Names (White Privilege)

[Andre Cramblit]

Could you please forward me a text copy of the White Knapsack


On Apr 25, 2006, at 9:54 AM, MJ Hardman wrote:

Thanks for sharing this.  There is also 'Unpacking the White  
Knapsack' by
Peggy MacIntosh, which I also use.

In my own case, I was born and raised white, but the family I built  
is not
white, so I have lived on both sides now.  And, though white  
privilege is
clearly part of who I am, in terms of identity my Ndn family takes
precedence when it comes to things like salary decisions here at the
university, as well, of course, as being a woman.  On occasion I am  
with a
white group that sees me as white, period.  The ensuing conversation  
reminds
me of Lisa at the races in My Fair Lady.  But most of my life today  
is lived
in the borderlands, and my scholarship as well.

MJ

On 04/25/2006 12:35 PM, "Andre Cramblit" <andrekar at NCIDC.ORG> wrote:

> White Privilege
>
> by Robert Jensen Department of Journalism, University of Texas
> Austin, TX 78712, work: (512) 471-1990,
> [Note: This article appeared in the Baltimore Sun ]
>
> Here's what white privilege sounds like: I'm sitting in my University
> of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white
> student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he
> opposes and I support. The student says he wants a level playing
> field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he
> thinks that being white has advantages in the United States. Have
> either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run
> mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and
> tangible we could call white privilege.
>
> So, if we live in a world of white privilege – unearned white
> privilege - how does that affect your notion of a level playing
> field? I asked. He paused for a moment and said, "That really doesn't
> matter." That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate
> white privilege: The privilege to acknowledge that you have unearned
> privilege but to ignore what it means. That exchange led me to
> rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove
> home the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white
> people carry around with us every day: in a world of white privilege,
> some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and
> anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its
> roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk open and
> honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.
>
> White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white
> supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not
> they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but
> such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other
> aspects of one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other
> kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white
> privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has
> affected me.
>
> I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern
> European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the
> whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white
> world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because
> I didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the
> state's only numerically significant nonwhite population, American
> Indians.
>
> I have struggled to resist that racist training and the racism of my
> culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip
> over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the
> institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix"
> myself, one thing never changes - I walk through the world with white
> privilege.
>
> What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission
> to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't
> look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me look like me
> they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves - and in a
> racist world, that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of
> them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am
> cut some slack. After all, I'm white.
>
> My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some
> complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled
> with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority
> faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very many. As Henry
> Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were
> in place for the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of
> that time the university could have as many mediocre minority
> professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as
> an insult to anyone, but it's a simple observation that white
> privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have
> slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of
> solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.
>
> Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a
> bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real
> people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I
> know, because I am one of them. I am not a genius - as I like to say,
> I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full
> time for six years and I've published a reasonable amount of
> scholarship. Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one churns out to
> get tenure, and some of it, I would argue, is worth reading. I worked
> hard, and I like to think that I'm a fairly decent teacher. Every
> once in a while, I leave my office at the end of the day feeling like
> I really accomplished something. When I cash my pay check, I don't
> feel guilty. But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by
> merit alone. I benefited from among other things, white privilege.
> That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't
> white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all
> through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white.
>
> All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was
> accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a
> teaching position by the predominantly white University of Texas,
> headed by a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and
> in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one
> nonwhite tenured professor. I have worked hard to get where I am, and
> I work hard to stay there. But to feel good about myself, and my
> work, I do not have to believe that "merit" as defined by white
> people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that
> in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from
> white privilege. At one time in my life, I would not have been able
> to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was
> due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the
> heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by
> the culture's mythology that I couldn't see the fear that was binding
> me to those myths.
>
> Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I
> didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had
> more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn't
> heroic or rugged, that I wasn't special. I let go of some of that
> fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn't special, but that I was
> still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know
> that the rules under which I work in are stacked to my benefit. Until
> we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their
> fate - that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose - then we
> will live with that fear.
>
> White privilege is not something I get to decide whether I want to
> keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man
> and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am
> benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all
> the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but
> it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day
> white supremacy is erased from this society.
>
> [Note: A version of this essay ran in the Perspective section of
> the Baltimore Sun on July 4, 1999. It is a follow-up to an essay on
> the same subject that ran in July 1998.   By writing about the
> politics of white privilege--and listening to the folks who responded
> to that writing--I have had to face one more way that privilege runs
> deep in my life, and it makes me uncomfortable.
>
> The discomfort tells me I might be on the right track.
>
> Last year I published an article about white privilege in the
> Baltimore Sun that then went out over a wire service to other
> newspapers. Electronic copies proliferated and were picked up on
> Internet discussion lists, and the article took on a life of its own.
>
> As a result, every week over the past year I have received at least a
> dozen letters from people who want to talk about race. I learned not
> only more about my own privilege, but more about why many white folks
> can't come to terms with the truism I offered in that article: White
> people, whether overtly racist or not, benefit from living in a world
> mostly run by white people that has been built on the land and the
> backs of non-white people.
>
> The reactions varied from racist rantings, to deeply felt expressions
> of pain and anger, to declarations of solidarity. But probably the
> most important response I got was from non-white folks, predominantly
> African-Americans, who said something like this: "Of course there is
> white privilege. I've been pointing it out to my white friends and co-
> workers for years. Isn't funny that almost no one listens to me, but
> everyone takes notice when a white guy says it."
>
> Those comments forced me again to ponder the privilege I live with.
> Who really does knows more about white privilege, me or the people on
> the other side of that privilege? Me, or a black inner-city teenager
> who is automatically labeled a gang member and feared by many white
> folks? Me, or an American Indian on the streets of a U.S. city who is
> invisible to many white folks? Whose voices should we be paying
> attention to?
>
> My voice gets heard in large part because I am a white man with a
> Ph.D. who holds a professional job with status. In most settings, I
> speak with the assumption that people not only will listen, but will
> take me seriously. I speak with the assumption that my motives will
> not be challenged; I can rely on the perception of me as a neutral
> authority, someone whose observations can be trusted.
>
> Every time I open my mouth, I draw on, and in some ways reinforce, my
> privilege, which is in large part tied to race.
>
> Right now, I want to use that privilege to acknowledge the many non-
> white people who took the time to tell me about the enduring
> realities of racism in the United States. And, I want to talk to the
> white people who I think misread my essay and misunderstand what's at
> stake.
>
> The responses of my white critics broke down into a few basic
> categories, around the following claims:
>
> 1. White privilege doesn't exist because affirmative action has made
> being white a disadvantage. The simple response: Extremely limited
> attempts to combat racism, such as affirmative action, do virtually
> nothing to erase the white privilege built over 500 years that
> pervades our society. As a friend of mine says, the only real
> disadvantage to being white is that it so often prevents people from
> understanding racial issues.
>
> 2. White privilege exists, but it can't be changed because it is
> natural for any group to favor its own, and besides, the worst
> manifestations of racism are over. Response: This approach makes
> human choices appear outside of human control, which is a dodge to
> avoid moral and political responsibility for the injustice we
> continue to live with.
>
> 3. White privilege exists, and that's generally been a good thing
> because white Europeans have civilized the world. Along the way some
> bad things may have happened, and we should take care to be nice to
> non-whites to make up for that. Response: These folks often argued
