Dismantling Racism ‘Whiteness Studies’ Movement Aims To Explain And Deflate White Power

On college campuses in California and across the United States, students are poking fun at white stereotypes and exploring how being white has benefits.

At workshops on the East Coast, some white professionals are struggling with what it means to be white in an increasingly multiracial workplace.

In books and journals, some activists are discussing the need for whites to be recognized as an ethnic group, complete with a White History Month and white studies departments at universities.

This widespread interest in white culture is part of the emerging “whiteness studies” movement.

Although this might seem to be a concept conjured up by supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nations, whiteness studies are aimed at exorcising the country’s psyche of the racial hierarchy that for centuries has placed whites above blacks and other minority groups, according to those involved in it.

It is becoming a popular field of study and research at such schools as the University of California at Berkeley, Northwestern University, Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts. Moreover, some say it has the potential to reinvigorate the civil rights movement, preparing whites for the day they no longer will be in the majority.

“This was the first class that implicated me and showed me how I contributed to the system of oppression,” University of Massachusetts graduate Tina Cincotti said.

In 1996, Cincotti, 22, took a whiteness course in which she studied theories on how the “white race” was invented to unite disparate European immigrants into a single group while oppressing blacks, analyzed how the legal system often treats whites better than blacks and examined how subtle cultural influences affected her racial views.

“It taught me that white people are racist - I’m racist - and the best way to dismantle it is to educate other white people so that anti-racist whites are no longer in the minority,” she added.

The whiteness studies movement comes when the country appears to be at a crossroad on the race issue. Affirmative action programs are being dismantled, and civil rights leaders have been wringing their hands about what to do next.

So far, the fledgling movement is sparking curiosity, along with anger and skepticism.

For some African-Americans, an emphasis on whiteness evokes images of white supremacy. For some whites, the studies are insulting, particularly a focus among a team of scholars at UC Berkeley on “poor white trash.”

The whiteness studies movement is fluid and undefined, but there is some consensus on what it is intended to do.

Just as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders helped eradicate legal obstacles for minorities during the 1950s and ‘60s, those in the whiteness studies movement hope they can help topple psychological barriers that keep white and black people divided.

“White people disproportionately control the resources and power in our society,” said Jeff Hitchcock, executive director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture, an organization based in Roselle, N.J., that is attempting to extend the movement beyond academia. “Our goal is to take white people out of the center of our society and make a multiracial center.”

Discussions and research focus on how white advantage correlates with black disadvantage and what it means and feels like to be a white person in America.

Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, helped prompt an exploration of the topics with her 1988 paper, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” The paper lists dozens of inconveniences suffered by her African-American friends that she avoids because of her white skin:

“I can swear or dress in secondhand clothes … without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.

“I can take a job … without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.”

African-Americans have been talking and writing about such disparities for generations. That a white woman was able to get white people to pay attention to them, according to McIntosh, illustrates how black concerns are often discounted.

“I made a point identical to (the ones made by) people of color. They weren’t taken seriously, but viewed as having a chip on their shoulder or trying to get more than they deserved,” she said. “It took white people to put this on the map for white people.”

Lowell Thompson, an African-American advertising executive from Chicago who has been involved in the whiteness movement for years, says he is disturbed by how white scholarship is valued more than work by blacks.

“My fear is that a lot of the academics see this as an intellectual exercise,” said Thompson, founder of Partnership Against Racism and author of “White Folks: Seeing America Through Black Eyes.”

“For me, it’s a basic and gut-level issue.”

The movement has drawn criticism on several fronts. Some fear that emphasizing whiteness could backfire, reinforcing the very stereotypes it was intended to destroy.

“American history has demonstrated that dealing with ourselves in racial categories is dangerous,” said Christopher Rapp, who has examined the movement for the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a conservative think tank based in Los Angeles.

“Part of the American experiment now is to transcend these essentially meaningless differences - skin color and national origin,” he added. “Whiteness studies, it seems, are trying to solidify the categories and lock us into them.”

For one militant group called the New Abolitionist Society, the studies don’t go far enough.

They have renounced their whiteness and are calling for an overthrow of the political order.

Racial classification, they assert, is evident in such practices as redlining and other forms of housing discrimination as well as tracking or assigning minority public school children into lower-level classes.

“This is an attempt to run the film backwards, an effort to dissolve the white identity so that no one is white,” said Noel Ignatiev, a founding member of the society and a scholar at Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Center for Afro-American Research.

Like other members of the group, Ignatiev has disowned his white heritage, calling himself “pale-skinned.”

What Hitchcock, 46, envisions is a world in which his African-American wife and biracial children can be accepted.

To that end, he is seeking white ethnic studies departments at schools and a White History Month as vehicles for raising consciousness about the white experience and the need for a new racial identity.

“White people need to develop a sense of pride not based on saying we’re superior,” he said, “but based on the fact that we’re working on building a multiracial society.”