CU Joins "Whiteness Studies" Guilt-Fest

"Whiteness Studies" has finally crept in among the other academic fads and established its place at the University of Colorado at Boulder, joining hundreds of other similarly misguided colleges nationwide:

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) - 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."

Ahh, the unmistakable stench of liberal white guilt.
So how is this supposed to inform, educate, or indeed contribute anything of value to the college experience? The instructor explains:

"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."

"I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious," she says.

The secret code--do not reveal "white privilege" to others lest you be forced to commit self-flaggelation in atonement for your sin--the sin of being white that is. "Invisible knapsacks"? "Unearned assets"?
Hmmm El Presidente is curious. How does one sign up for this privilege? He must have missed the memo. Of course, despite his Hispanic heritage and last name, he was once told that he was not "ethnic" enough to understand, and was an inadvertent beneficiary of white privilege.
Opposition, of course, draws the attention of the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which does much great work monitoring the few crazy white supremacists running around dropping leaflets and practicing paramilitary operations in remote compounds. But much reasoned opposition remains, opposed to the false establishment of more divisive academic fads designed to critically interpret, in Marxist or multi-culti diversity fashion, the liberal-left desire to instill guilt for anything sexist, racist, religionist, or whatever that might have occurred in the past at the hands of Euro-Americans, anywhere in the world. According to this view, nothing from Western culture has any redeemable value, and therefore must be criticized or expunged.
Thankfully a few keep tabs on these academic navel-gazing guilt-fests:

Outside of academia, not many have heard of whiteness studies, said Matthew Spalding, director of the Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation. He called it an abstract, "invalid category of education" based on the "assumption that you should teach according to racial categories."

"Things like this show the increasing divide between the outer reaches of the academy and the average American," Spalding said. "Not only do they not know about these things, my guess is the average American couldn't come up with this if they tried."

Aside from the fact that only guilt-ridden liberal trust-fund college kids sporting Che t-shirts and grousing about global-warming attend these classes taught by the likes of Ward Churchill (that still is his department) and other 1960s radical leftovers, who cares about these intellectual tin-foil hat wearing moonbats? Everyone should, because intellectual fad becomes liberal dogma, and liberal dogma becomes Democratic talking points. The Alito hearings this past week bear this out, as the distinguished nominee withstood bloviating attacks by the Democratic senators spouting off the latest in doublespeak, hoping to trip up Alito and pin him to the racist-sexist-etc epithet. They attempted to imply that Alito, at best, was a closet bigot, and at worst, a bigot who was now disavowing past affiliations. (This, of course, required them to forget about Democratic Sen. Robert "Sheets" Byrd, himself an actual member of an explicitly racist organization, the Ku Klux Klan)
And this guilt-laden feeling has already spread to other liberal arts departments (not to mention the business community, who must institute "diversity" plans on all levels to avoid boycotts from the likes of Rev. Jesse Jackson):

The course is popular at CU, though, and it's mostly white students who take it, said Eleanor Hubbard, a retired CU professor who taught it.

Professors had to turn away students, capping the class at about 60 a semester. But the concept of white privilege is infused in many sociology and ethnic-studies courses.

To fight racism, whites need to see they have advantages that are a "result of them being white, not for any other reason like they are smarter or have a better education," Hubbard said.

"It's not about feeling guilty," she said. "That doesn't help anyone. What is helpful is to use those privileges to make changes so that equality is possible."

Right, "equality through guilt." El Presidente can see the bumper stickers now.

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