Richard Dyer leaps to the defence of white studies because, he argues, it forces us to see whiteness as strange rather than as the benchmark of what is ordinary

It doesn't take much to raise the spectre of white studies. One conference organised in Berkeley by a graduate student, a handful of books, and suddenly there are pieces in the press about the emergence of white studies. Neither conference organiser Matt Wray nor the authors of the said books are proposing to set up a discipline called white studies. Yet already the media is debating whether white studies is an idea whose moment has come or just the crazed logical extension of political correctness; as if there already was such a thing as white studies.

The study of whiteness is not the same thing as "white studies". Matt Wray and the handful - including Theodore Allen (The Invention of the White Race), Ruth Frankenberg (White Women, Race Matters) and David Roediger (The Wages of Whiteness) - have something else in mind. They are responding to calls from black intellectuals - most recently Patricia Williams in this year's Reith lectures - for white people to recognise and investigate their whiteness. White people, and especially liberal, anti-racist white people, tend not to think of themselves as white. Perhaps this is because the white people who do so nowadays are avowedly racist and white supremacist. Yet not to acknowledge our whiteness is to assume we have no "racial" identity, as if other, non-white people are raced, but we whites are just people.

On the whole, we do not much like to be told that we are something specific and limited like a race. It suggests that our predominance in jobs, politics and education may not be down to us as splendid individuals but may also have something to do with privileges accorded whiteness. In the academy, we are happy to approve courses on, say, "black history" or "British Asian literature", but less happy when it is suggested that the other history or literature courses we teach may only be about white history and literature.

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Studying whiteness is about decentering white people, it is about making whiteness strange rather than treating it as a taken-for-granted touchstone of human ordinariness. Until we start to see whiteness, we will go on reproducing its power, with all the discrimination that stems from that. This though is where the problems start.

One of these is that we may let white supremacism in by the back door. There is already a mood on some UScampuses that would be only too pleased to see the introduction of white studies to balance what are seen as the excesses of affirmative action programmes in black, Chicano and Asian studies. However, in arguing for the importance of seeing whiteness, one is not arguing for its affirmation. There is no parallel withblack studies. That was about acknowledging the validity of lives that had been ignored. The same cannot be said of white lives.

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At the same time, an equally problematic development would be study that sets out to denigrate white lives. Decentering is one thing, but turning that into a diatribe against the awfulness of whites is quite another. We must not flinch at the mobilisation of whiteness in white colonialism and European fascism, nor even at the appalling legacy of centuries of white domination in the world. Yet we should not simply stick the label white on to anything we do not approve of, as if whites have been uniquely wicked in human affairs. We should indeed investigate the whiteness of, say, Jane Austen, ballet or U2, but without drifting into the idea that they are reprehensible and worthless because they are white. Above all, we must not indulge in an orgy of guilt, leading inexorably to resentment - this is the path that leads back to affirmative white studies.

Worried by precisely these problems, some scholars writing about whiteness define their aim as moving "Towards the Abolition of Whiteness", the title of Roediger's recent book. They argue that whiteness was only ever a position of power and privilege, an invention whose main purpose was a strategic alliance between disparate groups to justify genocide and slavery - all whites had in common was that they were not those over whom they held sway. Such scholars advocate a refusal to speak about white people and, especially, white culture. If white people want an identity alongside those of non-white peoples, they should find it in national or perhaps continental belongingness. The impulse behind these arguments is honourable. Yet it has the effect of assuming that a historical "invention" is merely an invention that can be wished away. But all of human culture is invented and we live by those inventions.

My own approach has been to begin uncovering some of the historical processes of this invention. Whiteness can be traced in the complex history of Christianity (with Christ becoming more gentile and fair as Christianity became the defining religion of Europe and America), in the growth of racial theories (which in designating other races must imply what the white race is), in the development of colonialism (which justified itself with reference to the white character). And alongside all these positive versions of whiteness there runs the melancholy suspicion that whites, in being nothing in particular, may be nothing at all, a kind of living dead, an anxiety that surfaces in the horror movie.

It would, of course, be a better world if we did not think in terms of races at all. But we are not yet in that world and to get there we have to put whites in their place. That, though, is not the same thing as advocating the creation of white studies.

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Richard Dyer is professor of film studies at Warwick University. His book, White: Essays on Race and Culture, is published next month by Routledge, Pounds 12.99.