Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 01:46:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Fears: "Hue and Cry on 'Whiteness Studies'"


Hue and Cry on 'Whiteness Studies' - An Academic
Field's Take on Race Stirs Interest and Anger

by Darryl Fears

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14386-2003Jun19.html?nav=hpto

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.

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."

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 chairman 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."

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."

Horton said poor white workers often joined black
slaves and freemen in popular rebellions 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 


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."

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."

Cairns, who had sailed through the privilege walk,
said whiteness studies 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."


===="The world is the natural setting of and field for all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not 'inhabit' only 'the inner man' or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world and only in the world does he know himself."

— Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945

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