Analyzing “whiteness” has become a topic for academic courses, research, and anthologies, and attempts to redefine and reorient understanding of white identity.
At the University of Chicago, the provocatively titled seminar for undergraduate students, “The Problem of Whiteness,” covered familiar academic territory: how the racial category “white” has changed over time.
However, according to the New York Times, lecturer Rebecca Journey was surprised when her inbox exploded in November with vitriolic messages from dozens of strangers. One wrote that she was “deeply evil.” Another: “Blow your head clean off.”
There was an instigator behind all the hateful emails – Daniel Schmidt, a sophomore and conservative activist with tens of thousands of social media followers.
Schmidt tweeted, “Anti-white hatred is now mainstream academic inquiry,” along with the course description and Dr. Journey’s photo, and university email address.
Of course, Schmidt denied harassing the newly minted Ph.D., and the university dismissed Journey’s claims of harassment. Seeing as Mr. Schmidt did not send Journey any emails, under the university’s longstanding, much-hailed commitment to academic freedom, speech was restricted only when it “constitutes a genuine threat or harassment.”
The university’s 2014 declaration of free speech principles, known as the Chicago statement, has become a touchstone and guide for colleges across the country, and scores of colleges and universities have adopted it.
A divisive and adversarial course
The study of “whiteness” in the United States and the U.K. dates back to the 1980s when a discipline called “whiteness studies” was first created.
The field developed a large body of work during the early 1990s, which extends across the disciplines of “literary criticism, history, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, popular culture, communication studies, music history, art history, dance history, humor studies, philosophy, linguistics, and folklore.”
By 2004, according to The Washington Post, at least 30 institutions in the United States, including Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles, among others, offered courses in whiteness studies.
At some universities, there are classes dedicated to understanding the notions of whiteness, white supremacy, and what the field’s proponents see as the quiet racism of white people.
What is interesting about this discipline is that in America, from the early days, whiteness was a criterion for full citizenship and acceptance into society. The American definition of whiteness evolved over time; initially groups such as Jews and Southern Europeans were not regarded as white, but as skin color became the primary criterion, they were gradually accepted.
Whereas disciplines such as African American studies and Asian American studies focus on race as it relates to communities of color, other courses look at how race is experienced by white people, exploring institutional racism and the dominance of those considered “white” in America.
So what is so different about White studies, you may ask? Social critic David Horowitz told The Washington Post in 2013, “Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women’s studies celebrates women and white studies attacks white people as evil.”
Lee Bebout of Arizona State University, says, “White supremacy makes it so that white people can’t see the world they have created. It’s a culture so pervasive that living in it, subscribing to it, and upholding it feel as natural to most Americans as breathing air.”
While anti-racist in its intent, whiteness studies can often yield counterproductive outcomes., as we are seeing today. “One problem inherent in whiteness studies is that it might become a white pity party,” said Terrance MacMullan, a philosophy of race professor at Eastern Washington University. “Instead of talking about how whiteness is problematic, it becomes about the problems of white people.”
