A group of researchers affiliated with the University of Minnesota (U of M) has released a report claiming that the United States is afflicted by a pervasive “culture of Whiteness,” which it describes as a contagion requiring intervention.
U of M has a page dedicated to the report on its Institute of Child Development website. “The culture of Whiteness is a set of beliefs, practices, and laws that favor the White racial group,” the webpage reads, describing it as a centuries-old system whose modern features include racial silence, fragility, and passivity in the face of racial injustice.
Launched after George Floyd’s death, the project seeks to guide parents in confronting “whiteness” through what it describes as “courageous” conversations about race with their children. “Collectively, color-evasion and power-evasion—pathogens of the Whiteness pandemic—are inexorably transmitted within families,” the report reads, “with White parents serving as carriers to their children unless they take active preventive measures rooted in antiracism and equity-promotion.”
“Like other pandemics,” the U of M website says, “everyone can play a role in stopping the transmission.”
The university urges white adults to engage in ongoing “antiracist” self-correction. “[P]ositive antiracist changes [are] facilitated by listening to antiracist media, engaging with antiracist movements, and being aware of legal justice (e.g., conviction and sentencing of Derek Chauvin for Floyd’s murder).”
Critics reject the report, calling it overtly racist. “To call anyone’s skin color a pandemic is absolutely racist and absolutely wrong,” said Angela Morabito of the Defense of Freedom Institute.
The Whiteness Pandemic Project, however, is not an isolated example of academic work that singles out whites. Last year, Minding the Campus reported on a now-withdrawn study at Colorado State University in which professors intentionally provoked shame, guilt, and anger in white students and recorded those reactions as research data. The study bypassed formal ethics review and interpreted student distress as resistance to “anti-racism,” rather than as evidence of a hostile classroom environment. Only after public scrutiny did the journal pull the study and initiate further review.
Despite charges of racism, colleges and universities show little inclination to abandon research that pathologizes “whiteness,” in part because such work falls squarely within the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) framework, which continues to dominate higher education and has proven resistant to reform. Data from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, for example, show that DEI leadership remains largely intact. In its 2025 survey of 394 chief diversity officers and academic diversity officers, only eight percent reported that their roles had been eliminated since 2023.
Thus, the Whiteness Pandemic Project looks less like an outlier than a reflection of a research culture increasingly comfortable with pathologizing whites or “white culture.” Whether future projects meet the same resistance seen at Colorado State remains uncertain—but absent meaningful institutional change, there is little reason to expect this approach to recede.
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