whiteness studies
Jun. 21st, 2003 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mercifulserpentOrginal Article here:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/928992.asp?0cv=CB20
Hue and cry on `whiteness studies' classes
By Darryl Fears
THE WASHINGTON POST
AMHERST, Mass. — Naomi Cairns was among the leaders in the privilege
walk, and she wasn't happy about it. The exercise, which recently
involved Cairns and her classmates in a course at the University of
Massachusetts, had two simple rules: When the moderator read a
statement that applied to you, you stepped forward; if it didn't, you
stepped back. After the moderator asked if you were certain you could
get a bank loan whenever you wanted, Cairns thought, "Oh my God, here
we go again," and took yet another step forward.
"YOU LOOKED BEHIND YOU and became really uncomfortable," said Cairns,
a 24-year-old junior who stood at the front of the classroom with
other white students. Asian and black students she admired were near
the back. "We all started together," she said, "and now were so
separated."
The privilege walk was part of a course in whiteness studies, a
controversial and relatively new academic field that seeks to change
how white people think about race. The field is based on a left-
leaning interpretation of history by scholars who say the concept of
race was created by a rich white European and American elite, and has
been used to deny property, power and status to nonwhite groups for
two centuries.
Advocates of whiteness studies — most of whom are white liberals who
hope to dismantle notions of race — believe that white Americans are
so accustomed to being part of a privileged majority they do not see
themselves as part of a race.
"Historically, it has been common to see whites as a people who don't
have a race, to see racial identity as something others have," said
Howard Winant, a white professor of sociology at the University of
California at Santa Barbara and a strong proponent of whiteness
studies. "It's a great advance to start looking at whiteness as a
group."
Winant said whiteness studies advocates must be careful not to paint
white heritage with a broad brush, or stray from the historical
record. Generalizations, he said, will only demonize whiteness.
LEFT GONE OUT OF CONTROL?
But opponents say whiteness studies has already done that. David
Horowitz, a conservative social critic who is white, said whiteness
studies is leftist philosophy spiraling out of control. "Black
studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos,
women's studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white
people as evil," Horowitz said.
"It's so evil that one author has called for the abolition of
whiteness," he said. "I have read their books, and it's just
despicable."
Whiteness studies, said Matthew Spalding, is "a derogatory name for
Western civilization." Its study is important only to those who
think "black studies and Chicano studies haven't gone far enough in
removing the baggage of Anglo-European traditions," said Spalding,
director of the Center for American Studies at the Heritage
Foundation.
"The notion that you can get rid of a historical tradition as a way
to further current . . . concerns strikes me as intellectually
misleading," Spalding said. "It makes certain assumptions and looks
for certain outcomes. It's close-minded."
A PIVOTAL TIME
Whiteness studies can be traced to the writings of black
intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin, but the field
did not coalesce until liberal white scholars embraced it about eight
years ago, according to some who helped shape it.
Now, despite widespread criticism and what some opponents view as
major flaws in the curriculum, at least 30 institutions — from
Princeton University to the University of California at Los Angeles —
teach courses in whiteness studies.
The courses are emerging at a pivotal time. Scientists have
determined that there is scant genetic distinction between races, and
the 2000 Census allowed residents to define themselves by multiple
racial categories for the first time. Dozens of books, such as "The
Invention of the White Race," "How the Irish Became White"
and "Memoir of a Race Traitor," are standard reading for people who
study whiteness. Recently the Public Broadcasting System aired a
documentary titled "Race: The Power of an Illusion."
"If you ask 10 people what is race, you're likely to get 10 different
answers," said Larry Adelman, who conceived, produced and co-directed
that documentary. "How many races would there be? Where did the idea
come from?"
At U-Mass., those questions and others were raised in "The Social
Construction of Whiteness and Women," one of two whiteness studies
courses Cairns took last semester.
READ AND DISCUSS
The students, about three-quarters of them white, slid into desks and
unloaded giant book-bags, which were stuffed with required reading.
The books included Theodore Allen's "The Invention of the White Race:
Racial Oppression and Social Control," which argues, in part, that
the collection of European immigrants into a white race was a
political act to control the country.
