It's nowhere near the first college course on this subject and FoxNews is trying to gin up concern in a television market where its audience demographic is strong and wears
pink underwear. Is this perhaps another ethnic studies curriculum violation of state law.
Sounds more like a supplemental course for ASU campus police enforcing faculty jaywalking as well as something useful for the usual racist nutlogs wishing to demand I-D papers from folks or drive POC "back to where they came from" like California, Nevada, or New Mexico.
But academic freedom, what's that to a FoxNews whose memes read like Accuracy in Academia screeds. Heck, they can package a distance learning course like this for those folks in other states who aren't real happy with being in the same zip code as "those people".
Fox News is raising alarm bells over an Arizona college course that studies whiteness.
The network’s “Fox and Friends” show ran a segment Friday titled “Trouble with Schools,” criticizing an Arizona State University course called “U.S. Race Theory & the Problem of Whiteness,” portraying it as an attack on white people. The professor of the course, Lee Bebout, is white.
"Fox and Friends" co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who has not sat in on the course and was unable to reach the professor for comment, referred to it as “quite unfair, and wrong, and pointed.”
Hasselbeck based her comments on criticisms leveled by ASU student Lauren Clark, who objects to the course’s books, including Richard Delgado’s Critical Race Theory and Jane Hill’s The Everyday Language of White Racism.
“All of these books have a disturbing trend and that’s pointing to white people as a root cause of social injustices for this country,” Clark told Hasselbeck on the segment, adding that such a course “causes more problems than solutions.” Clark is not herself enrolled in the class.
having more fun
The former president of the American Anthropological Association, Jane Hill, has a fascinating new book, The Everyday Language of White Racism. She analyzes how whites’ racial oppression, white power and privilege, are daily created and reinforced in routine English. Central here is analysis of hundreds of cases of mock Spanish phrasing (“hasta la vista, baby; no problemo; knock back some cervazas, etc) and how widespread that is–and how it assumes racial stereotyping from the white racial frame about Mexicans, Mexican Americans, or other Latinos.
Hill reports, significantly, that almost no whites she has presented the material to are willing to see how such mock Spanish embeds racist stereotyping and framing.
She offers a probing and provocative analysis of whites’ use of other racist language, such as the insistence in Arizona on preserving the name of a mountain as “squaw peak,” “squaw” being a derogatory and racist term used by whites for Native American women some time now. There is also much language mocking by whites of so-called “black English” and of the speech of Asian Americans.
Hill offers excellent discussions of how and why whites come to define racist outbursts, such as those of Senator Trent Lott, comedian Michael Richards, and talk show host Don Imus, as only “gaffes” that do not reveal racist framing by whites who engage in such behavior. This research makes clear the central role of the English language in embedding and perpetuating the white framing and the system of racism that it defends.