african american college essay

Our Favorite Essays by Black Writers About Race and Identity

Books & Culture

A personal and critical lens to blackness in america from our archives.

It’s fitting that two of the first three essays in this roundup are centered on examining the Black American experience as one of horror. In a year when radical right-wing activists are truly leaning in, we’ve already seen record numbers of anti-LGBTQ legislation, the very real possibility of the end of Roe v. Wade, and more fervent redlining measures to keep Black people (and other marginalized communities) from voting. Gun violence is at an all time high, in particular mass shootings.

Since the success of Jordan Peele’s runaway hit film Get Out , there has been a steady rise in films depicting the Black American experience for the fraught, nuanced, dangerous life that it can be. This narrative isn’t entirely new, but this is the first time these films have gained critical acclaim and commercial attention. The reason is simple. Whatever the cause—social media, an increasingly diverse population—America can’t run from itself anymore. Our entertainment is finally asking the question that Black people have been asking for generations: In America, who is the real boogeyman?

Naturally, the discourse and critical analyses must follow suit. But it doesn’t stop there: the essays on this list span far and wide when it comes to subject matter, critical lens, and personal narrative. There are essays about Black friendship, the radical nature of Black people taking rest, and the affirmation of Black women writing for themselves, telling their own stories. Icons like Michelle Obama, Toni Morrison, and Gayle Jones get a deep dive, and we learn that we should always have been listening to Octavia Butler. This Juneteenth, I hope you’re taking a moment to reflect, on America’s troubled legacy, and to celebrate the ways that Black people continue to thrive.

Modern Horror Is the Perfect Genre for Capturing the Black Experience

Cree Myles writes about the contemporary Black creators rewriting the horror genre and growing the canon:

“Racism is a horror and should be explored as such. White folks have made it clear that they don’t think that’s true. Someone else needs to tell the story.”

Modern Narratives of Black Love and Friendship Are Centering Iconic Trios

Darise Jeanbaptiste writes about how Insecure and Nobody’s Magic illustrate the intricacy of evolving Black relationships:

“The power of the triptych is that it offers three experiences in addition to the fourth, which emerges when all three are viewed or read together.”

I Was Surrounded by “Final Girls” in School, Knowing I’d Never Be One

Whitney Washington writes that the erasure of Black women in slasher films has larger implications about race in America:

“Long before the realities of American life, it was slasher movies that taught me how invisible, ignored, and ultimately expendable Black women are. There was no list of rules long enough to keep me safe from the insidiousness of white supremacy… More than anything, slasher movies showed me that my role was to always be a supporting character, risking my life to be the voice of reason ensuring that the white girl makes it to the finish line.”

“Palmares” Is An Example of What Grows When Black Women Choose Silence

Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies , writes that Gayl Jones’ decades-long absence from public life illuminates the power of restorative quiet:

“These women’s silences should not be interpreted as a lack of understanding or awareness, but rather as an abundance of both, most especially the knowledge of what to keep close to the vest, and the implications for failing to do so. They know better than to explain themselves, their powers and their origins, their beliefs and reasons, their magic. These women are silent not because they don’t know anything. They are silent because they know better.”

Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” Showed Me How Race and Gender Are Intertwined

For the 50th anniversary of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye , Koritha Mitchell writes how the novel taught her that being a Black woman is more than just Blackness or womanhood:

“I didn’t have the gift of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of ‘intersectionality,’ but The Bluest Eye revealed how, in my presence, racism and sexism would always collide to produce negative experiences that others could dodge. It was not simply being Black or being dark-skinned that mattered; it was being those things while also being female.”

The Delicate Balancing Act of Black Women’s Memoir

Koritha Mitchell writes about how Michelle Obama’s Becoming illustrates larger tensions for Black women writing about themselves:

“In other words, when Black women remain enigmas while seeming to share so much, they create proxies at a distance from their psychic and spiritual realities because they are so rarely safe in public. Despite the release of her memoir, audiences will never be privy to who Michelle Obama actually knows herself to be, and that is more than appropriate.”

50 Years Later, the Demands of “The Black Manifesto” Are Still Unmet

Carla Bell writes about James Forman’s famous 1969 address, The Black Manifesto , and its contemporary resonances:

“But the Manifesto is as vital a roadmap in our marches and protests today as the day it was first delivered. We, black people in America, remain compelled by the power and purpose of The Black Manifesto, and we continue to demand our full rights as a people of this decadent society.”

You Should Have Been Listening to Octavia Butler This Whole Time

Alicia A. Wallace writes that Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower isn’t just a prescient dystopia—it’s a monument to the wisdom of Black women and girls:

Through her protagonist Lauren Olamina, Butler has been telling the world for decades that it was not going to last in its capitalist, racist, sexist, homophobic form for much longer. She showed us the way injustice would cause the earth to burn, and the importance of community building for survival and revolution. Through Parable of the Sowe r, we had a better future in our hands, but we did not listen.

The Book You Need to Fully Understand How Racism Operates in America

Darryl Robertson writes about Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and its examination of the history of overt and covert bigotry:

“While How to Be an Antiracist is an informative and necessary read, it is his National Book Award-winning, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America that deserves extra attention. If we want to uproot the current racist system, it’s mandatory that we understand how racism was constructed. Stamped does just that.”

I Reject the Imaginary White Man Judging My Work

Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts turns to Black writers as inspiration for resisting white expectations:

“…it doesn’t only matter that I’m a Black woman telling my story. What matters is the lens through which I’m telling it. And sometimes, many times, that lens, if we’re not careful, can be tainted by the ever-present consciousness of Whiteness as the default.”

Toni Morrison Gave My Own Story Back to Me

The incomparable literary powerhouse showed Brandon Taylor how to stop letting white people dictate the shape of his narrative:

“That’s the magic of Toni Morrison. Once you read her, the world is never the same. It’s deeper, brighter, darker, more beautiful and terrible than you could ever imagine. Her work opens the world and ushers you out into it. She resurfaced the very texture and nature of my imagination and what I could conceive of as possible for writing and for art, for life.”

Art Must Engage With Black Vitality, Not Just Black Pain

Jennifer Baker writes that books like The Fire This Time give depth and nuance to a reflection of Blackness in America:

“These essays provided a deeper connection because Black pain was part of the story; Black identity, self-recognition, our own awareness brokered every page. Black pain was not the sole criterion for the anthology’s existence.”

When Black Characters Wear White Masks

Jennifer Baker writes that whiteface in literature isn’t a disavowal of Blackness, but a commentary on privilege:

“Whiteface stories interrogate the mentality that it’s better to be white while examining how societal gains as well as societal “norms” inflict this way of thinking on Black people. Being white isn’t better, but, for some of these characters, it seems a hell of a lot easier, or at least preferable to dealing with racism.”

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130 African Americans Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

When it comes to discussing African American history, culture, and contributions, there is a wealth of topics to explore. Whether you are writing an essay for a history class, a social sciences course, or simply want to delve deeper into the African American experience, here are 130 essay topic ideas and examples to inspire your research and writing:

• The life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
• The impact of the Civil Rights Movement on African American communities.
• The Harlem Renaissance: A cultural and artistic movement.
• The contributions of African American musicians to American music.
• The role of African American athletes in breaking racial barriers.
• The history and significance of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
• The influence of African American cuisine on American food culture.
• The portrayal of African Americans in popular media and its effects.
• The role of African American women in the suffrage movement.
• The experiences of African American soldiers in World War II.
• The impact of African American literature on American literature as a whole.
• The history and impact of African American churches.
• The contributions of African American scientists and inventors.
• The challenges faced by African American activists in the fight for equality.
• The impact of African American art on the art world.
• The achievements and contributions of African American educators.
• The role of African American musicians in shaping popular music genres.
• The history and significance of African American quilting traditions.
• The representation of African Americans in the criminal justice system.
• The impact of African American vernacular English on American language.
• The history and influence of African American hair culture.
• The contributions of African American dancers to the world of dance.
• The role of African American women in the Civil Rights Movement.
• The history and impact of African American fraternities and sororities.
• The portrayal of African Americans in literature throughout history.
• The experiences of African American immigrants in the United States.
• The impact of African American playwrights on American theater.
• The contributions of African American athletes to Olympic history.
• The role of African American women in the feminist movement.
• The influence of African American fashion on popular trends.
• The history and impact of African American folktales and storytelling.
• The representation of African Americans in the healthcare system.
• The contributions of African American architects to American cities.
• The role of African American musicians in the evolution of jazz.
• The impact of African American entrepreneurs on American business.
• The experiences of African American students during the era of school desegregation.
• The portrayal of African Americans in film and television.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of medicine.
• The role of African American women in the fight against police brutality.
• The impact of African American writers on American literature.
• The history and influence of African American gospel music.
• The contributions of African American activists to the LGBTQ+ movement.
• The role of African American artists in challenging racial stereotypes.
• The experiences of African American soldiers in the Vietnam War.
• The impact of African American athletes on college sports.
• The history and significance of African American hair braiding.
• The representation of African Americans in politics and government.
• The role of African American musicians in the development of rock and roll.
• The impact of African American entrepreneurs on the beauty industry.
• The experiences of African American students in historically white schools.
• The history and influence of African American spirituals.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of psychology.
• The role of African American women in the Black Lives Matter movement.
• The impact of African American poets on American literature.
• The history and significance of African American step dancing.
• The portrayal of African Americans in advertising.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of technology.
• The role of African American musicians in the evolution of hip-hop.
• The experiences of African American women in the workforce.
• The impact of African American athletes on professional sports.
• The history and influence of African American hair straightening techniques.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of environmental activism.
• The role of African American artists in highlighting racial inequality.
• The experiences of African American soldiers in the Korean War.
• The impact of African American politicians on local communities.
• The history and significance of African American drumming traditions.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of engineering.
• The role of African American musicians in the evolution of blues.
• The impact of African American entrepreneurs on the tech industry.
• The experiences of African American students in predominantly white universities.
• The history and influence of African American spoken word poetry.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of sports broadcasting.
• The role of African American women in the fight for reproductive rights.
• The impact of African American playwrights on contemporary theater.
• The history and significance of African American dance traditions.
• The portrayal of African Americans in reality television.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of education reform.
• The role of African American musicians in the evolution of reggae.
• The experiences of African American women in the STEM fields.
• The impact of African American artists on the art market.
• The history and influence of African American hair care products.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of social work.
• The role of African American musicians in the development of funk music.
• The impact of African American entrepreneurs on the fashion industry.
• The experiences of African American students in historically Black colleges.
• The history and significance of African American tap dancing.
• The representation of African Americans in the healthcare industry.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of space exploration.
• The role of African American musicians in the evolution of soul music.
• The impact of African American athletes on the Paralympic Games.
• The history and influence of African American hair braiding.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of social justice.
• The role of African American women in the fight against environmental racism.
• The experiences of African American soldiers in the Gulf War.
• The impact of African American politicians on national policies.
• The history and significance of African American drum circles.
• The portrayal of African Americans in video games.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of aviation.
• The role of African American musicians in the evolution of rap music.
• The impact of African American entrepreneurs on the food industry.
• The experiences of African American students in historically Black sororities and fraternities.
• The history and influence of African American call-and-response traditions.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of criminal justice reform.
• The role of African American musicians in the development of gospel music.
• The impact of African American athletes on international sports.
• The history and significance of African American hair extensions.
• The representation of African Americans in the fashion industry.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of urban planning.
• The role of African American musicians in the evolution of R&B music.
• The experiences of African American women in the entertainment industry.
• The impact of African American entrepreneurs on the music industry.
• The history and influence of African American spoken word poetry slams.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of environmental conservation.
• The role of African American musicians in the development of electronic music.
• The impact of African American athletes on the Special Olympics.
• The history and significance of African American hair salons.
• The portrayal of African Americans in children's literature.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of computer science.
• The role of African American musicians in the evolution of funk music.
• The impact of African American entrepreneurs on the film industry.
• The experiences of African American students in historically Black marching bands.
• The contributions of African Americans to the field of LGBTQ+ activism.
• The role of African American musicians in the development of country music.
• The impact of African American athletes on the X Games.
• The representation of African Americans in the gaming industry.

As you can see, there are countless topics to explore when it comes to African American history, culture, and contributions. Choose one that resonates with you, conduct thorough research, and craft a compelling and insightful essay that sheds light on the rich and diverse experiences of African Americans throughout history.

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African American Studies: Foundations and Key Concepts

This non-exhaustive list of readings in African American Studies highlights the vibrant history of the discipline and introduces the field.

In the 1960s, student activists across the United States participated in sit-ins, strikes, rallies, and protests with the goal of having colleges and universities establish institutional support for the study of the lives, history, and culture of black people. This movement, both inspired by and an offshoot of the Civil Rights Movement, resulted in an increased number of syllabi including work that addressed the particular concerns of African Americans and the first department of black studies, which was inaugurated at San Francisco State University in 1968.

African American Studies examines the experience of people of African descent in the United States and the Black diaspora, both throughout history and in the present. Unbound by but indebted to critical methodologies from disciplines like English, history, sociology, law, and political science, African American Studies centers black people. It examines social, legal, and economic structures, and also our fundamental understandings of concepts like space, place, the human, belonging, and community.

This non-exhaustive list of readings in African American Studies highlights the vibrant history of the discipline, introduces readers to central questions in the field, and showcases its bright future.

Philip D. Morgan, “ Origins of American Slavery .” OAH Magazine of History , 2005

A concise but thorough overview of how American slavery fits into larger historical processes of the subjugation of black people, Philip Morgan’s description of slavery as an international institution looks at the institution’s centrality in shaping global trends throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By placing American slavery in a global context, Morgan explains how the expanding scale of capitalism and a long-standing perception of black inferiority converged to produce an instantiation of slavery that stands out as peculiarly heinous.

Hortense Spillers, “ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book .” Diacritics , 1987

Hortense Spillers argues that discourses around blackness and gender during slavery continue to determine the ways in which black bodies are read in the United States. By focusing on black women, Spillers contends that we get it wrong when we only view slavery through the experience of enslaved people who identified as male. The machinations of enslavement as an institution fundamentally relied on fully disarticulating black women from the categories of “woman” and “human.”

Spillers goes on to argue that critiques of black community that make a lack of black fathers in black communities a talking point ignore the ways in which structures of power (particularly the law) well beyond the control of African Americans destabilized the conceptions of gender and the frames of genealogy upon which those critiques depend.

Stephen Best, “ Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive .” Representations , 2011

Ostensibly a review essay of articles that appear in a special issue of Representations on “New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual,” Stephen Best argues that black people have often been understood as objects rather than subjects. Best cites a case in which a photograph of two young black boys from the nineteenth century was advertised as rare at an estate sale. It was later discovered that copies of the photograph could be found at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and on eBay. Best addresses the paradox of the archival turn in studies of slavery: How can we claim to know that which cannot be known? That is, whether evidence can be found in the archive or not?

Anthony B. Pinn, “ Black Bodies in Pain and Ecstasy: Terror, Subjectivity, and the Nature of Black Religion .” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions , 2003

Anthony Pinn argues that black religion, a capacious term that he purposefully deploys to reference a range of religious and spiritual practices beyond Christianity, plays a key role in African Americans’ struggle for what he calls complex subjectivity, a mode of being defined by ambiguity and multidimensionality. If dominant society defined black people by their corporeality during slavery, Pinn argues that black religion, which is an experience mediated by and through the black body, constitutes an important site of resistance against oppression. It contains an aesthetic, both in performance and style, that must be more prominently considered by the field of black religious studies.

Harvey Young, “ The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching .” Theatre Journal , 2005

Lynching, a phenomenon of extra-juridical violence used as a tool of social control, continues to be a lesser acknowledged practice in American history. Harvey Young analyzes what it meant for white participants in lynching spectacles to either steal or purchase the body parts of those who had been unjustly hanged, burned, castrated, and otherwise victimized and killed in public. Young asks what it means for white people to treat black bodies as souvenirs, fetish object, and remains.

Michael A. Gomez, “ Of Du Bois and Diaspora: The Challenge of African American Studies .” Journal of Black Studies , 2004

In a special issue of Journal of Black Studies celebrating 30 years of African American studies, Michael Gomez focuses on “double consciousness,” W. E. B. Du Bois’ term for the experience of African Americans who must simultaneously identify with blackness and Americanness. The nation signified in the latter term oppresses people based on the former term. Gomez makes a case for black intellectuals in the field of African American studies to more thoughtfully engage a larger diasporic approach with their work. Because the study of black people in America is a diasporic project about dispersal, loss, and community building, Gomez’s call for African American studies to take the diasporic turn seriously continues to influence the field.

Sarah Haley, “ Like I Was a Man: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia .” Signs , 2013

Sarah Haley argues that the prison industrial complex has been an important site in which racialized conceptions of gender have been consolidated. Focusing on a comprehensive and historic prison reform act passed in Georgia in 1908 that forced imprisoned black women onto chain gangs and introduced a system of parole that compelled black women released from prison to become domestic servants in white homes, Haley argues that these reforms illustrate how black women were stripped of their gender. Incarcerated black women were obligated to perform both domestic labor that was gendered as female and hard physical labor that was gendered as male, but also, as a result of this un-gendering, they were legislated out of the category of the human.