Arlene Avakian, the chair of the U-Mass. women's studies department,
sat on a wide desk, let her legs dangle and asked the class to
discuss the ideas of racial privilege, environmental comfort and
social control. Not all of her students had taken part in the
privilege walk — it was conducted in another course — but many of
them had.
Winnie Chen, 22, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, said it pained
her to deal with race every day when her white peers seemed to rarely
think about it. She tried to discuss race with a white friend once,
she said, but he felt ambushed.
"He said I was pulling a Pearl Harbor on him," she said. "It is so
difficult for them to think there is another lens. He talked about
Irish oppression. I asked, `Have you ever considered why you're no
longer oppressed here when Asians, blacks and Hispanics still are?' "
A white student raised her hand and said she and a friend had gone to
a hall reserved for black student affairs, and the friend said she
didn't feel comfortable.
Brandi-Ann Andrade, a 21-year-old junior who is black, rolled her
eyes. "So what?" she asked. "I never feel comfortable here. I'm a
student at a school where most people are white. The only time I feel
comfortable is when I'm at home."
Dan Clason-Hook, 24, a white senior, said, "White students would
never say that we own the campus, but [whites] feel they do."
COMFORTABLE IN THEIR SKIN
The desire to always feel comfortable in their skin is something
white people feel entitled to, said Avakian, who is white. The
dominant group wants to control its environment, to own it. The
students listened without objection, but they don't always. Avakian
said two students in an earlier semester had challenged her,
questioning why she taught the course. After some discussion, Avakian
recalled, they concluded her reason was white guilt.
Avakian dismissed that conclusion. "It's the suppressed history I'm
interested in teaching," she said. "White people can't know ourselves
and our country without knowing this history."
Although whiteness studies teachers adopt different approaches for
different courses, they draw on the same reading of history.
That reading traces the invention of race to the time and social
class of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the late 18th century not
only that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of
Independence, but also this, from his "Notes on the State of
Virginia":
"I advance it, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether
originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and
circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of
body and mind."
From such sentiments, whiteness studies advocates say, race was
invented, and the idea of white superiority was crucial to justifying
slavery and, later, the dispossession of Native Americans, Hispanics
and Asians.
"Jefferson believed in majority rule, but what majority was he in?"
said historian James O. Horton of George Washington University. "He
wasn't in the majority in terms of gender. He wasn't in the majority
in terms of class. The only majority he was in was race."
SOMETHING HAPPENED
Horton said poor white workers often joined black slaves and freemen
in popular rebellion in the 18th century. For example, he said,
Crispus Attucks, a black man, was among the first to die when an
interracial mob confronted British soldiers in the "Boston Massacre,"
five years before the American Revolution started.
But something happened between that time and Andrew Jackson's
presidency in 1828, Horton said. "Property laws were struck down,
allowing white people at the bottom of society to vote based on race
in 1807. At the same time that was done, race laws were put into its
place.
"There is this constant message hammered at poor white people,"
Horton said. "You may be poor, you may have miserable lives right
now, but . . . the thing we want you to focus on is the fact that you
are white."
In the 19th and 20th centuries, "race science" was used by Supreme
Court justices to deny rights, property and citizenship to various
Asian immigrants.
In the housing boom that followed World War II, black veterans were
denied new federally backed mortgages that helped build white suburbs.
Avakian said that if American history curriculums "told that story,
this would be a different country."
"Slavery and genocide coexist with democracy and freedom," she said,
and that's what whiteness studies teaches. "President Andrew Jackson
presided during the mass murder of Indians. If we knew in detail how
slavery existed alongside freedom, we would have to change the
national narrative."
AFTER CLASS
Winnie Chen said Avakian's course made her more aware of how the
sense of belonging corresponds to skin color. "I would never not
choose to be someone's friend because they are white, but I think
it's important to have friends of color," she said.
Jya Plavin, a 20-year-old sophomore who is white, said the
course "was really, really hard . . . both personally and as a white
person, because you really want to take the focus off you and your
whiteness."
Clason-Hook said that the class was the only one he knew of that
explicitly spoke of whiteness, and that it helped him realize
that "other classes, like economics, politics and history, are about
whiteness. They are written by and are about white people."
