A University of Minnesota website linked to its Culture and Family Lab has sparked controversy by calling ‘Whiteness’ a “pandemic” and urging White parents to “re-educate” their children to address the issue, Fox News reported.
This initiative is part of the university’s broader efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. It includes providing school teachers with ethnic studies materials covering topics such as Black Lives Matter, defunding the police, and settler colonialism.
What is the ‘Whiteness pandemic’?
According to the university, the concept of ‘Whiteness’ refers to American culture and not biology. It listed colour blindness, passivity, and ‘White fragility’ as features of the centuries-old culture, calling them covert expressions of racism commonly seen in the US.
Children raised in White families are socialised into this culture from birth, making family systems key in perpetuating systemic racism, the university stated.
The website also stressed that while being socialised into Whiteness as a child is “not your fault,” White adults are responsible for self-reflection, re-education, and engaging in anti-racist parenting and encouraged developing a “healthy positive White identity”.
Resources offered include literature from racial justice scholars such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, along with guides on how to explain white privilege to children.
Whiteness pandemic: Concept sparks major backlash
The framing of Whiteness as a “pandemic” behind racism has drawn significant criticism. Rhyen Staley, research director at the advocacy group Defending Education, described the initiative as “far-left programming” that legitimises “absurd ideas like ‘whiteness’.
“It is not only concerning that these programs appear to still be up and running, but that absurd ideas like ‘whiteness’ also gain legitimacy through dubious activist-academic scholarship. Universities must end this nonsense [immediately],” Staley told Fox News.
Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota has defended the webpage under principles of academic freedom, emphasising that institutions must be allowed to explore, research, and share ideas, even those that provoke debate or controversy.