What are the ethics of ethnic studies and theoretical underpinnings of critical ethnic studies? We will examine some of the most significant critical debates in US literature: authenticity concerns, interracial relations, women of color feminism, queer of color critique, and new materialisms. Some important guiding frameworks are the cold war impact on civil rights and American studies; the establishment of cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, and ethnic studies in our political landscape and higher education; and finally, the theoretical and historical gender, sexual and racial formations of the “posts”-- post-civil rights, post-9/11, and post-racial eras. Throughout, we will map the demands of US empire in its turn-of the nineteenth-century, cold war, and contemporary eras and the ethical and theoretical projects developing within comparative race, critical ethnic, feminist, and queer studies.