If the Asian American Association gets to whine about a supposedly offensive National Review cover, I should get to press my own grievance as an English-Scottish-German-American. I can cope with the nasty ethnic stereotypes (affinity for unnatural acts with sheep and unnatural affinity for invading Belgium being two of the more unattractive) that come with this background, but academia seems to have created something far more offensive. The April 24 Wall Street Journal reports that "White Studies" is the latest fad sweeping the nation.
Previous to reading this, my only contact with White Studies was as a debating point in ethnic studies arguments: "You want Latino Studies? I want White Studies. Ha!" I can report from experience that advocating White Studies is not a particularly persuasive debating tactic. The average Harvard student has read a lot of stuff by white guys and found it pretty boring. If the smart white guys are boring, the average Harvard student's reasoning goes, why would anyone want to study the stuff written by the not-so-smart white guys?
But White Studies in respectable, so to speak, academia is a
different beast altogether. There seem to be two approaches to White
Studies, the Journal reports. Anthropological White Studies
doesn't moralize about the white scourge, but rather focuses on
studying whites in their natural environment. The word "natural"
probably should be used guardedly here, since the highlights of white
culture are apparently guns, malls and Spam. In other words, it's not
White Studies, it's White Trash Studies. 
Now, I have nothing against white
trash. Some of my best friends like shooting critters with
high-powered weaponry, and a disturbing number of my high school
comrades thought hanging out at the mall was a great way to spend an
afternoon. There is probably even a little white trash in me, since,
to the embarrassment of my parents, I'm willing, if pressed, to eat
Spam. (Grilled Spam tastes sort of like Canadian bacon in a mild
petroleum dip.)
Forensic/therapeutic White Studies, on the other hand, tries to figure out what's wrong with white people and what can be done to fix them. Some scholars in this field consider white people pretty much incorrigible, but other scholars think white people just need a positive racial identity. Doctoral candidate Jessica Drew, for example, praises white people for their individualism, punctuality and work ethic, although she criticizes their competitiveness and "hierarchicalism." The apparent conclusion is that if only white people could get over their desire to rule the world, they could be productive McDonald's employees. Other White Studies researchers just want whites to receive a new, more positive, racial identity that will allow whites to build racial self-esteem without wanting to oppress the nearest black person.
As someone who has been white for almost 22 years, I find something sort of sad about this sanitized whiteness. It used to be that critics accused whites of being genocidal imperialists. I know that genocidal imperialism is an inappropriate way of resolving international disputes, but there's something respectable about genocidal imperialism that is lacking in Kinder, Gentler Whiteness. At least no one laughs at genocidal imperialists.
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