How a Top Social Work Journal Published—and Then Erased—Abuse as Pedagogy

The withdrawn “Whitelash” paper reveals what students endure in the name of “anti-racism.” The real scandal is how normal it has become.

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Every year, parents tearfully send their children off to school believing they’ll be taught the knowledge and skills to become capable adults. Employers look for new graduates and treat a college degree as proof of competence and maturity. But what if that promise is hollow—and the degree itself a certification in ideology?

A recent paper in social work education—briefly published, then quickly withdrawn—exposes just how profoundly the profession has been captured by Critical Social Justice dogma. Behind the jargon and calls for “pedagogies of discomfort” lies something far more troubling: not education, but sanctioned abuse. And social work is only the canary in the coal mine.

Last week, I wrote about the scientifically disqualifying elements of a reflection piece disguised as a study titled “Exposing and Disarming Whitelash to Advance Anti-Racism: A Collaborative Autoethnography on Interracial Co-teaching” by Quinn Hafen from the University of Wyoming and Marie Villescas from Colorado State University (CSU).  It was published in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research (JSSWR) this July, then pulled in early August.

While this embarrassment of a study has been pulled from publication, it cannot be overlooked that this piece was given the go-ahead at CSU, approved by an ethics board, carried out to completion, processed through peer review, edited, and finally published in the JSSWR, a well-regarded journal in social work that some rank among the top five journals of the profession. Through the entire process, not only was the discrediting methodology endorsed, but an unconstitutional, racist, and abusive plan was rolled out with the endorsement of academia behind it.

The Whitelash paper and its journey to public distribution exemplify how social work education has shifted from professional training to activist indoctrination. Abusive pedagogical methods are masked by obfuscating language, and the hollow core of a profession intended to help others has been exposed as ethically bankrupt.

The Road to Radical Activism

According to the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the first class in social work began at Columbia University in 1898. The aim was to help people in need.

Traditionally, the field focused on client welfare and incorporated the insights of psychology and therapy as knowledge increased and the needs of the population shifted from direct survival concerns to other issues. Lately, Critical Race Theory and anti-racism have become core mandates, as this quote from the Whitelash paper attests:

By pushing students to engage in uncomfortable reflexivity, we sought to provide students with the skills to identify their own complicity in the reproduction of whiteness within social work education. This approach aligns with the National Association of Social Workers’ (NASW) call for “confronting the harm that our profession has caused and continues to perpetuate” by engaging in honest and accountable self-reflection.

Indeed, throughout the paper, the authors position anti-racism education as a battle against “white supremacy” in the classroom, thereby putting the priority on activism even in the education itself over neutral instruction. Repeated emphasis is placed on their interracial co-teaching to “interrupt harm” and foster “reflexivity and accountability.”

In this progression, the Whitelash paper itself advocates for social work instructors to act as ideological enforcers, using the classroom to “disrupt white emotional hegemony” and push students toward internalizing the professor’s idea of white supremacy, transforming education into political indoctrination rather than skill-building or any other sort of learning.

Obfuscation Through Jargon, the Veil for Coercion

Those outside of Academia and DEI-infused circles may have found much of the last section difficult to parse. That is by design. Not my design, but that of the proponents of Critical Social Justice, Critical Race Theory, woke, DEI, or any of the other names this ideology has been called to hide the bigotry underneath. Without composing a full glossary of terms, I will highlight a few here to make it easier to follow the language used in this study and in other DEI contexts.

• Anti-racism* - The practice of seeing reality through a racial lens and acting to make up for historical inequalities with racism today. In this view, people of color are never capable of succeeding on their own merit. As a result, white people must be penalized as a way to make the world more “fair.”

• Colonialism* - The use of historical, political, social, or economic events as an excuse to place blame on white people.

• Color-blind racism - Not preferentially favoring racial minorities, and treating people equally regardless of race, as encouraged by Martin Luther King.

• Ethnocentrism - The unsubstantiated idea that people consciously or unconsciously favor their own ethnic group over others. 

• Pedagogy of Discomfort - Euphemism for inducing guilt, shame, and anger to coerce people into accepting whatever is being taught. A tool for indoctrination.

• Racism* - The intrinsic superiority of being white. In this view, only white people can be racist, and due to white supremacy, it is impossible for white people not to be racist.

• White Comfort - Racialized states of contentment or safety in white people. Dismissed in the whitelash study as a tool of white supremacy, thereby justifying humiliation and denial of emotional support. A tool for indoctrination.

• White Fragility - The Idea that any negative reaction from a white person to being shamed or humiliated is due to defensiveness to protect their privileged status as a white person.

• Whitelash - A portmanteau of ‘white’ and ‘backlash,’ intended to suggest that any pushback against this ideology from white people is a reflection of their inherent racism, and thus intended to protect their “privileged” status. Used in this study to pathologize the reactions of white students when they are shamed.

• White Privilege - The unsubstanciated idea that white people, by virtue of their skin color, have favored treatment in all situations.

• Whiteness - The state of being white, the white racialized identity. Can include cultural trends seen as popular along racial lines. Often used as a slur or to prejudge white people.

