The Study of Whiteness

At a conference held late in March, students, faculty, and administrators from the tri-campus community of Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore colleges gathered together with a group of journalists to discuss the status of multiculturalism on college campuses. At one point, a panelist suggested that part of the problem on many traditionally White campuses seems to be that the majority of students, faculty, and administrators are oblivious not only to what it means to be White, but to the extent to which their Whiteness dominates the campus culture, making it uncomfortable for many people of color.
"We need to understand the attendant privileges that come with White skin in this society before we can begin to truly understand what is like for those who are outside of White culture," she said.
Discussions such as this are at the heart of what is a growing field of scholarship. Dubbed "Whiteness studies" by some, the exploration of what it means to be White in the United States and the global community is the subject of a growing body of books, articles, courses, and academic conferences.
Whiteness studies is frequently misunderstood as either part of a supremacist movement or an effort to study "White trash," says Jean Stefancic, part of a husband and wife team that edited the 1998 release on the subject titled Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror. The discipline is generally divided into two camps. One, she explains, views the study of Whiteness as an essential part of eliminating racism and White privilege. The other camp focuses on the study of White, pop culture. Stefancic is a legal research associate at the University of Colorado Law School.
Richard Delgado, co-author of Critical White Studies, goes on to explain that the former perspective is derived from critical legal theory — a field that challenges the race/class and gender bias of U.S. laws. In this country, he says, many people believe that there's nothing wrong with our laws, and that racism simply results from mistakes or ignorance, and that the solution is simply integration. "[However,] most critical race theorists don't believe this," he says. 
While there are divergent views as to the exact origin of the study of Whiteness, Delgado traces its contemporary study back to the early 1990s, explaining that it came in response to the growing interest in the study of people of color. Books like Critical White Studies, David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), Ruth Frankenberg's White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993), and Alice McIntyre's Making Meaning of Whiteness: Exploring Racial Identity with White Teachers (1997) are examples of works that confronted the issue directly.
"People thought it was time to put Whites under the lens," Delgado says.
Taking a much longer view, however, Morris Jenkins, professor of Administration of Justice at Pennsylvania State University, says that the study of Whiteness began with the formation of traditional university curriculum.
"We get it without acknowledging it," he says. Which explains why, according to Jenkins, European Americans have problems with their Whiteness.
"They'll admit to being Americans, but are uncomfortable being ‘White,' though they accept the privileges of Whiteness."
Other scholars concur with Delgado that the study of Whiteness began because some White scholars wanted to find their place in the multicultural education movement.
Dr. David Goldberg, director of the School of Justice at Arizona State University, and a visiting professor of African American studies at the University of California-Berkeley, traces the origins back to the proliferation of race studies that occurred in the late 1980s. In addition to a few seminal texts, such as those by Roediger and Frankenberg, he cites an article that appeared in the British film magazine Screen in 1988. Titled "White," and authored by Richard Dyer, the article was about the impact of Whiteness on media and culture.
Irrespective of the field's precise origins, Jenkins, who studies critical race theory within the concept of law, says that the study of Whiteness can enhance the discipline of ethnic studies — that it's an important component to understanding race and ethnicity. He adds that having White professors teach ethnic studies could help to "legitimize" ethnic studies in the minds of those scholars who constantly attack it as not being "real scholarship."
"I think critical White studies is a very important and critical part of new directions in ethnic studies," says Dr. Evelyn Hu-Dehart, professor and chair of the department of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "Whiteness studies was clearly influenced by ethnic studies theories, and in turn, it is now positively influencing ethnic studies to see Whiteness as also a historically contingent and socially constructed racial category, one defined, to be sure, by privilege and power rather by marginalization and domination.  But Whiteness and the other racial categories are part of the same racial order and racial hierarchy in the history of this country and in contemporary social reality."