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At the beginning of my second semester of CC, my professor asked us all to write down a response on an index card to the question “What do you hope to get out of this class?” My response was, “The books we are reading have been used for centuries to justify cruelty against people of color, like me. I want to read and analyze these books so that I can better understand the dangerous arguments these books were used to support.” When I read John Stuart Mill’s work On Liberty, I focused on the aspects of his text that would later be used to justify the stripping of liberty and freedom from Indian bodies. When I read Nietzche’s The Genealogy of Morals, I focused on how this book was used to argue that some were just born innately with a “slave morality.” The reason I studied these books was solely due to the ways they had been used in the past.
