Whiteness Class at Colorado University Prompts Colorful Debate 

BOULDER, Colo.

      People stare when University of Colorado student Maren Gauldin wears her ``Black is Beautiful'' T-shirt.

      That's because she's White.

      The shirt, Gauldin says, is like a tag that forces her to engage in conversations about race, forces her to feel a tiny bit like Black and Latino students on an overwhelmingly White campus.

      ``Every time I put it on, I feel uncomfortable,'' Gauldin told students at a White-privilege symposium last month that filled an auditorium and spilled into a hallway. ``It helps me think about the kind of activist I want to be.''

      The symposium was one part of an introspective look by White CU scholars and students at the privileges they say are automatically afforded the White race. Awareness of the relatively new field, called Whiteness studies, is building at CU as the university examines its diversity and racial strife.

      The field of study — by some accounts born 10 years ago at a conference at the University of California at Berkeley and now taught at hundreds of universities — has its critics, who call it White-bashing rhetoric that shows how far academia has strayed from mainstream society.

      ``Whiteness studies is not about White-bashing, and it's not about White supremacy,'' said Duncan Rinehart, who will teach CU's fourth Whiteness-studies course this semester.

      ``As long as Whiteness is invisible, it's contributing to inequality and injustice. There is a fair amount of just flat-out denial, not malicious, but denial nonetheless.''

      Feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh, whose essay on White privilege often is required reading for students in Whiteness studies, defines it as an ``invisible weightless knapsack.''