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Study could reinforce ‘the very racial categorizations that contribute to bias,’ FAIR for All leader says
A University of Minnesota professor and her team are facing criticism for their ongoing “antiracist parenting” research, funded by a nearly $600,000 grant.
Gail Ferguson, a professor in the university’s Institute of Child Development, and her team are entering their third and final year of research with a $599,932 grant from the William T. Grant Foundation.
Their study is about “White parents’ racial identity and how they socialize their children on the topics of race, racism, and antiracism,” according to a news release.
The research centers on “an antiracist parenting intervention for White mothers of young White children” called CARPE DIEM, the release states. It stands for “Courageous, Antiracist, and Reflective Parenting Efforts – Deepening Intentionality with Each Moment,” according to the webpage for the study.
Two other professors, Melissa Koenig and Charisse Pickron, also are participating in the research. The College Fix emailed Ferguson, Koenig, and Pickron, as well as the Institute of Child Development, asking for comment on the research. Pickron was the only one to respond; she directed The Fix to the media relations team, which also did not respond.
Meanwhile, Monica Harris, executive director of FAIR For All, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that stands against identity-based practices, expressed concern about the study being conducted by a public institution.
“FAIR’s mission is to advance civil rights and oppose discrimination based on race or other immutable characteristics,” she said in an email to The Fix.
“We have concerns about interventions conducted at public universities that target individuals based solely on their race, in this case ‘White mothers’ and their children, as this approach risks reinforcing the very racial categorizations that contribute to bias rather than reducing them,” Harris said.
She continued, “Decades of research in social psychology demonstrate that effective bias reduction emphasizes our shared humanity and common values.”
“We believe research funding should support evidence-based interventions that bring people together rather than programs that may inadvertently perpetuate the salience of race in ways that deepen division,” Harris told The Fix.
According to the university, the study is for “mothers who have an interest in antiracist parenting, whether they have already begun taking steps in this direction or are considering the possibility of taking steps in the future.” Specifically, it focuses on “White mothers and their 5-8-year-old children.”
“We hope that our findings will teach us how to best equip and support White parents and their children on their antiracist journeys,” the researchers wrote on the study webpage.
The CARPE DIEM study is being conducted in partnership with EmbraceRace, a “national organization committed to supporting children’s racial learning.”
The Fix contacted EmbraceRace asking more information about the research through the media form on its website, but did not receive a response.
“A large and growing body of research has shown that children’s racial sensibilities begin to form in infancy, that almost all children develop racial and other biases by kindergarten, and that those biases become fairly entrenched by adolescence,” its “About” page states.
“There are too few resources for younger children available for parents, grandparents or other caregivers or for early and elementary childhood educators,” and it is this “gap” that EmbraceRace seeks to fill.
Previously, Ferguson and her team at the University of Minnesota also worked on the Whiteness Pandemic Project, with the purpose of “better understand[ing] the culture of Whiteness and support[ing] parents to challenge it.”
The “Whiteness Pandemic” was defined as “the invisible intergenerational transmission of the culture of Whiteness from adults to children through explicit words and actions or silence and implicit modeling.”
The 2020 research, published after the death of African American man George Floyd, concluded that “the majority of White American parents in the Minneapolis metro had not spoken with their children up to a month afterwards about his murder, about racism, or about the resulting social unrest.”
Many parents “felt nervous, fearful, and overwhelmed internally and struggled to manage these emotions sparked by the racial reckoning occurring externally, which undermined their parent-child conversations,” the study stated.
In research published in 2021, the team wrote, “We are still in the middle of the Whiteness Pandemic, and it seems even stronger now in some ways.”
“Your emotions are tied to your parenting, so we encourage you to keep investing in your own personal growth,” the team wrote. “What you say and do with your child as an antiracist parent matters and makes a difference. Your antiracist parenting matters.”
They also wrote that parents’ “positive antiracist changes were facilitated by listening to antiracist media, engaging with antiracist movements, and being aware of legal justice.”
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