Constructing Whiteness in America

Catalog description

This course will explore the construction and function of the social category of whiteness in American society from colonial times to the present. We will explore the development of idiosyncratically American social categories of race and ethnicity, and discover how American whiteness was fashioned in contrast to the identities constructed for indigenous, enslaved, immigrant, and borderlands peoples. The intersection of whiteness with sexuality and gender discourses is also evident in the interdisciplinary range of texts on our syllabus: primary historical documents, legal texts, scientific theories of race, literature (novels, plays, and poems), visual media from political cartoons to films and TV, and empirical studies of housing and policing. Special emphasis will be placed on understanding contemporary debate about such issues as "white privilege" and "white fragility" and the rise in open expressions of white supremacism in American culture in recent years.