Daryl Michael Scott, “ How Black Nationalism Became Sui Generis .” Fire!!! , 2012

Daryl Michael Scott’s exploration of the vicissitudes of black nationalism that developed over the course of the early and mid-twentieth century negotiates a tension between black nationalism and other forms of nationalism. While “nationalism” on its own may be problematic, “black nationalism” has described everything from black separatism and sovereignty to an imperium in imperio in which black people could self-determine without founding a new nation to a generic notion of racial solidarity among black people in a Pan-African context. The idea continues to have critical purchase in academia.

Scott meticulously traces the genealogy of the term, from the work of the Communist Party USA in the 1920’s to the rhetoric of black artists and activists in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. He ultimately argues that too many actually disparate ideologies about how to achieve racial uplift have been flattened out and occluded by a rather sweeping use of “black nationalism” to describe divergent ideologies.

Combahee River Collective, “ A Black Feminist Statement .” Off Our Backs (1979)

Written in the mid-1970s by a group of black feminists under a name that pays homage to the first successful slave revolt led by a black woman, this statement marks an important precursor to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality in the succeeding decades. The Combahee River Collective argues against any program for social justice that does not account for how structures of oppression are “interlocking,” affecting people of various identity categories differently. Though this intersectional approach to understanding oppression may seem commonplace now, the Combahee River Collective’s race-conscious and socialist model of feminism marks an epochal shift in thought about what we now call “identity politics.” Reprinted in the Women’s Studies Quarterly .

Cheryl Harris, “ Whiteness as Property .” Harvard Law Review , 1993

Cheryl Harris explores the extent to which whiteness became a form of property that had to be protected by juridical and legislative means. As she argues, whiteness became valuable when white people could not be reduced to property under slavery. Given this, it is not only the cultural legacy of enslavement that has kept black people oppressed in the United States, but also a legal system that has continued to treat whiteness as the norm. That system actively excludes people of color from the purview of equal rights and protections while also affording economic benefits exclusively or disproportionately to white Americans.

The article ends by addressing how affirmative action would challenge the property interest in whiteness, but only if it actively operates as a corrective to structural injustices by redistributing power and resources to those that have been historically denied access in the United States.

Heather Ann Thompson, “ Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History .” The Journal of American History, 2010

As we continue to live in an age of mass incarceration, Thompson’s article reminds us of the lasting legacy of what the writer Michelle Alexander has provocatively called “The New Jim Crow.” Thompson argues that the exploding incarceration rates that we see in the late twentieth century correlate strongly with African Americans’ continued struggles for equal citizenship after the passages of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Thompson’s meticulous research reveals that, over the course of the postwar period, urban spaces became increasingly criminalized. Local laws and law enforcement officials targeted communities of color and increased criminal sentences for various infractions.

Alexander G. Weheliye, “ After Man .” American Literary History , 2008

African American studies has long been charged with being too parochial in scope, attending solely to the concerns of one minority group in the United States. Weheliye contends that black studies contributes to an understanding of the category of the human by filling in the gaps of a category that did not consider blackness as a constitutive part of its makeup and imagining other ways of being human.

Daphne Brooks, “ ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe .” Meridians , 2008

As if anticipating the bevy of scholarly and popular responses to Beyoncé Knowles’s Southern aesthetic in her 2016 visual album, Lemonade , Daphne Brooks argues that the work of Beyoncé (and Mary J. Blige) in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina should be read as a convergence of a long-standing set of sociopolitical concerns made that much more visible by the devastating storm. By analyzing Mary J. Blige’s duet with U2 at the Shelter from the Storm telethon, an event meant to raise money for survivors of the hurricane, as a way of opening up space to talk about the political dimensions of desire in Beyoncé’s second solo album, B-Day , Brooks shows how black women’s vocal and visual performances continue to constitute an important site of black resistance.

Dwight McBride, “ Can the Queen Speak?: Racial Essentialism, Sexuality, and the Problem of Authority .” Callaloo , 1998

Dwight McBride’s critique of racial essentialist discourse in the work of African American intellectuals argues that African American Studies must more urgently attend to the experience of black queer people if it is going to continue to theorize around concepts like “blackness” or “black community.” Rather than simply call for more inclusion, McBride argues that black gays and lesbians must be represented in ways that accurately portray them and their concerns. This must be done by considering the work of black queer writers and activists like James Baldwin and Essex Hemphill on its own terms.

Jennifer Nash, “ Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics and Post-Intersectionality .” Meridians , 2011

Love-politics, which Jennifer Nash theorizes as a facet of black feminist politics that makes use of love as an affective mode of relationality that exceeds identity categories and identity politics, uses shared affinity rather than shared oppression to construct deep coalitions. Turning to love, Nash argues, allows for a turning away from the state when seeking redress for oppression and discrimination. Preferring the radical utopianism of imaginary new worlds to the politics of visibility that is a cornerstone of intersectional politics, black feminist love-politics helpfully imagines a political terrain in which the public sphere can be effectively changed.

Walter R. Allen, Channel McLewis, Chantal Jones, and Daniel Harris, “ From Bakke to Fisher: African American Students in U.S. Higher Education over Forty Years ” RSF: The Russel Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences , 2018

Considering 40 years of quantitative data on college enrollments and degree completion rates among African American students in the context of critical race theory, Walter R. Allen, Channel McLewis, Chantal Jones, and Daniel Harris explain how the inherent anti-blackness in the United States’ system of higher education continues to hamper socioeconomic achievement for African Americans. Though the rates of college enrollment for African Americans have modestly increased since the mid-1970s, these scholars argue that the continued underrepresentation of black students in selective colleges, coupled with black students’ relative over-enrollment in community and for-profit colleges, negatively impact African Americans’ generational accrual of wealth.

Evie Shockley, “ Going Overboard: African American Poetic Innovation and the Middle Passage .” Contemporary Literature, 2011

Noticing a marked increase in the number of historical poems that have been written in the twenty-first century, Evie Shockley argues that the influx of poetry about slavery reveals a continued engagement in black writing with the relationship between language and subjectivity. Focusing on poetic treatments of the Middle Passage, Shockley addresses how contemporary poets like Douglas Kearney ( The Black Automaton ) and M. NourbeSe Philip ( Zong! ) reckon with the historical gaps and violent breaks in space and time that the transatlantic slave trade forced upon captured Africans. Shockley makes use of postmodern rhetorical strategies like polyvocality, linguistic fragmentation, and narrative implacability to undermine our understanding of how stories, even those lost to the archive, can be told.

Frank Wilderson, “ Social Death and Narrative Aporia in 12 Years a Slave .” Black Camera , 2015

Frank Wilderson takes up 12 Years a Slave (both the slave narrative written by Solomon Northrup, published in 1853, and the recent movie adaptation directed by Steve McQueen) to argue that telling the stories of enslaved people in particular—and black people in general—constitutes both a logical impasse, one characterized by their status as non-human humans, and a fundamental critique of our normative understandings of narrative. Wilderson takes on theories of narratology that claim that the non-human typically becomes human in narrative by way of characterization. Wilderson argues that the figure of the enslaved person—a figure that lives under the threat of gratuitous violence, constant shame, and unguaranteed kinship—operates outside of this realm of narrative.

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How to Talk About Race on College Applications, According to Admissions Experts

R afael Figueroa, dean of college guidance at Albuquerque Academy, was in the middle of tutoring Native American and Native Hawaiian students on how to write college application essays when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious college admissions processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional .

Earlier in the week, he told the students that they shouldn’t feel like they need to talk about their ethnicity in their essays. But after the June 29 Supreme Court ruling , he backtracked. “If I told you that you didn’t have to write about your native or cultural identity, you need to get ready to do another supplemental essay” on it or prepare a story that can fit into short answer questions, he says he told them.

For high school seniors of color applying to colleges in the coming years, the essay and short answer sections will take on newfound importance. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested as much when he wrote in his majority opinion, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” That “discussion” is usually in an essay, and many colleges have additional short-answer questions that allow students to expand more on their background and where they grew up.

“The essay is going to take up a lot more space than maybe it has in the past because people are going to be really trying to understand who this person is that is going to come into our community,” says Timothy Fields, senior associate dean of undergraduate admission at Emory University.

Now, college admissions officers are trying to figure out how to advise high schoolers on their application materials to give them the best chance to showcase their background under the new rules, which will no longer allow colleges or universities to use race as an explicit factor in admissions decisions .

Shereem Herndon-Brown, who co-wrote The Black Family’s Guide to College Admissions with Fields, says students of color can convey their racial and ethnic backgrounds by writing about their families and their upbringing. “I’ve worked with students for years who have written amazing essays about how they spend Yom Kippur with their family, which clearly signals to a college that they are Jewish—how they listened to the conversations from their grandfather about escaping parts of Europe… Their international or immigrant story comes through whether it’s from the Holocaust or Croatia or the Ukraine. These are stories that kind of smack colleges in the face about culture.”

“Right now, we’re asking Black and brown kids to smack colleges in the face about being Black and brown,” he continues. “And, admittedly, I am mixed about the necessity to do it. But I think the only way to do it is through writing.”

Read More: The ‘Infamous 96’ Know Firsthand What Happens When Affirmative Action Is Banned

Students of color who are involved in extracurriculars that are related to diversity efforts should talk about those prominently in their college essays, other experts say. Maude Bond, director of college counseling at Cate School in Santa Barbara County, California, cites one recent applicant she counseled who wrote her college essay about an internship with an anti-racism group and how it helped her highlight the experiences of Asian American Pacific Islanders in the area.

Bond also says there are plenty of ways for people of color to emphasize their resilience and describe the character traits they learned from overcoming adversity: “Living in a society where you’re navigating racism every day makes you very compassionate.” she says. “It gives you a different sense of empathy and understanding. Not having the same resources as people that you grow up with makes you more creative and innovative.” These, she argues, are characteristics students should highlight in their personal essays.

Adam Nguyen, a former Columbia University admissions officer who now counsels college applicants via his firm Ivy Link, will also encourage students of color to ask their teachers and college guidance counselors to hint at their race or ethnicity in their recommendation letters. “That’s where they could talk about your racial background,” Nguyen says. “Just because you can’t see what’s written doesn’t mean you can’t influence how or what is said about you.”

Yet as the essay portions of college applications gain more importance, the process of reading applications will take a lot longer, raising the question of whether college admissions offices have enough staffers to get through the applications. “There are not enough admission officers in the industry to read that way,” says Michael Pina, director of admission at the University of Richmond.

That could make it even more difficult for students to get the individual attention required to gain acceptance to the most elite colleges. Multiple college admissions experts say college-bound students will need to apply to a broader range of schools. “You should still apply to those 1% of colleges…but you should think about the places that are producing high-quality graduates that are less selective,” says Pina.

One thing more Black students should consider, Fields argues, is applying to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). (In fact, Fields, a graduate of Morehouse College, claims that may now be “necessary” for some students.) “There’s something to be said, for a Black person to be in a majority environment someplace that they are celebrated, not tolerated,” Fields says. “There’s something to be said about being in an environment where you don’t have to justify why you’re here.”

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14 influential essays from Black writers on America's problems with race

• Business leaders are calling for people to reflect on civil rights this Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
• Black literary experts shared their top nonfiction essay and article picks on race. 
• The list includes "A Report from Occupied Territory" by James Baldwin.

For many, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a time of reflection on the life of one of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders. It's also an important time for people who support racial justice to educate themselves on the experiences of Black people in America. 

Business leaders like TIAA CEO Thasunda Duckett Brown and others are encouraging people to reflect on King's life's work, and one way to do that is to read his essays and the work of others dedicated to the same mission he had: racial equity. 

Insider asked Black literary and historical experts to share their favorite works of journalism on race by Black authors. Here are the top pieces they recommended everyone read to better understand the quest for Black liberation in America:

An earlier version of this article was published on June 14, 2020.

"Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" and "The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States" by Ida B. Wells

In 1892, investigative journalist, activist, and NAACP founding member Ida B. Wells began to publish her research on lynching in a pamphlet titled "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases." Three years later, she followed up with more research and detail in "The Red Record." 

Shirley Moody-Turner, associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University recommended everyone read these two texts, saying they hold "many parallels to our own moment."  

"In these two pamphlets, Wells exposes the pervasive use of lynching and white mob violence against African American men and women. She discredits the myths used by white mobs to justify the killing of African Americans and exposes Northern and international audiences to the growing racial violence and terror perpetrated against Black people in the South in the years following the Civil War," Moody-Turner told Business Insider. 

Read  "Southern Horrors" here and "The Red Record" here >>

"On Juneteenth" by Annette Gordon-Reed

In this collection of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed combines memoir and history to help readers understand the complexities out of which Juneteenth was born. She also argues how racial and ethnic hierarchies remain in society today, said Moody-Turner. 

"Gordon-Reed invites readers to see Juneteenth as a time to grapple with the complexities of race and enslavement in the US, to re-think our origin stories about race and slavery's central role in the formation of both Texas and the US, and to consider how, as Gordon-Reed so eloquently puts it, 'echoes of the past remain, leaving their traces in the people and events of the present and future.'"

Purchase "On Juneteenth" here>>

"The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates, best-selling author and national correspondent for The Atlantic, made waves when he published his 2014 article "The Case for Reparations," in which he called for "collective introspection" on reparations for Black Americans subjected to centuries of racism and violence. 

"In his now famed essay for The Atlantic, journalist, author, and essayist, Ta-Nehisi Coates traces how slavery, segregation, and discriminatory racial policies underpin ongoing and systemic economic and racial disparities," Moody-Turner said. 

"Coates provides deep historical context punctuated by individual and collective stories that compel us to reconsider the case for reparations," she added.  

Read it here>>

"The Idea of America" by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the "1619 Project" by The New York Times

In "The Idea of America," Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones traces America's history from 1619 onward, the year slavery began in the US. She explores how the history of slavery is inseparable from the rise of America's democracy in her essay that's part of The New York Times' larger "1619 Project," which is the outlet's ongoing project created in 2019 to re-examine the impact of slavery in the US. 

"In her unflinching look at the legacy of slavery and the underside of American democracy and capitalism, Hannah-Jones asks, 'what if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we [Black Americans] have never been the problem but the solution,'" said Moody-Turner, who recommended readers read the whole "1619 Project" as well. 

Read "The Idea of America" here and the rest of the "1619 Project here>>

"Many Thousands Gone" by James Baldwin

In "Many Thousands Gone," James Arthur Baldwin, American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist lays out how white America is not ready to fully recognize Black people as people. It's a must read, according to Jimmy Worthy II, assistant professor of English at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

"Baldwin's essay reminds us that in America, the very idea of Black persons conjures an amalgamation of specters, fears, threats, anxieties, guilts, and memories that must be extinguished as part of the labor to forget histories deemed too uncomfortable to remember," Worthy said.

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 13 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights activists were arrested after peaceful protest in Birmingham, Alabama. In jail, King penned an open letter about how people have a moral obligation to break unjust laws rather than waiting patiently for legal change. In his essay, he expresses criticism and disappointment in white moderates and white churches, something that's not often focused on in history textbooks, Worthy said.

"King revises the perception of white racists devoted to a vehement status quo to include white moderates whose theories of inevitable racial equality and silence pertaining to racial injustice prolong discriminatory practices," Worthy said. 

"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" by Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde, African American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist asks readers to not be silent on important issues. This short, rousing read is crucial for everyone according to Thomonique Moore, a 2016 graduate of Howard University, founder of Books&Shit book club, and an incoming Masters' candidate at Columbia University's Teacher's College. 

"In this essay, Lorde explains to readers the importance of overcoming our fears and speaking out about the injustices that are plaguing us and the people around us. She challenges us to not live our lives in silence, or we risk never changing the things around us," Moore said.  Read it here>>

"The First White President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This essay from the award-winning journalist's book " We Were Eight Years in Power ," details how Trump, during his presidency, employed the notion of whiteness and white supremacy to pick apart the legacy of the nation's first Black president, Barack Obama.

Moore said it was crucial reading to understand the current political environment we're in. 

"Just Walk on By" by Brent Staples

In this essay, Brent Staples, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer for The New York Times, hones in on the experience of racism against Black people in public spaces, especially on the role of white women in contributing to the view that Black men are threatening figures.  

For Crystal M. Fleming, associate professor of sociology and Africana Studies at SUNY Stony Brook, his essay is especially relevant right now. 

"We see the relevance of his critique in the recent incident in New York City, wherein a white woman named Amy Cooper infamously called the police and lied, claiming that a Black man — Christian Cooper — threatened her life in Central Park. Although the experience that Staples describes took place decades ago, the social dynamics have largely remained the same," Fleming told Insider. 

"I Was Pregnant and in Crisis. All the Doctors and Nurses Saw Was an Incompetent Black Woman" by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an author, associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty affiliate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. In this essay, Cottom shares her gut-wrenching experience of racism within the healthcare system. 

Fleming called this piece an "excellent primer on intersectionality" between racism and sexism, calling Cottom one of the most influential sociologists and writers in the US today.  Read it here>>

"A Report from Occupied Territory" by James Baldwin

Baldwin's "A Report from Occupied Territory" was originally published in The Nation in 1966. It takes a hard look at violence against Black people in the US, specifically police brutality. 

"Baldwin's work remains essential to understanding the depth and breadth of anti-black racism in our society. This essay — which touches on issues of racialized violence, policing and the role of the law in reproducing inequality — is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to understand just how much has not changed with regard to police violence and anti-Black racism in our country," Fleming told Insider.  Read it here>>

"I'm From Philly. 30 Years Later, I'm Still Trying To Make Sense Of The MOVE Bombing" by Gene Demby

On May 13, 1985, a police helicopter dropped a bomb on the MOVE compound in Philadelphia, which housed members of the MOVE, a black liberation group founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Eleven people, including five children, died in the airstrike. In this essay, Gene Demby, co-host and correspondent for NPR's Code Switch team, tries to wrap his head around the shocking instance of police violence against Black people. 

