http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14386-2003Jun19.html?nav=hptop_tb I'm rendered speechless.
The new Ebonics. They should really have Marketing folks look at these names. This has Jay Leno written all over it. This quote is priceless: I'd like to think that the author put that in there for ironic value, but the tenor of the piece suggests otherwise.
Someone might wish to inform the KKK and other white supremacy groups that they "don't have a race" and don't have a "racial identity"...
Why??? Because I was overwhelmed by the moronity of the article. I mean, it was wall-to-wall cluelessness, from the writer, to the people being reported on, down to the fact that they reference David Freakin' Horowitz as a voice of the opposition.
I've read quite a bit of the historical literature on Whiteness that's come out recently and several of the books are among the best material that's been written in US history in the past 10 years. The article is really a terrible explanation of the key arguments of the literature (the classes that are profiled in the article do sound poorly thought-out). Briefly, here goes. Whiteness studies, when it's done well, sets out to study White as a socially constructed racial category. It examines when White became a recognizable category, who could claim to be White at different points in history, how White was defined (often arguing that Whiteness was constructed by locating social pathology in Blackness), how groups (such as the Irish or Italians) moved from indeterminate racial status to being included as White, and what social privileges went along with being included in Whiteness. If you believe that race is a socially constructed category, which most people today do, it's logical to study the social construction of Whiteness. For too long, the default has been to leave White as an unstudied marker of what is "normal." Obviously, Whiteness is not one thing, no more than Blackness is (which is where the classes seem to fall short). But what it means to be White has changed over time and it is different in different parts of the country. Understanding all these concerns helps us to understand how race was made and continues to shape the nation. The article sucks, the classes sound bad, much of the scholarship is excellent.
Wow, for once I agree with Dave (except about Horowitz). The sooner we all stop pigeonholing ourselves into distinct racial groups (especially since most of us probably have at least one ancestor within the last few hundred years who wasn't a member of whichever "race" we like to view ourselves as), the better off we will be as a country. James Gandolfini (the guy from the Sopranos) had an interview in Maxim a few months back where he said something like "People need to just keep fucking each other until we're all the same race, as soon as everyone's part Puerto Rican and part Italian and part Arab we'll all be better off." I agree completely, maybe the Europeans and Japanese and Chinese wouldn't like it but in a melting-pot country like the US it would make things a lot better. Dave is contributing by banging an Ethiopian chick, my girlfriend is part Cuban, what the hell are the rest of youse doing?
needs, what you describe sounds like a very interesting class, or maybe two classes. But a whole field of study? You gotta be joking.
It does sound as though the author is trying to scoop the latest thing from "those whacky leftists, trying to make white folks feel bad about themselves". And unfortunately, GMA, Leno, etc. can't really use well thought out information as punchlines in their monologues. (Why is it that we get most of our "everyman" sentiments either first thing in the morning or last thing at night, anyway?). Limbaugh et al are going to have a field day with this. A really unfortunate thing this article was run. I remember my wife (a recent German immigrant who doesn't watch alot of TV (and is taking good American jobs and your taxpayer dollars, BTW )) coming home from Linguistics class, telling me how her professor explained that Black American English is actually an own language, and that he proved it linguistically. This was a good eight or so years after the Ebonics fiasco. Articles like this are the ways meaningful social change gets stymied in this country at every turn.
I don't know if you can take "white" outside of geographical context. Mr. Charlie in New York is going to have significant differences compared to an ofay in Indiana or a cracker in California, let alone honkies in Canada and YT over in Europe. And because "white" has for decades been an American "default," it's doubtful whether scholars are going to address that accurately. It's an anomaly, really, when talking about ethnicity. It's easy to come up with definitions of white that don't include the first eighteen stereotypes that come to mind - even if you don't include the traditional Anglo-Saxon definition of "white." And then there's the ability/occasional insistence of whites claiming ethnicities or subdivisions outside of "white." You see this from fake Indian drivers licenses to born-again Scotsmen at Celtic Fairs. And then there's anti-Semitism, which probably seems to a large section of the African-American community to be intramural, when it is anything but. And then there's the Klan, of course, and visible racists the vast, vast majority of white people want nothing whatsoever to do with. Okay, so there is a lot to study. And I see the usefulness of not leaving the field to people like the KKK. Maybe this won't suck as much as it sounds like it will.
Well, I think even the classes are a bad idea, and here's why. An entire class on Whiteness sounds like White ethnic studies, and that's not really the point of the best scholarship. Instead, I think the classes should be history of race classes, with the evolution of Whiteness being considered an important development of America's racial history. As for it as a field of study, well, there's no place I know of giving any kind of degree in Whiteness studies. It's more of a group of scholars who have turned to studying the development of Whiteness as an important element in understanding the history of race in America and overturning White racial privilege. There are some conferences, but not anything that happens on an annual basis, mostly ad hoc stuff.
It has long been my pet theory that one of the most significant elements of a morally laudable person or group is how much of the species they regard as truly human. It doesn't take much inquiry to realize that folks like the Nazis, imperial Japan and the KKK share the quality of obsessing about people they don't regard as human. When you don't think someone is human, you can pretty much do anything to them you want to. If you're obsessed about them, you want to. In this context, I think Whiteness studies would make a lot of sense, since in its original use it implied that non-white more or less equalled non-human. Even though the term is not used that way by most people today, ideas are no more likely to be completely seperated from their origins than people are.
Treat him like Liuzzo/Goodman/Schwerner, would you? That'll keep his ass in line. Actually, my guess is that the people he's referring to know exactly what they're saying, but don't care. Kinda like a lot of folks who post in this forum.
The most shocking thing I thought about when reading this article was "WTF are they teaching at liberal arts colleges today?" How about a course on breathing or dog walking?
And then my friends want to know why I don't want to go to a liberal arts school... Last year this guy I go to school with and had some classes with was reading My Awakening by David Dukes. One of my friends and I borrowed it on a free day in one of our classes and went through it and read parts of it. It's extremely disturbing to thing that people really are that closed minded.
Okay, they should have picked a different marketing group when they picked the ****************** name.
The fact that you missed the obvious humor in the term "cockpunching" leads me to believe that you need a cockpunching, too. We all knew guys like that in college - he takes a class on Eastern religion and becomes a Buddhist, he takes an African history course and starts wearing a kaftan, he takes a women's studies course and starts joining NARAL marches - all for about the duration of a semester. Do you mean you?
I thought about that after I posted- that is, that maybe "cockpunching" refers to something that would keep him from being a wuss (if recognizing racism within himself and in others makes him a wuss). I don't know that he needed to refer to himself, but he would know better than I -or you. It sounds to me like he simply saw the light. Hey, better late than never. Anyhow, instead of being happy that he found out what lots of people of all colors already know (that the status quo is a mofo, and has been for some time), you decided to focus on the fact that he's a Johnny come-lately and suggest that he be silenced. Why? Even a neoconservative like yourself should get tired of looking at the Emperor's hairy ass once in a while. Of course not.
Wimpy Socialist BS. WHAAAAAAA! Let's have minority rule like these people want. O wait we had that in South Africa. Oops that's Whitey again.
If some nitwit at UMass realizing there's "racism in all of us" makes that chip on your shoulder lighter, then so be it. However, if you think said nitwit, who voluntarily takes a course on "Whiteness studies" in Massachusetts, is somehow significant, and indicative of the problem with racism in this country, then you are beyond help. I'm suggesting he should be silenced? Hardly. If anything, he should be singing his moronic proclamations from the mountaintop, if only to notify the rest of America how ridiculous certain segments of academia have become. Check again.