A new student group at Kenyon College in Ohio is called the “Whiteness Group,” and one of the rules of the discussion group is that white students cannot ask students of color questions, according to campus news reports.
The goal of the new group, run through the private school’s multicultural center, is to “educate students on whiteness, what it means to be white, and ways to deconstruct whiteness to work towards anti-racist actions.”
That according to its student founder, Juniper Cruz, also a student manager of the center, in an interview with the Kenyon Thrill.
“I decided to start this group last semester when I got tired of white people who would post these very intellectual and passionate statuses on their social media accounts, but that’s as far as their activism went,” Cruz told the Thrill.
“… My goal, as I kind of mentioned earlier, is to create a sustainable form of activism that relies on community, education, and white people educating each other, while not relying on people of color to educate them.”
With that, white students are apparently not allowed to ask students of color questions.
“Some ground rules at the Snowden Multicultural Center’s Whiteness Group: If you have an unpopular opinion, speak up. No white person can ask a person of color questions; white people must try to answer their questions for themselves. And no spreading rumors about what people say during the meetings,” reports the Kenyon Collegian.
Cruz, the group’s facilitator, is a self-described transgender Queer Afro-Latinx Muslim. The group has had a couple of meetings so far and Cruz reports it’s going well.
“White allies have a reputation of talking a lot, putting a lot on social media, but not really doing anything about it,” Cruz told the Collegian. “Not doing much besides default sharing. I’m really pleasantly surprised so many came to take a good hour out of their day to come here.”
This is not the first time the issue of “whiteness” has been tackled at Kenyon College. Two years ago the “Whiteness Project” documentary was screened there.
“Being a predominantly white campus, Kenyon has many multicultural programs to include the minorities on campus, yet lacks opportunities to ‘make white people the center of conversation again,'” the Collegian reported at the time.
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