"I would argue that the fact that police were authorized to literally bomb Black citizens in their own homes, in their own country, is directly relevant to current conversations about militarized police and the growing movement to defund and abolish policing," Fleming said.  Read it here>>

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After Affirmative Action Ban, They Rewrote College Essays With a Key Theme: Race

The Supreme Court’s ruling intended to remove the consideration of race during the admissions process. So students used their essays to highlight their racial background.

By Bernard Mokam

Bernard Mokam interviewed dozens of high school students, parents and counselors about preparing college applications in a new landscape.

Astrid Delgado first wrote her college application essay about a death in her family. Then she reshaped it around a Spanish book she read as a way to connect to her Dominican heritage.

Deshayne Curley wanted to leave his Indigenous background out of his essay. But he reworked it to focus on an heirloom necklace that reminded him of his home on the Navajo Reservation.

The first draft of Jyel Hollingsworth’s essay explored her love for chess. The final focused on the prejudice between her Korean and Black American families and the financial hardships she overcame.

All three students said they decided to rethink their essays to emphasize one key element: their racial identities. And they did so after the Supreme Court last year struck down affirmative action in college admissions, leaving essays the only place for applicants to directly indicate their racial and ethnic backgrounds.

High school students graduating this year worked on their college applications, due this month, in one of the most turbulent years in American education. Not only have they had to prepare them in the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war — which sparked debates about free speech and antisemitism on college campuses, leading to the resignation of two Ivy League presidents — but they also had to wade through the new ban on race-conscious admissions.

“It has been a lot to take in,” said Keteyian Cade, a 17-year-old from St. Louis. “There is so much going on in the world right now.”

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Introductory Essay: Continuing the Heroic Struggle for Equality: The Civil Rights Movement

To what extent did Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for African Americans during the civil rights movement?

• I can explain the importance of local and federal actions in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
• I can compare the goals and methods of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Malcolm X and Black Nationalism, and Black Power.
• I can explain challenges African Americans continued to face despite victories for equality and justice during the civil rights movement.

Essential Vocabulary

Continuing the Heroic Struggle for Equality: The Civil Rights Movement

The struggle to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence a reality for Black Americans reached a climax after World War II. The activists of the civil rights movement directly confronted segregation and demanded equal civil rights at the local level with physical and moral courage and perseverance. They simultaneously pursued a national strategy of systematically filing lawsuits in federal courts, lobbying Congress, and pressuring presidents to change the laws. The civil rights movement encountered significant resistance, however, and suffered violence in the quest for equality.

During the middle of the twentieth century, several Black writers grappled with the central contradictions between the nation’s ideals and its realities, and the place of Black Americans in their country. Richard Wright explored a raw confrontation with racism in Native Son (1940), while Ralph Ellison led readers through a search for identity beyond a racialized category in his novel Invisible Man (1952), as part of the Black quest for identity. The novel also offered hope in the power of the sacred principles of the Founding documents. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun , first performed in 1959, about the dreams deferred for Black Americans and questions about assimilation. Novelist and essayist James Baldwin described Blacks’ estrangement from U.S. society and themselves while caught in a racial nightmare of injustice in The Fire Next Time (1963) and other works.

World War II wrought great changes in U.S. society. Black soldiers fought for a “double V for victory,” hoping to triumph over fascism abroad and racism at home. Many received a hostile reception, such as Medgar Evers who was blocked from voting at gunpoint by five armed whites. Blacks continued the Great Migration to southern and northern cities for wartime industrial work. After the war, in 1947, Jackie Robinson endured racial taunts on the field and segregation off it as he broke the color barrier in professional baseball and began a Hall of Fame career. The following year, President Harry Truman issued executive orders desegregating the military and banning discrimination in the civil service. Meanwhile, Thurgood Marshall and his legal team at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) meticulously prepared legal challenges to discrimination, continuing a decades-long effort.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund brought lawsuits against segregated schools in different states that were consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , 1954. The Supreme Court unanimously decided that “separate but equal” was “inherently unequal.” Brown II followed a year after, as the court ordered that the integration of schools should be pursued “with all deliberate speed.” Throughout the South, angry whites responded with a campaign of “massive resistance” and refused to comply with the order, while many parents sent their children to all-white private schools. Middle-class whites who opposed integration joined local chapters of citizens’ councils and used propaganda, economic pressure, and even violence to achieve their ends.

A wave of violence and intimidation followed. In 1955, teenager Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was lynched after being falsely accused of whistling at a white woman. Though an all-white jury quickly acquitted the two men accused of killing him, Till’s murder was reported nationally and raised awareness of the injustices taking place in Mississippi.

In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks (who was a secretary of the Montgomery NAACP) was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. Her willingness to confront segregation led to a direct-action movement for equality. The local Women’s Political Council organized the city’s Black residents into a boycott of the bus system, which was then led by the Montgomery Improvement Association. Black churches and ministers, including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, provided a source of strength. Despite arrests, armed mobs, and church bombings, the boycott lasted until a federal court desegregated the city buses. In the wake of the boycott, the leading ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) , which became a key civil rights organization.

Rosa Parks is shown here in 1955 with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the background. The Montgomery bus boycott was an important victory in the civil rights movement.

In 1957, nine Black families decided to send their children to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to prevent their entry, and one student, Elizabeth Eckford, faced an angry crowd of whites alone and barely escaped. President Eisenhower was compelled to respond and sent in 1,200 paratroops from the 101st Airborne to protect the Black students. They continued to be harassed, but most finished the school year and integrated the school.

That year, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act that created a civil rights division in the Justice Department and provided minimal protections for the right to vote. The bill had been watered down because of an expected filibuster by southern senators, who had recently signed the Southern Manifesto, a document pledging their resistance to Supreme Court decisions such as Brown .

In 1960, four Black college students were refused lunch service at a local Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and they spontaneously staged a “sit-in” the following day. Their resistance to the indignities of segregation was copied by thousands of others of young Blacks across the South, launching another wave of direct, nonviolent confrontation with segregation. Ella Baker invited several participants to a Raleigh conference where they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and issued a Statement of Purpose. The group represented a more youthful and daring effort that later broke with King and his strategy of nonviolence.

In contrast, Malcolm X became a leading spokesperson for the Nation of Islam (NOI) who represented Black separatism as an alternative to integration, which he deemed an unworthy goal. He advocated revolutionary violence as a means of Black self-defense and rejected nonviolence. He later changed his views, breaking with the NOI and embracing a Black nationalism that had more common ground with King’s nonviolent views. Malcolm X had reached out to establish ties with other Black activists before being gunned down by assassins who were members of the NOI later in 1965.

In 1961, members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) rode segregated buses in order to integrate interstate travel. These Black and white Freedom Riders traveled into the Deep South, where mobs beat them with bats and pipes in bus stations and firebombed their buses. A cautious Kennedy administration reluctantly intervened to protect the Freedom Riders with federal marshals, who were also victimized by violent white mobs.

Malcolm X was a charismatic speaker and gifted organizer. He argued that Black pride, identity, and independence were more important than integration with whites.

King was moved to act. He confronted segregation with the hope of exposing injustice and brutality against nonviolent protestors and arousing the conscience of the nation to achieve a just rule of law. The first planned civil rights campaign was initiated by SNCC and taken over mid-campaign by King and SCLC. It failed because Albany, Georgia’s Police Chief Laurie Pritchett studied King’s tactics and responded to the demonstrations with restraint. In 1963, King shifted the movement to Birmingham, Alabama, where Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor unleashed his officers to attack civil rights protestors with fire hoses and police dogs. Authorities arrested thousands, including many young people who joined the marches. King wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” after his own arrest and provided the moral justification for the movement to break unjust laws. National and international audiences were shocked by the violent images shown in newspapers and on the television news. President Kennedy addressed the nation and asked, “whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities . . . [If a Black person]cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” The president then submitted a civil rights bill to Congress.

In late August 1963, more than 250,000 people joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in solidarity for equal rights. From the Lincoln Memorial steps, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. He stated, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson pushed his agenda through Congress. In the early summer of 1964, a 3-month filibuster by southern senators was finally defeated, and both houses passed the historical civil rights bill. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, banning segregation in public accommodations.

Activists in the civil rights movement then focused on campaigns for the right to vote. During the summer of 1964, several civil rights organizations combined their efforts during the “ Freedom Summer ” to register Blacks to vote with the help of young white college students. They endured terror and intimidation as dozens of churches and homes were burned and workers were killed, including an incident in which Black advocate James Chaney and two white students, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in Mississippi.

In August 1963, peaceful protesters gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial to draw attention to the inequalities and indignities African Americans suffered 100 years after emancipation. Leaders of the march are shown in the image on the bottom, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the center.

That summer, Fannie Lou Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as civil rights delegates to replace the rival white delegation opposed to civil rights at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Hamer was a veteran of attempts to register other Blacks to vote and endured severe beatings for her efforts. A proposed compromise of giving two seats to the MFDP satisfied neither those delegates nor the white delegation, which walked out. Cracks were opening up in the Democratic electoral coalition over civil rights, especially in the South.

Fannie Lou Hamer testified about the violence she and others endured when trying to register to vote at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Her televised testimony exposed the realities of continued violence against Blacks trying to exercise their constitutional rights.

In early 1965, the SCLC and SNCC joined forces to register voters in Selma and draw attention to the fight for Black suffrage. On March 7, marchers planned to walk peacefully from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. However, mounted state troopers and police blocked the Edmund Pettus Bridge and then rampaged through the marchers, indiscriminately beating them. SNCC leader John Lewis suffered a fractured skull, and 5 women were clubbed unconscious. Seventy people were hospitalized for injuries during “Bloody Sunday.” The scenes again shocked television viewers and newspaper readers.

The images of state troopers, local police, and local people brutally attacking peaceful protestors on “Bloody Sunday” shocked people across the country and world. Two weeks later, protestors of all ages and races continued the protest. By the time they reached the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, their ranks had swelled to about 25,000 people.

Two days later, King led a symbolic march to the bridge but then turned around. Many younger and more militant activists were alienated and felt that King had sold out to white authorities. The tension revealed the widening division between older civil rights advocates and those younger, more radical supporters who were frustrated at the slow pace of change and the routine violence inflicted upon peaceful protesters. Nevertheless, starting on March 21, with the help of a federal judge who refused Governor George Wallace’s request to ban the march, Blacks triumphantly walked to Montgomery. On August 6, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act protecting the rights to register and vote after a Senate filibuster ended and the bill passed Congress.

The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act did not alter the fact that most Black Americans still suffered racism, were denied equal economic opportunities, and lived in segregated neighborhoods. While King and other leaders did seek to raise their issues among northerners, frustrations often boiled over into urban riots during the mid-1960s. Police brutality and other racial incidents often triggered days of violence in which hundreds were injured or killed. There were mass arrests and widespread property damage from arson and looting in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, Chicago, and dozens of other cities. A presidential National Advisory Commission of Civil Disorders issued the Kerner Report, which analyzed the causes of urban unrest, noting the impact of racism on the inequalities and injustices suffered by Black Americans.

Frustration among young Black Americans led to the rise of a more militant strain of advocacy. In 1966, activist James Meredith was on a solo march in Mississippi to raise awareness about Black voter registration when he was shot and wounded. Though Meredith recovered, this event typified the violence that led some young Black Americans to espouse a more military strain of advocacy. On June 16, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael and members of the Black Panther Party continued Meredith’s march while he recovered from his wounds, chanting, “We want Black Power .” Black Power leaders and members of the Black Panther Party offered a different vision for equality and justice. They advocated self-reliance and self-empowerment, a celebration of Black culture, and armed self-defense. They used aggressive rhetoric to project a more radical strategy for racial progress, including sympathy for revolutionary socialism and rejection of capitalism. While its legacy is debated, the Black Power movement raised many important questions about the place of Black Americans in the United States, beyond the civil rights movement.

After World War II, Black Americans confronted the iniquities and indignities of segregation to end almost a century of Jim Crow. Undeterred, they turned the public’s eyes to the injustice they faced and called on the country to live up to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and to continue the fight against inequality and discrimination.

Reading Comprehension Questions

• What factors helped to create the modern civil rights movement?
• How was the quest for civil rights a combination of federal and local actions?
• What were the goals and methods of different activists and groups of the civil rights movement? Complete the table below to reference throughout your analysis of the primary source documents.

African American - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

The term African American refers to an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the black racial groups of Africa. Essays on African American topics could explore the history, culture, and contributions of African Americans, or delve into issues of racial discrimination, civil rights, and social justice. They might also discuss the impact of African American individuals or movements on US history, the representation of African Americans in media and literature, or the ongoing challenges and opportunities facing African American communities today. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to African American you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

The Struggle for African American Equality

The struggle for African American equality played out in all parts of life including schools, public life, and political office. This struggle was ingrained in American culture and it proved to be extremely difficult to escape. Until the 1940s, segregation, inequality, and violence was the norm for African Americans. In the late 1940s, African Americans began to see an opportunity for true freedom and that gave them the fuel to take action to demand change. Change was made through various […]

African American Writers

The importance of having black writers lies within their works. Black writers have a distinct culture. They have different experiences than other races. Therefore, their perspective is unique. Black writers are important because they are not afraid to write about the treatment of African-Americans, experience within the black community, and the culture of black life. Alice Walker writes about the treatment of African American culture. She has written novels, short stories, and poems. Her most notable novel was The Color […]

Thank you Ma’am Characters

Langston Hughes was born in 1902 and grew up in Kansas with his grandparents. He later left his grandparents’ home to live with his mother, but his father had moved to Mexico and was not very involved in his life. Many people who knew Hughes or studied his life have said that this parental neglect could have caused him to be more interested in reading and poetry. His years of loneliness and wondering may have given him the desire to […]

We will write an essay sample crafted to your needs.

Jackie Robinson and African American Community

On April 15th 1947 Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers professional baseball travel team and changed America forever (Aaseng). This was incredibly significant for the Sports Entertainment business and Civil Rights Movement because he was the first African American to break the color line in his sport (Loverro). Robinson didnt just play though, he dominated which allowed for him to be recognized as the man most responsible for creating opportunities for African-American athletes in professional sports […]

The Harlem Renaissance and the African American Experience

The campaign established important problems influencing the experiences of African Americans within a mixture of protests, movies, painting, drama, music, art, sculpture, and literature. The creativity explosion between black authors of the time was the outcome of the various conditions and situations of the past. Consequently, the Harlem Renaissance was stronger than a movement of literature; it was an impressive social interpretation of the experience of racism which reached within each section of the black experience. The importance of the […]

The Importance of Black History Month

Black History Month is a time in which we celebrate the achievements of African-Americans leaders and acknowledge the prominent role of blacks in U.S. history. Carrie Pittman Meek, a Democratic politician and educator, is one who has played an important role in public service throughout Florida. She served in the United States House of Representatives from 1993 to 2003. Carrie Pittman, the daughter of Willie and Carrie Pittman, was born in segregated Tallahassee, FL on April 29nd, 1926. Her parents […]

Leader of African American Community – Booker T. Washington

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How to Write the American University Essays 2023-2024

American University has one optional prompt for all applicants about why you want to attend AU. Additionally, the school has prompts for each of its special programs.

There are three prompts for Honors Program applicants, two prompts for Global Scholars Program applicants, three prompts for Lincoln Scholars Program applicants, three prompts for Politics, Policy and Law Scholars applicants, two prompts for Public Health Scholars applicants, two prompts for Sakura Scholars Program applicants, and five prompts for AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship (International Students) applicants.

Since AU receives thousands of applications from academically strong students, your essays are your chance to stand out. In this post, we’ll discuss how to craft an engaging response to each of these options.

Want to know your chances at AU? Calculate your chances for free right now.

All Applicants Prompt

At american university, inclusive excellence is a cornerstone of the academic experience for our students, and we deeply value the learning that is inspired by the diversity of backgrounds and life experiences that all our community members bring with them. please share why you would like to join this community. (150 words).

This is a standard instance of the common “Why This College?” prompt . Unless this is the first college you are applying to, chances are you’ve already seen a prompt like this before. There are no tricks here; this straightforward prompt is meant to gauge your interest in AU.

The admissions committee will use your answer to determine how you fit with the University and how you’ll make the most of all its opportunities. To help them figure these things out, your essay should show how your personal goals and the AU’s resources intersect.

A good approach to an essay like this is establishing a connection with AU. There are two kinds of connections—tangible and intangible. Ideally, you’ll be able to establish both, but a good response will establish at least a tangible connection.

Establishing a tangible connection can be done by explicitly discussing resources and opportunities offered by AU that resonate with you personally. To have a strong, specific response, you’re going to need to do some research. Don’t fret if you haven’t done this before; we’ve created a handy guide to help you research colleges effectively!

To begin, try to find your desired major’s webpage by consulting this list of degree programs . You should also look into faculty members in your department. To do that, you can use this searchable directory to find your department, which will have its own faculty list. Finally, look into the wealth of centers, institutes, and initiatives at AU.

