that connect to the images/quotations from today's class.

• Mark up lines that respond to our focus question: What does it take to disempower a human being?

• Mark up lines where you feel empathy for Douglass.

HW:
1. Signed class syllabus due tomorrow (Thursday, Jan 11).

2. Finish reading the Chapters 1 and 6 in Douglass (through page 5 in your packet) annotating for passages that reveal something about power, disempowerment, and/or hegemony in the practice of slavery.