Whiteness Studies
By Chris Weinkopf
June 25, 2003


“WHITNESS STUDIES,” which began as a small fringe of the academic world only
eight years ago, has since blossomed into the latest academic fad. The
Washington Post reports that “at least 30 institutions—from Princeton
University to the University of California at Los Angeles—teach courses” in
the subject. WS has its own think-tank (the Center for the Study of White
American Culture), its own journal (Race Traitor, “treason to whiteness is
loyalty to humanity”), periodic national conferences, and a veritable
library of books and tracts.



The essence of the discipline can be summed up in two words: Hating Whitey.



Now, we didn’t have “Whiteness Studies” back when I was in college. Then,
all the rage was multiculturalism, of which I got more than I could handle
when, as a freshman, a scheduling snafu forced me into a section of the
mandatory freshman-English program bearing the ominous title of
“Differences.” There we studied literature through—to use the most pervasive
cliché in academia—the lens of “race, class, gender, and sexual
orientation.”



What that meant, in application, was that in the first weeks of class, we
read books by African-Americans, the theme of which, unfailingly, was hatred
for white people. Next we moved on to books by Hispanics, the theme of which
was hatred for white people. From there it was books by Asians and Native
Americans on—you guessed it—hatred for white people. There were a few
variations, including some readings on anti-Semitism and homophobia, but
otherwise, the theme was constant. This was a study of oppression, and the
oppressors were always white guys.



Of course, all this took place way back in the early 1990s, eons ago for the
modern-day Ivory Tower. Multiculturalism, once the primary fetish of
academia, is now old hat in a culture that values the avant-garde above all
else. Its permutations are spent. There are no more -isms to define; no more
ethnic groups to balkanize; no more victims to patronize. That leaves
academics looking for the next Big Thing, and they think they’ve found it in
WS.



The focus has changed from multiculturalism, but the “hating whitey” theme
remains.



“Whiteness,” as its would-be studiers see it, is the underlying cause of
most every conceivable social ill. As David Horowitz has observed,
“Whiteness Studies” is different in kind from other ethnocentric
disciplines: “Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates
Chicanos, women’s studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white
people as evil.”



Whiteness Studies doesn’t even pretend to be a cultural inquiry—how could
it? “White culture” can scarcely be said to exist as a single entity. Even
the white population of the United States alone, which includes Protestants
in Appalachia and Jews in New York City, doesn’t easily lend itself to
stereotype. White rural southerners, to cite but one example, have far more
in common, culturally, with similarly situated blacks than say, most any
white person in San Francisco.



Not that such diversity stands in the way of the WS pseudo-scholars. They
have identified a common thread that unites all whites throughout most of
American history—oppression. All whites are oppressors, they reason, ergo
Whiteness Studies—like the seemingly disparate collection of cultures that
make up any other race-based “study”—is the examination of Whitey’s
unceasing subjugation of everyone else.



As Gregory Jay, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin, puts
it, “‘Whiteness’ is that special property unique to ‘white people,’ the sum
total of the supposed characteristics, traits, or essential qualitities
[sic] of ‘white people.’” It “is a term derived from the historical practice
of white supremacy.” The purpose of Whiteness Studies, Jay adds, is “to make
visible the history and practices of white supremacy as found in social
life, the law, literature, music, politics, and every other realm of our
‘civilization.’”



“There is plenty to blame whiteness for,” says CSWAC co-founder and
executive director Jeff Hitchcock “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.”



Thus the difference in name—“Whiteness Studies,” as opposed to “White
Studies,” which would be consistent with “Black Studies” and the like. For
the radicals specializing in this burgeoning discipline, “whiteness” isn’t a
culture, nor is it even an ethnicity or a race. It’s a condition, a mental
state, one of tyrannizing others, often unwittingly. It’s also inescapable,
regardless of how much one flagellates himself and embraces white guilt.
Echoing the Nation of Islam’s bizarre white-man-is-the-devil cosmology, the
Whiteness Studies worldview holds that if you’re white, your evilness can at
best be mitigated, but never expunged.



