Analysis by Joe Schaeffer, 247 Real News
The University of Minnesota is determined to eradicate the systemic racism of white babies.
Seriously.
Dr. Gail Ferguson is an associate professor at the university's Institute of Child Development.
Ferguson is apparently the lead driver of the institute's "Whiteness Pandemic" project. On April 11, she wrote an essay for The Society for Personality and Social Psychology that captures just how insane higher education has become in the United States today:
Inaction in response to systemic racism reveals the Whiteness Pandemic. Whiteness, here, refers not to skin color — after all, not all the convicted officers were White — but to the culture of Whiteness characterized by colorblindness, silence, passivity, and fragility around race. The central pathogens of the Whiteness Pandemic are color-evasiveness (avoidance or denial of race) and power-evasiveness (denial of racial oppression), which are passed on intergenerationally, especially in White families.
Imagine for one second using the term "pathogen" to describe a racial minority in any way. Yet this grotesque dehumanization of white people is perfectly acceptable language at the University of Minnesota. Ferguson continues:The intergenerational transmission of the Whiteness Pandemic in families helps to explain why U.S. racism is so intractable. Color-evasiveness and power-evasiveness are especially common in the racial socialization approach of White U.S. parents and they also characterize the less advanced phase of Dr. Janet Helms’s White Racial Identity Development theory—which we call WRID for short. WRID’s two phases are:
Phase 1: White individuals in this phase show obliviousness, denial, avoidance, or ambivalence about race and racism, and/or bias against racial groups.
Phase 2: White individuals in this phrase seek to abandon racism, including White privilege, and show antiracist desires and/or actions to dismantle systemic racism and promote racial equity.
Our study investigated WRID and racial socialization among 392 non-Hispanic White mothers in the Minneapolis metro area within 1 month of [George] Floyd’s murder, an event that no Minnesotan could have been unaware of due to the significant community unrest and ubiquitous media coverage. How would White parents respond personally? Would Mr. Floyd’s murder in their own city be enough to get them to talk with their children about racism and antiracism?
Ferguson indicts white mothers for racial crimes against the new America:We found that the majority of White mothers were racially silent (53%), making no mention of Mr. Floyd’s murder nor any community events that followed, signaling that the murder had no impact of their families. Their racial silence was meaningful, because these mothers also had significantly lower multiculturalism scores and lower psychological distress than their peers. The apathy evident in their racial silence immediately following Floyd’s murder in their own city may have served as a coping mechanism to lower race-related distress....
In sum, our study demonstrated the insidious intergenerational transmission of the Whiteness Pandemic, which was not slowed by close proximity to a high-profile race-related police murder.
This is racial hatred at its most seething level being aimed at mothers and children, and it is being promulgated by the flagship university of the Gopher State.A June 2021 article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune is titled "New St. Paul nonprofit wants to nip racism in the bud through early childhood education." "The organization, Before Racism, is developing anti-racism curriculum for 1- to 5-year-olds," the subhead explains. Cue the Cultural Marxism aimed at vulnerable children:
The next frontier for preventing racism and bias starts with the littlest Minnesotans.
That's the premise on which Bill Svrluga is basing his new St. Paul nonprofit: an early childhood education program to block prejudice before it takes root, in Minnesota and across the United States.
"Minnesota could be a leader in this kind of new frontier," said Svrluga, who is white and has run a nonprofit consulting company for years. "The return on the investment of working on preventing [racism] vs. turning it around is pretty clear. Changing minds and hearts is hard to do."
[...]
Children aren't born racist, Svrluga said. But they start to notice differences and develop judgments at a young age.
"The Vision" page on Before Racism's website could not be more forthright:"Preventing the development of overt and covert racism in very young children ages 1-5 with a particular emphasis on white children."
Two University of Minnesota staffers are on the advisory board for Before Racism, including Sheila Williams Ridge, director of the Shirley G. Moore Lab School at the Institute of Child Development. Among other advisors are the President Emeritus of Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the CEO of YWCA of St. Paul, and a former Senior Vice President for Twin Cities United Way.The Star Tribune piece sheds more light on the total lunacy running rampant on campus at UM:
At the University of Minnesota, Charisse Pickron is researching the ability of infants to differentiate and categorize faces by race, which could be a precursor to later social biases and judgments.
"Children notice race and it's not something that has to be explicitly taught," said Pickron, a research associate at the U's Institute of Child Development.
She's found that babies from 6 to 9 months old are clearly shaped by their environment — such as who their primary caregiver is — and that even at that point they have a hard time distinguishing faces of people of an unfamiliar race, such as a baby raised by a white woman who is met by two women of color.
"That doesn't mean that a 6-month-old is necessarily racist, but it does mean that this is an age period where having experience with a wide group of people is probably really valuable," Pickron said. "It's not a malicious intent. It's what are children being exposed to, who do they see and who do they learn from."
Not necessarily racist? At six months old? This is an assistant professor of a major American university speaking. In October 2021, Ferguson's vile anti-white belligerence was given a platform at The Minnesota Post. Her target: white children at the youngest of ages:Research shows that infants as young as three months show racial preferences that grow into racial discrimination by elementary school without intervention.
At least she doesn't call white people pathogenic here as she browbeats them into the ground:A white person has a healthy white racial identity when they are fully aware of systemic racism, acknowledge their own racial privilege and role in perpetuating racism, and are committed to self-reflection, self-education and other antiracist actions. White parents seeking this personal growth can join a local chapter of an antiracism organization or use an antiracism workbook.
Race matters in the United States because racism still exists. Parents, especially white parents, can play a role in addressing racism because of the power and privilege they hold in our racialized society. Taking time for honest self-reflection and explicit conversations with children about race and racism (including your own) is, in and of itself, an important act of antiracism.
The University of Minnesota receives taxpayer funding to promote racial hatred against white families and white children. The university is asking for just shy of $1 billion in state funding for the 2022-23 biennial budget. Whatever money is allocated will help keep material like this on UM's Whiteness Pandemic website page: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 perpetrate and 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 powerful systems involved in systemic racism.
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