He said later that confronting whiteness, day to day, is
challenging. "I am racist. It's not on the surface, but it's in me.
Day to day I hear racist comments, and people don't even know what
they're saying."
Brandi-Ann Andrade said she thought "the class was beneficial,
because it brings to light that white people too are racialized."
Thinking back on the class discussion a few days later, Andrade
wondered: "In a culture that puts whiteness on top, what is
blackness? When you look at whiteness, blackness is always in the
negative."
Naomi Cairns, who had sailed through the privilege walk, said
whiteness studies had helped her understand race a little better. "My
social group has always been white," she said. "I've noticed that,
and I've started to look beyond my group."
http://www.msnbc.com/news/928992.asp?0cv=CB20
Hue and cry on `whiteness studies' classes
By Darryl Fears
THE WASHINGTON POST
AMHERST, Mass. — Naomi Cairns was among the leaders in the privilege
walk, and she wasn't happy about it. The exercise, which recently
involved Cairns and her classmates in a course at the University of
Massachusetts, had two simple rules: When the moderator read a
statement that applied to you, you stepped forward; if it didn't, you
stepped back. After the moderator asked if you were certain you could
get a bank loan whenever you wanted, Cairns thought, "Oh my God, here
we go again," and took yet another step forward.
"YOU LOOKED BEHIND YOU and became really uncomfortable," said Cairns,
a 24-year-old junior who stood at the front of the classroom with
other white students. Asian and black students she admired were near
the back. "We all started together," she said, "and now were so
separated."
The privilege walk was part of a course in whiteness studies, a
controversial and relatively new academic field that seeks to change
how white people think about race. The field is based on a left-
leaning interpretation of history by scholars who say the concept of
race was created by a rich white European and American elite, and has
been used to deny property, power and status to nonwhite groups for
two centuries.
Advocates of whiteness studies — most of whom are white liberals who
hope to dismantle notions of race — believe that white Americans are
so accustomed to being part of a privileged majority they do not see
themselves as part of a race.
"Historically, it has been common to see whites as a people who don't
have a race, to see racial identity as something others have," said
Howard Winant, a white professor of sociology at the University of
California at Santa Barbara and a strong proponent of whiteness
studies. "It's a great advance to start looking at whiteness as a
group."
Winant said whiteness studies advocates must be careful not to paint
white heritage with a broad brush, or stray from the historical
record. Generalizations, he said, will only demonize whiteness.
LEFT GONE OUT OF CONTROL?
But opponents say whiteness studies has already done that. David
Horowitz, a conservative social critic who is white, said whiteness
studies is leftist philosophy spiraling out of control. "Black
studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos,
women's studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white
people as evil," Horowitz said.
"It's so evil that one author has called for the abolition of
whiteness," he said. "I have read their books, and it's just
despicable."
Whiteness studies, said Matthew Spalding, is "a derogatory name for
Western civilization." Its study is important only to those who
think "black studies and Chicano studies haven't gone far enough in
removing the baggage of Anglo-European traditions," said Spalding,
director of the Center for American Studies at the Heritage
Foundation.
"The notion that you can get rid of a historical tradition as a way
to further current . . . concerns strikes me as intellectually
misleading," Spalding said. "It makes certain assumptions and looks
for certain outcomes. It's close-minded."
A PIVOTAL TIME
Whiteness studies can be traced to the writings of black
intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin, but the field
did not coalesce until liberal white scholars embraced it about eight
years ago, according to some who helped shape it.
Now, despite widespread criticism and what some opponents view as
major flaws in the curriculum, at least 30 institutions — from
Princeton University to the University of California at Los Angeles —
teach courses in whiteness studies.
The courses are emerging at a pivotal time. Scientists have
determined that there is scant genetic distinction between races, and
the 2000 Census allowed residents to define themselves by multiple
racial categories for the first time. Dozens of books, such as "The
Invention of the White Race," "How the Irish Became White"
and "Memoir of a Race Traitor," are standard reading for people who
study whiteness. Recently the Public Broadcasting System aired a
documentary titled "Race: The Power of an Illusion."
