One night the comic-strip character Binkley from Bloom County woke his father with the rant, “Well, Dad, I guess it’s safe to say we aren’t exactly a couple of short, Hispanic, Hindu, French-speaking, physically handicapped, Communist, gay, black women.” Binkley’s problem that night was his realization that “in every regard, we’re hopelessly in the majority.”
As Binkley explained, “In fact, we’re as majority as you can get! And there’s darn few of us left!! Do you realize what that makes us?” His dad did. “A minority,” he answered.
Binkley’s dad’s not the only one. The latest curriculum-busting Ethnic Studies discipline to begin to track its way through the trend-hopping halls of academe is a little something called “Whiteness Studies.”
Unlike the other genes-as-proxy-for-culture Studies disciplines, however, Whiteness Studies isn’t an academic niche carved out by professors of the corresponding genetic configuration for the purpose of promoting the politics presumed in the academy to accompany people of those genes. In fact, it’s often the opposite; a common area for professors to delineate and then denounce “whiteness” — for example, see the “white issue” (No. 73, 1998) of Transition, where folks such as bell hooks and Cornel West discuss what it means to be white. In the Orwellian atmosphere on campus, Whiteness Studies offer the Two-Minute Hate, with white guys in the Goldstein role.
Whiteness Studies began to catch on in the 1990s. In one proving ground for the discipline, the University of Connecticut, a black professor’s course in “White Racism” gained approval along with opprobrium in 1996, when the course was first taught. A member of the curriculum committee that approved the course told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the university needed the course and that “racism and the notion of ‘whiteness’ [were] being examined in many disciplines.”
In April 1997 the campus of the University of California at Berkeley held the first major academic conference on the subject of whiteness. Scholars determined whites were “passive inheritors of a system of privilege and wealth,” uncomfortable with identifying themselves as members of the “white race” out of the desire to avoid alliance with the hateful rhetoric of white-supremacists, neo-Nazis, and similar extremist groups. A goal of Whiteness Studies that came out of the Berkeley conference was to change the fact that, in the words of conference organizer Matt Wray, then a Ph.D. candidate at Berekeley, “we [whites] don’t think of ourselves as belonging to a racial group. We tend to think of ourselves as individuals.”
No self-respecting marxist peddling critical-race malarkey could accept that. Thus the need for Whiteness Studies. Like the other race- or sex-based Studies “disciplines” they push, it’s social change — not scholarship — that drives them. As Mary Washington of the Center for the Study of White American Culture, founded in 1995 in New Jersey, announced, “We’re hoping that we can provide a dynamic force for change.”
“The first commandment of whiteness studies,” wrote Susan Wise Bauer in the September/October issue of Books & Culture, is to “recognize that you are not colorless; you are the color white. And the second [is that] your color has distorted your view of the world.”
These are important revelations because, as the saying goes, one needs to admit one has a problem before one can work to eliminate it. And white’s problems are well known in the academy:
• They have “internalized racism” — as opposed to overt racism. (They don’t even know they’re racists!)
• They live in a world of “white privilege.” (They don’t even know they’re favored by society!)
• And they are “unconscious participators” in perpetuating this system of racial bias. (They don’t even know they’re perpetuating racism and white privilege!).
But first, of course, they have to find out that they’re white. (They don’t even know that!)
Not all Whiteness Studies scholars hew to the world-saving notion of teaching whites awareness of their whiteness to bring about social change. Harvard University’s Noel Ignatiev, publisher of Race Traitor, believes that the white race ought to be abolished in order to bring about social change — a view that presupposes whites’ awareness of their whiteness.
The motto of Race Traitor holds that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” The journal’s statement of purpose announces that the “key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.”
In his recent Harvard Magazine essay “Abolish the White Race” Ignatiev compares whiteness with a monarchy and scholars like him with anti-royalists. He also writes that “people who still think of race as biology” greet his ideas with “bewilderment.”
“The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists,” Ignatiev wrote. Later he added, “Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race.”
Quoting the editors of Race Traitor to one of their bewildered readers, he wrote “Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed — not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.”