> the curiously contradictory position that (1) non-whites and their
> cultures are not inferior, but (2) white/European culture is
> superior. As for the civilizing effect of Europe, we might consider
> five centuries of inhuman, brutal colonialism and World Wars I and
> II, and then ask what "civilized" means.
>
> 4. White privilege exists because whites are inherently superior, and
> I am a weakling and a traitor for suggesting otherwise. Response: The
> Klan isn't dead.
>
> There is much to say beyond those short responses, but for now I am
> more interested in one common assumption that all these
> correspondents made, that my comments on race and affirmative action
> were motivated by "white liberal guilt." The problem is, they got two
> out of the three terms wrong. I am white, but I'm not a liberal. In
> political terms, I'm a radical; I don't think liberalism offers real
> solutions because it doesn't attack the systems of power and
> structures of illegitimate authority that are the root cause of
> oppression, be it based on race, gender, sexuality, or class. These
> systems of oppression, which are enmeshed and interlocking, require
> radical solutions.
>
> And I don't feel guilty. Guilt is appropriate when one has wronged
> another, when one has something to feel guilty about. In my life I
> have felt guilty for racist or sexist things I have said or done,
> even when they were done unconsciously. But that is guilt I felt
> because of specific acts, not for the color of my skin. Also,
> focusing on individual guilt feelings is counterproductive when it
> leads us to ponder the issue from a psychological point of view
> instead of a moral and political one.
>
> So, I cannot, and indeed should not, feel either guilty or proud
> about being white, because it is a state of being I have no control
> over. However, as a member of a society--and especially as a
> privileged member of society--I have an obligation not simply to
> enjoy that privilege that comes with being white but to study and
> understand it, and work toward a more just world in which such
> unearned privilege is eliminated.
>
> Some of my critics said that such a goal is ridiculous; after all,
> people have unearned privileges of all kinds. Several people pointed
> out that, for example, tall people have unearned privilege in
> basketball, and we don't ask tall people to stop playing basketball
> nor do we eliminate their advantage.
>
> The obvious difference is that racial categories are invented; they
> carry privilege or disadvantage only because people with power create
> and maintain the privilege for themselves at the expense of others.
> The privilege is rooted in violence and is maintained through that
> violence as well as more subtle means.
>
> I can't change the world so that everyone is the same height, so that
> everyone has the same shot at being a pro basketball player. In fact,
> I wouldn't want to; it would be a drab and boring world if we could
> erase individual differences like that. But I can work with others to
> change the world to erase the effects of differences that have been
> created by one group to keep others down.
>
> Not everyone who wrote to me understood this. In fact, the most
> creative piece of mail I received in response to the essay also was
> the most confused. In a padded envelope from Clement, Minn., came a
> brand-new can of Kiwi Shoe Polish, black. Because there was no note
> or letter, I have to guess at my correspondent's message, but I
> assume the person was suggesting that if I felt so bad about being
> white, I might want to make myself black.
>
> But, of course, I don't feel bad about being white. The only
> motivation I might have to want to be black -- to be something I am
> not -- would be pathological guilt over my privilege. In these
> matters, guilt is a coward's way out, an attempt to avoid the moral
> and political questions. As I made clear in the original essay, there
> is no way to give up the privilege; the society we live in confers it
> upon us, no matter what we want.
>
> So, I don't feel guilty about being white in a white supremacist
> society, but I feel an especially strong moral obligation to engage
> in collective political activity to try to change the society because
> I benefit from the injustice. I try to be reflective and accountable,
> though I am human and I make mistakes. I think a lot about how I may
> be expressing racism unconsciously, but I don't lay awake at night
> feeling guilty. Guilt is not a particularly productive emotion, and I
> don't wallow in it.
>
> What matters is what we decide to do with the privilege. For me, that
> means speaking, knowing that I speak with a certain unearned
> privilege that gives me advantages I cannot justify. It also means
> learning to listen before I speak, and realizing that I am probably
> not as smart as I sometimes like to think I am.
>
> It means listening when an elderly black man who sees the original
> article tacked up on the bulletin board outside my office while on a
> campus tour stops to chat. This man, who has lived with more kinds of
> racism than I can imagine through more decades than I have been
> alive, says to me, "White privilege, yes, good to keep an eye on
> that, son. Keep yourself honest. But don't forget to pay attention to
> the folks who live without the privilege."
>
> It doesn't take black shoe polish to pay attention. It takes only a
> bit of empathy to listen, and a bit of courage to act.
>
> How We Are White
>
> By Gary Howard from the Southern Poverty Law Journal, Teaching  
> Tolerance
>
> The break is over and I am ready to begin the second half of a four
> hour multicultural curriculum workshop. Twenty-five teachers and
> staff are scrunched into 2nd grade desks, all eyes and White faces
> turned toward their one African American colleague, who has asked to
> address the group. He announces that he will be leaving this workshop
> immediately and resigning at the end of the year. He has lost hope in
> their willingness, and ability to deal with issues of race.
>
