Portland State course aims to ‘make whiteness strange’

According to Portland State University Professor’s Rachel Sanders’ “White Privilege” course, “whiteness” must be dismantled if racial justice will ever be achieved.

The course description states that “whiteness is the lynchpin of structures of racial meaning and racial inequality in the United States” and claims that “to preserve whiteness is to preserve racial injustice.”

Students taking the course will “endeavor to make whiteness strange.” In order to make whiteness strange, the description says students must “interrogate whiteness as an unstable legal, political, social, and cultural construction.”

The course readings and concepts are drawn, in part, from the field of “critical race theory.” According toHarvard University, critical race theory “combine[s] progressive political struggles for racial justice with critiques of the conventional legal and scholarly norms which are themselves viewed as part of the illegitimate hierarchies that need to be changed.”

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