Sociology professor Dr. Ted Thornhill is teaching a "White Racism" class at Florida Gulf Coast University. (FOX4)
A Florida university is teaching a "White Racism" class designed to show "the U.S. has been and remains a white supremacist society," the course's professor told Fox News.
Dr. Ted Thornhill, a Florida Gulf Coast University sociology professor, told Fox News in a statement his class this spring is “about the search for truth” and any controversy around the title or description proves its “urgency.”
“Too many Americans, especially whites, are cocooned in a ‘bubble of unreality’ as it concerns racial matters,” Thornhill said.
Students will read “important scholarship” to “gain a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of race, white racism, racial inequality, and white supremacy,” in addition to challenging “widely and adamantly held, but empirically unsubstantiated myths about racial matters in the U.S.,” Thornhill said.
“Many whites have subscribed to and promoted racist ideologies, championed and/or enacted scores of racist laws, policies, practices, and traditions, and made incalculable decisions in their daily lives that have operated to maintain white racial domination over blacks and other people of color for hundreds of years,” he said.
Thornhill was adamant that the White Racism course isn’t “anti-white” but rather is “anti-white racism.”
“Clearly, not all white people are racists; some are even anti-racist,” Thornhill said, though he added all white people “derive, in some measure, material and psychological benefits by virtue of being racialized as white.”
Thornhill told Hello SWFL the class would discuss slavery, genocide, internment, segregation, discrimination, rape, violence, and theft against non-Europeans throughout U.S. history.
“When you name 'whiteness' I think it disturbs them,” he said. “It shakes many white people at their core and requires them to question the assumptions they have about their life…”
Thornhill says the new course wasn’t developed in response to racially charged messages found around campus last fall, but instead to give students a broad idea of the history of racism, white supremacy and how to challenge racism in today’s society, according to FOX4.
The course was expanded from 35 to 50 students and is currently at capacity.
