Campus Ideology Gone Epidemic: The Whiteness Conspiracy

When a flagship university declares a “whiteness pandemic,” the ideology has far overstepped its welcome.

Scholars at the University of Minnesota have apparently decided America doesn't need innovation, job creation, or border security, but rather, it needs a cure for the pandemic of whiteness.

According to the school's Culture & Family Life Lab, whiteness stands behind racism the way the witch in a fairy tale stands behind her poisoned apple.

You're apparently infected if you were raised in the United States, so congratulations! You're a part of the problem.

Racism is an epidemic (CDC, 2021) that can also be considered a pandemic, given its widespread cross-national prevalence and spread (APA, 2020). However, there is another pandemic lurking behind and driving the racism pandemic – the Whiteness Pandemic. Whiteness refers to culture, not biology: the centuries-old culture of Whiteness features colorblindness, passivity, and White fragility, which are all covert expressions of racism common in the United States. Naming the Whiteness Pandemic shifts our gaze from the victims and effects of racism onto the systems that perpetuate racism, starting with the family system. 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 potent systems involved in systemic racism.

I can't rightly speak for everybody, but I'll do my best.

We're tired.

We're tired of lecturers telling us our identity equals infection, that our culture equals contagion. We're working, raising families, and trying to keep the faith in a republic rather than an academic petri dish. Yet, here comes a university site (surprise!), urging white adults to re-educate themselves, develop a "healthy positive White racial identity," and engage in "courageous antiracist parenting." The message tells us that we're not only bad, but we're infected, and only confession cures you — a tone that couldn't be more frank and self-inviting of contempt.

Let's break it down.

The word "pandemic" evokes emergency room crunches, ventilators, and global viral spread. By applying that language to whiteness, the institution trivializes real medical crises and appropriates the language of illness to smear a culture.

That brings up a question: When did being born white become a global health hazard?

According to the Culture & Family Life Lab, it's part of a system of culture, power, passivity, and fragility. But if that system is so powerful, why doesn't it demand constant praise from the very institution that declares this?

The target here lies not in evil behavior, but identity itself. The site states that being raised in "White" culture automatically socializes you into "Whiteness." What we see is the assignment of collectivist guilt by birth. In a nation grounded on individual rights and character, not race, it's an idea that reeks of grievance ideology, not education.

Americans know that blaming someone's behavior rather than their background changes how we think about morals.

Taxpayers fund the University of Minnesota. We expect degrees in engineering, business, and science, not self-flagellation workshops dressed up as research.

Luckily for the rest of us, the institution claims that it remains "steadfast in its commitment to the principles of academic freedom."

Too bad academic freedom doesn't include freedom from the absurd. When public institutions become factories of identity shame, they lose any credibility with the people who know when they're being preached at instead of spoken with.

There's also a political reality. We live in a cultural moment where millions have rejected the narrative of victimhood and identity grievance. See Obama, Michelle. If an academic ignores our impatience with that wave of absurdity, it does so at its own risk. We've moved on to real-life concerns — you know, like crime, inflation, energy reliability, and national sovereignty, not cowering in our unwashed bodies for being white in America.

Here's a practical prediction: More of us will simply walk away from higher-education institutions that constantly preach identity pathology, especially those of us who actually pay for it. 

When the backlash finally builds, and dread phrases like "whiteness pandemic" become fodder for headlines, it starts driving students away.

Maybe the university is planning this and decided it doesn't matter.

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This whole thing smells of exhaustion: One cultural brigade after another hands out new labels and privileges, but only labels them as moral imperatives.

What people from the lab and other circles don't understand or care to know is that we're no longer in the mood for a pseudo-pandemic sprung from the campus corridor.

The university declares that we're infected, at fault, and we. must. repent.

I can't speak for all y'all, but I'm done.

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