I am white. Hear me roar.

by Ellen Barry

When removed from the incubator of the academy, whiteness scholarship can end up as artillery for a different kind of movement. Diversity consultants offer the concept of "white culture" as a certain balm to agonized whites: the reassurance that they, too, can join in the multicultural chorus.

Jeff Hitchcock, founder of the Center for the Study of White American Culture, is one of the people bringing whiteness studies from the academy to the public. The center runs seminars for corporations and religious groups all over the country, and will hold its second annual conference in Cambridge in November.

Call them the "Iron John" whites, in honor of Robert Bly's self-affirming male-bonding movement. They are sharing with each other the time they heard a beloved aunt use the N-word, and working toward the goal of -- in the words of psychologist Robert Carter -- "learning to value [themselves] in a noncomparative and nonoppressive way."

This can be achieved in a number of ways. One program operating out of the center is the Recovering Racists Network, a self-help program that encourages whites "to admit that by growing up in a racist culture, there is no way they could have avoided becoming racists themselves." The RRN badge (to be worn at all times) comes with a recovering-racist litany that reads, in part:

* I have come to understand that I am living in a racist culture and have learned to be a racist, and I want to work diligently to end racism in myself and be an example to others.

* I have come to realize that I have directly or indirectly taken part in perpetuating racism.

* As I learn how to free myself from my racist shortcomings, I will share this knowledge and join with others of like mind in working towards the elimination of racism in people and institutions.

Wearing the "recovering racist" badge is a way of publicly rejecting the standard white defense that contemporary whites aren't to blame for racism. It's about "having the courage to say `Blame me' " -- a mission of self-mortification. Other elements of Hitchcock's approach are more cheerful and self-affirming: he tells whites that they have a race too, and that they should learn about it. This comes across with an encounter-group chirpiness.

"I do think there is something called culture that runs much deeper [than skin color] as a result of having lived as an identity group," Hitchcock says. "We could look at white middle-class values, because those tend to be the most identifiable. Rugged individualism, nuclear family structure. It's male-dominated, it tends to be Protestant, monotheistic . . . I think there are good things about white culture as well as bad things."

Either way, the therapeutic aim is to make whites comfortable talking about race issues. And that means making whites comfortable with their race. Hitchcock has investigated the revolutionary options and finds them wanting; what is necessary, he says, is to get along.

"This can only be worked out culturally," he says. "I don't think you can step out of your race."

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Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.