While the university’s Diversity Commission mulled over race relations on campus, students in two anthropology courses last semester considered race from an angle that often goes ignored: the construction of “whiteness.” The two courses culminated in December in a joint mini-conference where students presented their original research. The conference made for a thought provoking forum offering fresh ideas on a highly politicized topic.

  

The idea persists among many white students that the problem of race is about minorities on campus and not about them,” said Ira Bashkow, who taught one course on whiteness. “Whites are also raced. It’s just that they have the privilege of not having to think about it or apologize for it or qualify their social interactions on the basis of it.” Bashkow’s course addressed the formation of whiteness in the West as the unmarked racial norm at the privileged center of a constellation of racial categories — a norm that is seldom closely examined.

Wende Marshall taught a course on whiteness from the perspective of African-Americans and other non-whites. Through readings on the white backlash after the civil rights advances of the 60s, Marshall asked her students to think about “how white power reacts to challenges to it, how white power is constructed through these challenges and what difference it makes to the coherence and discourse of whiteness when the non-white other is Mexican or Japanese.”

The two professors share broad interests in race and racial constructions, although they came to the issue from different backgrounds. As a medical anthropologist, Marshall has recently explored the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa from an anthropological perspective; her early fieldwork was focused on Hawaiian healing practices and decolonization. She is presently working on a book about how the processes of decolonization in Hawaii are happening in, on, and through the body. Bashkow came to anthropology through the study of the discipline’s history and has done fieldwork in two areas of Papua New Guinea, where he looked at local conceptions of development. He’s now working on a book about how Papua New Guineans perceive the West and “whitemen.” But there was naturally some overlap between the two approaches their race-theory courses took. Graduates and undergraduates in both seminar classes read,

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for example, from UVA professor Grace Hale’s work on segregation in the South following the Civil War. And both courses challenged students to consider race as a social construct that can’t be reduced to simple notions of biology, class, politics or ethnicity. Students’ final papers covered a wide range of questions, ranging from whiteness in country music to lexical categories in East Africa. One paper dealt directly with the mapping of race at UVA, where the issue has recently gained considerable attention.

After a string of racially charged threats and an attack against Daisy Lundy while she was running for Student Council president last year, University president John Casteen convened a commission to talk about diversity at UVA. But some have criticized the commission — made up of administrators, faculty and students — for not tackling the issue of systemic racism head-on. It’s not a topic students in last semester’s anthropology courses were afraid to confront. Before finalizing their work, they met for an evening of public talks in Cabell Hall and presented research during a series of concurrent workshops. Outside discussants moderated the workshops and suggested ways to develop and refine each student’s paper.

Students were expected to incorporate the comments into their final product. And Bashkow, who borrowed the idea from a linguistics course offered at the University of Chicago, said it worked. “It seemed even better, with a really political issue, that instead of having the papers go into the black hole of my files, we could share them in a broader way,” he said. “I was really happy about it. I thought the nervousness of students getting ready to present, the necessity of preparing their papers beforehand, was a powerful motivation for presenting work that was worth hearing.” Marshall agreed and added, “This conference helped open up anthropology to the public, so that non-anthropologists could engage in thinking critically about the social construction of whiteness.”

The discussants, drawn from anthropology doctoral candidates and faculty in a number of departments, also lent a special touch to the conference. Participants said they were struck by how seriously the discussants received their work, and with the critical but fair responses they gave. Bashkow said having those alternative voices helped “push the limits” of the internal discourses developed in each course. A number of students, he said, told him it was one of the highlights of their academic lives at the university.