Everyone who has lived in the U.S. has direct experience of race. Do not try to pretend you don't.

Your assignment for this week comes in two stages:

1) For your section on Th or F, May 22 or 23, narrate an experience from your own life that demonstrated the existence of racial categories in our social life. Tell the story of what happened, then tell how this demonstrated the social existence of racial categories. You should write between one and two double-spaced pages. Bring a draft of your essay to the section on that day.

2) For your graded assignment due in your first section for week 9, on T or W May 27 or 28, analyze this experience by doing two things:

a) Compare and contrast your own experience to some event related by Henry Louis Gates in Colored People.

b) State how racial categories shaped your experience and Gates's experience similarly or differently.

Again, you should write between one and two pages, so your total assignment is about 3 pages long.