The university's website contends that white adults need to take anti-racist action by self-reflecting and engaging in courageous anti-racist parenting. Fox News reports that the website not only warns about the “whiteness pandemic” but it also provides resources in order to correct the problem.
One of the key takeaways listed is “walking the anti-racist walk goes hand in hand with talking the anti-racist talk.”
The university published research after the murder of George Floyd, stating that white American parents did not speak to their children about the murder, racism, or the social unrest. If the parents did, they claimed that they used evasive language that “minimized or denied the reality of systemic racism in society.” Now, in 2025, they state that the U.S. is still in the middle of a whiteness pandemic which appears to be even stronger.
According to the previous research done in 2020, there are five stages of change a parent goes through in developing anti-racist parenting: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. The journey follows them from being unaware of their impact in racism to being aware and owning it, actively changing in a commitment to lifelong learning.
Laurie Higgins is a culture-education writer of Breakthrough Ideas. She says that this is an offshoot of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movements.
"The people who are graduating from the University of Minnesota, whether they're in their psychology department or their education department, have been indoctrinated for four years into this ideology that's pervasive at the university," states Higgins.
Though the idea of a "whiteness pandemic" was first expressed in 2021, she says that it is reemerging because leftists are worried DEI and CRT are subsiding.
"They're just trying to keep this alive, this anti-racism DEI/CRT because they profit from it. That's the only reason. It's not because they think they're helping America. It's because they're helping their own bank account," states Higgins. “Though there will always be individual racism, there is no systemic institutional racism, and racism has been diminishing slowly but steadily.”
