In a story that defines irony, a new course at Arizona State University titled "Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness" has roused the ire of American racists, including the intellectuals at Fox News.
Southern Poverty Law Center is reporting a story about ASU professor Lee Bebout who developed the course on race and racism in America and published it as an ASU Spring offering. He intended it to be hard-hitting and controversial. He was not prepared for the predictable racist reaction.
He had no idea that it would also provoke the wrath of, first, Fox News viewers, and then, white supremacists, sparking protests on campus, and yet ultimately drawing the explicit support of ASU administrators.
An ASU student wrote a blog about her outrage over whites being picked on for fomenting racism in America. After she appeared on Fox News, the story went national and the neo-Nazi organization National Youth Front paid a visit to the ASU campus.
A short time later, members of a neo-Nazi youth organization called the National Youth Front (NYF), a youth-oriented arm of the white nationalist organization American Freedom Party, began plastering the ASU campus with fliers featuring Bebout’s portrait and the stark label “Anti-White.” They also went to Bebout’s neighborhood and distributed them there.
Although the ASU administration was initially cautious about intervening, they ultimately supported Bebout and the course is going forward with the blessing of the ASU faculty and administration.
ASU President Michael Crow told the student paper, the State Press, that he and a vice provost both examined the course carefully and found that it was well within the framework the school hoped to offer academically.
“[The] course looked like a pretty good critical thinking course to me,” Crow said. “It looked like it was doing what it was supposed to do, which is to deal with a complex subject through literature and get students interested in talking and writing and thinking about that complex subject.”
Of course the subject is only "complex" if you are actually capable of critical thinking.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of this story is the link that Bebout observed between Fox News and the neo-Nazi groups.
“Since my class came under the attention of white supremacists, I noticed that NYF and other groups regularly post stories from Fox News and Campus Reform as ‘proof’ for their ideology,” he said. “While these outlets like Fox News and Campus Reform certainly use different rhetoric than National Youth Front, it would be erroneous to say that they are completely separate discursively or ideologically (one being colorblind and the other being explicitly racist). Indeed, I am fascinated with how much they share in common in terms of rhetoric and ideology.”
Maybe he can include it in the course.