A New Low in Woke Academic Nonsense
The University of Minnesota has entered the national spotlight again, this time because the Culture and Family Lab at its Institute of Child Development is warning Americans of what it calls a “whiteness pandemic.” According to the lab’s website, this supposed crisis can be “halted and reversed” if White Americans “re-educate” themselves and adopt the lab’s approved antiracist parenting methods.
It reads like a parody, but the university insists it is serious. And critics say that is exactly the problem.
The webpage is led by Dr. Gail Ferguson and several Ph.D. co-authors, including Lauren Eales, Sarah Gillespie, and Keira Leneman. These academics argue that racism is not the only pandemic in America. They say there is another pandemic behind it, which they call “the Whiteness Pandemic.” They define whiteness as a culture that includes colorblindness, passivity, and what they call White fragility. They insist these traits are covert forms of racism.
The university claims that children raised in White families are automatically socialized into this culture from birth. According to the lab, the family unit is one of the most powerful systems sustaining racism in America. Their conclusion is blunt. If you were raised in the United States, you grew up infected by this whiteness pandemic. If you are White, the lab says you hold power and privilege and have a duty to re-educate yourself.
A Full Menu of Ideological Homework
The webpage offers books, workshops, videos, and even Sesame Street segments to help White parents teach their kids to view the world through this racial lens. They promote Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Black Lives Matter, and other activist materials. They encourage parents to constantly talk about race with their children, even at very young ages, using examples like George Floyd and police shootings as teaching tools.
The lab insists silence is dangerous and claims failing to discuss race with kids communicates approval of racism. They also push parents to use media coverage of racial incidents to “humanize victims” and guide children toward antiracist activism.
A Poll of Affluent Liberal White Mothers
The primary study behind this “whiteness pandemic” idea surveyed 392 participants. Almost all were White women living in Minnesota with incomes over $125,000. Over 90 percent held bachelor’s degrees or higher. More than 60 percent described themselves as somewhat or very liberal. Only 18 percent identified as somewhat or very conservative.
In other words, the lab built a sweeping accusation against an entire racial group based on a narrow slice of wealthy, left-leaning mothers. The university still calls the findings proof of an insidious pandemic.
Not everyone is impressed. Parents’ rights groups and critics of DEI programs call the university’s stance openly racist. They argue that labeling an entire culture as a disease crosses every line of reason and decency.
Defending Education’s research director, Rhyen Staley, called it another example of far-left programming that is deeply embedded in higher education. Minnesota Congressman Brad Finstad went further, calling it anti-white rhetoric and demanding an investigation into taxpayer funding linked to the lab. He said the project is a radical DEI effort and an example of misuse of federal money.
Even the National Institute of Mental Health distanced itself, clarifying that its funding supported a general graduate training program and did not fund this project or its claims.
A Case Study in Academic Racism Disguised as Scholarship
This entire effort reveals a disturbing trend. Universities preach tolerance while promoting ideas that stereotype, shame, and pathologize one racial group. The language used by the University of Minnesota lab describes whiteness as a disease, families as breeding grounds of racism, and children as infected from birth. It turns normal family life into a target for ideological correction.
Calling an entire culture a pandemic is not anti-racist. It is racist. It is not scholarship. It is activism wearing a lab coat. And it is exactly the type of political indoctrination most parents do not want shaping their children’s education.
The University of Minnesota’s “whiteness pandemic” framing is not thoughtful research. It is not useful guidance. It is a sweeping accusation soaked in the kind of ideological zeal that treats dissent as dangerous and labels entire families as carriers of a societal disease.
The fact that this came from a major public university’s child development program makes it even more alarming. Instead of helping families raise healthy children, this program appears determined to shame them into adopting a rigid political worldview.
This is exactly what many Americans reject. It is why more people are questioning what is happening in universities and why so many parents are furious that such ideas are now wrapped in academic language and pushed onto students.
The so-called “whiteness pandemic” is not a public danger. The real danger is academic racism dressed up as research.
