‘Dead Honky’ – College of Education Department Chair Commits to ‘Death of Whiteness’

A department chair at the University of Denver’s College of Education wrote an article calling on educators to “commit to realizing the death of whiteness.”

The April 2022 article features a call to academics and critical race theorists to join the author in committing themselves to the “death of whiteness,” specifically asking them to take up the “verbal effigy ‘dead honky.’”

Titled “’Dead Honky’— against technologies of (white) violence,” the article focuses on a 1975 skit from Saturday Night Live in which a white character used a racial slur in conversation with a black man. The article, authored by D.L. Stewart, proceeds to use the skit to expound upon a model of “white violence,” which the author argues consists of “malicious white terror,” “rhetorical white innocence,” “white contempt and white transmission,” and finally “pacifying white concession.”

Stewart contends that “whiteness is itself a violence” while also arguing that “in its emptiness, white refers to no ethnic group and defines itself only in reference to what it is not — it is not Black, disabled, poor, trans, non-Christian.”

 The article also parroted one of the central tenets of critical race theory — that white supremacy has hegemonic control over American institutions. Stewart even claims that “whiteness remains in power even when no white people are in leadership.”

Author D.L. Stewart is the Higher Education Department Chair of the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver. Stewart is affiliated with the American Educational Research Association and is a “critical and poststructural scholar” who focuses on race, gender, and intersectionality.

 The Morgridge College of Education has a number of different academic programs, some of which prepare students to become teachers in the K-12 education system. The graduate school also has a program in curriculum development and instruction.

The article was published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, which aims to “enhance the practice and theory of qualitative research in education.” 

The journal focuses on “racism (including whiteness, white racism, and white supremacy), capitalism and its class structure (including critiques of neoliberalism), gender and gender identity, heterosexism and homophobia,” in addition to “other issues of oppression and exclusion.”

Breitbart News previously revealed that this same education journal published a call to “eradicate whiteness” and send it “to its grave.”

D.L. Stewart, the Morgridge College of Education, and the University of Denver did not respond to requests for comment. 

Spencer Lindquist is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach out at slindquist@breitbart.com