Whiteness Class at Colorado University Prompts Colorful Debate
BOULDER, Colo.
People stare when University of Colorado student Maren Gauldin wears her “Black is Beautiful” T-shirt.
That’s because she’s White.
The shirt, Gauldin says, is like a tag that forces her to engage in conversations about race, forces her to feel a tiny bit like Black and Latino students on an overwhelmingly White campus.
“Every time I put it on, I feel uncomfortable,” Gauldin told students at a White-privilege symposium last month that filled an auditorium and spilled into a hallway. “It helps me think about the kind of activist I want to be.”
The symposium was one part of an introspective look by White CU scholars and students at the privileges they say are automatically afforded the White race. Awareness of the relatively new field, called Whiteness studies, is building at CU as the university examines its diversity and racial strife.
