Has 'whiteness studies' run its course at colleges? [View all]

[seabeyond]

While there are no standalone departments dedicated to the field, interdisciplinary courses on the subject quietly gained traction on college and university campuses nationwide in the 1990s. Today, there are dozens of colleges and universities, including American University in Washington, D.C., and University of Texas at Arlington, that have a smattering of courses on the interdisciplinary subject of whiteness studies.

The field argues that white privilege still exists, thanks largely to structural and institutional racism, and that the playing field isn't level, and whites benefit from it. Using examples such as how white Americans tend not to be pulled over by the police as often as blacks and Latinos, or how lenders targeted blacks and Latinos for more expensive, subprime loans during the recent U.S. housing crisis, educators teach how people of different races and ethnicities often live very different lives.

Most of the instructors specialize in sociology, philosophy, political science and history, most of them are liberal or progressive, and most of them are, in fact, white. Books frequently used as textbooks in these courses include "How the Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev, an American history professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and "The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter, a professor emeritus of American history at Princeton; but the field has its roots in the writings of black intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois and author James Baldwin.

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Other academics who study what they see as America’s racial hierarchy say they struggle to teach that racial inequality remains a problem, and that it must be addressed. They point to more subtle indicators of structural racism like the fact that the overwhelming majority of CEOs are white men, and a vastly disproportionate number of convicted felons are black and Latino.

http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/30/has-whiteness-studies-run-its-course-at-colleges/?hpt=hp_bn1