"If you ask 10 people what is race, you're likely to get 10 different
answers," said Larry Adelman, who conceived, produced and co-directed
that documentary. "How many races would there be? Where did the idea
come from?"
At U-Mass., those questions and others were raised in "The Social
Construction of Whiteness and Women," one of two whiteness studies
courses Cairns took last semester.
READ AND DISCUSS
The students, about three-quarters of them white, slid into desks and
unloaded giant book-bags, which were stuffed with required reading.
The books included Theodore Allen's "The Invention of the White Race:
Racial Oppression and Social Control," which argues, in part, that
the collection of European immigrants into a white race was a
political act to control the country.
Arlene Avakian, the chair of the U-Mass. women's studies department,
sat on a wide desk, let her legs dangle and asked the class to
discuss the ideas of racial privilege, environmental comfort and
social control. Not all of her students had taken part in the
privilege walk — it was conducted in another course — but many of
them had.
Winnie Chen, 22, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, said it pained
her to deal with race every day when her white peers seemed to rarely
think about it. She tried to discuss race with a white friend once,
she said, but he felt ambushed.
"He said I was pulling a Pearl Harbor on him," she said. "It is so
difficult for them to think there is another lens. He talked about
Irish oppression. I asked, `Have you ever considered why you're no
longer oppressed here when Asians, blacks and Hispanics still are?' "
A white student raised her hand and said she and a friend had gone to
a hall reserved for black student affairs, and the friend said she
didn't feel comfortable.
Brandi-Ann Andrade, a 21-year-old junior who is black, rolled her
eyes. "So what?" she asked. "I never feel comfortable here. I'm a
student at a school where most people are white. The only time I feel
comfortable is when I'm at home."
Dan Clason-Hook, 24, a white senior, said, "White students would
never say that we own the campus, but [whites] feel they do."
COMFORTABLE IN THEIR SKIN
The desire to always feel comfortable in their skin is something
white people feel entitled to, said Avakian, who is white. The
dominant group wants to control its environment, to own it. The
students listened without objection, but they don't always. Avakian
said two students in an earlier semester had challenged her,
questioning why she taught the course. After some discussion, Avakian
recalled, they concluded her reason was white guilt.
Avakian dismissed that conclusion. "It's the suppressed history I'm
interested in teaching," she said. "White people can't know ourselves
and our country without knowing this history."
Although whiteness studies teachers adopt different approaches for
different courses, they draw on the same reading of history.
That reading traces the invention of race to the time and social
class of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the late 18th century not
only that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of
Independence, but also this, from his "Notes on the State of
Virginia":
"I advance it, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether
originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and
circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of
body and mind."
From such sentiments, whiteness studies advocates say, race was
invented, and the idea of white superiority was crucial to justifying
slavery and, later, the dispossession of Native Americans, Hispanics
and Asians.
"Jefferson believed in majority rule, but what majority was he in?"
said historian James O. Horton of George Washington University. "He
wasn't in the majority in terms of gender. He wasn't in the majority
in terms of class. The only majority he was in was race."
SOMETHING HAPPENED
Horton said poor white workers often joined black slaves and freemen
in popular rebellion in the 18th century. For example, he said,
Crispus Attucks, a black man, was among the first to die when an
interracial mob confronted British soldiers in the "Boston Massacre,"
five years before the American Revolution started.
But something happened between that time and Andrew Jackson's
presidency in 1828, Horton said. "Property laws were struck down,
allowing white people at the bottom of society to vote based on race
in 1807. At the same time that was done, race laws were put into its
place.
"There is this constant message hammered at poor white people,"
Horton said. "You may be poor, you may have miserable lives right
now, but . . . the thing we want you to focus on is the fact that you
are white."
In the 19th and 20th centuries, "race science" was used by Supreme
Court justices to deny rights, property and citizenship to various
Asian immigrants.
In the housing boom that followed World War II, black veterans were
denied new federally backed mortgages that helped build white suburbs.
Avakian said that if American history curriculums "told that story,
this would be a different country."
"Slavery and genocide coexist with democracy and freedom," she said,
and that's what whiteness studies teaches. "President Andrew Jackson
presided during the mass murder of Indians. If we knew in detail how
slavery existed alongside freedom, we would have to change the
national narrative."