Here’s an example of what a successful, specific response might look like:

“I am from a multicultural family; my mother is Jewish and my father Muslim. This background exposed me to some profound discussions of geopolitical affairs from a fairly young age. I am fascinated by international studies and I wish to contribute to initiatives that aim to reduce conflict between Israel and Palestine. AU’s International Studies program at the School of International Service offers in-depth classes that are highly relevant to this passion of mine. RELG-475 Religion and Violence and SISU-319 Arab-Israeli Relations specifically will grant me insights into the religious roots of the conflict that I simply cannot learn by just talking to my parents.

I am particularly interested in the work of Professor Mohammed Abu-Nimer. My mother showed me his book Evaluating Interreligious Peacebuilding earlier this year, and I found his thoughts on conducting evaluations in conflict areas illuminating, as they explain some consequences of fieldwork.”

This response does a few things effectively. First, it gives the admissions committee an idea of who the student is and where she comes from. Second, it establishes her motivations and passions. Third, it specifically discusses several courses and the work of one of AU’s faculty members, as well as why those resources are important to the student. You can do all these things while remaining within the small word limit.

Besides describing the particular resources to intend to make use of, you might also wish to express an intangible connection with AU. This isn’t necessary, but it would add to your application if you can do it. An intangible connection is just what it sounds like—a connection that isn’t based on the tangible resources offered by the University. Often, an intangible connection involves alignment between your personal values and those of the institution.

For example, perhaps you’re deeply invested in environmental conservation. You’ll be happy to know that AU is “the first urban campus, the first research university, and the largest higher education institution in the United States to achieve carbon neutrality.” It also achieved this goal two years ahead of schedule! You could write a bit about how much you appreciate AU’s sustainability initiatives to your response to establish an intangible connection.

Finally, there are a few things you’ll want to avoid doing in your essay:

• Name-dropping. Don’t write a laundry list of activities, classes, or professors that interest you without explaining why those things are important to you. Even though you are discussing facets of the university, this essay needs to be primarily focused on you.
• Empty flattery. Anyone can write that “AU is a well-respected institution with an amazing international studies program.” It’s nice to compliment the university, but you don’t have a lot of space, and empty flattery suggests that you don’t have anything more substantive to say.
• Generic remarks. Talking about AU’s good location, a strong program in some field, or small class sizes won’t add much to your response. These are generic things that apply to many schools.

Make sure that you do ample research, develop nuanced reasons for choosing AU, and write a sincere response, and you will be off to a great start!

American University Special Program Essay Prompts

Click on the link to be taken to the special program prompts.

• AU Honors Program
• Global Scholars Program
• Lincoln Scholars Program
• Politics, Policy and Law Scholars Program
• Public Health Scholars Program
• Sakura Scholars Program
• AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship

AU Honors Program Applicants, Prompt 1

Au honors students are distinguished by their sense of intellectual curiosity, both inside and outside of the classroom. tell us what you are most curious about, and how that curiosity has influenced your life thus far. (300 words).

This prompt is fairly broad, so you can approach it in a few different ways. We recommend writing a sort of blend between a “Why This Major?” essay and an extracurricular activities essay . Focusing on an aspect of your intended major will show your passion for something inherently intellectual, and throwing in some of your other interests/hobbies will add nuance and personality to your response.

Before you begin writing, you’ll want to gather your thoughts so that your essay will have structure. Think of the following questions as a way to focus your thoughts:

1. What piques your curiosity and interest the most? What are your authentic reasons for being interested in this thing?

2. What are some specific examples of things that you enjoy with regard to this interest?

If this is something you’re truly curious about, you shouldn’t describe it generically. Instead of thinking “I love reading,” think “I enjoy reading novels that explore existentialist philosophical themes.”

3. How might pursuing this thing serve your life and/or career goals?

Is your curiosity about this thing a driving force in your plans for your future? For example, are you so curious about ocean life that your biggest life goal is to become a marine biologist?

4. Is this interest primarily academic or extracurricular? What are your best experiences with this interest both inside and out of the classroom?

5. Is there any recurring emotional experience that you have when exploring this thing that piques your curiosity? Why do you find that experience or state of mind appealing?

6. How has this thing influenced your development as a person? Have you developed or strengthened any personality traits or skills as a result of your object of interest?

Questions 4, 5, and 6 will be especially helpful when you’re trying to recall some anecdotes to support your interest and curiosity in it.

You only have 300 words to work with, so you should keep your response limited to one thing you’re deeply curious about (or maybe two if they’re related). A strong essay will do a few things:

• First, it will show that you have nuanced interests with intellectual depth.
• Second, it will talk a bit about the trajectory your life has been on as a result of your interests.
• Finally, it will display an important part of your personality that can give the admissions committee an idea of who you are as an individual.

There are a couple of common mistakes you should avoid when writing your response:

• Picking the wrong topic. Bad topics include: an interest you already wrote about somewhere else in the application; an interest that sounds impressive, but that you aren’t very invested in; one you haven’t spent much time on.
• Writing a generic statement about why the interest you chose is interesting or cool without addressing the personal connection you have with it. It’s great to appreciate your own interests, but you need to show the admissions committee why the thing that makes you curious is so important to you.

Some examples of strong topics would be:

• A student who’s a second-generation Japanese immigrant might be curious about the relationship between language and identity. She’s noticed while learning Japanese that it’s easier to have more complex conversations with her parents in their native tongue, and that they’re better able to express their personality. And as she’s become more comfortable speaking Japanese, she’s able to connect more with her heritage. This has led her to attend local language exchanges and start a podcast about the stories of the attendees and their thoughts on language and identity. She hopes to study Japanese at AU and become a translator.
• A runner who got tendonitis in his junior year may be curious about how the tendons and ligaments in our body work to support us during exercise. After doing physical therapy and healing his tendon, he decided to take an anatomy course and shadow his physical therapist. He wants to become a physical therapist or sports medicine doctor to help other athletes rehab their injuries.

AU Honors Program Applicants, Prompt 2

What aspect of the au honors program piques your interest the most (300 words).

This prompt is a slightly more specific version of the “Why This College?” prompt . However, you’re being asked why you’re drawn to the AU Honors Program in particular rather than to American University as a whole.

The prompt is meant to assess a few things:

• First, it’s meant to see if you know what you’re getting into with the program. If you’ve done your research on the Honors Program, you should have something detailed to say about it.
• Second, it’s intended to determine how you will fit in the program. The admissions committee wants to know what role you’ll have in the program and how you’ll make use of its resources to achieve your goals.
• Finally, it’s an effective way for the admissions committee to see which students are genuinely interested in the program.

Before you begin writing, make a list of the reasons you decided to apply to the program. You might find it helpful to explicitly jot down the things that drew you to the Honors Program in the first place. One of these reasons might very well be the subject of your essay. You should also explore the Honors Program website to make sure you don’t miss any of your reasons.

The prompt asks specifically for the aspect that most piques your interest, so you have to figure out if you want to write about an academic reason, an extracurricular one, or an intangible one. Let’s go over what makes each of these unique.

Academic reasons are as straightforward as they sound. Things such as the Honors Colloquium courses, the Honors Capstone , and research opportunities are academic aspects of the program that you might want to write about.

Extracurricular reasons include activities and opportunities that are supplementary to academics. Things such as Honors housing , the Student Advisory Council , and the Honors “Have You Ever Wondered?” discussion series are extracurricular aspects of the program.

Intangible reasons are those that involve values, beliefs, and other nonphysical things. The program’s commitment to interdisciplinary thinking and the BIPOC Affinity Group ’s dedication to “an empowering and supportive environment” are examples of intangible aspects of the program.

Your reasons for being interested in the program don’t have to be the most exotic or outlandish; you can write an effective straightforward response to this prompt. The thing that piques your interest the most might be the ​​Honors Colloquia, the opportunity to engage with Program Associates, or the opportunities in Honors housing. All these options are valid ways to establish a tangible connection with the program.

For example, consider a student who wants to do political science research in her future career. She might be most interested in the Honors Program’s curriculum. Her response can cover the rigorous nature of the program, discuss some of the Honors-specific courses, and talk about the ample opportunities to conduct undergraduate research (such as HNRS-398 Honors Challenge Course and the Honors Capstone).

Avoid name-dropping random courses, activities, or faculty members without elaborating on how they resonate with you personally. Doing so will make your interest look superficial or disingenuous.

As long as you can describe what in particular has drawn you to the Honors Program as well as why it did so, you will be able to write an effective response to this prompt.

AU Honors Program Applicants, Prompt 3

We all have meaningful experiences that shape us and inform our worldview. what aspect of your background would you most like to share with other students in the honors program (300 words).

This is, in essence, a version of the common diversity prompt that many colleges provide. Colleges often include diversity prompts so they can learn something about your personal background and its influence on your worldview.

In June 2023, the United States Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions. Nevertheless, the ruling allows colleges to consider race on an individual basis, which is one reason many schools are now including diversity prompts as one of their supplemental essay prompts. If you feel that your racial background specifically has impacted you significantly, this is the response in which you should write about that.

More generally, you can respond to this common prompt with a fairly traditional answer. One tried-and-true method you could use involves identifying the most important part of your identity, then discussing how that aspect of your background is relevant to you and your life experiences.

Before you jump into writing your response, think of aspects of your background that may have had an impact on the way you look at the world or the way you live your life. Some examples of things that have likely influenced your worldview include:

• Personal identity. Your race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, etc. all have a profound influence on the way you think and perceive the world.
• Cultural identity. Your religious affiliations, political views, socioeconomic status, social class, and even the place you are from influence what issues you see the most, and what solutions you envision for these issues.
• Personal history. Things in your life may have an average trajectory. Maybe you’ve had a fortunate life with few obstacles to overcome so far, or maybe you’ve experienced a great deal of adversity or tragedy. The way things generally tend to go in your life will have a great impact on how you view life and the world around you.
• Interests. The things you’re really invested in can change how you perceive the world. If you’re a musician, for example, you might find musicality in the most mundane sounds out in the world on a daily basis.

That said, there are several angles with which you could approach this prompt. Some more specific examples of aspects of identity you might write about include:

• Having a disability that has changed your perspective on something in the world.
• Being a member of an ethnic group that has an interesting cultural practice.
• Fluency in another language that you use to help members of your community.
• Being a member of a fandom.

You have 300 words to work with, which is a considerable length, so feel free to structure your essay using an anecdote. You might begin with a time when your worldview was different, then describe how it changed due to the aspect of your background that is the subject of your essay.

One thing you should avoid is simply listing out things that generate diversity. Diversity includes everything mentioned above and more, but just writing out a list of things contributes very little to your application and also fails to respond to the prompt. The prompt asks you which singular aspect of your background you would like to share, so make sure to choose wisely and elaborate.

This prompt is one of the few opportunities you have to showcase your unique perspectives. Whatever aspect of your background you choose to write about here, make sure your response is sincere. Try to show as much individuality and specificity as you can in your response.

Global Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 1

In your view, what is the greatest challenge facing humanity today and how do you envision yourself being part of the solution (no word count given).

In this prompt, you are asked to give your opinion on the greatest challenge facing humanity today. This sounds like a very tall order, but don’t worry; it’s an opinion question, so any reasonable challenge you choose will be fine.

Admissions committees want to see specifics, so we often recommend not identifying too broad a problem. In the brainstorming stage, however, you can think as broadly as you’d like. Global poverty, world hunger, illiteracy in developing countries, human rights abuses—each of these things can be an effective starting point.

Thinking about your identity and values might help you determine which issues are most important to you. Aspects of your identity include your ethnicity, race, country of origin, language, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, hometown, income class, socioeconomic status, illnesses/disabilities, and even interests and activities!

Consider these different aspects of your background and list broad world issues that may have an impact on some part of your identity. For example, you might be Ukrainian and have family members directly affected by the current war. In this case, your ethnic background may compel you to write about geopolitical conflicts or human rights issues.

Be sure to narrow your topic to something specific once you begin writing. Even though the prompt asks what you think is “the greatest challenge facing humanity today,” you should be prepared to discuss concrete examples of that challenge.

For instance, if you want to write about world hunger, try to also describe particular situations and specific problems related to that broader issue—some things you might want to examine in such an essay can include widespread food and water shortages in Venezuela as a result of governmental policies, hunger in Haiti due to food insecurity and currency inflation, and the impending famine in Sudan as a result of internal conflicts.

The aforementioned examples can add a great deal of nuance to your essay for a couple of reasons. First, citing specific instances of your chosen challenge goes beyond simply stating that your challenge exists. It creates tangible reasons to be concerned about the issue. Second, having a few concrete examples demonstrates that you are informed and knowledgeable about the issue.

Once you have decided on a global challenge and have thought of a few examples to support your point, reflect on how you might be able to contribute to a solution to this problem. This program is offered by the School of International Service, so you will be pursuing a degree in International Studies.

You might already have some ideas about how you wish to help solve your chosen problem, but your essay will be even better if you can connect your goals to the school and degree. Read up on the BA in International Studies and the Global Scholars Program to inspire your writing!

There really is no wrong way to envision yourself as part of the solution. Consider the following hypothetical students to see how contributions can vary:

• A student who’s passionate about the environment might say that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity, and might describe how it has devastated different communities around the world, including his small coastal town, which has experienced worsening floods. He might hope to major in International Studies to eventually work in the United Nations and be a part of climate change conferences and agreements.
• A student who wants to be a doctor might say that lack of access to good, inexpensive healthcare is the greatest global challenge. She could describe how the U.S. healthcare system fails many low-income people, and how poorer countries lack the infrastructure and resources to treat easily treatable illnesses. She hopes to go to medical school then join Doctors Without Borders to help those in conflict zones and those facing disasters get the treatment they need.

This prompt is meant to gauge which global issues you deem important and how you intend to use your college education and degree to contribute to ongoing efforts to solve these issues. You’ll have a strong essay as long as you’re sincere and write about a problem you’re personally invested in.

Global Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 2

Describe a situation in which you had to work harder than you expected. when and how did you know that your current efforts were not enough how did you adjust (500 words).

This prompt asks you to describe a time in your life when you faced a challenge that required you to put in an unprecedented amount of time and effort. What you choose to write about doesn’t have to be a singular experience; a situation in this context can be something much larger.

You can choose to describe any experience—academic, personal, extracurricular, and so forth—in your answer. Like most other prompts, the key will be in how you not only relate your chosen situation to your personality, but to the Global Scholars program at large.

Think first about your identity and your environment—are there any distinguishable experiences in which you have always felt that you’ve had an uphill battle or unfair disadvantage? Think about periods of your life in which you may have had to undergo a major transition or change.

Regardless of the situation you choose, remember that the best answers come out of asking yourself questions. This applies equally to a situation you may describe that does not involve your identity or environment—you can also approach this prompt by thinking about any life-altering events that forced you to pivot or make a change.

For example, maybe COVID-19 left one or both of your parents unemployed, and you had to pick up a job on top of your schoolwork. While you may have expected to be able to handle the part-time job, perhaps you saw your schoolwork and relationships begin to slip through the cracks and you were forced to really reevaluate your time management skills.

You may end up writing about an experience that is similar to that of other applicants, so it’s how you relate it to yourself and to your environment that will make you stand out from the crowd. Make sure you continue to emphasize your emotions and honesty throughout your answer, and lastly, try to relate your chosen experience back to the Global Scholars program at large.

You can conclude by writing about how you hope to apply what you learned from your life experiences to your participation in the Global Scholars program—how you hope to apply your newfound understanding of various financial or personal circumstances to learning about various cultural and global circumstances.

Lincoln Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 1

Tell us about a morally complicated text that you think would lead to good discussion for first year college students. in what way is the text morally complicated and why do you recommend it (no more than 500 words).

This might seem like a daunting prompt, but it can be easier than it seems. Don’t worry about having some grandiose, impressive tome to talk about for this essay. If you think creatively, you should be able to identify moral complications in simpler texts. This is the kind of essay that really benefits from careful argumentation.

Brainstorming your topic:

There are two kinds of texts that would probably make for a strong essay:

• Texts you’ve read recently, which should still be fresh in your mind
• Texts you’ve read a long time ago and still remember because they were impactful or profound to you

It’s important that you pick one of these kinds of texts because you’ll want to write about something you know well enough. If you choose a text that you don’t really remember, or worse, a text you haven’t read that looks impressive, your points will probably be shallow and superficial, which will drag the overall quality of your essay down.

As far as the text itself is concerned, you can write about nearly anything (just make sure it’s not too trivial, like a children’s book). Perhaps you have read a clearly morally complex text, such as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird . If you have, and you remember the details well enough to explain your choice, then by all means write about it!

However, if you haven’t read a text like that, that’s fine too. Think of things you’ve read recently that have moral dilemmas you might discuss. For some idea on how you might stretch the theme of morality, consider some examples:

• Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a young adult novel, discusses themes related to individuality and emotional depth and can be pitted against order and conformity. This moral conflict leaves a lot of room for debate, as the balance between individuality and societal conformity is one that is often hard for individuals to navigate.
• Marvel Comics’ Civil War, a seven-issue comic book storyline from 2007, has a plot centered around the U.S. government requiring super-powered individuals to reveal their identities to be superheroes under official regulation. While this may not be a traditional text, it has been acclaimed for its exploration of the conflicting desires of security and freedom that are still discussed in American politics today.
• Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, the authorized biography of Apple’s co-founder, is a thorough look at the life of the controversial business magnate. It discusses not only his great achievements in the worlds of business and technology, but also his personality, which has been described as abrasive or difficult at times. This text allows students to examine the ways in which massive corporations, their employees, and their consumers can be directly affected by the very human individuals who lead them.

