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White Folks Need Whiteness Studies

For the record, I like white people.  Seriously. I mean some of my best friends are white, so arguably I can’t be racist.  I even told you that I was dating white men; that’s all the proof necessary.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard the inversion of the above sentiments by white Americans regarding minoritied[1] Americans, I assure you that I would no longer owe the United States government for my education.  And just as for some unknown reason in your gut you probably found the aforementioned statements to be inconsequential regarding the persistent reality and practice of racism in the United States, questioning what manner of empty rhetoric have you gotten yourself into, that is precisely the same thought most minoritied in America have upon hearing such statements from whites.  It is almost as if whites are mandated to learn such a script before graduating from junior high school.  The script, which pacifies the speaker with the idea of being liberal and progressively humanistic, is false. Especially, when one turns around and not only rants, “The young black thugs need to die…put down like the dogs they are” while in the same breath arguing to “not have a prejudiced bone in [his] body,” all the while operating within a system that disproportionately diagnoses Blacks and Latino children with pathologies and places them into alternative schools.  Who cares if one personally identifies with racism, when the dominant practices throughout society function within a structure of institutionalized racism?  This is the strategic flaw and greatest hindrance to successfully achieving humanistic equity in the US: believing that racism is merely couched in individual/personalized beliefs and activities.

With the recent attacks on Africana/Black Studies by Naomi Shaffer Riley, the systematic dismantling of Ethnic Studies (specifically La Raza Studies) in Arizona, the racist justifications for the death of Trayvon Martin, and the constant misreading of social and political moments of outrage as reverse racist bantering, it is understandable why David Leonard would argue that white folks need Black Studies.  They do.  We all do.  Just as we need Asian American Studies, Chicano Studies, Gender Studies, Indigenous Studies, La Raza Studies, Sexuality Studies, and much more. However, more importantly, white folks need Critical Whiteness Studies.

Many will argue that a traditional American curriculum already is whiteness studies; this kind of thinking precisely allows white supremacist ideology to persist.  Inverting Americanness as a synonym for whiteness is an outcome of white privilege.  To be clear, then, Critical Whiteness Studies “seek to confront white privilege—that is racism”.  CWS marks a shift from whiteness being ubiquitously invisible, to worthy and necessary of serious examination.

Because the lives, cultures, and experiences of the dominant group is often perceived as normal, critically examining what it means to be white (or male, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied, etc.) goes under the radar for almost everyone, but most significantly in this regard, for white folks.  Conversely, when others (ethnic communities, women, transgender people, differently abled, and so forth) articulate a critical examination of the dominant group, the rationale to not pay too close of attention is couched within displaced anger and bitterness.  An example lies in the rhetoric that Ethnic Studies teaches our students to be angry at American patriotism. Accusations that Ethnic Studies curriculum merely teaches students to resent white people come from a tradition of not critically engaging the construct of whiteness itself in the United States.

Each academic term, I am bound to have students that have never been asked to think about what it means to be racially white, especially if they are white. Race is predominately understood as applied to all those who are not white, leaving whiteness to just be…who knows, whatever the heck it claims to be, or not be.  As this is the case, the response is often a dissonance in consciousness because white students on average articulate, “I’m just American; or I just see myself as Sam/Sarah…you know, just a regular person, not someone who is white.”  As many thinkers afore me have stated, this is the very essence of white privilege in the United States—being and benefitting from whiteness without ever having to claim it.  Whiteness as a racial culture in the United States, allows itself to shine a spotlight on the identities of others while neutralizing itself as the norm.  CWS is the missing piece of critical race studies, which moves that spotlight so that everybody gets to be examined. The space must be available for whites to ask of themselves and grapple with: What conditions and mechanisms have been in place for me to miss being white all this time?

A colleague at another institution recently shared an all too familiar experience with me.  A student entered her office distraught because another student had said something idiotically debasing in their mandatory reading group session. The distraught student was trying to explain to the group some problems with how History in the United States is generally told and taught from a white male perspective.  Not surprisingly, the student’s peer responded, “Well sure, isn’t that because until recently nobody else ever did anything.”

Now scores of you reading this are flabbergasted by such a comment; but for those of us in these trenches daily, ain’t nothing surprising about this statement—regardless of the racial/ethnic space that either of the students may occupy.  Because this is such a common perspective from students across space and place in the US, this is why Critical Whiteness Studies is needed.  One response to this kind of thinking is definitely to teach the histories, contributions and perspectives of non-white people of the United States.  This is what many Ethnic Studies curricula accomplish.  However, it must additionally be coupled with critically examining what the privilege of whiteness has been doing to circumvent the “doings” of others. How one came to sincerely believe that within the grand scheme of human existence, a limited group of people was the only ones engaged in activity necessitates serious intellectual consideration.

Without Critical Whiteness Studies, we will continue living in a society that blindly privileges particular ways of organizing institutional practices and structures, not realizing that these ways are rooted in the histories and cultural beliefs of specific people.  It will leave me binging on chocolate, writing blogs and wishing I could tolerate the taste of alcohol every time some student vehemently argues, “But it really was the way he was dressed that caused him to look suspicious.”