{"id":37810,"date":"2014-10-19T21:23:48","date_gmt":"2014-10-19T21:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37810"},"modified":"2014-10-19T21:23:48","modified_gmt":"2014-10-19T21:23:48","slug":"the-whiteness-project-will-make-you-wince-because-white-people-can-be-rather-awful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37810","title":{"rendered":"The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather awful"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather awful<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a>
\n2014-10-15<\/p>\n

Steven W. Thrasher<\/strong><\/a>, Weekly Columnist<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve never seen privilege quite like this: \u2018You can\u2019t even talk about fried chicken or Kool-Aid<\/a> without wondering if someone\u2019s going to get offended\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

White and black Americans see race from radically different perspectives<\/a>, to the point that the white, world-saving New York Times<\/em> columnist Nicholas Kristof<\/a> has rung the alarm<\/a> that \u201cwhites just don\u2019t get it\u201d. As someone who is half black and half white, I can certainly attest to the truth of that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So I had misgivings about director Whitney Dow\u2019s<\/a> The Whiteness Project<\/em><\/a>, the new interactive documentary launched over the weekend by POV<\/a><\/em>. \u201cI made this project for white people, not for people of color,\u201d Dow told me on Tuesday, because \u201cif white people are going to participate in changing the racial dynamic, we need to deal with our own shit first.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n

Dow, who is white, has been making smart films about race with his black filmmaking partner Marco Williams<\/a> since 2002\u2019s Two Towns of Jasper<\/em><\/a>. But it was still hard to believe that white people talking about whiteness could do anything more than produce the gazing of blue eyes at pale navels.<\/p>\n

After all, Dow\u2019s project sounds a lot like \u201cwhiteness studies<\/a>\u201d, which is an actual field of academia I\u2019ve recently encountered. The field is often credited with having its intellectual origins in a WEB Du Bois meditation<\/a>, but more recently evolved to the point that it simply allowed white scholars to talk more about … well, white people…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather awful The Guardian 2014-10-15 Steven W. Thrasher, Weekly Columnist You\u2019ve never seen privilege quite like this: \u2018You can\u2019t even talk about fried chicken or Kool-Aid without wondering if someone\u2019s going to get offended\u2019 White and black Americans see race from radically different […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,394,20],"tags":[18193,18191,2103,18192],"class_list":["post-37810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-steven-thrasher","tag-steven-w-thrasher","tag-the-guardian","tag-whitney-dow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}