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Politicians are making a big whoop of critical race theory.

People might call me such a theorist judging by a seminar I just taught at Lock Haven University, but I would struggle to explain critical race theory.

I dont use the phrase myself.

If those politicians define it, they are probably not defining it well. It sounds like they just put a foggy label on something they dont like.

It might assuage our fear of the concept, however, if I explain some of the seminar I just taught. Seminars at Lock Haven, by the way, are upper level courses with open topics. It enables faculty to teach a subject without trudging through a convoluted bureaucracy. It makes the university nimbler.

I called my seminar Whiteness and White People.

White people are very important to understand in American society. Not only are there a lot of them, but they have power.

At the start, we wove ideas from two good books: The Wages of Whiteness and Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Look them up.

Slavery was worldwide and much older than our nation. The same philosophies from western civilization that led to American independence, however, also was the beginning of a long fight against that slavery.

The Founding Fathers of our nation wrestled with the contradictions between slavery and their freedom from Britain and they knew it could lead to civil war. The forefathers had foresight.

The Quakers ended slavery among themselves in 1776 not a coincidental date. And Britain ended slavery in 1808.

In North America, racism did not so much lead to slavery. Slavery led to how we constructed race and racism.

I will forgive you for freaking out over the term socially constructed. It has gotten some bad press from folks such as Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson, but it is rooted in old and sound Symbolic Interactionism. Centuries ago, the English saw the Irish as a different race and acted upon them as though they were. And that is how it happens. The Irish later became white.

You should look up that good book too, How the Irish Became White.

So to make ourselves OK with slavery in the free world, we worked on whiteness and blackness.

This was made worse by Irish immigration. That group was oppressed by the British and immigrated with few skills at a time when it was becoming difficult to own land or start a shop.

They could have seen themselves as also unfree and chosen to side with slaves.

Instead, they played up the racial differences and took whiteness like a paycheck. We often associate black faced minstrels with the Irish during the 19th century. Many stereotypes of blackness crystalized during this time.

We failed our ideals also after reconstruction when northerners did not have the political will of presidents Lincoln or Grant.

Grant created the department of justice to crush the Ku Klux Klan and it did.

The Klan was much larger 50 years later because by then nearly all European immigrants were claiming whiteness.

It was a short circuit to citizenship.

Damn Democrats.

Just a few decades ago, whiteness remained an emotional thing. It meant you were a good American without needing to do all the work of being a good American.

That was valuable.

Many whites obsessed about stereotyping blackness.

Watermelon is good to eat. Why did we snicker in my youth like Beavis and Butthead about blacks eating watermelon?

See there?

Whites are weird when you study them.

We read one of my favorite ethnographies by anthropologist John Hartigan called Racial Situations.

He studied three different groups of whites in Detroit. Whites are a minority there and their experiences give whiteness some clarity.

We learned that rednecky whites often appear racist when they are actually inclusive of others.

We learned that wealthier whites can be both colorblind and exclusive of others. Wealthier ones are a tad slicker.

Its complicated.

Our university library put it on the shelf.

Students appreciated looking closely at Amish culture or at how Germany embraced a black sociologist a few years before they murdered millions of Jews.

My students did not become anti-American.

They pointed out the spaces between who we say we are and who we are.

Such self-examination is a very American thing to do.

Greg Walker is professor and chair of Sociology, Anthropology and Geography at Lock Haven University. Those books are available in Stevenson Library at Lock Haven University.

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