University Offering Course on ‘The Problem of Whiteness’

Via a kind reader:

Professor sells ‘George Bush is the real terrorist’ t-shirts

Elizabeth Harrington

The University of Wisconsin is offering a course this spring on the “Problem of Whiteness,” which is taught by a radical assistant professor who believes America is a terrorist state.

The course will cover institutional racism and “what it means to be #woke.”

Damon Sajnani, an assistant professor in UW-Madison’s African Cultural Studies department, is teaching the course.

“Have you ever wondered what it really means to be white?” the course description states. “If you’re like most people, the answer is probably ‘no.’ But here is your chance!”

“In Frantz Fanon’s famous White Skin Black Mask (1952), his chapter ‘Look, a Negro!’ interrogated the meaning and experience of coming to know oneself as Black under the constant scrutiny of the white gaze,” the course description continues. “It is an experience concomitant with W.E.B. Du Bois’s observation that under systemic racism, even well-meaning whites are constantly asking, in one way or another, ‘what is it like to be a problem?’ But, Like Richard Wright’s quote above, philosopher George Yancy’s book, Look, a White! (2010), turns the question around, and rightly returns ‘the problem of whiteness’ to white people. After all, since white supremacy was created by white people, is it not white folks who have the greatest responsibility to eradicate it? Our class begins here.”

The course is part of “Critical Whiteness Studies,” and will attempt to offer solutions to the “problem of whiteness.”

“We will come together with our socially ascribed identities of Black, white, mixed and other and, with the problem properly in its place we will ask ourselves and our allies, what are we going to do with it?”

“Critical Whiteness Studies aims to understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy,” the course description reads. “Our class will break away from the standard US-centric frame, and consider how whiteness is constructed globally, with particular attention to paradigmatic cases like South Africa.”

The class will also cover how white people “consciously and unconsciously perpetuate institutional racism and how this not only devastates communities of color but also perpetuates the oppression of most white folks along the lines of class and gender.”

“In this class, we will ask what an ethical white identity entails, what it means to be #woke, and consider the journal Race Traitor’s motto, ‘treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.’”

Sajnani also teaches a course on “Global Hip Hop and Social Justice.”

Aside from his assistant professor role at UW-Madison, Sajnani runs “Justus League Records,” a political rap group that calls for revolution. He calls it the “The Dope Poet Society,” so-called “Hip Hop revolutionaries in the struggle to save the world!”

Justus League sells t-shirts that read “George Bush is the real terrorist.” Sajnani has written anti-capitalist pieces arguing that America is a “global terrorist.”

In the article “Jay-Z is 1%, Not HipHop,” Sajnani criticizes the rapper for being too pro-America and identifying with “an oligarchy whose interests are antithetical to Black liberation.”

“America is the reigning, though waning, seat of capitalist imperialism,” he writes. “Among other things, it is an enslaver of Africans, exterminator of aboriginals, environmental devastator, global terrorist, captain of neo-colonialism and chief beneficiary of these crimes.”

“To be pro-American does not mean that you support Americans, but that you buy into the propaganda that allows the richest Americans to collude with the richest global elites elsewhere, to the detriment of the world’s people including the majority of Americans,” Sajnani continues. “American culture is the set of beliefs, practices and ways of living that support America as such.”

Sajnani calls Jay-Z and President Barack Obama “mouthpieces for imperialism.”

“Don’t get it twisted, the struggle continues,” he concludes.

Sajnani changed his profile picture on Facebook to Fidel Castro the day after the Communist dictator’s death. The picture reads, “Keep it classy mi gente. Rest in freedom to the REAL most interesting man in the world.”

He also posted a picture of a 1950s-esque American family serving turkey for Thanksgiving with the words “Genocide, terrorism, small pox, colonization, torture” written in blood over it.

Request for comment from the university was not immediately returned.

Source: University Offering Course on ‘The Problem of Whiteness’