'Whiteness History Month' launches at Portland Community College

"Whiteness History Month" launched Friday at all Portland Community College campuses.

The school says the lectures, discussions, assessments and other activities involved are meant to help fight racial bias and hidden prejudices, but some students say it rubs them the wrong way.

"I think what they were trying to do was a good idea," said William Haley, a PCC freshman."There's a lot of people out there who, rightly, have to acknowledge the fact that white people, white males like me who've come from an upper-middle class family are gonna not have had to deal with certain things."

If he gets pulled over by police, for example, Haley admits he may very well be treated much better than a person of color.

"We just get an easier hall pass on a lot of things," Haley said, "that isn't rightly deserved in a lot of cases."

Haley and one of his African-American classmates, Abdul Ahmed, told KATU they like the goal behind it but feel the name, Whiteness History Month, is misleading.

"You don't want to call it Whiteness History Month," Ahmed said. "You just make it seem like it's all about white people."

"I just think that they did a bad job sending out a message and they could've done better," said Haley.

A video on the school's Facebook page defines whiteness as "a word used to describe the process that created racists and perpetuates racism."

"This is not about shaming white people. It's really about providing a better understanding for all of us," said Craig Kolins, dean of instruction at PCC's Southeast Portland campus."This is an opportunity to dialogue about some of the tensions ... created because of the societal pressure of whiteness."

Nearly 100 events are planned on all PCC campuses in April and anyone can go.

An event a KATU crew went to on PCC's Southeast Portland campus Friday was was attended by around 30 people. Almost all of them were faculty members and Kolins said only about two or three of them were students.

They took the Harvard Implicit Bias Assessment in an attempt to test their own prejudices. You can take the test here.

"I hope there's something good that comes out of it," said Ahmed. "I don't know if it will. I don't know if it will not, but people should learn that there's people out there who are gonna smile but behind your back something's gonna happen."