Get Ready! April Is “White Shaming Month”!

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The college-wide project is an “Effort to change our campus climate by challenging the mater narrative of race and racism through an exploration of the social construction of “whiteness,” CampusReform reports.

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Downtrend Reports:

An Oregon community college has dedicated an entire month to shaming white people.

Portland Community College has designated April as “Whiteness History Month,” where they will explore how the “construct of whiteness” makes everything in the world horribly, horribly racist.

The college-wide project is an “Effort to change our campus climate by challenging the mater narrative of race and racism through an exploration of the social construction of “whiteness,” CampusReform is reporting.

Whiteness and racism is everywhere, the program states. It is an “ideology based on beliefs, values, behaviors, habits, and attitudes, which result in the unequal distribution of power and privilege based on skin color.”

Not only does the concept of whiteness allow those who are “socially deemed white” to accrue benefits, the page asserts, but those benefits “are accrued at the expense of people of color, namely in how people of color are systemically and prejudicially denied equal access to those material benefits.”

The ideology of whiteness, it continues, dates back to “at least the seventeenth century, [when] ‘white’ appeared as a legal term and social designator determining social and political rights,” a concept that eventually grew to include “thousands” of “special privileges and protections” for white citizens.

For those interested in learning even more about the study of whiteness, PCC provides a link to a portal on the school library’s site listing additional resources.

Planning for the event is still ongoing, with applications being accepted until February 1 from those who wish to “get engaged” by hosting a lecture, guest speaker, panel, film screening, discussion, art exhibit, or class field trip to local art or history museums.

Representatives for PCC had not responded by press time to Campus Reform’s inquiries as to whether professors would be allowed to assign grades for participating in field trips or on-campus events.

While details about the specific programming are not yet available, PCC does outline the objectives that it seeks to accomplish through the project, as well as the concepts it would like students to explore over the course of the month.

In the “Context” category, for instance, the school challenges students to explore the meaning and history of whiteness, specifically how it “[emerged] from a legacy of imperialism, conquest, colonialism, and the American enterprise.”

Following from that, PCC wants students to explore the “legal, cultural, economic, social, environmental, educational, and/or intrapersonal consequences of whiteness,” especially in terms of the winners and losers that result from it.

Finally, the school asks them to consider “alternatives to a culture of white supremacy … approaches and strategies to dismantling whiteness … [and] the roles and responsibilities of white people and people of color in dismantling whiteness.”

Through the event, PCC says it hopes to improve its campus climate and bolster student retention and success, while also helping students to graduate “with local, national, and global sensibilities regarding the learning tasks of Critical Race Theory.”

Photo:  Bing

 

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