Class next semester will try to understand race and identity.
AB Wire
A professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, Damon Sajnani, will offer a class semester titled ‘The Problem of Whiteness’, which aims to “understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy.”
“Whites rarely or never questioned what it is to be white,” Sajnani, who will teach the course, told The College Fix in a telephone interview last week. “So you go through life taking it for granted without ever questioning or critically interrogating it.”
For Sajnani, one way to solve this is to offer “The Problem of Whiteness,” an analysis of what it means to be white and how to deal with it as a “problem.”
“The idea of talking about the problem of whiteness is to turn the question back to where it belongs,” he said.
One of the main goals in the class will be to understand race and identity and how it impacts lives on a daily basis, he said. One of the talking points is juxtaposing white privilege and white power, and how the two can be intertwined and similar to each other, the scholar said.
“The problem of racism is the problem of whites being racist towards blacks,” he said.
The class will also theorize what white students can do with their “whiteness” and how to mobilize their identities as a mode for social justice as opposed to racial injustices, he added.
Sajnani told The Fix the premise of the course is to understand that race is neither biological nor cultural, but rather a social and political construct. He purports that blacks, throughout their life, constantly question what it is to be black, however “blacks did not invent racism or racial oppression.”
Naming the problem of whiteness is a play on what used to be known as the “Negro Problem” in the 20th Century, he points out.
Sajnani is an accomplished HipHop artist too. As leader of The Dope Poet Society, one of Canada’s top selling independent HipHop acts, he has toured worldwide and released four critically acclaimed CDs. He is the winner of the Inaugural Nasir Jones HipHop Fellowship at the DuBois Institute at Harvard.