Laney College

Associate Degree in African American Studies

The African American Studies program prepares students with the comprehensive knowledge base, critical skills, and social consciousness necessary to function as effective leaders in an increasingly globalized and diverse society. Our program is grounded in the decolonization and liberation projects of African Americans and their allies in the civil rights, gender, and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s that continue through the present in new forms that address new conditions. The aim of African American Studies is to support students in developing a critical consciousness and an understanding of social, political, cultural, and economic forces that have shaped the histories and current-day realities of African Americans. Our studies are grounded in the principles of social justice and self-determination of oppressed communities. This program centralizes the knowledge, epistemologies, and critical thinking produced by racially and sexually oppressed subjects, and we endeavor to examine the entangled intersectionality of racialized sexuality, gender, and class in complex socio-historical processes.