> After he leaves, a painful silence grips the room. I realize that my
> planned agenda is no longer appropriate. Gradually the participants
> begin to talk. Their comments are rife with guilt, shame, anger,
> blame, denial, sadness and frustration. It becomes clear there has
> been a long history leading to this moment. Together they are
> experiencing a collective meltdown over the realities of race and
> their own whiteness. One faculty member remarks, "I feel so helpless.
> What am I supposed to do as a white teacher?"
>
> In my 25 years of work in multicultural education, I have encountered
> an almost universal uneasiness about race among White educators.
> Since the publication of my book "We Can't teach What We Don't Know":
> White teachers, multiracial schools, many people have shared their
> stories with me. A White teacher from California reports, "I realize
> that I have contributed to the failure of my students of color by not
> being able to drop the mask of privilege that I wear. Another White
> teacher writes, "I thought I was going crazy. It was helpful to hear
> that other White teachers feel similar confusion."
>
> As White educators, we are collectively bound and unavoidably
> complicit in the arrangements of dominance that have systematically
> favored our racial group over others. In my own family, the farm was
> in Minnesota that I cherish as part of our heritage was actually
> stolen from the Ojibwe people only a few years before my great-
> grandparents acquired it. This is only one of the countless ways I am
> inextricably tied to privilege. I did not personally take the land,
> yet I continue to benefit from its possession.
>
> But privilege and complicity are only part of the story. The police
> officers who brutally assaulted civil rights activists during the
> Selma march in 1965 were certainly White, but so were many of the
> marchers who stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Dr. Martin Luther
> King Jr. on that awful Sunday. It is true that three White men
> dragged James Byrd to a horrific death in Jasper , Texas, but it is
> also true that many White townspeople and a predominantly White jury
> condemned this act of racist violence.
>
> In the course of my work and personal reflection, I have discovered
> there are many ways of being white. Some Whites are bound by
> fundamentalist White orientation. They view the world through a
> single lens that is always right and always white. White supremacist
> hate groups represent one particularly hostile form of fundamentalist
> White orientation, but there is also an uninformed and well-
> intentioned version that simply has never been exposed to other
> perspectives. This was my orientation from birth through my high
> school years, when I had never met a person who wasn't white.
> Fundamentalist White teachers often say, "I don't see color. I treat
> all my students the same."
>
> Other Whites live from an integrationist White orientation, where
> differences are acknowledged and tolerated but still not fully
> accepted. Integrationist Whites are self-congratulatory in their
> apparent openness to racial differences, yet often paternalistic and
> condescending of people of color. In this way of being White, we
> prefer to keep the peace, avoid confrontation and maintain control,
> rather that actually get to the core of our separate truths and
> unique racial perspectives. Integrationist White teachers say to
> students of color, "I know how you feel," even when we have no real
> connection to their reality. This was my first orientation when I
> first began "helping" Black kids in the ghetto in the 1960s. I
> thought I was the answer, rather than the question.
>
> Finally, there is the transformationist White identity, which is a
> place of humility and active engagement in one's own continuing
> growth and reformation. Transformationist Whites have acquired a
> paradoxical identity, which allows us to acknowledge our inevitable
> privilege and racism while at the same time actively working to
> dismantle our legacy of dominance. Transformationist White teachers
> know it is our place and our responsibility to engage issues of race
> and multicultural education in the classroom.
>
> White educators do have a choice to grow beyond our ignorance,
> denial, and guilt. There is a journey, which I envision is like a
> river that carries us through many confusing currents and treacherous
> rapids, but which eventually can lead to a place of authentic
> multicultural White identity. Ultimately, good teaching is not a
> function of the color of our skin. It is much more closely related to
> the temperament of our mind and the hue of our heart. We did not
> choose whether to be White, but we can effect how we are White. This
> is both our challenge and our hope. In the last few years I have
> returned several times to work with the elementary staff who
> experienced such a painful meltdown over issues of race. With courage
> they have stayed on the river, chosen to look deeply into the
> reflective pool of their own difficult history together, and have
> come to a place of honesty and renewed commitment to a multicultural
> vision for their school. At our last meeting, when the painful event
> was alluded to in discussion, a newly hired Asian American asked,
> "What happened?" A veteran White teacher responded, "Its a long story
> we need to share with you. It will help you know who we are."
>
> Gary Howard is currently President of the REACH Center for
> Multicultural Education in Seattle. He is the author of "We Can't
> Teach What We Don't Know", available from REACH 206-545-04977
>
>
> Hue and Cry on 'Whiteness Studies'
> An Academic Field's Take on Race Stirs Interest and Anger
>
> "It's the suppressed history I'm interested in teaching," says
> University of Massachusetts professor Arlene Avakian
>
> By Darryl Fears Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 20, 2003;
> Page A01
>
> 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.
>
> 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."
>
> © 2003 The Washington Post Company