The Anti-Whiteness "Pandemic": How Academia's Anti-Racism “Cure” Poisons the Well of Equality, By Chris Knight (Florida)
At the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (UMTC), where taxpayer dollars flow like the Mississippi, a new plague has been diagnosed: the "Whiteness Pandemic." Not a virus, mind you, but a congenital affliction infecting white families from birth, breeding racism like bacteria in a petri dish. This isn't satire from The Babylon Bee; it's the earnest output of the Culture and Family Lab in the Institute of Child Development — a federally funded project urging white parents to "self-reflect, re-educate, and act" through "courageous antiracist parenting." Backlash erupted last week when Defending Education spotlighted it, igniting a firestorm on X and beyond: "This is pure racist dribble," one user fumed, tagging university brass. Another: "Just imagine if 'Whiteness Pandemic' was replaced with 'blackness pandemic'..." Spot on. What parades as progressive healing is, at its core, a venomous attack on white people — essentialising an entire racial group as carriers of a moral disease, demanding collective guilt and behavioural reprogramming. It's racism with a PhD, and in an era of eroding trust in higher ed, it's the kind of "madness" that's driving parents to homeschool and donors to defect.
The Diagnosis: White Families as Racism Factories!
Rooted in a 2021 paper by lab director Gail Ferguson, published in the American Psychological Association's flagship American Psychologist journal, the project frames "familial Whiteness socialization" as the insidious engine behind America's "racism pandemic." Ferguson's thesis? White parents unwittingly transmit "pathogens" like "color-evasion" (ignoring race) and "power-evasion" (downplaying white privilege) to their kids, perpetuating systemic evil. Post-George Floyd, whose death in Minneapolis (UMN's backyard) galvanised the study, white mums were surveyed (392 highly educated liberals, mostly). Apathy toward Floyd's death? Proof of infection. Grief and BLM alignment? Signs of budding immunity.
The "Whiteness Pandemic Resources for Parents, Educators, and Other Caregivers" site operationalises this with missionary zeal. It declares: "At birth, young children growing up in White families begin to be socialized into the culture of Whiteness, making the family system one of the most powerful systems involved in systemic racism." Remedies? White adults must "humanize victims of racism such as George Floyd," devour BLM manifestos, and drill kids on "white privilege" via curated agitprop — books, videos, discussion guides that hammer home racial guilt from toddlerhood. It's not optional; it's a "preventive measure" against the "centuries-old culture of Whiteness — involving colorblindness, passivity, and fragility." Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (part of UMTC's $628 million federal haul in FY2024), this isn't fringe, it's institutional gospel, baked into child development curricula. Whiteness isn't a trait; it's a toxin, and only antiracist exorcism — state-sanctioned, no less — can cleanse it.
The Backlash: A Reckoning for Reverse Racism
The Blaze broke the story December 6, but X lit the fuse days earlier. Posts exploded with raw fury: "Wth is wrong with MN?" one user vented, linking the Blaze piece. "Get your Caucasian kid out of that hell hole," another warned parents. Defending Education's Rhyen Staley torched it as "far-left programming" legitimizing "absurd ideas like 'whiteness'" through "dubious activist-academic 'scholarship.' Universities must end this nonsense yesterday." Semantic ripples show the pattern: Users decry it as "racist study claiming a new #pandemic a #Whiteness pandemic," with memes flipping the script to "blackness" for hypocrisy's sting. One viral thread: "Evidently there is an extremely racist study... at University of #Minnesota."
Public figures piled on. National Review queried UMTC, which stonewalled with a platitude: "Steadfast in its commitment to the principles of academic freedom." NIMH? Radio silence. But in Trump's America, where executive orders gut DEI in federal grants, this hits a nerve. As Staley noted, it's "ingrained" in higher ed, resisting the "dismantle" wave sweeping K-12 and government. X sentiment? Overwhelmingly condemnatory — posts tag @UMNews and @PublicHealthUMN as "pure racist dribble."
The Deeper Venom: Racism Rebranded as Redemption
Strip the jargon, and this is textbook racism, anti-white edition. It doesn't critique actions or systems; it indicts being white as inherently pathogenic, demanding prophylactic shame from cradle to grave. White kids aren't neutral; they're "socialized into the culture of Whiteness" at birth, per the site, implying original sin by melanin deficiency. Parents? "Carriers" unless they proselytize BLM and "dismantle colorblind racial ideology." It's not empowerment; it's erasure, reducing individuals to racial vectors, echoing the very essentialism it claims to fight.
This isn't new; it's peak "woke" orthodoxy. Post-Floyd, academia doubled down on "ideological propagation," alienating half the audience. UMN's no outlier; similar "decenter whiteness" curricula infest campuses from Harvard to UCLA, federally juiced via $1B+ in DEI grants yearly. But backlash is brewing: Trump's DOE probes, state bans on "divisive concepts," and X's unfiltered roar signal the tide turning. As one post snarls: "George Floyd was a criminal drug abuser who died from an overdose... yet we're curing 'whiteness'?"
At day's end, this "cure" is the disease — a racist assault cloaked in compassion, pitting race against race under equity's banner. It shames white families for existing, weaponising Floyd's tragedy to enforce guilt. True antiracism lifts all; this drags one down. Defund the delusion; cut the funding to the bone!
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