So it would be crazy to consider the possibility that as a white dude teaching this class, he’s likely not advocating separatism or harm towards his own racial group?

True, it’s not as if a prominant media personality has called for the strengthening of the White Establisment or anything.

Happy to help. :-)

I disagree with your assumptions about intent since people in the field would be familiar with the reference. Course descriptions are written for profs’ colleagues as much as they’re written for students, but it is undeniably true that a catchy course title might draw students to add your class. I also disagree that…

Well, maybe white people should learn to think of and understand ourselves as white, because instead we think of ourselves as “just people”- as if whiteness were “neutral” and non-white was “Other.” White people tend to think of ourselves as not having a race. That has some pretty big implications. Everyone…

The course is not “The Problem with Whites”, so already your hypothetical has failed. If you were actually looking for a reasonable comparison, you would have said “The Problem with Hispanicity”, which would be a valid course of study, since as you noted Hispanic is a catch-all, which diminishes the individual…

I actually think that “The Problem of Blackness” and “The Problem of Jewishness” could both be interesting courses - they would just be about basically the same thing as “The Problem of Whiteness,” which of course is that race is a social construct and the product of white supremacy. In that way, the title of this…

there is a book called How the Irish Became White, which you’d think doesn’t make any sense! They’re European! They’re the whitest of the white, next to the Nordic!

In an academic setting, a problem can be something you question and analyze, rather than a negative situation to be eliminated. Like, in Bertrand Russell’s “The Problems of Philosophy.” Russell doesn’t say philosophy is a terrible thing, he examines what classical philosophy is and what it tries to do.

I suppose so, and that’s the baffling thing about it. I can’t understand that, really.

The course title is clearly referencing WEB Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), wherein DuBois uses the refrain “how does it feel to be a problem?” to refer to the condition of being black in the US. Flipping the script makes people pay attention when they ordinarily wouldn’t think about an issue at all. Which…

“I wonder if his course covers how a white guy becomes a professor of African Cultural Studies?

The course’s name strikes you as being the immediate problem here.

The trolls are out in force. Please dismiss, flag, and absolutely don’t ungrey!

Force them all to audit the course. Maybe they’ll learn something outside of their echo chamber.

This political trend right now that is propagating the notion that legislatures should have the final say over the academic work done at colleges and universities is absolutely, nightmare-inducingly chilling.

“Whiteness” is a construct designed by a particular group of people in order to exclude particular other groups and deny them their rights. It has been used to mean or to exclude a variety of people of varying skin tones and ethnic backgrounds, depending on what was convenient at the time. “Blackness” is also a social…

people need to learn to separate criticism of an entity from criticism of the individuals who make up that entity. Hating “Whiteness” as a structural inequity is way different from hating “You, White Person”. Same way I can say “organized religion is awful” and respect You, A Religious Person, exercising your shit.

Well this is what we need. Politicians without degrees making determinations about course offerings at universities.

Just another coward demanding the whole world be his safe space.