Students Being Taught ‘WHITE TERROR’

(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – An African American Studies course at the University of Florida is exploring the horror genre through “whiteness” and “racial identity and oppression,” a report informs.

The course entitled “Black Horror, White Terror” is taught by Professor Julia Mollenthiel, whose doctoral dissertation discussed “horrifying whiteness,” The College Fix reports.

The 2023 spring syllabus of the course informs that it explores “the relationship between horror and Black literary modes and traditions focusing on key moments that depict fears of Blackness and/or the terror associated with being Black in America.”

Students enrolled in the class are supposed to read “classic works by 19th-century white authors” and look into how those have “affected racialized discourses.”

Literary works on the course list feature Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” among others.

An academic article on the syllabus is entitled “The Power and Horror of Whiteness.”

It argues that Edgar Allan Poe was “haunted” by black people, as allegedly evidenced by his fiction works.

The course also features two more resources whose titles mention “whiteness.”

The course teacher, Professor Julia Mollenthiel, failed to respond to a request to comment on “what is meant by the term ‘whiteness,’ how it is portrayed in the course, and why it is necessary to include material on queer sexuality.”

So did David Canton, director of the University of Florida’s African American Studies program.

The report delves further into the course materials, which include required reading on “the Marxist and the feminist location” of “Frankenstein … in the social and psychological context of the times.”

The resource claims that Shelley’s monster “parallels … the racial stereotypes of the age.”

The course further examines how black authors have “used the horror aesthetic as a means of countering white constructions of Blackness in the horror/Gothic genre.”

Its analysis also dwells on the 1991 novel “The Gilda Stories” by Jewelle Gomez as well as its significance for “Afrofuturism and black feminism” and “queering personhood in the neo-slave narrative.”

“No lesson is intended to espouse, promote, advance, inculcate, or compel a particular feeling, perception, viewpoint, or belief,” reads in bold an underlined section of the syllabus, which may be due to Florida’s pending Stop WOKE Act.

The name of the course is the same as the title of the professor’s dissertation. Mollenthiel earned a doctorate in English literature, focusing on African American works, at the University of Miami.

“My concept of horrifying whiteness offers an avenue for Black resistance by disrupting the centuries-old whiteness as innocence and blackness as culpability narrative; and my concept of crippling fear versus empowering fear offers an opportunity to probe the advantages/disadvantages of Black fear,” reads an abstract from Mollenthiel’s dissertation.

This year, the professor plans to release a book of the same name to the University of Miami’s library.

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