HOSTILE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT ON ACCOUNT OF RACE: Teaching ‘White People’ Are Toxic on America’s Elite Campuses.
If you’re white, you’re a blight. This past winter Yale University became the latest of dozens of colleges across the country to roll out a course aiming to teach undergraduates how to understand and counteract “whiteness”—a sinister force that, according to its official description, is “a culturally constructed and economically incorporated entity, which touches upon and assigns value to nearly every aspect of American life and culture.”
The professor in charge, Claudia Rankine, is a poet and MacArthur “genius” grant winner who was recently hired away from the University of Southern California to hold an endowed chair in poetry in the Yale English department.
The website The College Fix obtained a copy of Rankine’s syllabus for the course titled, “Constructions of Whiteness,” which makes the possession of pale skin sound menacing indeed, examining such topics as “white prosperity,” “white masculinity,” “white spaces,” and “white imagination.” The course’s goal, according to the syllabus, is to “create a lab for the construction of counternarratives around whiteness.”
Rankine’s obsession with skin color extends to her other professional endeavors. Her play The White Card, which opened in Boston in March, struck dutifully liberal Boston Globe theater critic Don Aucoin as marred by “stilted dialogue” but otherwise praiseworthy as an “inquiry into structural racism and an interrogation of whiteness.”
Rankin’s Yale course, currently winding up for the semester, slaps a patina of Ivy League polish onto the “toxic whiteness” fad currently raging in academia and other intellectual circles that if focused on any other ethnicity would be denounced as out-and-out racism.
It still is out-and-out racism, it’s just not denounced because it pushes a favored message. I’d like to see the Department of Education weigh in on this, as I believe this sort of overt institutionally sanctioned racism may create a hostile environment on account of race.
Related: How white women use strategic tears to avoid accountability.