A Fox News host raised alarm bells Friday over a university course that studies whiteness, saying that the titles of the books used in the class make it clear that the syllabus aims to stoke anti-white resentment among students.
But the authors of two of those books, one of whom is herself white, say the claim is ridiculous.
In a Friday segment of “Fox & Friends,” co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck described an Arizona State University course called “U.S. Race Theory & the Problem of Whiteness,” taught by Lee Bebout, an assistant professor at the school. Hasselbeck characterized the class as an attack on white people, calling it “quite unfair, and wrong, and pointed.”
Hasselbeck based her comments on an interview with ASU student Lauren Clark, who has not taken the class but who said she objects to the teaching of books like Jane Hill’s The Everyday Language of White Racism and Richard Delgado’s Critical Race Theory.
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“Those young, animated and in my view quite gifted teachers were teaching kids in Tucson schools about their own histories and their own culture and how to understand racial dynamics in the United States,” Delgado said. “They were teaching them how to think about their own condition, and their own histories, and why their own families were where they were in the social pecking order. And the kids got extremely excited, wanting to go to college, wanting to be lawyers, wanting to change things and make them right.”
“I was thrilled when I found out that my book was helping fire up young students,” he added.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments this month in a lawsuit brought by Tucson students seeking to overturn the state’s ethnic studies law. The three-judge panel has yet to release its decision.
