A feminist professor at Grinnell College is offering a course this fall on “American Whiteness” that will focus on “attacking racism by making whiteness visible.”
Professor Karla Erickson, a self described “feminist ethnographer,” will teach the four-credit special topics class called “
American Whiteness,” which vows to explore “whiteness as a specific racial formation with a distinct history, proactive and defensive politics, and institutional and personal investments.”
According to the course description, students will learn about the “historical expansion” of whiteness while discussing both the “formal and informal advantages that accrue to whiteness” and potential “challenges to whiteness.”
Although Erickson declined to provide a copy of the current syllabus, Campus Reform located
a syllabus for a previous iteration of the course from the spring of 2015, which contains a course description identical to the one of that being offered in the fall.
“Whiteness is, among much else, a very bad idea,” the syllabus states, quoting Kansas University Professor David Roediger. “It is quite possible to avoid hating white people as individuals but to criticize the ‘idea of white people in general.’”
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Karla A. Erickson https://www.grinnell.edu/sites/defau...?itok=E8GtlPG4
Professor
ericksok@grinnell.edu
Karla is a feminist ethnographer of labor. She studies interaction and community in market exchanges. Her first book,
The Hungry Cowboy, was about a Cheers-like restaurant, and her second single-authored book
How We Die Now studies how residents and workers in a Midwestern elder community manage the challenges of longer lives and slower deaths. Erickson serves on the board of Grinnell Regional Medical Center and Grinnell Community Day Care and Preschool. Erickson received her Ph.D. in the Department of American Studies with a minor in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2004, her M.A. in Liberal Studies from Hamline University in 1998 and her B.A. in English and Women's Studies at Illinois Wesleyan in 1995.