As you can see from the above examples, you can find and argue for moral complications almost anywhere you look. You might use a traditional example of a large, classic novel with clear and distinctive moral ambiguity, or you might explore some more creative options, such as biographies, YA novels, and even comic books or graphic novels!

Tips for writing your essay:

A good response will answer every part of the prompt. You should strive to identify the text, explain how it’s morally complicated, and detail your reasons for recommending it. The first and last part shouldn’t be too hard once you’ve settled on your text—naming the text and talking about why you’re recommending it are tasks that you can probably do easily if you know your chosen text well. After all, you know why you like the book.

It’s the second part of the prompt that will require some more careful thought. Effectively explaining how the text is morally complicated is only something you can do if you’re familiar enough with the text and its themes. Oftentimes, the moral complications of a book aren’t directly relevant to the plot—they’re often a thematic consequence of a character’s actions or are intended to be seen behind the main narrative, but not the focal point of the text itself.

That said, it might actually be a good idea to consult online summaries, videos, and study guides of the text you chose. Of course, you should absolutely have read the text and have a decent grasp of its material, but this isn’t a test for school—you can and should see how the moral themes are discussed by other readers. This will inform your argument that this text should be used in discussions among first year students.

Mistakes to avoid:

There aren’t too many ways to tackle this prompt incorrectly, but there are a couple of things you should avoid , which have already been mentioned but are worth repeating:

• Choosing a text you aren’t familiar with, just because it looks more impressive. It’s better to write a thoughtful, intelligent essay on a text that might be seen as lackluster than to write a shallow, generic essay on a text seen as impressive. Remember, the admissions officers aren’t making decisions based on books you have or haven’t read—they’re making decisions based on the quality of your essays.
• Choosing a trivial or juvenile text. Most young adult novels should be complex enough to be valid texts for this essay, but don’t try to be overly creative by writing about something for little children. Children’s books are intentionally written in a way that does not deal with the complex, intellectual themes that you’re tasked with discussing here.

As long as you pick a decent text (i.e., one you’re familiar with that isn’t too trivial), describe the ways in which it deals with questions of moral complexity, and make a good case for its use in Caltech’s first year classrooms, you’ll be well on your way to crafting a strong response.

Lincoln Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 2

One goal of the lincoln scholars program is to encourage intellectual and political diversity on campus. what does this goal mean to you and why does a program with this goal interest you (no more than 500 words).

This prompt puts a specific spin on the common “Why This College?” and “Why This Major?” prompts, with a couple of key differences:

• First, you’re asked about a particular goal and what it means to you.
• Second, rather than discussing the University as a whole or a particular major, you’re tasked with describing why a program like the Lincoln Scholars Program appeals to you.

Make sure to address both parts of the question to have a full response. You have up to 500 words to work with, so you can really go into detail about each part. A good approach would be to answer each portion of the question in turn.

Before you begin writing, think about what intellectual and political diversity mean to you. Note the wording of the prompt: “What does this goal mean to you?” You can take advantage of the nuanced meanings of the word “mean.” In a literal sense, the question is asking how you would define such a goal. But in another sense, it’s asking why the goal is significant or important to you.

It might be helpful to jot down some bullet points that you might want to build on in your response. You might end up with a list that looks something like this:

• Having a group of people with different fields of expertise work on one project from various angles
• Different viewpoints creating points for intellectual debate
• Multiple people of various backgrounds informing each other’s perspectives
• Generating varied approaches to the same problem with the shared goal of solving it

Whatever you think of, try to come up with a solid personal definition of intellectual and political diversity. From there, you can begin to describe why these kinds of diversity are important to you. Using an anecdote-driven narrative to explain this point is a good approach. For example, perhaps you participated in a school project in which a different perspective was the one that led to a solution. Or, maybe you were part of a debate club and learned to see a topic differently because of a well-informed persuasive argument on the other side.

As you develop your thoughts on why such a goal is important to you, transition into a discussion of the program and why it interests you. Here, it’s essential that you establish a connection to the program. Do some research on the program’s webpage to learn about resources and opportunities that are offered.

Perhaps one of the program’s courses is appealing to you because of its content. Or, maybe you resonate with the program’s mission “to explore the great questions of moral and political life in a context of intellectual and political diversity.” Be sure to describe how and why a program like this piques your interest.

Connect the goal of intellectual and political diversity to your personal goals and values. This is the strongest way to convey your interest in the Lincoln Scholars Program and in exploring big questions from multiple viewpoints.

Lincoln Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 3

List five texts, magazines, movies, websites, podcasts, music, or other media that you regularly engage with and explain briefly why you like each one. please list a variety of types of media. (1-2 sentences per item, no more than 400 total)..

This is a more niche prompt that you probably haven’t seen often, if at all. Luckily, there’s really no right or wrong answer! In fact, the program’s webpage lists some of the books that students have applied to the program with this year, and they include all kinds of works—ancient epic poems, classic novels, niche novellas, poetry collections, philosophical dialogues, and memoirs!

AU is curious about what interests you, how you think, how you’ve developed intellectually, and how you may have challenged yourself with the media you consume. Choose your examples carefully, but also be honest.

One great way to think about this prompt is through the idea of a “capsule wardrobe.” In a capsule wardrobe, each piece of clothing is unique and works well on its own—you might have a graphic tee, a leather jacket, a button-up shirt, and a few pairs of jeans. Even though each article of clothing has its own character, each also works toward your overall style—the entire wardrobe. Combining items into outfits can highlight different aspects of each item as well as similarities they share

The same idea applies to the texts, movies, websites, and music in your list. Each item should be compelling on its own, but should also contribute to the wardrobe that is your intellectual style. A great list will have items that complement each other, like a belt that matches with a pair of shoes. Some more style tips:

​​1. List items that build on each other. You want your list to have synergy . Just like wearing two matching items together can convey your sense of style, including two similar items in your list can display a sustained interest in a subject. For example, if you include both Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story in my list of films, you’re showing the admissions officer that you’re interested in exploring how the same story has been interpreted by different creatives from different times and places. Neither Romeo and Juliet nor West Side Story could demonstrate this idea alone—when included together, the message is greater than just the sum of its parts!

• Show multidimensionality. There’s something to be careful about. It’s possible to show sustained interest in a topic without indicating growth, and this is something you’ll want to avoid. For example, if your entire list consists of true-crime podcasts, it will look a bit one-dimensional and bland because each item effectively conveys the same message. Aim to list works that show your interest in the multiple angles of a topic. For example, listing the true-crime podcast Serial and Criminal Perspective as well as the journal Psychological Review and a blog on forensic psychology will add levels of intellectual nuance to your interest in the broad theme.
• Don’t overdress. You might want to only include the most impressive, difficult, intellectual media you’ve consumed to show that you’re intelligent and academic, but too much of that will probably make you look like you’re exaggerating for the admissions committee. Instead of doing that, balance the weightier, deeper items with some more relaxed or jocular ones. Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theory are going to look less like you’re pandering if you include something like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in your list. Balance the intellectual interests you wish to show off with your some distinctive personality.
• Don’t underdress. The opposite of the previous tip is also true. While throwing in some fun little books, movies, or music can add some dimension and personality to your list, they shouldn’t be the only things you include. You absolutely can (and should) include a sitcom or a non-academic novel on your media list, but make sure you don’t overfill the list with items of lesser substance. Also avoid including items that are too juvenile. Think smart casual clothing—you don’t need to wear a suit everywhere you go, but some places (like this supplemental essay) require a bit more than sweatpants and flip flops. Some nice jeans and a polo can be enough.
• Recognizable brands can be effective. Mentioning a couple of notable pop culture items will increase your list’s relatability in the admissions officer’s eyes. And, psychologically speaking , similarities on paper can help you in non-personal interactions. Just make sure you pick something that is well received both critically and by the masses, like a Beatles album or the movie Parasite —something that you and your reader could have a robust intellectual debate about.
• Moderation. If it’s not already clear by now, making a strong list is going to be a delicate task. You’re going to need to find the middle ground between casual and intellectual, specific and general, fiction and nonfiction, books and movies, etc. Don’t wait until the last minute to cobble together a list of random things just because this isn’t a fully fledged essay. Remember that you still need to explain and defend your choices. Devote as much time to this list and you do to your essays. The list reveals as much about you as an individual as a full essay does—be sure to treat it with the same respect.
• Be honest! You may be asked about this list somewhere down the road during the admissions process. Don’t get caught off guard by what you’re passing off as your own list. Nothing is more embarrassing and detrimental during this process than not having a clue about something you purport to have read/seen.

Politics, Policy and Law Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 1

The politics, policy, and law scholars program is an intensive course of study in which students from diverse backgrounds live and learn together. given its intense and unique nature, why do you want to be a part of the program why do you think you would be a good fit for the politics, policy and law scholars program (250 words).

This is essentially a “Why This College?” prompt , but applied to a special program rather than AU as a whole. Moreover, in addition to describing how the program is a good fit for you, you’re tasked with describing how you are a good fit for the program.

Brainstorming your essay:

A recommended strategy for prompts like this is to establish a connection to the program. Two kinds of connection you might try to establish are a tangible connection and an intangible one.

A tangible connection can be made by identifying specific program offerings that resonate with you personally. To find such resources, you should do some in-depth research on the program. A good place to start is the PPL Scholars website . There you’ll find the course of study, the applicable majors, information about the living learning community, and more.

You might write about things like the campus culture, specific classes or academic opportunities, particular professors, etc. Given the rather low word limit, try to stick to academic features, as others might come off as less important.

An intangible connection can be made by discussing how your personal values align with those of the program. The PPL program emphasizes “the principles, practices, and institutions of politics and law from quantitative and qualitative, philosophical, and social science perspectives.”

If your personal values deeply resonate with the ideas of practicing law, government, public policy, criminal justice, or a similar field, you might wish to discuss how those values will be supported and informed by those of the program. Be sure to take a look at the PPL Scholars FAQ webpage to get a little more insight into the program.

Since you only have 250 words to work with, it would be a good idea to choose either a tangible connection or intangible one to discuss, rather than both. Remember, you need to save some space to discuss how you’re a good fit for the program.

Also note that it’s okay if you can’t develop a really strong intangible connection to the program—that is usually the harder kind of connection to write about. A strong tangible connection and a good explanation of how you’re a good fit for the PPL Scholars Program will make for a good response.

For example, consider a hypothetical student whose mother is a lawyer and whose father is a police officer. She might feel deeply connected to issues of justice and reform through the stories her parents tell her. She might write a response that begins like this:

“My parents are both deeply involved in the legal professions—my dad is a police officer and my mom is a lawyer. They have told me how the justice system isn’t perfect—both of them have seen the system succeed and fail many times. The passion with which they describe their careers has inspired me to go into a legal field too.

Having been raised by two parents in intense careers in legal fields has given me the resolve I will need to undertake such a career myself. I believe that my passion and determination, as well as my existing background knowledge about these fields make me uniquely equipped to take on the challenges of the Politics, Policy and Law Scholars Program…”

This excerpt is an excellent start to this prompt because it explains the unique features of the students past that equip her with the skills needed to succeed in the PPL Scholars Program. Note that this blurb is only half the word limit, which should give you some perspective on how much detail you might go into.

With prompts like this one, there are three things you will want to avoid doing in your response. These include the following:

• Name-dropping. It looks superficial and insincere to simply name certain courses or professors without elaborating on the ways in which these resources are meaningful or useful to you.
• Empty flattery. Don’t waste your word count talking about the prestige of the program or the University. There’s nothing wrong with being nice, but overdoing that in a prompt with a word limit might lead to you writing an essay that doesn’t answer the question.
• Naming general resources that are applicable to many schools. Don’t base your essay on things like good class sizes, strong political science courses, a nice location, etc.—these things apply to many schools and programs, and don’t showcase a personal connection to this particular program.

Politics, Policy and Law Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 2

The living learning community and cohort aspects are integral parts of the politics, policy & law scholars program. describe a specific project, course, or other experience that required you to work with others toward a shared goal or to resolve conflict and build consensus. how did you contribute to accomplishing the goal or resolving conflict how did you engage with others how has this experience prepared you for the ppl program be specific. (250 words).

This prompt asks you to elaborate on a team-based problem-solving experience that will give the admissions reader insight into how you will fit in with the PPL program at large. As an intensive program, PPL requires all students to be a part of their Living Learning Community, meaning that you’ll be working alongside fellow PPL students both in and outside of the classroom. As such, the admissions committee wants to ensure that you’re able to support a larger community of like-minded (or even sometimes diversely minded) students.

First, think back over your time in high school and try to identify any large-scale projects that you were involved in with a group. At the same time, keep in mind that this response should not just be more explanation of something that may already appear on your application. When selecting what to write about, try to fill in the gaps your application has.

For instance, perhaps you were on the Executive Board of Model UN, and hope to share an experience about how you organized a conference hosted at your high school. While that’s definitely a valid experience, this answer should be less about the what and more about the how .

How did that conference come together? How did you delegate responsibilities among your peers and which responsibilities did you take on? What challenges or obstacles did you face as a team and how did you overcome them together? Did you have to work through any conflicts when working with one another?

Ultimately, reflect not only on your accomplishments with whichever experience you choose, but also on the failures, conflicts, and honest strategies you chose to employ to keep the ship afloat. The next step will be highlighting the crucial lessons that the experience taught you, and how you hope to apply those lessons to your time in the PPL program.

In order to brainstorm how you wish to close out your response, remember that the PPL program will require you to live and learn alongside your peers—make sure your answer emphasizes that you were able to come together as a group to tackle a complicated problem, and ultimately come out not just successful, but as a closer group overall.

Politics, Policy and Law Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 3

You have been hired to advise a member of congress or a state legislator (you can choose which one, but you should pick one) about the issues that affect americans aged 18-26. you have been asked to identify one legal, political, or policy issue that will resonate with this group of americans and recommend a policy proposal that he or she should support and promote. explain the issue, explain why the elected official should highlight it, and propose a specific original policy solution. provide support for your proposed solution. your proposal should not simply be to support another individual’s already created policy. (650 words).

This prompt is less of a by-the-books response and more of an exercise, asking you to not only identify a major issue facing the country but also persuading a hypothetical elected official to pay attention to it and also brainstorm a possible solution.

The purpose of this prompt is to get a sense of your level of political engagement, as well as to give you a chance to attempt your first case study, which will serve as a gateway to the PPL program at large. This essay will require thorough research and deliberation, but, at its core, it’s just an expanded version of a typical Political/Global Issues prompt.

First, decide the scale of your chosen issue. Trying to brainstorm a list of possible issues to focus on will end up generating a laundry list of options, and might exhaust your brain before you even begin writing your response.

Something that may help guide you is remembering that you should have a unique perspective on your chosen issue. For example, you wouldn’t want to write your response about something general like the dangers of climate change if you genuinely don’t have anything to add to the conversation—the point is not to reiterate discourse that is already out there, but rather to think creatively and critically about the world and the ways in which your unique perspective can be valuable in trying to solve your chosen issue.

Therefore, it may be more useful to start small and then expand outwards. Look at your environment—what issues impact your community, your state, or your region? Looking again at the issue of climate change, perhaps you come from a state where fracking is not only legal, but still actively occurs. Perhaps your own family or a family you know has ties to the fracking business, and you feel as though current legislation and efforts to outlaw fracking stall because of pushback from these communities.

Tie your belief to your perspective—you may believe that fracking should be illegal, and your perspective can guide you in persuading an elected official to provide various incentives to those who rely on fracking for their livelihoods. As such, starting small will make your answer more specific and unique while still tackling a national issue like climate change.

If you don’t feel as though your environment has given you a distinct perspective on a current event, do some research on what issues have most recently surfaced in the country. For example, recent months have called attention to a migrant crisis that the United States is facing and how resources for these migrants are quickly diminishing.

Regarding this example, perhaps you are very active in community service and volunteering—how can you use that interest to frame your answer? Your proposed solution can involve rallying young people to volunteer and provide support to these migrant communities, while also trying to work with the opposing party to reach a solution.

Remember, your answer still needs an official policy proposal, so perhaps your proposed solution can immediately provide temporary shelter and resources for migrants while also opening the door to a firmer long-term solution. Your proposed solution doesn’t have to completely close the door on an issue, but it should showcase your understanding of the political process.

Public Health Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 1

Discuss a public health issue of local, national, international, or personal importance to you. explain why it is important to you and describe how you envision impacting this issue (500 words)..

This prompt is meant to gauge two things. First, it’s trying to find out which public health issues you consider important and why. Second, it wants to discern how you intend to use your college education and life experience to contribute to a solution to this issue.

Admissions committees are constantly looking for nuance and specificity, so we recommend that you choose a problem that isn’t very broad. A problem like “COVID-19” is too vague to write an effective essay on. Instead, choose something more narrow, such as “COVID-19 in impoverished communities.”

If you’re having trouble settling on a topic to write about, think about your identity and values. Aspects of your identity include your ethnicity, race, country of origin, language, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, hometown, income class, socioeconomic status, illnesses/disabilities, and even interests and activities! There might be an aspect of your identity that is directly related to a public health issue.

Consider these different aspects of your background and make a list of public health issues that may have an impact on part of your identity. For example, African Americans are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease or stroke than white Americans. In cases like this, people with your racial background may be affected by a health issue more than people of other backgrounds.

To help add nuance to your essay, be sure to cite specific examples or your chosen issue. Concrete examples will make your essay more specific as well as help you transition into a discussion of how you intend to help contribute to solving the issue.

