February 15, 2015 — “White culture has been on the fritz lately and I’m not sure it is coming back.” So wrote one of my undergraduate students on her final exam a few years back. I remember laughing out loud at the time, but her pithy sentence stuck with me. Somehow, that image of white culture as a broken-down appliance seems to reflect how many of us see whiteness today: it’s an aging relic, unreliable, no longer able to do the job it was designed to do, ready for the junk heap of history. More…