Funding Media relations Background - The need, and our response United States society suffers from pandemic racism, racial inequality and racial conflict. Twenty years before that, Gunnar Myrdal said exactly the same in his landmark sociological study, An American Dilemma . Yet a recent survey of research articles conducted by the Center for the Study of White American Culture looked at articles published between 1963 and 1993 on racial identity, awareness, consciousness and experience.
People of color understand there is a gap.
In the 1994 documentary, The Color of Fear , featuring a frank discussion between nine men of diverse racial backgrounds, Victor, an African American, emphatically tells David, a white American, that white people do not talk about themselves as white people. Instead, white Americans pontificate about the experience of other racial groups, and thus engender frustration, distrust and anger among those same groups by failing to acknowledge the impact of their own whiteness. The Center examines white American culture in the context of the greater American culture. Explicitly a multiracial organization, the Center predicates its work on the founding belief that a complete examination of white American culture must include the perspectives of both insiders and outsiders to that culture. The original Board of Trustees consisted of five persons, including founding members Jeff Hitchcock and Charley Flint.