You make a good point about innocence and guilt presuming choice--though I could counter that evil tendencies can still admit choice: propensity to evil does not guarantee all choices will be to do evil. But it was a fairly weak point regardless. I wanted to show not that it literally does say white people are evil but rather that it points the way to CRTwoke (or whatever we want to call it) which does often literally say white people are evil. Since you not only granted this point but gave an example, I'm content. And I grant that CRT: An Intro itself does not come close to calling white people inherently evil.

On the "whiteness" side, though, you seem to have totally missed or ignored my point. My point was about choice of language. The idea to use "whiteness" as the label for the field of study is new. Old texts are full of references to the civilized white man vs. primitive savages and whatnot, but they did not cleanly extract and express "whiteness" as the key feature. As perspectives widened and the moral depravity of these views became more apparent, they became known, for the most part, as white supremacy: the idea that the white race not only meaningfully exists but also that it is intrinsically superior.

Now, all the bad things that have been done in the name of white-favoring racism is indeed a worthy field of study. What do we call this field?

Well, let's see. Maybe we can call the study of Japanese war crimes (prompted by ideas of Japanese superiority) "Japanese studies". Maybe we can call the slaughter, torture, and repression committed by ISIS and the Taliban "Islamic studies". Maybe we can call a study of big tobacco's suppression of the dangers of smoking "capitalism studies".

Or maybe that's not fair.

Maybe we don't want to imply by our unrestricted use of a very general descriptive term that all Japanese people are war criminals. Maybe we don't want to imply that all followers of Islam are terrorists. Maybe we don't want to imply that the only thing capitalism is good for is killing people in pursuit of profit. Not that these things don't happen. Of course they do, and they deserve study. But that is no excuse for a label that applies to a broad group of people today being used exclusively to describe malicious and immoral actions.

So, some context. We already had a perfectly good term under which to gather these studies--"white supremacy"--and the people establishing this field rejected that and chose the more general "whiteness studies". The people who did so included tons of people who otherwise are exquisitely sensitive to the demeaning implications of language ("flight attendant" not "stewardess") to the point that there is even a field of study of this (Critical Discourse Analysis).

That gathering all the negative stuff together at this point when we already have a functional term and picking something that applies to every "white" person (whatever "white" means) seems highly unlikely to be an unhappy accident. Even if it is an unhappy accident, the thing to do is immediately change it. Not, as a Professor of Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, to come up with a bunch of new "misinterpreted" terms like "white privilege".

I simply do not see any credible way for the people involved to retain (1) any shred of competence in their disciplines, (2) avoid the most ludicrous levels of hypocrisy about the power of language, and (3) not be viewed as actually intentionally attacking white people as evil.

It's not a very strong attack, granted. As the majority, for now at least, the attack isn't very impactful. I'm not losing any sleep over it. Yet.

But I do not think that it is intellectually defensible that this wasn't an attack on the intrinsic character of white people.

I agree with everything you say about studying the justifications for colonialism, slavery, and other barbaric treatment. But my point was not about that. My point was about the choice of label.