2. What does Catherine Myser mean by "whiteness"?

…by talking about whiteness I am talking about a marker of location or position within a social, and here racial, hierarchy— to which privilege and power attach and from which they are wielded—and how this is complicated by a forgetting of the history of whiteness in the United States and by its current invisibility. Furthermore, by focusing on the dominance of whiteness in the cultural construction of bioethics in the United States, I do not wish to imply that whiteness does not operate in bioethics in other countries. Clearly the issue of whiteness is not simply a problem in the United States. As such, the question of whiteness concerns not only those who are shaping bioethics theory and policy but also those who will be affected by this theory and policy in the United States and elsewhere.

It seems like there must be a great deal of shame and guilt driving the legislative attempts to eliminate any teaching or books pertaining to U.S. racial history.  If we can't learn from out past, we are doomed to repeat the worst parts of that history.