The training from Pritzker’s Department of Human Rights—offered to ‘private-sector, government, and public participants’—also shows a black woman torching the mosquitoes with a flamethrower
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker’s (D.) administration offers a taxpayer-funded training on “microaggressions” and other “exclusionary behaviors” that depicts white people and police officers as mosquitoes who suck blood from people of color.
The training—which Pritzker’s Department of Human Rights offers to “private-sector, government, and public participants” and which the Washington Free Beacon attended—is meant to “increase knowledge, awareness and prevention of discrimination and harassment issues and offer solutions to employers and employees on how to appropriately respond to situations as they arise.” It defines “microaggressions” as “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons solely based upon their marginalized group membership.”
The training divides such “microaggressions” into two categories: those that are “race-based” and those that go “beyond race.” The former category includes “color blindness”—which the training says “denies a person of color’s racial/ethnic experience.” It also includes the “assumption of criminal status”—for example, a “store owner [who] follows a customer of color around the store”—and “denial of individual racism,” including statements like “My best friend is Black.” The latter category includes “micro-insults,” like calling a person of color “articulate,” as well as “micro-invalidation,” which includes “buildings named only after white men.”
Those examples are presented in a video shown in the training called “How Microaggressions Are Like Mosquito Bites.” The beginning of the video depicts a blonde white woman who calls a black woman “well-spoken” while the two wait at a bus stop. The white woman transforms into a mosquito that bites the black woman and begins sucking her blood. Similar scenes play out as the microaggressing mosquitoes say things like “Your English is so good” and “We have to keep the Redskins name.” Toward the end of the video, a narrator says that experiencing “microaggressions” can make you “want to go ballistic on those mosquitoes” as a black woman torches the pests with a flamethrower. Police officers, meanwhile, are presented as “mosquitoes” that “carry strains that can even kill you.”
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The training marks the latest example of how Pritzker, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, has made a point of embracing far-left cultural politics—even as polling shows that voters dismissively view Democrats as “woke.” The governor, for example, has expressed support for biologically male athletes competing in female sports leagues, saying, “Why is it that the Republican candidates can’t understand that they ought to let people live how they want to live?” He also signed a 2021 bill that grades prospective state contractors on how much money they donate to DEI nonprofits and how much their leaders pledge to promote DEI in their communities, the Free Beacon reported.
Pritzker’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The Illinois Department of Human Rights training was run by the agency’s public service administrator, Michael Patrick. This Free Beacon journalist attended the May 15 seminar alongside 10 other participants, who upon completion of the session were awarded certificates of completion signed by Department of Human Rights director James Bennett, a Pritzker appointee whose official biography touts his work launching “new training [sic] that advance knowledge and understanding of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and implicit bias.” The department had a budget of nearly $30 million in 2024.
“A lot of times people don’t mean to cause harm, but the impact and the intent is not the same thing,” Patrick said during the training. “And over time, repeated experiences like that can contribute to things like stress, exclusion, and inequity—again, both for individuals and within workplaces and communities.”
Patrick went on to dismiss the training’s critics as people who are “not on the receiving end” of microaggressions.
“I had somebody in one of my classes that thought the woman with the flamethrower was overreacting,” Patrick said, referencing the black woman who torches the mosquitoes in the “How Microaggressions Are Like Mosquito Bites” video. “And it just kind of shows you that maybe they were not on the receiving end of the mosquito bites because they can kind of have that visceral reaction.”
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The training is the latest example of left-wing racial ideologies persisting in liberal-controlled institutions, even after President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, in which the president’s opposition to “wokeness” was a defining feature of the campaign.
A mandatory “antiracism” class at Penn State Law School, for example, described all white people as “privileged,” called to “eradicate patriarchy,” and asserted that the justice system is “about keeping black people in their place,” the Free Beacon reported. And in blue cities across America, government housing programs still explicitly incorporate racial preferences into their weighting systems.