Whiteness Studies / “White Privilege”

Whiteness Studies / “White Privilege”

Overview


The Left’s candid, proud, and unfiltered contempt for all things white serves as the foundation for the rapidly growing academic field of Whiteness Studies — a.k.a. Critical Whiteness Studies — which first made its way onto college campuses in the early 1990s. From the moment of its inception, this discipline has borne no resemblance whatsoever to other group-identity-based curricula like Black Studies, Chicano Studies, and Women’s Studies. Whereas those fields steadfastly celebrate their respective groups and emphasize their status as innocent victims of societal oppression, Whiteness Studies programs depict whites uniformly as malevolent oppressors of people with darker complexions. They aren’t Italians, or Brits, or Poles, or Germans, but rather, they are depraved white miscreants, best known for their many crimes against humanity. As Jeff Hitchcock, the co-founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture, once put it: “There is plenty to blame whiteness for. There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of color. There is no crime that we have not committed even against ourselves…. We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today that deny the rights of those outside of whiteness and which damage and pervert the humanity of those of us within it.”

The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education describes Whiteness Studies as “a growing body of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege.” Central to this definition is the notion that the average white person is largely unaware of his own racism, and that he therefore must be helped to overcome the dreaded “ignorance of one’s ignorance” which prevents him from even recognizing “racism as a system of privilege” that benefits him at the expense of others.

The writings of feminist Peggy McIntosh, for instance, are renowned in the field of Whiteness Studies, where professors and course readings often make reference to her famous metaphor of white skin privilege as an “invisible knapsack of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious.”

Whiteness Studies professor Lee Bebout of Arizona State University, for his part, says that “white supremacy makes it so that white people can’t see the world they have created.”

University of Wisconsin English professor Dr. Gregory Jay  maintains that “Whiteness Studies is an attempt to think critically about how white skin preference has operated systematically, structurally, and sometimes unconsciously as a dominant force in American—and indeed in global—society and culture.” Moreover, he contends that telling white people that they’re racists whether or not they realize it, will ultimately foster interracial harmony: “I believe that Whiteness Studies must be part of the general effort to eradicate prejudice, bigotry, discrimination, and racism.”

University of Colorado associate professor Amy Wilkins proudly explains that her Whiteness Studies class is in essence “an advanced course on racial inequality.”

Jodi Linley, a white assistant professor at the University of Iowa, says that she aims to “dismantle whiteness” in her “curriculum, assignments and pedagogy,” in order to battle “white supremacy” and “white privilege.”

In his class called “The Problem of Whiteness,” University of Wisconsin professor Damon Sajnani, a passionate admirer of the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, explores how white people “consciously and unconsciously perpetuate institutional racism.” In November 2016, Sajnani posted to his Facebook account a picture of a white American family seated for a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day with the words “Genocide, terrorism, small pox, colonization, torture” written in blood over it.

In a “White Privilege” course taught by Portland State University Professor Rachel Sanders, students learn that “whiteness is the linchpin of structures of racial meaning and racial inequality in the United States,” and that “to preserve whiteness is to preserve racial injustice.”

The common themes that run through all of the aforementioned programs and courses are Universal White Guilt on the one hand, and Universal Black Innocence on the other—flip sides of the same racialist coin. More than that, they are the twin centerpieces of the tribal mentality which aims to pit various groups of people against one another by dividing them neatly into oppressors and oppressed, victimizers and victims, evil and good.

Additional Resources:


The Left’s War on Whiteness
By John Perazzo
August 2018

Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream (pamphlet)
By David Horowitz and John Perazzo
 2013

On the Phenomenon of White Shaming
Jason Hill interviews Charles Negy
April 24, 2020

Smith College Staffer Quits Over Anti-White Racism
By Petr Svab
February 21, 2021

San Diego Requires Anti-Racism Training for Teachers
By Alex Nester
December 4, 2020

The Ugly Racism of “Whiteness Studies” Programs
By John Perazzo
August 1, 2016

University Offering Course on ‘The Problem of Whiteness’
By Elizabeth Harrington
December 17, 2016

Only You Can Stop Whiteness
By Daniel Greenfield
April 22, 2016

Biracial Student Fails Critical Race Theory Class for Refusing to Confess His ‘White Dominance,’ Mom Claims
By Breck Dumas
March 11, 2021

Another University Sponsors Campaign Teaching Students It Is “Unfair” to Be White
By Oliver Darcy
February 12, 2013

Students Defend Professor under Fire for Expressing Concern about Anti-White Sentiment on Campus
By Phil Shiver
March 19, 2021

BOOK

White Shaming: Bullying Based on Prejudice, Virtue-Signaling, and Ignorance
By Charles Negy
2020

 

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