MOVING OUR MINDS: STUDYING WOMEN OF COLOR AND RECONSTRUCTING SOCIOLOGY.

The article presents information on sociology. In a recent essay, "Notes of a Barnard Dropout," the black poet and writer June Jordan evocatively recalls her undergraduate education in sociology. She remembers professor Samuel Barber telling his class that if you really assimilated the perspectives and assumptions of sociology, you could never be bored. Sociology, Jordan says, gave her a new way to think about everything. Her essay reveals the promise of sociological thinking but also discloses the perils of an educational curriculum in which the voices of women and especially women of color, are silenced. It is imperative to make the sociology curriculum more inclusive of women of color, because (as Jordan says) unless we do so we will not alter the racism and sexism that permeate our lives. This paper stems from feminist scholarship on transformation of the curriculum through women's studies. This literature documents the marginality of women across the disciplines and suggests revisions in the content of teaching, based on the new scholarship on women.