Professor Teaching 'White People' Course

Should We Study White People?

February 6, 2012, 11:31 am

By Laurie Essig, The Chronicle of Higher Education

This semester I am teaching a new (for me) course: “White People.” The course considers the historical formation of whiteness as well as its current cultural and economic manifestations. For me, teaching “white people” is an obvious way to work through some of the key issues of critical race studies: How did our current racial categories form and under what conditions? How are these racial categories intertwined with one another? How does race depend on class, gender, sexuality and often geographic location to make sense?

Of course, when you teach a course called “White People,” you are bound to take some teasing. Someone suggested that it’s a course to “paint white people as bad.” Another friend said I’m just trying to “relieve my liberal white guilt.” But I reject both the claim that all white people are the same and the claim that to critically examine one’s racial position is motivated by “guilt” rather than the sociological imagination. To me, the question that motivates white studies is the same as the question that motivates sociology: How does social power operate in our everyday lives?

But according to Alex P. Kellogg, who wrote a piece at CNN last week called “Has ‘whiteness studies’ run its course at US colleges?” my new course may already be DOA. That’s because, according to Kellogg, most college students believe we live in a “post racial” America and

    the election of Obama represents the culmination of decades of racial progress, they say.