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White is not a culture
Thursday's edition of the University of Pennsylvania's student paper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, carries a remarkable short piece describing the latest multicultural awareness initiative on campus. Entitled, "'White Week': New Take on Race Dialogue," the article asserts the importance of studying "white culture" if one is to have a proper grasp of race relations:
Campus groups have long set aside time for examining minority culture: Black History Month, Festival Latino, QPenn for the gay community. Now, a group has decided to give white culture a week of its own.Penn's first "White Week" kicked off Tuesday night with a discussion on the history of white culture. Events will continue through mid-April.
But even with a name seemingly intended to create controversy, the series of events isn't intended to celebrate white culture.
Instead, its purpose it "to provoke" students and foster multiracial dialogue, College senior Miji Park said.
"We think it's important for all ethnic groups to talk abotu their perspectives on whiteness," White Week organizer and College senior Fatimah Muhammas said.
The week was put together by the Race Dialogue Project, a campus group that discusses issues of race and privilege.
The kickoff event Tuesday night aimed to explore the meaning of white culture and examined its roots in history. Participants also compared various current stereotypes.
Moderators College junior Shakirah Simley, chairwoman of the United Minorities Council, and College senior Julija Zubac said their purpose was to understand, not condemn, white culture in America and on Penn's campus.
One handout -- adapted from an article in The Counseling Psychologist, a scholarly journal -- says that it highlights "common characteristics of most U.S. white people most of the time."
Over 40 people discussed "assumptions" from the article, such as that white people avoid conflict and intimacy.
"Society has a mindset of what 'white' is," said College sophomore Alex McCobin, who participated in Tuesday's event. "The stereotypes we are dealing with are inherent in every culture."
With all this emphasis on identifying stereotypes and challenging assumptions, one would think that someone would realize that the entire enterprise here is fundamantally flawed. White is not a culture; white is a color. More particularly, it is phenotype that tells us virtually nothing about a person's ethnic makeup, or values, or socioeconomic background, or tastes, or beliefs, or ancestral roots, or even race (on this last, see Henry Louis Gates' remarkable recent PBS special, African American Lives). To perceive the color of someone's skin is not to gain any automatic insight into the culture of the person whose skin it is; the former does not in any meaningful way imply or invoke the latter; to assume that it does is to engage in the very type of pernicious racism that the Race Dialogue Project ostensibly wants to resist. If the people running Penn's Race Dialogue Project can't figure that out, they aren't likely to generate much useful insight during White Week--even though that "week" will last for nearly three.
UPDATE: It must be noted that most Penn students are not as confused as the ones above, though, as this piece suggests, some Penn administrators are. Via Discriminations.
Posted by acta online at April 1, 2006 08:50 AM
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