On a weekday morning at the University of Melbourne's Parkville campus, in a small lecture theatre, a group of undergraduates has shown up for class.

With laptops open and notebooks out, they are a mix of races, but they're all there to study the same thing: whiteness.

"This is a really important week; this is an important lecture," says Odette Kelada, their instructor, as she introduces Lilly Brown, the guest lecturer — a former student of the class who is now a PhD candidate in youth studies and education.

Asking the room if they ever feel unsure when talking about race, Ms Brown is met with nods and chuckles of recognition.

"That makes sense. Like, if we don't actually know what race is or where it comes from, if we don't know how to engage with it as a language, then how do we talk about it?" she says.

"So it's like anything. When you don't have the language or background information to discuss a topic, the topic is hard to talk about."

Do you notice when everyone around you is white?

This is a racial literacy course, with a focus on indigeneity and whiteness, and the material can be confronting for students, says Dr Kelada.

"It's seeing something that they haven't noticed before," she says.

"They can't believe they never noticed certain spaces, or even … movies are all white."

"They had just not thought about it, and that is confronting because they're surprised that something that becomes so obvious was something they never even noticed before."

Dr Kelada says it's not possible to talk about race without addressing whiteness.

"As the idea of race developed into a hierarchy, the idea of whiteness developed, and it develops as an idea of a racial category that is at the apex of the racial hierarchy," she says.

"Whiteness is a social construct with a very particular specific history.

"To understand where whiteness originated is to understand how whiteness became invented simultaneously with the concept of race. They happen at the same time."

For some of the white students, the class is eye-opening.

"Growing up I was never taught to think about my race as something that influenced the opportunities that I got or the way that I was treated, whereas as a white person, that has framed my entire existence," says one student, Isadore.

Another student, Emily, says she's tried to use her lessons in racial literacy to talk to her parents about race — with mixed results.

"It very much makes you realise the way that whiteness is incredibly embedded with left-wing progressive self-identity as well," she says.

White people urged to 'lean in to discomfort'

For Robin DiAngelo, a white American educator and racial equity consultant whose work is taught in Dr Kelada's course, "resistance and deflection" are familiar reactions to hearing about the concept of whiteness for the first time.

Dr DiAngelo holds a doctorate in white racial identity and whiteness studies, and she's known for coining the term "white fragility".

"White folks tend to be very defensive about the suggestion that our race has any meaning, and we tend to respond in ways that will stop that challenge, that will get us back into our comfort zone," she says.

"So we'll argue, we'll cry, we'll get hurt feelings, we'll withdraw, we'll claim we've been attacked. We'll do whatever we need to do to get you to stop challenging us.

"It's not fragile in the sense of the impact that those responses have on people of colour, but it's fragile in the sense of the inability to bear the discomfort."

But rather than turn away from the discomfort, Dr DiAngleo says white people should lean into it and start building resilience for these conversations.

"Honestly, we're not going to get there from a place of comfort," she says. "Racism is not comfortable. We have got to get uncomfortable."