College of Education Department Chair Commits to ‘Death of Whiteness’

A department chair at the University of Denver’s College of Education wrote an article calling on educators to “commit to realizing the death of whiteness.”

The April 2022 article features a call to academics and critical race theorists to join the author in committing themselves to the “death of whiteness,” specifically asking them to take up the “verbal effigy ‘dead honky.’”

Titled “’Dead Honky’— against technologies of (white) violence,” the article focuses on a 1975 skit from Saturday Night Live in which a white character used a racial slur in conversation with a black man. The article, authored by D.L. Stewart, proceeds to use the skit to expound upon a model of “white violence,” which the author argues consists of “malicious white terror,” “rhetorical white innocence,” “white contempt and white transmission,” and finally “pacifying white concession.”

Stewart contends that “whiteness is itself a violence” while also arguing that “in its emptiness, white refers to no ethnic group and defines itself only in reference to what it is not — it is not Black, disabled, poor, trans, non-Christian.”

{snip} Stewart even claims that “whiteness remains in power even when no white people are in leadership.”

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