Wood s lot ferrets out another great one. Whiteness Studies?
I’ve been thinking about how I want to approach teaching composition, and one way I hadn’t considered really was the use of theme courses. Brandy and I talked briefly after class this week; we’re both starting to teach next semester. She has put together a theme class on gender roles that she’s really excited about, collecting essays written from male and female perspectives. It seems like a really fun idea for an intro class.
Can you tell the difference between male and female writing? I liked her approach a lot. Rather than concentrating on “feminist issues” what she wants to do is examine the difference in perspectives from both sides. This is a great way of teaching “rhetorical sensibility” without being excessively polemic. No need to reach too deeply into the real theories behind it, just an exposure to different ways of writing from a gender perspective.
Here’s the deal: as Frank Zappa says in Trouble Coming Every Day, “I’m not black, but there are lots of times I wish I could say I’m not white.” That, in essence is what “Whiteness Studies” is all about. Being white is a culturally constructed identity. Every effort I have been exposed to in “multicultural studies” focuses solely on the margins. You read writing by every cultural group around except white folks. The rationale I’ve often heard, is that you get exposed to whiteness everywhere else in the curriculum, so there is no need for it in a class that deals with race. I’ve heard the same thing regarding gender issues, and I think it’s a cop out.
White people need to confront their whiteness for what it is: a totally fake, socially constructed form of identity. Ethnic studies often focus on ethnic pride. I have always felt left out of this equation, because I have no strong ethnic identity. I’m a mutt. I can’t get support by any nationalistic or ethnic props. A site linked from the whiteness studies site, Race Traitor, sums up what I think about whiteness pretty nicely.
The white race is a club, which enrolls certain people at birth, without their consent, and brings them up according to its rules. For the most part the members go through life accepting the benefits of membership, without thinking about the costs.
I don’t really give a shit about the color of my skin, or anyone else’s. Whiteness studies tries to confront that problem, a problem I suspect I share with lots of white folks. I think it’s important to examine the costs involved with always being perceived as the oppressor. The folks on the site are calling for a new form of abolition: the abolition of whiteness. So, a course could be constructed that deals with a different sort of opposition. Not black power vs. white power, but ethnic consciousness vs. the abolition of race.
There isn’t enough time to put that together now, but I suspect on a campus that is probably around 30% black it might generate some interest. Like the gender question, there aren’t any easy answers. People who find pride in ethnicity can create a hundred reasons why racial identity is a good thing. But I can’t say that I’m all that terribly proud of mine, even if we supposedly have all the power.
