Whiteness Studies - Criticisms

Criticisms

Writer David Horowitz draws a distinction between whiteness studies and other disciplines. "Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women's studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white people as evil."

Barbara Kay, a columnist for the National Post, has sharply criticized Whiteness Studies. She wrote that Whiteness Studies "points to a new low in moral vacuity and civilizational self-loathing" and is an example of "academic pusillanimity." According to Kay, Whiteness Studies "cuts to the chase: It is all, and only, about white self-hate."

Regarding the Center for the Study of White American Culture (CSWAC), a think tank for Whiteness Studies, Kay cited CSWAC co-founder and executive director Jeff Hitchcock, who stated in a 1998 speech:

"There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of colour... We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today... which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within it...We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today that deny the rights of those outside of whiteness and which damage and pervert the humanity of those of us within it.”

Regarding Whitness studies more broadly, Kay wrote that:

teaches that if you are white, you are branded, literally in the flesh, with evidence of a kind of original sin. You can try to mitigate your evilness, but you can't eradicate it. The goal of WS (Whitness Studies) is to entrench permanent race consciousness in everyone -- eternal victimhood for nonwhites, eternal guilt for whites -- and was most famously framed by WS chief guru, Noel Ignatiev, former professor at Harvard University, now teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art: "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race -- in other words, to abolish the privileges of the white skin."

In addition to such criticism in the mass media, whiteness studies has also earned a mixed reception from academics in other fields. In 2001, historian Eric Arnsen declared that “whiteness has become a blank screen onto which those who claim to analyze it can project their own meanings” and that the field “suffers from a number of potentially fatal methodological and conceptual flaws.” Firstly, Arnsen writes that the core theses of whiteness studies—that racial categories are arbitrary social constructs without definite biological basis, and that some white Americans benefit from racist discrimination of non-whites—have been common wisdom in academe for many decades and are hardly as novel or controversial as whiteness studies scholars seem to believe. Additionally, Arnsen accuses whiteness studies scholars of sloppy thinking; of making claims not supported by their sources; of overstating supporting evidence and cherry picking to neglect contrary information. A particular datum almost entirely ignored by whiteness studies scholars is religion, which has played a prominent role in conflicts between various American classes. A type of “keyword literalism” persists in whiteness studies, where important words and phrases from primary sources are taken out of their historical context. Whiteness has so many different definitions that the word is “nothing less than a moving target.” Arnsen moreover notes that whiteness studies scholars are entirely on the far left of the political spectrum, and suggests that their apparent vitriol towards white Americans is due in part to white workers not fulfilling the predictions of Marxist theory that the proletariat would overcome racial, national and class distinctions to unite and overthrow capitalism; he cites as an example Roediger’s afterword to the seminal Wages of Whiteness which asserts that the book was written as a reaction to “the appalling extent to which white male workers voted for Reaganism in the 1980s.” Arnsen also argues that in the absence of supporting evidence, whiteness studies often relies on amateurish Freudian speculation about the motives of white people: “The psychoanalysis of whiteness here differs from the 'talking cure' of Freudianism partly in its neglect of the speech of those under study.” Without more accurate scholarship, Arnsen writes that “it is time to retire whiteness for more precise historical categories and analytical tools.”

While Arnsen’s appraisal of whiteness studies is often scathing, in 2002 historian Peter Kolchin offered a somewhat more positive assessment and declared that, at its best, whiteness studies has "unfulfilled potential" and offers a novel and valuable means of studying history. Particularly, he praises scholarship into the development of the concept of whiteness in the United States and notes that the definition and implications of a white racial identity have shifted over the decades. Yet Kolchin nonetheless describes a “persistent sense of unease “ with certain aspects of whiteness studies. There is no consensus definition of whiteness, and thus the word is used in vague and contradictory ways, with some scholars even leaving the term undefined in their articles or essays. Kolchin also objects to “a persistent dualism evident in the work of the best whiteness studies authors,” who often claim that whiteness is a social construct while also arguing, paradoxically, that whiteness is an “omnipresent and unchanging” reality existing independent of socialization. Kolchin agrees that entering a post-racial paradigm might be beneficial for humanity, but he challenges the didactic tone of whiteness studies scholars who single out a white racial identification as negative while praising a black or Asian self-identification. Furthermore, scholars in whiteness studies sometimes seriously undermine their arguments by interpreting historical evidence independent of its broader context (e.g., Karen Brodkin’s examination of American anti-Semitism largely neglects its roots in European anti-semitism). Finally, Kolchin categorically rejects the argument—common amongst many whiteness scholars—that racism and whiteness are intrinsically and uniquely American, and moreover he expresses concern at the “belief in the moral emptiness of whiteness there is a thin line between saying that whiteness is evil and saying that whites are evil.”