This advanced expository course seeks to understand and to mediate the current “post-racial” moment by developing strategies for racial literacy. This course builds from Lani Guinier’s (2004) challenge to “rethink race as an instrument of social, geographic, and economic control of both whites and blacks” by constructing a racial literacy that “offers a more dynamic framework for understanding American racism.” To do so, we will explore a range of methods for understanding, analyzing, and critiquing conceptions of post-racial America. We will develop a particular methodology for racial literacy by adapting tools from critical language study, critical race theory and critical community engagement. Through a variety of writing exercises that combine narration, argumentation, reflection and analysis, we will explore ways of constructing powerful counter-hegemonic critiques that demand that the “we” in public spaces be fundamentally restructured.