Participants will:

• Define cultural patterning and explain how shared narratives, images, and interpretive habits shape perception.

• Identify how repetition, representation, and documentation practices reinforce familiar ideas across generations.

• Recognize that many assumptions feel “natural” because they have been culturally inherited, not individually chosen.

• Observe how cultural patterns appear in everyday life through media, community storytelling, and social expectations.

• Understand how present‑day patterns echo earlier historical portrayals and prepare to examine those origins in Module 2.

Participants will:

• Identify what blackface is and describe why it still appears today.

• Explain the difference between intent and impact in culturally sensitive actions.

• Recognize early examples of blackface and their role in shaping public perception.

• Describe how humor, pranks, and caricature can reinforce harmful stereotypes.

• Explore the emergence of blackface in the 19th century, examining how it became a dominant cultural force and how it shaped public perception of dark‑complected people.

Participants will:

• Explain how laws, policies, and social structures created racial categories and hierarchies.

• Describe how colorism, segregation, and discriminatory practices shaped social norms.

• Connect historical policies (e.g., Dawes Act, Racial Integrity Act, Naturalization Act) to long-term cultural outcomes.

• Analyze how systemic forces made blackface culturally acceptable and widely normalized.

Participants will:

• Summarize key historical events that illustrate the consequences of racial caricature and dehumanization.

• Explain how blackface contributed to violence, displacement, and cultural erasure.

• Identify patterns across massacres, redlining, sundown towns, and economic sabotage.

• Describe how media, entertainment, and policy reinforced racial narratives.

Participants will:

• Recognize the contributions of significant historical and contemporary figures across time.

• Explain how individuals and communities resisted oppression and built new cultural foundations.

• Analyze how innovation, creativity, and resilience countered the narratives created by blackface.

• Connect individual stories to broader historical patterns.

Participants will:

• Examine how historical figures were visually, linguistically, and culturally “whitened” to reinforce racial hierarchy.

• Analyze primary sources to understand how selective storytelling shapes public memory.

• Identify patterns in how power influences representation across art, literature, and national mythology.

• Reflect on how whitewashing distorts identity, erases complexity, and reshapes cultural understanding.

• Connect whitewashing to earlier modules on minstrelsy, systems, and historical events to see the full continuum of narrative control.

Participants will:

• Apply everything learned across Modules 1–5 to conduct independent research, analysis, and reflection.

• Explore contemporary and historical accounts of racial caricature, violence, and resistance through articles, documentaries, and first‑hand narratives.

• Identify modern examples of blackface and analyze their ongoing cultural impact.

• Examine how blackface contributed to economic sabotage, cultural erasure, stereotypes, psychological conditioning, and justification for destruction.

• Learn a new term: racial flattening.

• Recognize patterns of racial flattening, reclassification, and silence in the records across multiple biographies.

• Reflect on how historical knowledge intersects with personal experience, community memory, and present‑day social dynamics.

• Synthesize their learning into a cohesive understanding of how blackface shaped, and continues to shape, American society.

Participants will:

• Define the term racial flattening and explain why so many historical records show simplified or incomplete racial labels.

• Identify how census categories, state laws, and administrative practices erased Indigenous, mixed, and multi‑layered identities.

• Recognize that missing ancestry information is not evidence of absence, but evidence of a system designed to overwrite complexity.

• Examine examples of how racial flattening shaped family histories, community identities, and public records.

• Explore how these practices continue to influence modern assumptions about race, ancestry, and cultural belonging.

Participants will:

• Identify the system behind the patterns observed in Module 6, including racial flattening and the disappearance of Indigenous and mixed ancestry.

• Examine how racial categories were engineered as administrative tools rather than reflections of lived identity.

• Analyze how the one‑drop rule and blood quantum functioned as opposite but complementary systems of control.

• Understand why the historical record looks simple even when identity was complex.

• Develop the cultural awareness needed to reinterpret historical documents with context, history, and impact in mind.

Participants will:

• Practice applying cultural awareness to real‑world scenarios, relationships, and professional contexts.

• Reconstruct identity narratives using the tools of context, history, and impact.

• Learn how to recognize and avoid oversimplification, stereotyping, and misinterpretation.

• Explore how cultural awareness supports respectful engagement across differences.

• Identify personal commitments, habits, or practices they will carry forward to sustain cultural awareness as an ongoing skill.

Participants will:

• Remove a key social privilege, like a phone, gaming console, activity, or access to social media, for a specific time period of community service.

• Choose at least 2 non-profit organizations.

• Volunteer weekly to experience cultural awareness, support racial justice, and serving a diverse community.

• Reflect on the experience, connecting the volunteer work to the importance of respecting all members of a community.

Participants will:

• Lead an open and honest discussion on what they have learned about cultural awareness

• Present the findings from research and the community service experience.

• Use thought-provoking questions and statements to invite the family or group to discuss how they can collectively be more mindful of their language and actions, support one another in calling out racism and discrimination, and actively promote a more inclusive and respectful environment.

Participants will:

• Wrap up the project with feedback from the experience of completing it.

• Evaluate their course experience.

• Recommend improvements to the project.