To reinforce that message, a recent WS class at the University of
Massachusetts (the university that recently tried, unsuccessfully, to
eradicate its white Minuteman mascot) subjected students to what the
Washington Post describes as a “privilege walk”:



The exercise … 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, [white student Naomi] 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 image is rather amusing—university students, benefiting from an
expensive education heavily subsidized by their state’s taxpayers,
contemplating their varying degrees of oppression. It’s hard to imagine that
anyone who attends a college like UMass and makes good use of his degree
will ever have trouble getting a loan, regardless of race, especially in a
“white” society such as ours that has voluntarily adopted strict federal
laws prohibiting discrimination in lending (and, for that matter, most every
area of life). Nonetheless, the exercise served its purpose, namely,
convincing students that whites are, by the mere fact of existence,
purveyors of privilege.



The stated goal of Whiteness Studies enthusiasts is to make
race-consciousness a permanent part of American life for white people.
“Historically,” the Washington Post quotes Howard Winant, a sociology
professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, as saying, “it
has been common to see whites as a people who don’t have a race, to see
racial identity as something others have. It’s a great advance to start
looking at whiteness as a group.” Winant echoes a recurring theme in the WS
curriculum, that whites can happily live a “raceless” existence, while for
minorities, evidence of their difference is ubiquitous.



But who’s fault is that? Ever since the triumph of the American civil-rights
movement nearly four decades ago, it’s left-wing racial agitators and
academics who have most bitterly resisted the transition to a color-blind
society through hyphenated-Americanism, affirmative action,
and—ironically—multiculturalism.



Nowhere is this more clearly the case than on modern-day college campuses,
which, under the left’s design, have become thoroughly balkanized, with
racial minorities confined to their own dorms, culture clubs, and academic
departments. The process of segregation begins with separate but unequal
orientation programs, and extends all the way to racially segregated
graduation ceremonies.



Having spent decades erecting what they thought would be race-coded utopias,
academics are slowly coming to realize that, instead, they’ve created racial
ghettoes. When African-American students are nudged into their own campus
centers, the main campus center becomes the de facto white student
center—one much larger and more prominent. Ditto for the “white” orientation
programs and graduation ceremonies, or the “white” fields of academic study
which are, presumably, all those not designated as belonging to some other
race or ethnicity. As one UMass student complained in the Washington Post,
“other classes, like economics, politics and history, are about whiteness.”



For the WS literati, it’s all about whiteness—Western Civilization in
general and America in particular. America’s foundations, its ideals, and
its institutions are all tainted by the scourge of whiteness, and as such
are irreparably damaged. True to its Marxist underpinnings, Whiteness
Studies ultimately seeks solace in revolution, overthrowing or destroying
“whiteness” and the whole wicked society that contains it. (Marxism, for
what it’s worth, seems to be the one “white” idea the WS crowd is willing to
keep around.)



The goal isn’t to move minorities out of the academic ghettoes, but to
create a new ghetto for whites, and that begins—where else?—with whiteness’
own “ethnic studies” program.



The hatred for Whitey isn’t limited to just those with white skin. Anyone
who chooses to succeed in American society rather than despise it gets
lumped in with the pale-faced devils. “We must disrupt the historic process
of assimilation,” says CSWAC’s Hitchcock, a white man who derides Asians and
Hispanics who are “absorbed into the white community” as “honorary whites.”
For racialist radicals, minorities who embrace American notions of free
enterprise, democracy, pluralism, even integration, are Oreos, coconuts,
apples, and bananas—“white on the inside” regardless of their outer
appearance.



When the Whiteness Studies crowd speaks of abolishing “whiteness,” what they
really mean is abolishing Americanism, most notably the American ideal of a
society in which people are judged not by color of their skin, but by the
content of their character.


Chris Weinkopf is an editorial writer and columnist for the Los Angeles
Daily News. To read his weekly Daily News column, click here. E-mail him at
chris.weinkopf@dailynews.com.

--
Oh, be still my heart.

I'm falling in love with the guy all over again, while reading Hillary's
book.

Forget about her being the smartest woman in the world. She's the luckiest
woman!

- Bonnie BLUE EYES, boniblueyz@aol.com, who insists everyone knows she is
White