AAS 2224

This is an awesome class. Professor Shutt is really nice and its an engaging class with interesting material. You do have to do the readings/watch the movies because there is a reading quiz every week and they count for 25% of your grade. If you watch the movies, you'll get an easy A in this section but you will fail all the reading quizzes if you try to just read summaries. The films are actually interesting so it's not bad. Highly recommend this course

To say this class was a disappointment would be an understatement. Professor Shutt constantly refuses to understand her Black students’ views on the media she teaches. She frequently attempts to correct them and explains the way she thinks the media should be interpreted. She has said the n-word (and has done so multiple times in other semesters) and though she appeared to try to be better, she has ultimately refused to be accountable. She also used her class as a captive audience virtually every time we met, playing extremely racist films/clips like Birth of a Nation and Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat with no warning and then forcing us to talk about them, only to deny her Black students’ opinions. A significant portion of our syllabus seemed to consist of violent trauma porn and Black pain, and sometimes full or nearly full class periods were dedicated to showing it. She would often cite real life examples when discussing racism in media - which is not a problem in itself, except for the way she went about it. For example, regarding the accusations against Fairfax: she told us repeatedly that they could be fake, given the history of false accusations against Black men - and completely ignoring that his accuser was a Black woman and denying the entirely separate history this involves, and deliberately ignoring how Black women are frequent victims of abuse and rarely believed. She additionally said that women were the primary perpetuators of the patriarchy, further demonstrating a complete lack of understating of history and power structures. Her analyses of the examined media were superficial at best, rarely going beyond simply stating that something is racist or harmful. Her own engagement with the material is, ironically, done through a painfully white lens, and she affords a startlingly amount of sympathy to the creators of this media. Perhaps even more disturbingly, Professor Shutt is not only a white AAS professor, but has also held a high-level position at the Carter G. Woodson Institute - a fact which students have criticized given her consistently racist behavior. It is worrisome to know that a white professor can maintain such positions and yet fail so horrendously in understanding the very media she teaches. Her anonymous feedback was turned off on Collab, leaving no room for students who felt concerned or unsafe to talk in person or by email to discuss these issues.

It is telling that Lisa Shutt can continue this behavior as an AAS professor and work with the Carter G. Woodson Institute, and yet two Black professors cannot get tenure.