Southwestern U offers course on the 'Anthropology of Whiteness'
A liberal arts college in Georgetown, Texas is offering a sociology course called 'Anthropology of Whiteness.'
Anthropology of Whiteness reflects the department’s broader focus on studying issues like 'questions of race class and gender' and 'power and violence.'
A liberal arts college in Georgetown, Texas is offering a sociology course called “Anthropology of Whiteness.”
“The study of whiteness begins in the early twentieth century when W.E.B. Du Bois asserts that White Americans benefit from the wages of whiteness,” Southwestern University’s course description says. “This course explores the White Trash School of Thought; Whiteness in Education; ethnographies of White Womanhood; White Abolitionists; African Diaspora Anthropology; and Critical Whiteness Studies.”
Assistant Professor Naomi Reed has served as the course instructor. She also offers courses on “Critical Whiteness Studies,” “African Diaspora Studies,” “Educational Anthropology,” and “Cultural Heritage, Race and Racism in the American South.”
Anthropology of Whiteness reflects the department’s broader focus on studying issues like “questions of race class and gender” and “power and violence.”
The department also offers courses that touch on “cross-cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity,” “environmental injustice,” “global inequality,” “migration and identity,” and “advocacy and activism.”
Other Sociology and Anthropology Department course titles include “Race, Class and Gender in the Caribbean,” “Global Environmental Justice,” and “The Sociology of Gender.”
This is not the first time a college has offered courses on “whiteness.”
The University of Chicago announced a course in 2022 called “The Problem of Whiteness.”
“Critical race theorists have shown that whiteness has long functioned as an ‘unmarked’ racial category, saturating a default surround against which non-white or ‘not quite’ other appear as aberrant,” a description said at the time.
In 2018, the University of Colorado Boulder’s Sociology Department offered a course on “Whiteness Studies.” The university had previously featured a class called “Witnessing Whiteness.”
Campus Reform contacted Southwestern University, the Sociology and Anthropology Department, and Naomi Reed for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
