Maine college pushes anti-white narrative in host of courses, including CRT-based tap dance class
Colby College is offering a course titled ‘Critical Race Feminisms and Tap Dance,’ which will teach ‘the history of tap dance in the United States and abroad, the concept of intersectionality, and the systemic and institutionalized nature of racism.’
Other courses being offered by the school include ‘Interrogating Whiteness’ and ‘American Art: Identity and Belonging Since 1619.’
A college in Waterville, Maine, is teaching a course that focuses on tap dance through the lenses of critical race theory and feminism.
Colby College will offer “Critical Race Feminisms and Tap Dance” as part of its “January Program,” which is an “exploratory term” that allows students to “choose among hundreds of different academic experiences.”
The course will serve as an “an introduction to critical race theory and the art of tap dance,” according to the school’s course catalogue.
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“Students will learn about the history of tap dance in the United States and abroad, the concept of intersectionality, and the systemic and institutionalized nature of racism,” the course description notes. The class will also teach students to “understand and think critically about critical race theory, black feminist thought; and to know the history of tap dance and its significance to racial politics in the United States.”
The course catalogue advertises a number of other classes that focus on themes such as critical race theory, gender theory, and feminism, including some with descriptions seemingly hostile towards “whiteness.”
One such class is a senior seminar entitled “Interrogating Whiteness,” which “guides students through the process of designing, researching, and writing a major paper on a topic that interrogates whiteness.”
“How does white privilege intersect with gender and class to produce social, spatial, legal, political, environmental, and economic inequalities?” the course description asks. “What is white supremacy? What forms does antiracism take?”
Another course is called “American Art: Identity and Belonging Since 1619” and “addresses the racial biases and foundations of American art history as a field and exposes, to undermine, the enduring power of Whiteness.”
The class “Language, Thought, and Writing: Language + Race + Power” will consider, among other topics, “the racial and colonial conditions that produced Standard Written English” and “the social, political, economic, educational, psychological, and ethical stakes of normalizing the language of white enslavers and colonizers.”
Other courses examine topics related to gender and sexuality, such as “Queer Youth Cultures.”
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The catalogue describes the course as follows: “In the contemporary U.S. context of ‘don’t say gay’ and panic about trans youth, attacks on critical race theory, and book bans in schools, alongside an industry boom for #diversekidlit, this course asks: What stories do we tell to and about children? How do these stories travel? What can this tell us about the racialized, gendered, and sexualized notions of ‘childhood’ and its social effects? How has the institutionalization of children’s lit normalized ‘the child’? Students will read critical texts on children’s lit, and will experiment with using kids’ books to foster critical understandings of gender, race, and sexuality with youth.”
Campus Reform has reached out to Colby College for comment. The article will be updated accordingly.
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