Portland State University professor Rachel Sanders will be teaching a “White Privilege” course in an attempt to end racial inequality in America, according to Campus Reform.
The course description blames “whiteness” for racial inequality in America. Students taking the course, according to the description, will “endeavor to make whiteness strange” and “interrogate whiteness as an unstable legal, political, social, and cultural construction.”
The course structure is derived from an emerging field called “critical race theory,” which Harvard University defines as a “progressive political struggle for racial justice with critiques of the conventional legal and scholarly norms which are themselves viewed as part of the illegitimate hierarchies that need to be changed.”
Students taking the course will study the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates who, in his recent book “Between the World and Me,” called the first responders at 9/11 “menaces of nature.”
A few other universities across the country will be exploring similar subjects.
The University of Alabama-Birmingham will be offering a course called “Whiteness Studies.” In this course, students will learn to “uncover the history of the invention of whiteness.”
At Binghamton University, students can take a course called “The Social Construction of Whiteness,” which will explore the “intersection of whiteness and white privilege.”
In another ‘whiteness’ studies course at the University of Southern California, students will look at how whiteness “perpetuates inequality.”
The courses are taught in the English and Gender Studies Departments.