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FINAL EXAM QUESTIONS

Your Final Exam will take place on Monday, May 10, 2021, from 8AM to 10AM.  It will consist of two parts: quote identifications and essay questions. See the quotation guide for more on the quotation section.

PART I: Essay Questions

You will need to prepare an essay exam prep card using the following specifications:

  • Prepare an outline of your topic, thesis, main points, and quotes to support your claim.
  • Quotes with page numbers in your essay are expected. You do not need a works cited page.
  • You may record quotes in your essay, but each quote on the card needs to appear in the essay.
  • You may not write out the essay on the card, but you may outline the key points.
  • You will need to copy and paste your outline into the exam, so prepare it in a word processor.

Essay Options for Final Exam:

  • The role of formal education for African Americans dominates much of the reading in the latter half of this course, particularly in the competing theories of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.  Outline each educator's basic argument about the content and purpose of African American education and then consider which position is better. Then reflect upon the nature of education today in the United States and consider the impact of both of their ideas upon how education actually evolved into today's educational options for black people.

  • Throughout the readings this semester, descriptions of the daily lives experienced by African Americans play a dominate role. While the harshness of slavery and living under Jim Crow laws was generally acknowledged, these details made the lived reality of these conditions infinitely harder to ignore (both as a fact and in a call to action). Using at least three different authors, identify particularly compelling scenes that help to enrich the readers' understanding of what life was like for African Americans back then and how these scenes helped to challenge the nation's passive acceptance of these conditions.

  • While it's easy to use the texts in this course to show the challenges African Americans collectively faced prior to the twentieth century in the United States, most of them focused on the individual experiences of specific people, many of whom faced unique challenges in addition to the general problems of living in slavery or during the Reconstruction period. Using three different authors, discuss the unique challenges each faced in terms of social interaction, abuse, identity, or any other issue that you can document.

  • A sobering issue reading works from this course may have brought to life is the scale of change in race relations in the United States. While it is difficult to argue that there has not been some improvement since slavery for people of African descent in the USA, it's equally possible to observe how many of the issues facing African Americans in the texts from this semester still exist in one form or another today. For this option, you can either describe three issues (giving a body paragraph to each) or pick one issue and do a sustained discussion of the issue then and now. You will need to provide many references to specific readings for either option in order to complete this essay. The goal is to link current issue to specific textual descriptions from the course.

  • The effort to stake out a role for African American culture in defining the unique qualities of American culture as a whole appears in many of the readings. Identify three authors that speak to how African American culture doesn't just improve but breaks new ground in defining American culture. Outline what those cultural products are and how they have influenced American culture then and now.
 
 

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