For instance, if you want to write about substance misuse and substance abuse, discuss some specific situations in which these issues take hold. In such an essay, you might want to write about things you have seen firsthand—these can include opiate abuse by the homeless population in your home city, overprescription of certain drugs in your area, a persistent community habit of failing to finish a full course of antibiotics, etc.

The above examples can add nuance to your essay for two reasons. First, simply stating that your issue exists and is important (even if that’s true) is not a compelling argument without concrete evidence. Providing examples shows your reader that there are tangible reasons to care about the issue. Second, having some real-life examples in your essay shows that you are both inquisitive and informed.

Once you’ve picked a public health issue that you can support with tangible evidence, ponder how your future college education and life experience can afford you the ability to help solve this issue. AU’s Three-Year Public Health Scholars Program is an accelerated course of study designed to help you get a BA or BS in Public Health in 3 years (possibly on a pre-med track as well).

You might already have plans for your future contributions to solving your chosen issue, but you can potentially elevate your essay if you’re able to connect your goals to the school and degree. Look at AU’s Three-Year Public Health Scholars Program website as well as the Public Health BA website and BS website to inspire your writing!

This essay is about your plans for a career in public health, so don’t worry too much about having a “right” or “wrong” answer. Here are a couple of hypothetical student bios to show you just how different effective ideas can look:

• Jane has been curious about psychology and mental health since middle school. Throughout high school, she has had many conversations with her uncle, a cognitive behavioral therapist, about the staggering lack of mental health resources across the United States. Jane is pursuing a degree in Public Health because she feels that this field is the key to developing lasting reform in the domain of mental health.
• Robert is a Chinese-American with a family history of cardiovascular disease. Intrigued by this recurrent issue, he has done a lot of independent research on prevalence rates. Robert found that Asian-Americans are disproportionately affected by cardiovascular disease due to several social determinants. He hopes to get a degree in Public Health so he can help spearhead initiatives that will provide care to his underserved ethnic community.

Public Health Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 2

Why do you want to join a 3-year degree program what skills and insight do you hope to acquire through this experience respond in no more than 250 words..

This prompt is a bit of a mix of two common types of prompt—the “Why This College?” and the “Why This Major?” prompts. It’s a very straightforward question meant to gauge your interest in the University, the field of public health, and the 3-Year Public Health Scholars Program. The admissions committee wants to see how you fit with the program and how you’ll make the most of its resources.

You’ll want to establish at least a tangible connection to the program. The best way to do this is to describe your interest in the field then connect it to your reasons for applying to the program.

Think about why you’re passionate about public health. For what reasons do you want to study it? What are some career and life goals of yours? How will this 3-year program help you achieve these goals?

Explore the program’s website as well as the sites for the Public Health BA degree and BS degree to help inspire your writing! Try to find unique features of the program that you can use to inform your response.

Look at this hypothetical response to see how you might establish a connection with the program:

“Growing up, I had a lot of problems with my weight and health, and I was shamed for not making ‘healthy choices.’ It was only when my dad got a promotion and we moved to a new neighborhood that I realized what the main issue was. In my old, poorer neighborhood, all we had access to were fast food restaurants and corner stores. In my new neighborhood, there were several grocery stores with fresh, healthy food within a mile. My weight and health have improved significantly ever since our move.

I want to get a BS in Public Health because I hope to make it easier for young, poor kids like I was to gain access to the resources to live a healthier life. A 3-year program will allow me to help these communities more effectively.

I look forward to taking the course Gender, Poverty and Health, which will explore the intersections between these topics and allow me to reflect on systemic ways to bring much-needed health resources to impoverished communities. Furthermore, the course Multicultural Health will allow me to approach my work through an intersectional lens, as there are many immigrants in low-income communities who face unique health disparities based on their backgrounds.

Good health is not as simple as just ‘making the right choices’ when there are systemic barriers to making those choices. I hope to help remove those barriers in my work.”

This example is effective for a couple of reasons. First, it gives the admissions committee an idea of the student’s background, motivations, and passion. Second, it answers each point of the prompt explicitly and clearly. The student describes why he is interested in a 3-year program, then lists the main skills he hopes to acquire through this program.

There are a few things you should avoid when crafting your essay:

• Empty flattery. Writing about how unique or prestigious the University/program is might sound nice, but you shouldn’t talk about how cool a program is to you without elaborating on why . This kind of approach is vague and doesn’t add any nuance to your essay.
• Name-dropping. Don’t simply list a bunch of classes, professors, or activities that appeal to you without describing why they’re interesting to you.
• Being generic. A good location, a strong program in public health, a nice core curriculum, etc. are things that apply to many schools and programs. They are too vague and will make your essay stand out less.

As long as you give a genuine answer and you have solid goals that this program will help you achieve, you’ll craft an effective essay that is sure to stand out to admissions officers.

Sakura Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 1

The sakura scholars program requires students to study in both the united states and japan, learn the japanese language, focus on regional topics in east asia and the pacific, and complete a capstone for the joint bachelor’s degree in global international relations. why are you interested in this program what are your personal and/or professional goals and how will this program help you to reach them (500 words).

This prompt is similar to the common “Why This College?” prompt , but more specifically applies to the intercollegiate Sakura Scholars program. This prompt is meant to gauge your reasons for applying to the program to see if you’re a good fit for it and if it’s a good fit for you.

To write a successful essay, you‘ll need to establish a connection with the program and express how your goals are best served by being a part of it.

There are two kinds of connections that you can make with a college, program, major, etc. The first kind is the tangible connection. This involves identifying specific concrete reasons for applying to the program. To do this effectively, you will need to do in-depth research on the program and its offerings.

If you’ve made it to this point, you have probably written your response to the All Applicants prompt that was covered at the beginning of this guide. If you have, doing research on the program will be very similar to doing research on American University broadly, as you did earlier. If you haven’t done that essay yet, don’t worry! We have created a guide to help you research colleges (and programs) for this type of essay.

Go to the program’s website to begin your research. Scroll through the main site and the FAQ page to learn more about the program. In this program you have the choice of starting your undergraduate career at American University or Ritsumeikan University, so be sure to check out Ritsumeikan University’s program site as well! This will help you determine where you want to spend your first semester. Regardless of which school you choose, you’ll spend four semesters at AU and four semesters abroad.

The program awards a degree in Global International Relations, so a good approach to this essay is to describe why the field of international relations is important to you and how the program is uniquely equipped to help you achieve your goals in this field.

One direct way to establish a tangible connection between the program and your goals is to find courses or faculty members that really resonate with you. Since the program is between two universities, you should look through the faculty lists of both American and Ritsumeikan .

Consider the following excerpt from a response that might be written by a hypothetical Uyghur student, whose ethnic background has many people suffering human rights violations abroad:

“The Sakura Scholars program is the perfect opportunity for me to study international relations in the United States and Japan. It would give me unprecedented access to Western and Eastern perspectives. I am particularly interested in the work of Professor Jeffrey Bachman at American University and that of Professor Rieko Kitamura at Ritsumeikan University.

Prof. Bachman studies genocide, political violence, and human rights, and Prof. Kitamura has done work on human rights protections. Studying under the supervision of these professors will offer me the chance to delve deeper into specific regional issues. The degree awarded by this program will offer me new ways to help end the plight of my people.”

This response is very effective for a number of reasons:

• First, it establishes a personal background that helps the admissions committee understand the student’s personal motivations.
• Second, it showcases the student’s sincere interest in the Sakura Scholars program.
• Finally, it explicitly names resources (specifically professors) at both universities that will be assets to the student’s education and to the realization of the student’s personal goals.

The second kind of connection you can make with the program is an intangible connection. This involves things like seeing if your values and those of the program are aligned. For example, you might appreciate how the program takes place in the East and West, emphasizing “voices, experiences, and theory from a truly multicultural, multiregional, global perspective.”

There are some things you’ll want to avoid when writing your response:

• Name-dropping. Don’t simply list activities, courses, or professors that interest you without explaining why you’re interested in them. This essay needs to be about you more than the program itself.
• Empty flattery. Anyone can write about the reputations of AU and Ritsumeikan. Compliments are nice, but empty flattery suggests that you don’t have anything more substantive to say.
• Generic aspects of the program. Talking about good locations, a strong program in international relations, or small class sizes won’t really add to your essay. Try to write about unique aspects of the program or things that are rare .

Make sure you give yourself plenty of time to do deep research before you begin writing. Also be sure to write about nuanced personal motivations for applying to the program. Most importantly, write a sincere response! Honestly will go a long way, both in the application process and beyond.

Sakura Scholars Program Applicants, Prompt 2

In this joint degree program, you will gain first-hand comparative international experience as you spend two years at american university and two years at ritsumeikan university. think of a time when you faced a challenge or found yourself in an unexpected situation. explain what happened, what you learned, and how this experience might help you adapt to different intercultural situations, and work through future challenges as a sakura scholar. (no word count given).

This prompt is a very standard example of the Overcoming Challenges essay . You’re being asked about a challenge you faced as well as the lessons you learned from it. These questions are to give the admissions committee an idea of how you handle moments of adversity or surprise, and how you learn from adverse or unexpected experiences.

Before you begin writing, you should plan out your topic as thoroughly as you can so that the writing process can move smoothly. When trying to decide on a topic, think about any major challenges you’ve faced in life. Also consider any unexpected life events that may have turned out to be formative experiences. The prompt specifies that challenges and unexpected situations are both fair game, so don’t feel restricted to thinking only of negative experiences.

Once you’ve thought about possible experiences you could write about, create a list of the challenges that came to mind and a separate list of unexpected situations. For each list, ask yourself which experiences taught you the most important or influential lessons about yourself or the world.

Finally, after deciding on the best experience to talk about in this essay, ask yourself the following questions about it:

• What happened?
• In the moment, what was your reaction to the situation? How did it affect you, your thoughts, and your emotions? How have these emotions changed over time?
• Why was this experience so important to you? What is its personal significance?
• Consider the steps you took to manage the situation. Were they successful? Why or why not?
• Reflecting on the outcome of the event, how did the experience allow you to grow and mature as an individual? What did you learn from the success or failure of your approach? What lessons did you learn, both broadly and specifically?
• How did the experience prepare you to face occurrences like it in the future? How has it equipped you to adapt to different intercultural situations?

Once you’ve chosen a topic and answered these questions, writing the essay shouldn’t be so daunting.

Maybe you don’t have a clear answer for every question above. That’s fine, but be sure that you can do at least three things to effectively respond to the prompt:

• Describe the event/experience.
• Explain the most important lessons you learned from the experience.
• Detail the ways in which these lessons have improved your ability to adapt to different potential intercultural situations and your capacity to be a strong Sakura Scholar.

With regard to structuring your essay, you may find it helpful to frame it with a narrative format. After all, part of your response requires an explanation of the experience, which would benefit from an anecdote.

Here’s an outline to help you organize your writing:

• If you choose to use a narrative format, begin with an anecdote—a vivid and evocative retelling of the event to draw your reader in.
• After introducing the topic through an anecdote, describe yourself (your attitudes, beliefs, motivations, etc.) prior to the event that you learned from.
• State specifically how the experience was a turning point for you. How did your life change? What did you learn about yourself, others, and/or the world? The lesson should ideally reflect the way you now embrace challenges or unanticipated occurrences, and the ways in which you’re better equipped to tackle intercultural issues.
• If storytelling is one of your strong suits, you might choose to rearrange the order in which you describe events. For example, you might start with a summary of who you are now and how you’re able to approach intercultural situations, then transition to a discussion of who you were before the experience, then discuss the experience and how it affected you.

A hypothetical student might write about an experience related to his multiracial background. Perhaps the student felt like he had to deny both of his ethnic backgrounds to fit in with the American teens around him at school. He began to embrace his identity and eventually overcame his fear of being judged. He learned that innocent childhood ignorance was not a reason to detract from his own identity, a lesson that will help him later on because he has spent years confronting issues of identity in a multicultural context.

This example would be effective because it explicitly outlines the challenge the student had to confront, his response to adversity, what he learned about himself from overcoming the challenge, and how it has prepared him to undertake life as a Sakura Scholar in this multicultural program.

There is no word count given, but you should try to keep your response around 300 words. An essay longer than 350 words might become drawn out or redundant, and one shorter than 250 words might not leave you with enough space to be sufficiently detailed.

A Note About the AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship Prompts

The following five prompts are all required for applicants to the AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship. This scholarship covers all billable AU expenses (full tuition, room, and board) for one international student who will need a non-immigrant visa (preferably an F-1 or J-1 student visa) to study in the United States.

Since the scholarship is only being offered to international student applicants, you can disregard the next five prompts if you’re a U.S. citizen, U.S. permanent resident, U.S. pending permanent resident, or dual citizen of the U.S. and another country. You are also not eligible to apply if you’re enrolled in or have already begun any post-secondary studies at another university in your home country or the U.S., or if you graduated secondary school earlier than 2022.

AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship Applicants (International Students), Prompt 1

Discuss a significant issue in your home country about which you are passionate and describe how you would use the education you obtain at our institution, american university (au), washington, dc, to create positive civic and social change once you return home. (250 words).

This prompt is intended to help you reveal a few important things about yourself—your ability to find significant civic and social issues around you, the types of problems that are important and interesting to you, your critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, and your plans for using your college education to its full potential after graduation.

This prompt is a bit like the common community service prompt , albeit in the future tense. It’s different in that rather than describing how you helped solve an issue in the past, you’re tasked with writing about how you foresee yourself contributing to the solution to a problem in the future.

Before you begin writing, think about the issues that truly bother you in your home country. Since you’re just brainstorming a list right now, these problems can be big or small. To have an essay that stands out, however, you should ultimately pick something substantial when you begin writing.

Your problem doesn’t have to be within any specific domain as long as you can envision civic and social change being integral to the problem’s resolution. As you think, consider social, economic, political, governmental, environmental, war-related, and public health issues.

The prompt isn’t asking you to write a whole textbook on the issue, but be sure that you research it well enough to describe its important points at the very least. You need to write a description of the problem, as well as some ways in which your American University education will help you tackle the problem back in your home country.

That being said, you should have a good understanding of what the problem entails. You might want to pick an issue in which you have some personal investment so you can add a nuanced perspective to your essay.

You only have 250 words to address every part of the prompt, so be succinct and direct in your explanation of the issue. Don’t only talk about the basic facts, though. Be sure to also touch on why the problem is important to you. Be careful not to let bias direct how you report the facts. Try to strike a balance between straightforward reportage and personal interest.

For example, consider a hypothetical student from Ethiopia, a country still facing the effects of a yearslong civil war. Perhaps he has noticed that the problem primarily stems from a lack of communication between the government and the rebelling military faction. He might write a response like this:

“In December 2020, my family fled its home, the Tigray Region of Ethiopia, at the outset of war. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a political party that ruled Ethiopia for decades, held an election during the COVID-19 pandemic that the current federal government ruled illegal. This debate escalated to violence, beginning a war that, despite a ceasefire, still has lasting impacts.

My family fled and thankfully found a safe haven in Europe, but so many other families did not have such luck. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced or killed in this senseless conflict that is ravaging my homeland.

It is my hope that a strong education will equip me with the skills and knowledge to go back home and contribute to a more definite end to this conflict. Despite the ceasefire, some occupations continue and famine is widespread. I believe a degree in International Studies will help me better understand the causes of war and the preconditions necessary to end it.

I cannot solve this issue myself, but I can no longer watch my home get torn apart. I want to help resolve this conflict by participating directly in the peace and rebuilding processes. If nothing else, I can at least use my education on the global stage to direct more eyes to this dreadful time period. Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan once said, ‘Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.’ I know in my heart that he was right.”

This is an effective response. First, it provides a fairly detailed outline of an issue in the student’s home country. Second, it describes why the issue is such an important problem and why it’s so hard to solve. And finally, it discusses how a degree from AU can help the student contribute to awareness of the issue and attempts to resolve it.

You will craft a strong essay if you can address three things:

• What – Define the issue thoroughly but concisely.
• Why – Describe why the issue is important to you and to the people it directly affects.
• How – Detail how your AU education will prepare you to contribute to efforts to resolve the issue.

AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship Applicants (International Students), Prompt 2

Discuss your current involvement in community service projects and volunteer activities. describe what you have learned about yourself as a result of these activities. (250 words).

This is a prime example of the community service essay. Schools that use this prompt want to know about your level of engagement with the people and environment around you. The Emerging Global Leader Scholarship—a program that emphasizes “leadership development and global engagement” —is especially interested in your impact on your community.

Be sure to check out CollegeVine’s guide to writing the community service essay for some in-depth tips and examples!

Since you only have 250 words, you won’t be able to write about many activities. In fact, we recommend sticking to 1-2 really meaningful and long-term projects. These are the projects that tend to show a genuine commitment to community service. If you only have short-term projects to write about, then you can mention 2-3 in your response.

When picking a topic, try to think about any projects you do that might be less common. For example, painting murals on old buildings to brighten up the neighborhood is less common than volunteering at a food drive or soup kitchen. There’s nothing wrong with writing about a more common volunteering experience in this essay, but if you have a unique project to write about, it may make your essay more engaging.

If you deem all your volunteering activities and community service projects are fairly commonplace, try to choose the ones that are more meaningful to you. If you feel more connected to a particular experience over the others, your writing about it will be more passionate and vivid.

Once you have decided on an activity (or a few), think about these questions:

• What happened during the activity?
• What went through your mind and how did you feel as this was happening?
• How have your emotions regarding the activity changed over time?

