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Sunday, September 29, 2002

By Bill Schackner, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

They sign your paycheck, hold the mortgage on your house and drive a much better car than you do. Everywhere you turn, they're running things -- from Congress to Wall Street to the war on terrorism.

	Channa Newman teaches a course titled "Wealthy White Males" at Point Park College. (Matt Freed, Post-Gazette)

But wealthy white males also are a minority group, and one that's largely escaped study on college campuses, argues Channa Newman, a professor at Point Park College.

She wants to change that.

In a course provoking strong reactions this fall, Newman is taking minority studies where it rarely, if ever, goes. Her special topics course, "Wealthy White Males," explores how this "small but clearly impressive minority" came to garner such influence and what forces in society help ensure they hold on to it.

Experts in and out of academia are divided on whether wealthy white males qualify as a minority. One social historian, Peter Stearns, who is provost at George Mason University, said he nonetheless found the idea intriguing.

"It's clearly valid to study them," said Stearns, a former dean at Carnegie Mellon University. "I actually think it would be very illuminating, particularly in a society where this group has sort of separated itself out more in terms of wealth over the last two decades."

Others aren't buying the premise.

"It sounds like it's one of those goofy victimization courses that has no academic value," said Krista Kafer, senior policy analyst for education at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. "I'm neither male nor wealthy, but I'm not powerless."

Still, the class is filling seats on the small, private campus Downtown.

Every other Tuesday night, two dozen students -- eight of them male -- assemble in a classroom equipped with an overhead projector for a three-hour class that Newman, 59, said was grounded in sociology, psychology, history and linguistics.

Her aim is to examine a group whose influence is dominant in the boardroom and in government caucus rooms. By that definition, people such as Dick Cheney, Ted Kennedy and Bill Gates all qualify for study, and so do many others, as long as they have both wealth and clout.

"I don't just mean some happy, pretty rich guy living in Sewickley," she told the class on its first night. "We're talking about the super super rich who make policy. How do they do that?"

Newman assigned her students to explore "a wealthy white organization" like a think tank, foundation or club. She also wants them to research a wealthy white male of their choosing.

What they find could turn the traditional notion of minority struggles on its head. Cash flow? No problem for this group. Discrimination isn't a trouble spot either, nor is upward mobility.

"Minorities tend to view themselves as having problems in society and are often viewed by others as 'a problem,' " Newman said. "This minority seems to have no 'problems.' Is that why it doesn't need to be studied?"

Don't look for a guest speaker from Enron, though Newman said the corporate scandals in America were one reason that it's especially timely to study those with power.

Nationwide, courses devoted to subsets of the American population have been common for decades on college campuses. They usually involve groups facing adversity like African Americans, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, and women.

But a movement has developed over the past decade among academics who are intent on exploring "whiteness," its culture and power structure, said Dalton Conley, an author of books on race and class who directs New York University's Center for Advanced Social Science Research.

Conley explored those issues in a personal way in his 2000 memoir, "Honky," about growing up as one of the few white boys in a neighborhood of mostly black and Puerto Rican housing projects on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

The white studies movement doesn't sit well with some whites.

Nell Irvin Painter, a history professor at Princeton University, has learned that through academic work and research for a book she is writing, "The History of White People," due out in 2004.

"The foundation of white identity is that there isn't any. You're just an individual. You don't have to think about race," she said. "So giving white people a racial identity is kind of making them more like nonwhite people."

Neither she nor Conley had heard of a course like Newman's. Conley described it as the movement's logical next step.

"I think it's a good thing," he said. "It's a step toward a real dialogue about race in America."

But Kafer from The Heritage Foundation wondered how unbiased the dialogue will be. "I have a feeling this one is not going to be pro rich white guys," she said.

Two of the course's seven sections are called "Masculine Domination." Some students familiar with Newman's teaching said they were drawn to the class partly because they view her as liberal and opinionated.

But the intent of the course is not to bash males or spread a certain ideology, said Newman, a professor of French and cultural studies who's taught at Point Park for 35 years.

"It doesn't matter to me what conclusion a student reaches," she said. "What matters is that they are thinking about these things."

That said, she can be blunt when making a point. On the class's first night, she placed on the overhead projector an illustration of a 16th century French king surrounded by a white male inner circle plus a dog. She then flashed a photo of a bill signing in Washington in which the participants, save one woman, all were white males.

As her students chuckled, she declared: "What do we see 400 years later? The dog has been replaced by a female."

In her view, a corporate elite clearly runs things, and the populace has been lulled into thinking that's normal. She said cultural influences, including the media, help enforce the status quo.

"The fact that many see the notion of studying wealthy white males as funny or 'off the wall' is proof of what we are trying to bring to light in this course," she said. "We are in the habit of not seeing the whole picture."

The class is offered through the humanities department, and the reading list for the class includes "The Power Elite," a 1956 book by sociologist C. Wright Mills, and "Power Politics," a newer work by Indian writer Arundhati Roy. There are no tests. Fifty percent of the grade is based on the research projects, with the remainder coming from a survey and interviews the students are being asked to conduct.

Some who enrolled said they wanted to apply what they learn to their own majors. Some said they couldn't resist a peek at how the other half lives.

"I'm an African American, and if you look at the big picture, you see who runs the country, and basically it's the money and big corporations," said Carmita Bey, 26, a health services major from Beltzhoover. "I wanted to take a closer look."

Ian Wagasky, 25, a senior public relations major from New York City, said he wasn't nervous about being a male in the course.

"Just taking this kind of class [suggests] you have an open mind," he said. "I'm not going to tread lightly about things."