Northwestern University’s Department of Black Studies is offering a course next semester called “Unsettling Whiteness.” The course aims to disturb the “normal state of affairs,” which does not study or question the identity of “whiteness.”
The course appears on a spring course list for the university’s Department of Black Studies. The brief description on the list states that the course will make “the historical, political, and cultural formation of whiteness in Western modernity visible and narratable for commentary and analysis.”
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A more extended description appears on another page of Northwestern’s website. That description says that “whiteness” can be broadly understood as maintaining the current state of affairs.
“Whiteness, whether it occurs under the heading of white supremacy, white privilege or white authority is the meaning that defines just the way things are, a normal state of affairs, like in the phrase, ‘getting back to normal,’” the description says.
It continues to assert that regardless of its ubiquity in society, “whiteness” is relatively unstudied.
“[I]t remains the case that whiteness as it shapes and affects both white populations and non-white populations is routinely exempted from analysis,” it says. “All of which raises the question of how and why this particular white elephant in the nation’s room has remained unstudied and understudied for so long, so much so that many white individuals appear to be oblivious to the racial issues of whiteness and their own whiteness, until they encounter people of color.”
Understood in this way, “whiteness” will be explored in four ways during the course, “the racialization of white populations,” “the formation of white supremacy,” “the cultural institution of the White Gaze,” and “the regime of White Democracy.”
Barnor Hesse, the Department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies and an Associate Professor of Black Studies, Political Science, and Sociology, is the professor for “Unsettling Whiteness.”
Hesse’s university bio describes him as “a political and critical theorist concerned with decolonial questions of colonial-racial modernity, the western political, and Black politics in the lives, conceptualizations and formations of the Black Diaspora.”
His research interests are “Black Political Thought,” “Political Theory,” “Black Critical Theory,” “Critical Race Studies,” “Black Affect Studies,” “Decolonial Studies,” and “Black Conceptual Methodologies.”
Campus Reform contacted Northwestern University, the Department of Black Studies, and Barnor Hesse for comment.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
