Have we said that identity politics is poisoning America? That is blames police for defending themselves against injury? That it faults police for detaining lawbreakers? It starts in our schools. Ground Zero are elite universities like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which fuels our teacher corps and populates our newsrooms.
Welcome to “Critical Whiteness Studies.” It is a for-credit offering from the UW Department of African Cultural Studies in the School of Letters and Science. Have not Governor Walker and the Republican legislature enacted deep enough cuts in the UW budget? Must more paring be done in the next session. How did this perverse inversion of intellectual inquiry survive the knife?
From the syllabus:
Critical Whiteness Studies aims to understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy. Our class will break away from the standard US-centric frame, and consider how whiteness is constructed globally, with particular attention to paradigmatic cases like South Africa. Whereas disciplines such as Latino/a, African, and Asian American studies focus on race as experienced by non-whites, whiteness studies considers how race is experienced by white people. It explores how they consciously and unconsciously perpetuate institutional racism and how this not only devastates communities of color but also perpetuates the oppression of most white folks along the lines of class and gender.
And they say there’s no such thing as reverse racism!
This tendentious agit-prop is taught by one Damon Sajnani, assistant professor. His curricula vitae encompasses such Black Lives Matter tinder as “Africana cultural studies; social and political theory; HipHop studies; critical race theory; cultural sociology; Africana philosophy; comparative race, racism and (post)colonialism; globalization and diaspora; stratification and intersectionality; Black power and civil rights; whiteness studies; critical ethnic studies.”
Makes my teeth hurt just to write it.
Courses like this fuel the attack on free speech like the one November 16 at the Social Studies Building. Your tax dollar at work.
7 responses to “‘The problem of whiteness’”
What a joke. Credit class?
I always viewed that education & learning is never wasted. However such nonsense as this course, gender studies and other such foolishness proves me wrong. I guess they have to offer it so people that go into the UW can graduate with out majoring in the hard sciences, math, accounting, etc…
It’s interesting that the argument you’re making against this class is essentially the same one made often by politically correct liberals. You don’t like the ideas presented here and you want them quashed. Courses like this fuels questions and discussion, the idea of education.
Do you really think the professor, an admirer of Fidel Castro, is going to entertain debate? Don’t be naive. You want a good grade, you toe the line.
[…] the “Problem of Whiteness” class offered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison [found here in the syllabus) is the same one made often by politically correct liberals: You don’t like the ideas presented […]
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