Midterm 1 is due by Tue Oct 1 at 11:59 pm.  Late submissions are allowed but will be assessed a penalty as described in Late Work on syllabus.

The exam is based on Chapters 1 - 17 of So You Want To Talk About Race? by Ijeoma Oluo. This is referred to below as Talk About Race. You may consult this text and other resources, but please do not discuss the exam with other human beings. Your answers must be expressed in your own words so please continue to follow our policy on not using AI writing tools in any way (as described in our syllabus and reproduced below).

Please prepare your exam answers in the same way you have been preparing your personal essays - compose your answers entirely in a single Google Doc  and then submit a single URL when the exam is finished. Make sure that you have the Doc set so that anyone with the link is an editor. Your version history must show the complete evolution of all your answers from start to finish, so please do not start your answers somewhere else and then cut and paste them. Each question has a minimum word length requirement of 500 words (like our personal essays).

If you have questions about the exam, please ask those in class when we go over the exam, or thereafter post those to this thread on the discussion list on Canvas so that  everyone gets the same information about the exam. Please allow up to 12 hours for a response to questions in the discussion list.

There are four exam questions. Please make sure to number your responses in your Google Doc. You do not need to copy the question into your response although you can if you find that helpful. Do not of course include the questions in your word count.

Start of Midterm 1 Questions

1.  [5 points]  Please listen to episode 1 (37 minutes) of the Code Switch podcast entitled "Can we talk about Whiteness?" This is available for streaming or download here : 

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/05/31/479733094/the-code-switch-podcast-episode-1-can-we-talk-about-whiteness

I have also put a copy of the mp3 in our Canvas Files, just in case you have trouble accessing the NPR site. You can also find this episode on Apple podcasts, Spotify, etc.

After you listen, write a personal essay about what you heard. I'd like you to discuss at least three ideas that came up in the podcast that stood out to you in some way (either positive or negative) and how those connect to our class or your own personal experiences. Describe what those points are, why they stood out to you, and how those connect to our class or your experiences. Connections to our class could include Talk About Race, our in class discussions, or even our classroom dynamics. Support the points you highlight with enough detail so it would be understandable to someone who may not have heard the podcast or attended our class. 

2.  [5 points] Our text Talk About Race has 17 chapters, where each chapter centers on a question about racism. What are (at least) three questions you still have about racism that were not addressed in this book? Write a personal essay that explains your questions, gives examples from your life or the world as to why you have these questions, and what your best understanding of the answers might be, but why you aren't sure and would like to know more. Make sure that your questions aren't already answered in our text, and that they aren't simply clarifications or variants of the questions already in the book. You might imagine your essay as a letter to our author Ijeoma Oluo where you are explaining what you might like to see added to an expanded version of our text. 

3.  [5 points] Our author sometimes mentions people in Talk About Race who are presumably relevant to a particular chapter but without providing many details. For example in Chapter 6 on police brutality she mentions Sandra Bland and then Al Sharpton is in the title of Chapter 15 on tone policing, but not much background is given explaining why they are there. Our author may be assuming that we already know who they are or that we will investigate more on our own. To that end I would like you to pick two people that are mentioned in our text but not really explained much. These people should be from different chapters. Do some research to learn more about them. Write a personal essay describing what you find. You should be able to explain who the person is and their connection to the chapter in which they are mentioned. Some questions you may want to address might be : Why are they included? What made you want to learn more about them? Does this person relate to other chapters in our text? If so, which ones and how? Does this person remind you of other people you are already familiar with? If so, who and what is the connection? Do you think knowing more about this person helps you understand the chapter better? Please do not select Sandra Bland, Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King Jr., or Malcolm X for this question since we already discussed them in class. 

4.  [5 points] Talk About Race starts in Chapter 1 with an anecdote where a friend of our author says "I mean, I just feel like we would have gotten further if we'd focused more on class than on race." You've now read Talk About Race. Based on whatever you have learned, write a personal essay that would explain how you would respond to that point. Your response does not need to mirror that of our author's, and in fact should be based more on your own personal point of view than anything else. Support your essay with information from Talk About Race that you find convincing one way or the other and your own experience. If this idea has come up in real life conversations you've had feel free to include those experiences in your essay as well.

End of Midterm 1 Questions

Please follow our policy on Use of AI Writing Tools (from our syllabus)

Please do not use automated writing tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, CoPilot, etc. at any point in developing work for this class. This includes our Personal Essays, any take home Exams, and your Podcast. Do not use them for brainstorming ideas, do not use them for writing, and do not use them for polishing or correcting your work. 

All of your written work should be composed entirely in Google Docs. You may use the spelling and grammar checking tools provided in the standard version of Google Docs but do not use or add-on anything beyond that for any of our assignments.  

Why such a strict policy? I read all of your written assignments and exams. I listen to your podcasts. I do not offload the grading of your work on to a teaching assistant or an automated AI tool. I read what you submit carefully, and I would like to hear your own unique voice come through in the work you do for this class. I genuinely enjoy this experience. These tools obscure your voice and restrict your imagination. They make you sound more generic and less like the unique individual that you are. 

Any work that you submit in this class must be uniquely and exclusively written by you. This means no AI Writing Tools, it also means no cutting and pasting or overly close paraphrasing from other sources (which is essentially what these AI tools do, just in a very fancy and elaborate way). If you submit work that you did not uniquely and exclusively create, you may receive a 0 on that assignment.