Princeton to offer 'Gaming Blackness' course this fall

This fall, Princeton University will be offering a course titled, “Gaming Blackness: The Anthropology of Video Games and Race,” which will teach students to consider video games through an “intersectional approach.”

“This course is an anthropological and experience-based exploration of video games,” the course description reads. “As we consider scholarship in Digital Anthropology, Game Studies, and African American Studies, we scrutinize the design of games and engage in gameplay, with a particular focus on Black experiences.”

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Students in the course will read Woke Gaming: Video Games as Instruments of Injustice, edited by intersectional feminist Kishonna Gray and David Leonard, author of Playing While White: Privilege and Power on and off the Field. According to the book’s description, “Woke Gaming illustrates the power and potential of video games to foster change and become a catalyst for social justice.”

The course also incorporates teachings from Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist, a research article that “uses lyrics by Black women performers as a critical and cultural frame for understanding some of the work Black women have done with video games.”

The course will be taught by Akil Fletchers, a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows and anthropology lecturer. He has authored publications such as Black Gamer’s Refuge: Finding Community Within The Magic Circle of Whiteness and Why Gamers Should Read Black Authors.  

Gaming Blackness is just one of numerous Princeton’s intersectional courses that will be offered this upcoming semester.

“Race and Reproduction in U.S. History” will instruct students about “the enduring legacies of racism and reproductive violence in medical practice, and their impact on current issues of health inequality.”

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Those enrolled in “American Education, Race and Equality” will have the opportunity to “explore persistent inequality in American education through the lens of these colleges that were created in the shadow of emancipation.”

The New Jersey Ivy League is also offering “Race, Ethnicity, Space & Place: Exclusion, Confinement & Transformation (RESPECT),” which “focuses on the complex topics of race and racism from a spatial perspective, paying particular attention to the effects of interlocking systems of oppression on primarily urban African-American communities.”

Campus Reform has contacted all relevant parties for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.