Understanding Your Assignment
Before you begin looking for information you should make sure you understand your assignment. Some good questions are:
Your professor is your best resource to answer these questions.
Writing an argumenative paper on a controversial issue requires that you look at both sides of an issue and take a position on one side or the other. You not only take a stand on an issue, but you must defend it against opposing points of view. Therefore, your argumentative research paper will involve advocacy and persuasion.
What to do:
Breaking Down The Research Process
The following outline gives a simple and effective strategy for finding information for a research paper and documenting the sources you find. Depending on your topic and your familiarity with the library, you may need to rearrange or recycle these steps. Adapt this outline to your needs. We are ready to help you at every step in your research.
Need Help 
The Cerritos College Librarians can help you with your research in a variety of ways:
Librarians are available during library hours to answer your questions by phone or chat.
(562) 860-2451 x2425
In this final unit of our course we have studied the myth of race and the roots of structural racism in America.
In Robin Diangelo's White Fragility we read about how the struggle for African American racial equality is often undermined by those who would rather ignore historical truths in order to propagate a system that works to their advantage.
We have also studied the history of racism and xenophobia in creating what Holtzman and Sharpe argue is, ”our history, [where] there have been an untold number of assaults on the humanness of people of color in the interest of white hegemony”(p.638).
Coates argues that “America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complimentary” (p.616), which ultimately, he says is the way that America built the “economic foundation for it’s great experiment in democracy” (p. 619).
Hill continues the exploration of injustices against African Americans and argues that the violence being done to African Americans is “state-sanctioned” and that the murder of so many African American men and women happens because “they belong to a disposable class for which one of strongest correlates is being Black” (p.665), and the devastating consequences of “fragmenting” our communities in the name of neo-liberalism.
Finally, we have heard from our peers concerning their own experiences with learning about the history of race in America.
Reflect upon these readings and the videos you watched and and do research on the current struggle for racial equality in the US including: the U.S. government’s response to racial inequality, law enforcement agencies, the role of the media in reporting on race, our politicians in discussing and creating pathways to economic and social equity, our nation’s past, and lastly the struggles of African American’s living in the US to write a thesis driven essay responding to the following prompt:
Make an argument for how we as a nation can move forward in the current climate of race relations, and what we should do to curb racial inequality and injustice in our society.