With your activity and motivations in mind, think about how you want to structure your essay. If you’re writing about a singular experience, consider taking a narrative approach. An essay that simply lists facts lacks important emotion. Tell about your experience with vivid imagery—show, don’t tell. This is a good way to draw your reader into the experience.

For example, perhaps you speak Spanish and do volunteer work where you can serve as a translator. Maybe you have seen firsthand the impact that speaking someone’s native language can have. Lessons this experience might have taught you about yourself can include the following:

• Your ability to switch between two languages is better than you thought.
• You can take on a leadership role even under the pressure of needing to speak a second language.
• You have more patience than you thought you did.
• You’re really good at working with the elderly, and you didn’t know that before.

As you can see, there are plenty of lessons you can glean from even one volunteering experience. These might include skills, abilities, personal attributes, or something else entirely.

This shouldn’t be a difficult essay to write, but you should note that there are three particular things to avoid :

• Listing out everything that happened. You have 250 words to work with. While this is ample space, you should use it wisely. This isn’t a play-by-play, so stick to the most important details. Your essay should focus more on the lessons you learned.
• Using a privileged tone. You’ll want to maintain a balanced, humble tone. Looking entitled or pretentious is not going to help your application in the least. Show how the experience is important to you without painting yourself as some kind of savior.
• Clichés. You might think it’s a good idea to quote a famous person or to use a trite, old life lesson, but we actually recommend avoiding these strategies. Admissions officers have seen them hundreds of times, so they won’t contribute much to your application.

When you write your response, be genuine about your motivations, honest about your impact on the local community, and specific in your descriptions of activities. Doing all those things will ensure a strong essay.

AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship Applicants (International Students), Prompt 3

Describe an obstacle or challenge you have faced in your life. how have you overcome this challenge and grown from this experience (250 words).

This is the classic Overcoming Challenges prompt , so we recommend that you read our linked guide for advice and examples.

AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship Applicants (International Students), Prompt 4

The au diplomats are a diverse group of current au international students and us global nomads who have been selected by the au admissions team to form and maintain connections with new and prospective american university (au) students, and to represent au to the international community., our emerging global leader scholar is expected to play an impactful role in the work of our au diplomats group. what outreach, communication, and/or intake strategies would you employ to inform and welcome new and prospective students to american university, washington, dc (250 words).

This prompt tasks you with highlighting how you envision yourself connecting with new and prospective students who may also be international students. While it may seem daunting to have to think ahead to welcoming and guiding others to a University you yourself are currently applying to, the answer is really based more on your experience than you may think.

Think about how your application process has felt so far. Applying to a school in a country different from your own may have been an overwhelming process, and it’s perfectly all right to write about that feeling—in fact, it may even guide your answer.

Imagine you were in contact with an AU Diplomat or a current Emerging Global Leader scholar. What questions would you ask now or would you have asked in the past? Doing some role-reversal will help you imagine the kind of Emerging Global Leader Scholar you can be to help new and prospective students like yourself.

Additionally, reflect on what you wish you knew prior to the application process. How did you find American University? Did anything or anyone help you along the way? How did you engage with American University prior to applying? And eventually, what advice would you give to a younger student who will soon be in your shoes?

For example, perhaps you live halfway across the world, and had trouble attending virtual information events at many schools because of the time difference. Maybe American University offered some information sessions specific to your country or region of the world—how did that make you feel more connected to the school? Maybe you want to volunteer for these events to give more prospective students the opportunity to learn about the school, and maybe even reach areas that haven’t yet been reached.

Your strategies will come from your personal experiences, so be open and honest about your past and present—even though your own future may still be undetermined.

AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship Applicants, Prompt 3

This is the classic Overcoming Challenges essay, so we recommend that you read our linked guide for advice and examples.

AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship Applicants, Prompt 4

The au diplomats are a diverse group of current au international students and us global nomads who have been selected by the au admissions team to form and maintain connections with new and prospective american university (au) students, and to represent au to the international community. our emerging global leader scholar is expected to play an impactful role in the work of our au diplomats group. what outreach, communication, and/or intake strategies would you employ to inform and welcome new and prospective students to american university, washington, dc (250 words).

This prompt tasks you with highlighting how you envision yourself connecting with new and prospective students who may also be international students. While it may seem daunting to have to think ahead to welcoming and guiding others to a University you are applying to, the answer is really based more in your experience than you may think.

Think about how your application process has felt so far. Applying to a school in a different country than your own may have been overwhelming, and it is perfectly all right to write about that feeling – in fact, it may even guide your answer.

Imagine you were in contact with an AU Diplomat or a current Emerging Global Leader scholar. What questions would you ask or would you have asked in the past? Doing some role-reversal will help you imagine the kind of Emerging Global Leader Scholar you can be to help new and prospective students like yourself.

Additionally, reflect on what you wish you knew prior to the application process. How did you find American University? Did anything or anyone help you along the way? How did you engage with American University prior to applying? And eventually, what advice would you give a younger student who will soon be in your shoes?

For example, perhaps you live halfway across the world, and had trouble attending virtual information events at many schools because of the time difference. Maybe American University offered some information sessions specific to your country or region of the world – how did that make you feel more connected to the school? Maybe you want to volunteer for these events to give more prospective students the opportunity to learn about the school, and maybe even reach areas that haven’t yet been reached.

Your strategies will come from your personal experiences, so be open and honest even though your own future may still be undetermined.

AU Emerging Global Leader Scholarship Applicants (International Students), Prompt 5

What are the characteristics of leadership that you most admire who is a leader that exemplifies those qualities, and why (250 words).

There are two main approaches you can use to navigate this prompt. You can certainly begin by brainstorming a list of leadership qualities you find most important and then find a leader you admire, but it may actually be wise to work backwards and reverse-engineer your answer—essentially, choose a leader you admire first and then identify the qualities that make them a great leader. Choosing someone you already admire may make your response more sincere and detailed.

There are no real wrong answers to this prompt, which also means that the more specific and unique you can get, the better. It is, however, best to avoid leaders who would be generally named immediately. For example, you would not want to pick a figure like the current President of the United States, other former Presidents, or other well-renowned world leaders, as they will likely be a common answer to this question.

Instead, think about whether your home country has any leaders—political, social, environmental, etc.—that would make for a strong response. Remember, this answer isn’t just about proving why your choice is a strong leader, it’s about showing the admissions committee your perception of what makes for great leadership.

After you’ve selected a leader, analyze the characteristics of that leader that resonate with people. Are they a great public speaker? Have they managed to unify a wide populace of differing perspectives? What is their public image? What impresses you most about their accomplishments?

These questions can help you identify how your chosen leader reflects your perspectives on great leadership as a whole, and will allow you to craft an answer around your thesis rather than the other way around.

Where to Get Your American University Essays Edited

Do you want feedback on your AU essays? After rereading your essays over and over again, it can be difficult to spot where your writing could use some improvement. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

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African American Studies Essay

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The introduction of African American Studies in the curriculums has had a lot of support as well as disapprovals regarding the content coverage. This paper forms an analysis of the challenges and the right Trans or multi-disciplinary approaches required to contribute to growth and development of the studies.

The first challenges the researchers of these studies have to face include the Geographical boundaries. Evidently, most analysis and writings of the studies have dealt with the African Americans in the United States thus losing the discipline’s global significance.

This come within reach of truth shuts the historical, social and cultural influences of African heritage outside the U.S.A. The studies ought to apply distinctive and appropriate analytical techniques that assist in studying of specific circumstances that captures and accounts for experiences of all the major societies of the African Diaspora especially outside the American setting. (Green, 2001)

Secondly, the worldview of African-American studies need well representation and understanding. African worldview consists of values and believes of people with African decent to shape their inter-personal relationship. There studies ought to dwell upon the relationship of people and the environment without denying the wide variation regarding values and believes that assist to distinguish them from people of different origin. According to Irele (2001), the notion regarding African worldview entails the mode of expression for the shared values or believes without uniformly basing the studies upon particular system or a set of practices.

The challenge most Africana researchers and writers have to tackle today entails ways of combating a notion that “traditional African beliefs are historical relic of pre-modern life.” (Irele, 2001) A lot of writing has distorted experience of African Americans. The procedure of examining the extent of evolution involving variants of African origin would be a strategy to addressing of the human problems among people of African origin without confinement to a specific region.

There is need for a more accurate understanding of the complexity involved in the experiences of the African people. This is a measure to understand the history and contemporary efforts of people. They are shaping their destiny, as opposed to the perception that Africa-Americans are people who wait to consume the western ideas or products.

The paradigm of unity is an important aspect of the African-American studies and many writers/researchers have taken it as a major contributor to the social studies discipline. It is an important feature that offers periodical perspective of the Black people. The adequacy of the paradigm requires great thoughts due to the flow required in a text and the fact that the aspect requires constant updating thus continuous research findings.

In line with Green (2001), there is need to introduce and embrace the interdisciplinary approach of teaching the subject by enabling a foundation that supports major expansions especially in the upper division of the graduate or undergraduate level of studies. The current curriculum follows the department based structure of the academic organization especially in most higher institutions of education that have familiar chapters like the history, social science, or politics.

The conventional wisdom is not enough to acquaint the readers with all the required detail. The alternative ways such as hypothesis and other data sourcing procedures that assist in interpreting experiences not considered within the boundaries of the subject.

There is a wide distinction between the various approaches used for instructing scholars with respect to the Africana studies. People must differentiate between interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary procedures of blending or integrating theories of a study. Multidisciplinary process of studying entails a conscious effort to examine the subject matter using various approaches either sequentially or in a parallel format.

For instance, a research topic tackled by various contributors form different disciplines. On the other hand, interdisciplinary approach entails blending of theories and methods from various disciplines of an individual study. Both the methods are reactive in relation to the boundaries set by the traditional disciplines.

Today, people should decide to adopt trans-disciplinary approach that rejects the existing disciplinary boundaries to diversify the subject and synthesize various approaches of understanding the world to acquire extra information. This is a big challenge because the current trends of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches continue to shape the Africana studies as a study subject lacking progressive interpretation of the culture. (Green, 2001)

There have been great omissions of literature concerning women in the past African-American studies. Current research studies ought to address appropriate strategies to enhance the contributions or manifests of women. The contribution should not be gender biased but treated in parallel by fully integrating the women side of events rather than picking their study as an add-on to that of male.

Women have widely contributed to the liberation struggle and today it is evident that they equally and possibly playing the role of leadership in a better way especially in areas pertaining education, maintenance of the family, working and politics.

Lastly, the biggest challenge requires clear articulation concerns the name used for the studies. Various titles vary from Blacks studies, African studies, Afro-American studies, Africana, Africa-logy and the most common African American studies. The terms are different and possibly portray different meaning while they cater for the same discipline. Lingual perceptions of suffixes and prefixes bring about wide differences and the unmodified topic gives people too much room to diversify the studies beyond the requirements.

Green, Charles. (2001). Manufacturing powerlessness in the black Diaspora: inner-city youth and the new global frontier Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira press Publishers

Irele, Abiola. (2001). The African imagination : literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora.\ Oxford; New York: Oxford University press Publishers

• Child Abuse Allegations: Multidisciplinary Team Approach
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• Navy White Hat Eulogy Essay
• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2018, May 9). African American Studies. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-studies/

"African American Studies." IvyPanda , 9 May 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-studies/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'African American Studies'. 9 May.

IvyPanda . 2018. "African American Studies." May 9, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-studies/.

1. IvyPanda . "African American Studies." May 9, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-studies/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "African American Studies." May 9, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-studies/.

Anyone writing their essay about their racial identity?

<p>I was considering writing about how I felt alienated and struggled to fit in with “black culture” growing up because of accusations of “acting too white,” and how my parents’ constant pushing me toward a culture that rejected me affected me as a person (or something like that). Do you think this is a little cliche? I feel like admission officers read topics like these all the time.</p>

<p>Yeah, I kinda sorta wrote about the same thing :P. I honestly never thought about it being a common topic though…</p>

<p>Yes, I thought about that, but I wanted something more personal. There are too many people also struggling with racial identity, so I found something a little closer to home!</p>

<p>@detpeace What did you find?</p>

<p>Yes, I think it’s a bit cliche’ but there are very few topics adcoms haven’t seen over and over. I think you can use it, but you should think about approaching it from some specific angle or dynamic as a component of your experience rather than the central theme by itself.</p>

<p>Not only being black, but being from Detroit. I haven’t started much of my essays though, but that’ll definitely be my theme.</p>

<p>I too have heard that the diversity essay, as well as the all to frequent mission trip essay, is ‘played out’. There are a ton of black kids in predom. white competitive schools and boarding schools and magnet schools. There is also the essay of the black kid who does not feel that they fit in with the black race. These are frequent, too frequent by some standards, topics. BUT my thought is that it will depend on how you write it. But again, it is not seen as a ‘struggle’ much any more on a grand scale because SO many kids face the aforementioned.</p>

<p>It is tough, but that is the reality.</p>

<p>HSG</p>

<p>There are not “a ton” of black students at PWIs and boarding schools. Not in the slightest (that’s where the “PW” part comes in). </p>

<p>It doesn’t matter if adcoms have seen the topic before. They haven’t seen YOU write it. Everyone’s experience is different, and it’s foolish to assume that everyone writing on the same topic will sound the same</p>

<p>I dunno, I’m recounting a humorous yet racially-charged incident in my school cafeteria, using it as a framework to describe my experience hopping between schools of vastly different racial makeups (all-white to all-black to 50/50), then I’m describing how this constant adjustment and occasional alienation changed my outlook on diversity/acceptance, made me more adaptable, and gave me security in my identity.</p>

<p>It may still have elements of cliche, but it’s a lot better/more personal than the essay I was originally going to go with- How losing an election helped me learn to deal with failure.</p>

<p>Well yeah it’s a cliche topic (if you have to ask you know the answer lol), but just don’t touch on the cliche aspects of it. Try to focus on the most unique parts of your experiences. Writing about a creative topic is less important than how you write it ; however, ime it is easier to do the latter when you have a creative topic lol. Maybe brainstorm some more and see where it takes you, or just get drafting and decide to scrap it later on if need be. GL</p>

<p>CPUscientist3000…over the last 10 years there has been a HUGE boost in the number of black kids are boarding schools. There are programs that specifically work on matching black underpriv. kids with top boarding schools. Add to that the black kids who now are in middle and upper middle class families who are at boarding schools. It simply is not as rare as it was in our parents’ generation. Is it still a struggle? Of course. But it is NOT the same struggle as it was for kids that went in before the recruitment programs were in place, before school truly started seeking diversity, before schools began having programs in place at the school for black students to support them while they are there. Just because the schools are predom. white does NOT mean there are not a lot of blacks. Whites are a larger percentage of the population, a larger percentage of legacies at the schools and a larger percentage of American wealth. But the struggle, for blacks, is NOT the same as it was 10 and 15 years ago as the kids writing the essays are one of MANY in the situation…that is the point I was trying to make. Yes, it can be a GREAT essay, but it is important to be aware that it may not pack the punch it once did because it has been written about a lot. As others said, it just means you have to be aware of that, be creative and personal and KNOW that you can’t come off as ‘This is unique’…because that situation is not unique anymore. A lot of us are walking this walk. But how the walk impacted YOU is what would have to be unique, I would think. HSG</p>

<p>hsgrad what institution do you attend? Just curious. </p>

<p>And I still stick by what I said. Yes there are more blacks at PWIs and boarding schools than before (race isn’t mutually exclusive with “underresourced” or low socioeconomic status, but I’m not talking about poor kids of all races, or poor kids exclusively). That doesn’t mean there are “lots”, which is completely subjective. If you want to prove a point, use some hard numbers to back up your “lots” claims. </p>

<p>As FLVADAD said, there virtually isn’t an essay adcoms haven’t read or heard of. No point in stressing. When you force a “unique” essay, it backfires.</p>

<p>I don’t release, via preference of my parents and for other reasons, any information that can be ‘identifying’ to a significant degree online. Plenty of online safety classes at my school…drilled into us!</p>

<p>Also, I don’t think that our points are mutually exclusive, CPU. I fully agree that there is not an essay adcom that has not been written. I think the point I was trying to make (though not well) is that relative to 10-15 years ago there are ‘lots’ (though perhaps more would be a better term) of blacks in the situations we described. This is a GOOD thing on most levels. But with college essays it perhaps something to be mindful of when writing as we seek to show unique situations.</p>

<p>In the end, the best thing is to write a great essay, have great SAT/ACT scores AND grades…and have solid recommendation. All are easier said then done, of course.</p>

<p>We have to support each other and SHARE information and opinions during this process, and that was what my post intended…to pass on information I found helpful to consider. I appreciate and respect your counter points, CPU and hope that I receive the same.</p>

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African American Essays

Abstract The best-known origin of the phrase “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” A timely title of a book written by Martin Luther King Jr. The prompting for King’s book and the title is apropos for what is needed in education at this date in time. Where …

The message Childish Gambino is saying in ‘’This Is America’’ makes us say that we’ve made progress in fighting racism, gun violence, and oppression. But in reality there is still hatred in this world with no progress.Childish Gambino is saying by the Black America he speaks are concerns of place …

John Quincy Adams, a black man named after the president, was born a slave in Virginia in 1845 (Barnes, ‘The Slave That Reads is the First to Run Away’). Growing up, he was told that he would not always live as a slave, being assured freedom one day by his …

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Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old African American female was walking home from her church in Alabama on September 3, 1944, when she was abducted, assaulted, and raped by six white men in the woods. She was told if she ever spoke of the instance they would track her down and kill …

Is a complete annotation of the black experiences in America. Throughout the article, Riggs bring out the fact that there is no particular explanation for being black. The film narrates that blackness exists in its multiplicities; the film discourages the common belief that African Americans could be categorized and stereotyped …

Nothing great was ever accomplished without making a sacrifice. In the essay “Songs of a Son”, “From the Dark Tower” and A ”Black Man Talks of Reaping” the main focus of these poems is sacrifice. But, sacrifice was not the only problem they faced. They faced hardship in their work …

One could theoretically argue that these examples of were not intended, but alas, what all of these diverse groups still shared was racial conflict with white settlers. What white settlers of this time were certainly motivated to do was to expand their nation. They had to thus be willing to …

Improvements on technology increased efficiency. The shift to steam engines from water power and a shift to electricity using natural resources like coal improved the efficiency of business. Americans focus on improving technology helped the economic and business consolidation. The transcontinental railroad allowed for access to the West which gave …

The “Roaring twenties” was a time when many people defied prohibition, indulged in new styles of dancing and dressing, and rejected many traditional moral standards. The United States had developed a surging economy which created an era of mass consumerism. The almost instant urge to create a life of lavish …

Langston Hughes’s poem, “I, Too,” was written in 1932. Claude McKay wrote, “The White House,” in 1937. The authors are describing how white people treat African-American people back in the Harlem Renaissance, a period in the early 1920s and 1930s, In Langston Hughes, “I, Too,” line three he says, “They …

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Black History Month Essay Contest

About the scholarship.

