Join the Hennepin-University Partnership for a webinar with Gail Ferguson, Ph.D., who will present findings from her Whiteness Pandemic Project, which examines how White parents communicated with their children about racism or antiracism immediately after the murder of George Floyd and one year later. The study demonstrated that White mothers’ racial identity, including their own understanding of racism, was linked to how they socialized their children around topics of race. Importantly, with intentional effort, many mothers experienced growth in their own racial identity and antiracist parenting across one year. Implications and practical resources for White parents and educators in MN will be shared.
Gail Ferguson
Gail Ferguson is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota where she directs the Culture and Family Life Lab. Her research interests reside at the interface of developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and clinical psychology, with a particular focus on understanding how 21st Century globalization (e.g., multiculturalism, media, migration) impacts the cultural socialization of children, parenting, youth identity, and health. As head of the Whiteness Pandemic Project, Dr. Ferguson partners with White mothers – both fellow researchers and local research participants – in studying how White MN children are socialized into the ‘culture of Whiteness’ (meaning silence and passivity in the face of racial injustice that maintain racism) and how antiracist parenting can break this cycle. Dr. Ferguson’s Whiteness Pandemic research won the American Psychological Association’s 2022 Award for Outstanding Paper, and it has also been covered in the Star Tribune and MinnPost.
