Almost every university has programs in First Nations Studies, Asian Studies and Black or African-American Studies.  I learned only recently through EDST 507 about the possibilities of White Studies.  My ignorance is directly related to what Pajaczowska and Young call the "absent centre of White ethnicity". White culture has not been studied because it is based on power. 

An identity based on power never has to develop a sense of itself as responsible, it has no sense of its limits except as those are perceived in opposition to others.  The blankness of the identity of empire covers an ambivalence which is often unconscious, and which, consequently, can most readily be perceived in the representations it creates of the colonial "other" (Pajaczowska & Young, 1992, p. 202).

Edward Said's landmark work on "Orientalism" shows the need of white people to have an Other from which to gain their own identity.  Culture and race, according to Said, are largely products of the nineteenth century, engendering both theory and practice of human inequality.  The white "race" can only be known by distinguishing its difference from other "races".  The major component in European culture is that European identity is a superior one in comparison with all non-European peoples and cultures.  Home economics, with its origins in nineteenth century thought, promulgated the hegemonic notions of superior white culture. Who better to "improve" and therefore prove one's own superiority than those of lower status in race or class?   

The point of using white studies to examine home economics is to make visible its early contradictions and to situate it within the progressive education reform movement rather than as a women's issue.

References:



Pajaczowska, Claire & Young, Lola. Racism, representation, psychoanalysis.  In James Donald  & Ali Rattansi (Eds.) ( 1992).  "Race", culture and difference.  London:  Sage Publications in association with The Open University.  198-219.

Said, Edward. (1979).  Orientalism. New York: Vintage. 1-28.