The Black History Month Essay Contest is open to current 4th-12th grade students from Florida who are planning to attend a 2-year college within the state. Eligible applicants should have an interest in African-American leaders, educators, and public figures from Florida.

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• Election 2024

Students, teachers call on SC education agency to add AP African American Studies to state list

Districts can still offer it at their schools as an honors course, and students can still take the test for college credit, by: skylar laird - june 11, 2024 5:08 pm.

Nacala McDaniels, a 2023 graduate who took AP African American Studies, speaks during a news conference at the Statehouse on Tuesday, June 11, 2024. (Skylar Laird/SC Daily Gazette)

COLUMBIA — Nacala McDaniels was excited when her high school in Richland County started offering Advanced Placement African American Studies in her senior year.

“It seemed as though the school system that was there to support all their students was taking a step in the right direction,” the 2023 graduate said during a news conference Tuesday.

In 2022-23, McDaniels’ high school, Ridge View in Columbia, was the only school in South Carolina picked by the College Board to participate in a national pilot of its new course — among 60 nationwide — ahead of the curriculum’s public release. The pilot was expanded in 2023-24 to 700 schools in 40 states, though it’s unclear how many of those were in South Carolina.

The College Board tweaked the framework in December ahead of its official launch in the coming school year, following accusations from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of a woke curriculum.

But the South Carolina Department of Education opted not to include the new course among its roster of AP classes for 2024-25.

School districts can still choose to offer it on their own as an honors-level course. And students can still take the College Board’s end-of-course AP test to potentially earn college credit. (College credit was not available in the pilot course.)

But the state only covers the cost of the test for AP classes on its list, according to College Board . That means the district or student would need to pay for the test, which costs up to $98 per student.

Deputy Superintendent Matthew Ferguson announced the decision in a June 4 memo to school officials across the state.

“In the years since this pilot began, there has been significant controversy surrounding the course concerning issues directly addressed by South Carolina’s General Assembly,” Ferguson wrote as one reason not to add it to the state list of AP courses.

He’s referring to existing state law that prohibits racist concepts from being taught in K-12 schools and pending legislation Republican leaders contend is supposed to clean up that law and clarify that they don’t want to stifle instruction on the ugly parts of history.

A panel of legislators recently reached a compromise on the chambers’ differing versions of the bill. But the compromise requires supermajority approval in the House and Senate in an upcoming special session to advance to Gov. Henry McMaster’s desk. Otherwise, the effort dies for the year.

Concepts banned from K-12 classrooms since 2021 include any race being superior to another, anyone being responsible for past atrocities because of their race, and that traits such as hard work are oppressive and racist. The bill purposefully left out a line in current law banning lessons that make a student “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his race or sex.”

Besides the ongoing debate, Ferguson said, all of South Carolina’s social studies standards are coming up for their normal review.

“As a result, the (department) has not approved any new statewide social studies courses, instead focusing efforts to ensure future course offerings are aligned both with the soon-to-be-updated standards and state law,” Ferguson wrote.

South Carolina is also not putting AP Pre-Calculus on its AP roster for 2024-25. But it was the decision on AP African American Studies that raised alarms for advocates who saw removing it as a way of erasing Black history from public schools.

“To no longer offer this course is not only insulting to the Black community but also to the students who have a passion for learning,” said McDaniels, an elementary education major at Clemson University.

Advocates say the course does not violate existing law or the pending legislation. Instead, it covers a history of African cultures, slavery, the Civil Rights movement and notable African American figures throughout history.

Deciding not to add the class “implies that the study of African Americans is politically biased and inherently a form of indoctrination,” said Clementine Jordan, a rising sophomore at the University of South Carolina who also took the course at Ridge View High.

However, Ferguson’s memo reads, “there is nothing preventing districts from continuing to offer AP African American Studies as a locally-approved honors course should they choose to do so, in addition to continuing to offer other approved African American courses as districts have already done for a number of years.”

But that’s not enough, said Jennifer Bartell Boykin, a teacher at Spring Valley High School.

Advanced Placement classes allow students to earn college credit while still in high school, if they pass the end-of-course test with a high enough score, which can save them time and money in pursuing their degree, Bartell Boykin said.

“That is unacceptable, since it degrades the class from its original purpose of offering students the college-level instruction that AP courses provide,” Bartell Boykin said.

Last year, the scores on about two-thirds of AP exams taken by students in South Carolina were high enough to earn college credit.

AP courses also help boost grade point averages for students competing for class rankings.

While honors classes are weighted more heavily than other classes in calculating a student’s GPA, AP courses are weighted on an even higher scale. High-achieving students might opt to take another AP class instead of a lower-level African American history course to maintain their GPA lead, said Biana Woodard, who teaches history at Midland Valley High School.

The education agency “maintains its unwavering commitment to teaching the factual historical experience of African Americans to our students. We will continue to proactively seek ways to highlight the innumerable contributions black South Carolinians have made to our state, our nation, and the world,” Ferguson said in the memo, which pointed to programs such as an essay contest focused on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Programs like that cannot replace what students learned in the AP African American Studies class, advocates said. The class goes deeper on topics not covered in typical U.S. History classes but are important for people of all races to know, said Rep. Jermaine Johnson.

“We must teach the truth, because if they remove this from one class, they are effectively whitewashing history,” the Hopkins Democrat said.

Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected to reflect that South Carolina students will still be able to take the College Board’s AP African American Studies end-of-course test for college credit.  

Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website. AP and Getty images may not be republished. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of any other photos and graphics.

Skylar Laird

Skylar Laird covers the South Carolina Legislature and criminal justice issues. Originally from Missouri, she previously worked for The Post and Courier’s Columbia bureau.

SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom , the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Persuasion — The Power of Persuasion: An Analysis of “The Great Debaters”

The Power of Persuasion: an Analysis of "The Great Debaters"

• Categories: Persuasion The Great Debaters

About this sample

Words: 639 |

Published: Jun 13, 2024

Words: 639 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, body paragraph 1: the power of education, body paragraph 2: the struggle against racial injustice, body paragraph 3: debate as a tool for social change.

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2023-24 Guidance for Artificial Intelligence Tools and Other Services

Ap african american studies policy.

Generative AI tools must be used ethically, responsibly, and intentionally to support student learning, not to bypass it. Accordingly, the AP African American Studies Individual Student Project must be the student’s own work. While students are permitted to use generative AI tools consistent with this policy, their use is optional and not mandatory.  

Students can use generative AI tools as optional aids for exploration of potential topics of inquiry, initial searches for sources of information, confirming their understanding of a complex text, or checking their writing for grammar and tone. However, students must read primary and secondary sources directly, perform their own analysis and synthesis of evidence, and make their own choices on how to communicate effectively in their presentations. It remains the student’s responsibility to engage deeply with credible, valid sources and integrate diverse perspectives when working on the project.  

AP Art and Design Policy

The use of artificial intelligence tools by AP Art and Design students is categorically prohibited at any stage of the creative process. 

AP Capstone Policy

Generative AI tools must be used ethically, responsibly, and intentionally to support student learning, not to bypass it. Accordingly, all performance tasks submitted in AP Seminar and AP Research must be the student’s own work. While students are permitted to use generative AI tools consistent with this policy, their use is optional and not mandatory. 

Students can use generative AI tools as optional aids for exploration of potential topics of inquiry, initial searches for sources of information, confirming their understanding of a complex text, or checking their writing for grammar and tone. However, students must read primary and secondary sources directly, perform their own analysis and synthesis of evidence, and make their own choices on how to communicate effectively both in their writing and presentations. It remains the student’s responsibility to engage deeply with credible, valid sources and integrate diverse perspectives when working on the performance tasks. Students must complete interim “checkpoints” with their teacher to demonstrate genuine engagement with the tasks.   

Required Checkpoints and Attestations   for AP Capstone

To ensure students are not using generative AI to bypass work, students must complete interim checkpoints with their teacher to demonstrate genuine engagement with the tasks. AP Seminar and AP Research students will need to complete the relevant checkpoints successfully to receive a score for their performance tasks. Teachers must attest, to the best of their knowledge, that students completed the checkpoints authentically. Failure to complete the checkpoints will result in a score of 0 on the associated task.  

In AP Seminar, teachers assess the authenticity of student work based on checkpoints that take the form of short conversations with students during which students make their thinking and decision-making visible (similar to an oral defense). These checkpoints should occur during the sources and research phase (IRR and IWA), and argument outline phase (IWA only). A final validation checkpoint (IRR and IWA) requires teachers to confirm the student’s final submission is, to the best of their knowledge, authentic student work. 

In AP Research, students must complete checkpoints in the form of in-progress meetings and work in the Process and Reflection Portfolio (PREP). No further checkpoints will be required. 

College Board reserves the right to investigate submissions where there is evidence of the inappropriate use of generative AI as an academic integrity violation and request from students copies of their interim work for review.  

Please see the AP Seminar and AP Research course and exam descriptions (CEDs) for the current policy on AI and other tools along with guidance on administering mandatory checkpoints.

AP Computer Science Principles Policy

AP Computer Science Principles students are permitted to utilize generative AI tools as supplementary resources for understanding coding principles, assisting in code development, and debugging. This responsible use aligns with current guidelines for peer collaboration on developing code.    

Students should be aware that generative AI tools can produce incomplete code, code that creates or introduces biases, code with errors, inefficiencies in how the code executes, or code complexities that make it difficult to understand and therefore explain the code. It is the student’s responsibility to review and understand any code co-written with AI tools, ensuring its functionality. Additionally, students must be prepared to explain their code in detail, as required on the end-of-course exam. 

Two of Seven German National Honor Society Winners Hail from Montclair

Posted in: Homepage News and Events , World Languages and Cultures

Montclair’s German program has had an active chapter of the Delta Phi Alpha national German Honor Society since 2019 and has been recognized as a German Center of Excellence by the American Association of Teachers of German since 2020.

This spring, two students received additional recognition when they were among the seven winners selected nationally to win a $500 scholarship based on essays they wrote in German for the inaugural Delta Phi Alpha National Award for Undergraduate Students of German.

Sidney Berger (German and Linguistics double major) and Ath-Yah Brathwaite (German and Psychology double major, ‘24) each took advantage of this opportunity to flex their German skills, writing an original essay without any outside assistance about the relevance of German in their lives and in the world today.

Berger says of his essay, “This essay was a great opportunity for me to retrace my steps in both the German program and in my overall university studies. My original enrollment in German 101 helped me realize my passion for language as a whole, which I aimed to describe through this essay. I hope to continue using German in academic writing and as a future teacher of it and English.”

Bathwaite says of her essay, “My experiences traveling abroad, studying the culture, and taking class in German studies helped me write this essay. I wanted to showcase the culmination of my work ethic and personal development. I enjoy scholarly writing opportunities like this that highlight the great benefits and possibilities that come with studying a language.”

German Professor Pascale LaFountain notes, “I am so proud of our students for winning this. They have worked very hard in class, in co-curricular activities, and on study abroad programs to gain this level of fluency, and the scholarship will make their next endeavors all the more feasible.

Brathwaite, who graduated in May and received the Dean’s Student Recognition award for graduating seniors from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, plans to apply to graduate school for German Studies, become a German professor, and create learning programs that promote diversity and inclusion; Berger anticipates two more years at Montclair to complete certification in teaching English as a second language, hoping to one day take on a position in a European international school that will enable him to move between North American and European educational settings.

These students were recognized at an end-of-semester awards ceremony, which also named Avelisse Guzman as winner of a $5000 Schmitt Scholarship and Larissa Dauman as winner of the $1000 Vogel Scholarship, and again, Sidney Berger as winner of the $1500 Falk-Romaine scholarship for outstanding achievements as a German major.

Additional winners in the German program include:

• Flavia Hidalgo , who won a $1500 Soar scholarship for summer study in Munich.
• Jack Nardone, Mia Cortijo, Olivia Polverari, Bryan Horna, Jason Kleinschmidt, George McComas , and Leysel Romero , who each won a $1500 Kade scholarship for summer study in Munich.
• Stephanie Zirkenbach , who won a Graz Sister City Scholarship for a fully funded study abroad year in Austria.
• Bianca Isabella Zárate González , who won a full scholarship for the Middlebury Summer School as well as a Graz Sister City Scholarship full ride to study in Austria for a year.
• Lirena Engelsbel (‘23), who won a scholarship for the Sommerakademie Goethe Institut
• Alli Kodila (‘24), who won a Fulbright Austria Teaching Assistantship to teach in Austria for a year.

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Washington College’ Starr Center Begins Planning Public Artwork Commemorating African American History in Chesapeake Tidewater Region

June 13, 2024 by Washington College News Service Leave a Comment

The planning grant will fund a wide array of activities open to the public, including regional bus tours, public presentations by experts in art and African American history, and community forums. These events will ensure that all interested members of the local community will have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the process of commissioning the artwork. The artwork will be installed outside the historic  Custom House  in Chestertown, MD, near the bank of the Chester River.

The project grows out of  Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project,  a restorative community curation initiative launched by the Starr Center in 2020 that chronicles the region’s Black history in collaboration with the  Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture  and a coalition of community groups. Situating the Chesapeake Bay watershed as a national heartland of African American history and culture, Chesapeake Heartland has digitized more than 5,000 documents, images, artifacts, and recordings spanning almost 400 years; provided grants and internships to dozens of artists, researchers, and writers; and hosted over 200 public programs.  The archives are free to view online.

In addition to the initial PAAM planning support, the Town of Chestertown has awarded $5,000 to the effort and Washington College’s Department of Art & Art History has given $3,000—totaling $18,000 towards stakeholder engagement for the initial planning effort.

This project will continue to strengthen Chestertown’s commitment to public art. Starting with a National Endowment for the Arts-funded master plan adopted by the Town Council in 2014, Chestertown has increased its public art through commissioned artworks and the donation of the Woicke Collection, a group of 24 contemporary sculptures.

A public artwork along Chestertown’s waterfront is envisioned by both the Master Plan and the Chestertown Unites Against Racism framework adopted in 2020, which called specifically for a work along the Chester River addressing African American history.

“An artwork of remembrance such as this needs to be pursued with great care and wide community engagement from its inception. We are developing a highly inclusive planning process working with stakeholders across the Upper Shore, the Delmarva Peninsula, and the College to identify and articulate the scope and goals of the effort,” said Jaelon T. Moaney, deputy director of the Starr Center and project lead. “The African diasporic history and culture unique to the Chesapeake region is sacred, and it is our intention to engage these enduring legacies with respect.”

Beginning in fall 2024, regional bus tours will engage with aligned works of public art from Philadelphia to Annapolis and across Maryland’s Eastern Shore to build community with the visionaries involved in their creation and continuing use. Registration will be required to join due to space limitations.

Additionally, during winter 2024 and early 2025, the Starr Center will host a series of public presentations and discussions with experts in contemporary public art, art history, and the stewardship of cultural heritage and historic resources to provide space for a deeper understanding of the full range of possibilities for the project.  Brent Leggs , African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund executive director and senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, will launch the series on Monday, November 4. Time and location to be announced.  Those interested in joining the bus tours and public meetings should  sign up for the Starr Center’s newsletter  to receive notifications and sign up for more details before each event.

Next spring, the Starr Center will also host community forums to provide space for facilitated public discussion, exploring the current understanding of the regional African American experience and how a public artwork might address intergenerational memory making.

Focal to the process has been convening a 10-person planning committee with diverse disciplinary and geographic representation to inform each phase. Members of the planning committee include: Jana Carter, Charles Sumner Post #25, Grand Army of the Republic; Prof. Arlisha Norwood, University of Maryland Eastern Shore; Kate Dowd, Chestertown Public Arts Committee; Christalyn Gradison; Prof. Ada Pinkston, Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture; Vince Leggett, Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation, Inc.; Matt Kenyatta, University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design; Ashley Chenault, Maryland Tourism Development Board; DeLia Shoge, Kent County Public Schools; and Jason Patterson, Washington College.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

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