AFTER CLASS
Winnie Chen said Avakian's course made her more aware of how the
sense of belonging corresponds to skin color. "I would never not
choose to be someone's friend because they are white, but I think
it's important to have friends of color," she said.
Jya Plavin, a 20-year-old sophomore who is white, said the
course "was really, really hard . . . both personally and as a white
person, because you really want to take the focus off you and your
whiteness."
Clason-Hook said that the class was the only one he knew of that
explicitly spoke of whiteness, and that it helped him realize
that "other classes, like economics, politics and history, are about
whiteness. They are written by and are about white people."
He said later that confronting whiteness, day to day, is
challenging. "I am racist. It's not on the surface, but it's in me.
Day to day I hear racist comments, and people don't even know what
they're saying."
Brandi-Ann Andrade said she thought "the class was beneficial,
because it brings to light that white people too are racialized."
Thinking back on the class discussion a few days later, Andrade
wondered: "In a culture that puts whiteness on top, what is
blackness? When you look at whiteness, blackness is always in the
negative."
Naomi Cairns, who had sailed through the privilege walk, said
whiteness studies had helped her understand race a little better. "My
social group has always been white," she said. "I've noticed that,
and I've started to look beyond my group."
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no subject
Date: 2003-06-21 09:17 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-06-21 09:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-21 12:12 pm (UTC)My concern is picking any racial term and associating it with an almost exclusively negative body of study. I don't disagree with the imporatance of what is being studied, I just question the acuracy and the honesty of what they are labeling it. Again, going only by the information in the article.
The other thought that occurs to me is that I would feel perfectly comfortable making "Human Relatons 101" a mandatory elective. I would not feel the same about an "Introduction to Whiteness" mandatory for everyone that checked white on their application.
Re:
Date: 2003-06-21 02:28 pm (UTC)i didn't see the part of the article that suggested have an intro to whiteness class as a mandatory thing. however, i think that it might be a good idea to have such a class as a requirement for white students choosing to major in afro am or latin am studies... how can you dissect/deal with another's race until you've critically examined your own?
no subject
Date: 2003-06-21 03:27 pm (UTC)What I took from the article was the implication that most white students need to be taught what it means to be white because of their ignorance of what race means from other perspectives.
I dislike the idea of dividing studies by race or nationality. Ideas seem much more suited to be interwoven into the study of history, society, and culture. Not having the information there and having in its own line of study is to me taking it out of context.
Your question about when to study your own race raises an interesting question. I have often found that the study of that which is not me leads me down paths of thought that eventually lead back to that which is me, and in doing so allows me to go deeper than if I had started with me and then moved on to that which is not me. (I apologize for the wordiness of that last terrible sentence, it was the only way I could find to express the thought in my head. I hope it makes sense.) An example I suppose being that I am a tremendous reader of fiction and many times in thinking about the life of a fictional character I am led to examine myself more deeply. I owe at least part of my sobriety to several sober fictional characters.
ASIDE ONE: I believe that humanity's purpose in the universe is to evolve spiritually and socially. A huge part of that is learning how to honor, respect, care for, and love each other. It is something that I try to get a little better at each day I am alive. Sometimes I am successful, sometimes I am not.
ASIDE TWO: Thanks for the intelligent and stimulating conversation. My mind needed it this afternoon.
Re:
Date: 2003-06-21 04:13 pm (UTC)having you taken a latin am, asian am, or afro am course? all three are very careful about establishing a sociohistorical context. they just deal with topics that conventional conservative history courses aren't able to deal with in detail. think of it like this: history as a major is an overview. latin am, afro am, asian am, classics, italian, spanish, etc etc all are more spec majors, going into a particular aspect of history in more elaborate detail.
:) it's my pleasure.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-21 04:42 pm (UTC)My biggest complaint about my education is that I think in going to such a large school, with its particular culture, I was to some extent overlooked by people that could have helped me. Something that might not have happened at a smaller college. All the mistakes were mine, but I wish someone had tried harder to point them out. I did not have a well balanced college experience and my ideas of solving that for new students might indeed be a little hamfisted.