"CATONSVILLE, Md. -- For a long time, white folks in this country have put other races under the microscope.

Imagine turning that same microscope back on them. You'd look at white people as an ethnographer might, observing physical characteristics, habits and mores. What do these people wear? What about their mating rituals? How do they raise kids?

Though it sounds unusual, that's the approach curator Maurice Berger took in gathering the works for his intriguing, if vexing, exhibition "White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art," on view at the Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Berger aims to frame and describe whiteness as one would any other race. To do so, he chose works representing various groups -- yuppies, privileged girls, guilty liberals, white trash or biracial families. In large part, Berger's show subjects white folks to the kind of stereotyping other races have endured.

Berger's show is an important one to visit, though you likely won't enjoy what you see. He uses works from major contemporary artists -- Cindy Sherman, William Kentridge, Nikki S. Lee and nine others -- that explore, in sometimes painful detail, the conundrums and weaknesses of whiteness. Kentridge's films, for example, look at apartheid-era South Africa by focusing on fat-cat industrialists and guilt-ridden liberals. Sherman turns out sharp caricatures of suburban housewives, examining the ways a certain look and outfit evoke a distinct type of white woman. Artists Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley take a crueler tack, looking pointedly at sexual and physical abuse in an hour-long video. Such harsh work threatens to send Berger's show overboard. But it never loses its way.

This exhibition's strength comes from the provocative context Berger established for these artworks. Peering through the lens of race significantly alters meaning. Pieces I'd seen elsewhere took on darker casts here. Kentridge's films, which normally seem quite poetic, came off as whiny. Sherman, who never pulls punches, looked harsher than I remembered. In this show, most white people came off pitiful, simple-minded or, in a few cases, totally off their rocker.

Berger sets the show's tone in his catalogue essay: "Whiteness continues to offer white people of all classes a valuable dividend: the ability to exist in the world without having to think about the color of their skin."

Berger himself grew up white in a predominantly black and Hispanic housing project. His art was shaped by that experience. And he's accomplished much: Berger is a fellow at New York's New School for Social Research, curator of the Center for Art and Visual Culture, author of, among other books, "White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness," and curator of important retrospectives of African American artists Fred Wilson and Adrian Piper.

Still, his righteous indignation can rankle. "It is time for white people to acknowledge the power and meaning of their race," he writes. "Today, most white people, even the most liberal, are oblivious to the psychological and political weight of their whiteness."

Several of Berger's picks expose, quite plainly, the gaffes of white folks. Max Becher and Andrea Robbins photographed Germans who dress up like Native Americans, sort of like Civil War reenactors. The jowly, red-cheeked fellow outfitted in a poufy, braided wig -- and all the others in their headdresses and buckskins -- seem mindless to the implications of their dress-up game. These are documentary images, to be sure. Still, I can't help but feel a little sorry for them. They're such easy targets.

A hint of that same simplistic view comes through in Wendy Ewald's "White Girl's Alphabet." Inspired by children's alphabet picture books, the artist invited teenage girls attending the prestigious Andover Academy to pick words corresponding to letters of the alphabet and to illustrate each word with a photo. The resulting images of an interchangeable set of cute girls in low-rise jeans include words such as "tearful" for T and "PMS" for P. Their innocence is sweet enough. But in the context of "White," their sheltered lives come off as almost disgraceful.

The exhibition's strongest points are made when artists become the people they're looking at. Sherman literally dresses herself up as the stereotypical women she explores. Here, a pair of recent large-scale color portraits of the artist as suburban wifely types show her gift for gimlet-eyed satire. From the smug expression of an overly made-up dame to the demure round eyes of a straw-hat-wearing Mississippi society gal, Sherman captures something true about people simply by becoming them. Likewise, Asian American artist Lee, in photographs from her "Yuppie Project," assumes the dress and demeanor of young Wall Street firebrands and hobnobs among them. She almost fits in -- but not quite.

Berger's only misstep, to my eye, was the inclusion of McCarthy and Kelley's grim video, "Heidi." In it, the artists redo the Heidi story with sex-doll-like rubber dummies and creepy, masked men. In their version, perverse guardians terrorize the young girl. The exhibition wall text argues that the piece reveals the seamy underbelly of the lily whiteness that's been long upheld as a societal ideal (though I'll wager that's something of an outdated notion, thanks to the Jerry Springers of this world gleefully exposing the dark side of family life). Yes, abuse goes on behind the doors of white people's gingerbread houses. But this artwork isn't about race but about taboo shattering -- McCarthy's calling, it seems. Here, it brings Berger's argument from pointed to over-the-top.

Most -- though, significantly, not all -- of the artists in this show are white. The works created by them are by far the harshest. Does that make it okay? I'm not sure. But that's just one of many problems this show asks that you figure out on your own.

White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art at the Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Catonsville, Md., Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., closed Dec. 25, 26, Jan. 1, 410-455-3188, to Jan. 10. " (Jessica Dawson, The Washington Post, December 4, 2003)