Back in the days before “Black Lives Matter” there was a phenomenon called “acting white” that applied to black kids who tried to study and do well in school. Quite a few succeeded in spite of it. It has been succeeded by a new theme of “White Supremacy” that attributes certain behavior to “Whiteness.” An example is “Whiteness as a problem.” This is actually a college course.
A class to be taught next semester at the University of Wisconsin Madison called “The Problem of Whiteness” aims to “understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy,” the course description states.
“Whites rarely or never questioned what it is to be white,” Assistant Professor Damon Sajnani, who will teach the course, told The College Fix in a telephone interview last week. “So you go through life taking it for granted without ever questioning or critically interrogating it.”
For Sajnani, one way to solve this is to offer “The Problem of Whiteness,” an analysis of what it means to be white and how to deal with it as a “problem.”
Now, what is the problem of “Whiteness?”