Education

Stanford Students To Examine ‘Abolishing Whiteness’

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Rob Shimshock Education Reporter
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Students will examine the “possibilities” of “abolishing whiteness” in a fall 2017 course at Stanford University.

Stanford professor John Patrick Moran will teach the fall 2017 course, “White Identity Politics,” in which students will study concepts like “whiteness,” “white privilege,” and “white supremacy,” reported The College Fix.

“We will survey the field of whiteness studies, scholarship on the intersection of race, class, and geography, and writings on whiteness in the United States by contemporary public thinkers, to critically interrogate the terms used to describe whiteness and white identities,” the course description reads.

“Students will consider the perils and possibilities of different political practices, including abolishing whiteness or coming to terms with white identity,” Moran writes. “What is the future of whiteness?”

Moran also associates an alleged surge in “white identity politics” with the 2016 presidential election.

“‘Abolishing whiteness’ is a concept put forward in the 1990s by a number of white historians,” Stanford spokesman Ernest Miranda told The College Fix. “Their belief was that if other white people would, like them, stop identifying politically as white, it would help end inequalities.”

Miranda refused to provide a copy of the course syllabus to The College Fix.

“Just about any social category and subcategory has a ‘…ness’ to it,” Tomás Jiménez, a Stanford professor who has previously taught about “whiteness,” told The College Fix. “So, liberals and conservatives; men and women; Wisconsinites and New Yorkers are all social categories, and adding ‘ness’ to any of them is shorthand for the behaviors and outlooks associated with that category.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to Moran and Stanford for further comment, but received none in time for press.

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