At a time when Americans are still recovering from an actual global pandemic, the University of Minnesota has decided to declare a new one. This one isn’t caused by a virus, bacteria, or any medical threat, however. According to the school’s Culture and Family Life Lab, the newest pandemic sweeping the country is whiteness. Yes, really. In an official university-hosted resource page, researchers claim that being raised in a white family means inheriting a “centuries-old culture of Whiteness” that must be actively stopped and reversed.
Once you move past the headline, the university lays out its view in straightforward terms. The lab argues that whiteness isn’t biological at all. It’s a cultural system that white families supposedly pass down to their children from birth. That system, they say, includes traits like colorblindness, passivity, and what they call white fragility. According to the page, these traits help prop up larger systems of racism, and the only way to “halt and reverse the Whiteness Pandemic” is for white parents to re-educate themselves and intentionally raise their kids in “antiracist” ways. But what do colorblindness, passivity, and white fragility mean?
Three Symptoms of the Whiteness Pandemic
Colorblindness, according to the researchers, is when someone says they “don’t see race.” To an ordinary person, that usually just means treating people fairly regardless of race. But in academic circles, colorblindness is treated almost like a harmful germ that needs to be disinfected.
"It's so appealing on the surface to think that the best way to approach race is to pretend that it doesn't exist," says behavioral psychologist Michael I. Norton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. "But research shows that it simply doesn't work. We do notice race, and there's no way of getting around this fact."
The research world claims this approach “minimizes systemic racism.” But to many regular Americans, it sounds more like universities taking a normal attempt at fairness and turning it into a character flaw. And critics point out that colorblindness has been a moral ideal for decades, especially tied to Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of judging people “by the content of their character.” That message wasn’t controversial in 1963. Suddenly, in 2025, it’s treated like a public health hazard.
Then we get to passivity – the trait of white families not talking about race enough. The university page treats this hesitation like a dangerous inheritance, something that must be “halted” and “reversed,” as if silence alone were corrupting society. But do most families avoid race because they’re hiding some secret ideology? The American Psychological Association notes that people of all backgrounds avoid uncomfortable topics because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. Critics argue that this puts families in a no-win situation. If they don’t talk about race, they’re part of the problem. If they do talk about race, but not in the exact academic-approved language, they’re still part of the problem.
Finally, there’s white fragility. This is probably the most controversial idea of the three – that when some white people get uncomfortable discussing race, it’s actually a sign of racism. Robin DiAngelo, who popularized the term, said in a paper: “White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”
DiAngelo’s book, White Fragility, was published in 2018 and was on The New York Times best-seller list for 155 weeks. It has also been influential in academia. Alan Sokal’s critique of White Fragility, published in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, takes exception with the work. He called it a “[v]ague, inconsistent and sometimes incoherent use of epistemological concepts and distinctions: in particular, confusion between actual knowledge and claims to knowledge and belief, and between knowledge and truth; confusion between objectivity and neutrality; and confusion between different senses of social construction.” Furthermore, Sokal said the book misrepresents “to the point of caricature, of the nature of science and scientific method, and of ideas from the philosophy of science.”
But the problem, critics argue, is that this concept is designed so that no matter what a person says, it proves the theory right. If someone disagrees, that’s fragility. If someone stays calm, that’s fragility. If someone asks a question, fragility again.
In other words, the house always wins. Critics also point out that acting like an entire racial group shares the same emotional reactions is exactly the kind of stereotype society is supposed to be avoiding. Humans generally get uncomfortable in tough conversations regardless of race.
Going Too Far
Put it all together and call it a nationwide “whiteness pandemic,” and you can almost hear the collective sigh from the public. Instead of talking about behavior or context, it lumps entire families, and entire races, into one big diagnosis. A diagnosis that would be considered offensive if applied to anyone else.
Even many who support racial equity efforts say the language goes too far. Calling a racial culture a “pandemic” feels dramatic at best and divisive at worst. The choice of words makes it sound like millions of Americans need to be quarantined, sanitized, or cured of their upbringing. It’s not exactly a strategy for productive conversation.