• White Supremacy* - The unsubstanciated belief that the world is systemically racist against people of color and in favor of white people.

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* Indicates terms that are being used in radically different ways than past accepted definitions, or in ways opposite to what might be implied by a casual reading.

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With definitions altered, obscured with euphemism or jargon, this loaded language hides the reality of emotional manipulation and abuse. For example, “embracing discomfort,” as with the pedagogy of discomfort, may sound like it could be encouraging healthy humility. Using such terms minimizes the harm delivered to white students and deprives them of a language to explain what’s happening to outsiders.

Consider what is being said in this passage:

We re-affirmed that anti-racist pedagogy must not only be focused on subject matter, but also on re-constructing social processes to center BIPOC learning and validate BIPOC experiences of harm. We viewed this type of social and emotional learning as a form of resocialization, in which both students and instructors challenged white norms of behavior and racialized power dynamics. For example, in the first case example, when the white student lashed out to protect white comfort, we perceived that he was also lashing out against the decentering of whiteness. In fact, in direct response to this whitelash, a student of color spoke up during class and re-affirmed that it “felt really good to her” that we were centering BIPOC learning instead of caving to white comfort.

During a subsequent processing session, Author 2 reflected on this interaction, stating, “It's really interesting how this very bright, very intuitive person of color had assumed those things about me and my approach. But yet the white dudes in the class were attributing oppression and all kinds of nastiness to me.” [Laughs].

If it isn’t obvious, what is being communicated here is that education itself must be considered a tool to “resocialize” white students to forgo their own needs in favor of students of color. When a white student objected to this treatment, a student of color said they took pleasure in the experience of seeing the white student humiliated for their whiteness. 

Then, when the professor and author of the study thought about the exchange later, she was amused and laughed that the white ‘dudes’ called out her behavior as oppressive and harmful, but the black and brown students validated her targeting white students.

This mirrors a similar passage in the multicultural textbook, Counseling the Culturally Diverse, where author Derald Wing Sue relates that many students of color take a sadistic pleasure in watching their white classmates “squirm.”

By cloaking the description of these incidents in jargon and euphemism, this normalizes tactics that would have been seen as bullying or harassment in any other setting.

Pedagogy of Discomfort and Abuse - A Study Pulled

Without explanation, this study was pulled shortly after it was published. I reached out to the JSSWR for comment regarding the withdrawal of the Whitelash study, but received no response.

While it is unclear if an outcry about the abusive methodology used on the students provoked the publishers to pull the study, it was reported in the College Fix that at least two social workers took issue with its content, including Arnold Cantú, a social worker who left CSU’s PhD program over concerns about DEI groupthink in its social work training department. He was quoted as saying:

I worry especially about undergraduate students, seventeen, eighteen years old, right out of high school, and they are confronted with this.

I feel really, really bad and concerned for them to have to have this shoved down their throats. There are obvious power imbalances… students versus professors… I wonder if any of them eventually felt like they had to gaslight themselves to come around.

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The following are selections from Whitelash for you to judge for yourselves:

We found that learning about race and racism provoked discomfort, frustration, and anger from both students of color and white students; however, students of color’s emotional responses largely related to the validation of their experiences of racial oppression, while white students reacted to their feelings about their acknowledgement and/or denial of whether racism exists.

White students shared feelings of shame… “I no longer feel proud to be an American.”

One student stated, “I don’t feel safe in this classroom. The judgment and rejection come from the teachers’ reactions rather than the students. This makes me shut down.

Not all white emotionality was related to shame or guilt, instead some white students responded with denial…We found it both exhausting and exasperating how students denied the connection between their emotions and the course content.

When we doubled down and set a firm boundary that we could not defer to white emotional discomfort, we reflected that these students lashed out in an attempt to relieve negative emotions and ease feelings of shame and guilt.

“Students resist being pushed to question themselves in a way that disrupts their identity as a ‘good person.’” Moreover, critical race and whiteness scholars explain how the disavowal of white complicity can be “unconsciously experienced as deeply gratifying” because it reaffirms racial boundaries.

We used the phrase “class as container” to describe how we sought to actively create a boundaried space that minimizes harm to BIPOC. For example, in the second case example, when white students claimed it was oppressive to grade them on their engagement with content on race and racism, we reflected that “the container wasn’t firm.” 

We noticed that when whitelash escalated, it was due to not having firm enough boundaries. Furthermore, we noticed increased pushback from students when we did not provide sufficient structure for emotional engagement with learning. For example, after the whitelash incident in Case Example 2, we reflected “we're not utilizing their small groups enough… the authors argue that white students must learn to sit with uncomfortable emotions. Likewise, Bonilla-Silva’s (2019) contends that we must recognize racialized emotions and disrupt social and emotional aspects of racial domination in order to truly engage in anti-racist change.

In reflecting on the racially specific responses to discomfort, we reaffirmed that “[we] want the tension, [we] want the discomfort among people who hold privilege” (Author 2). This desire to embrace discomfort as essential to learning fits with a pedagogy of discomfort…. A pedagogy of discomfort is “a teaching practice that encourages students to move outside their comfort zones and challenge the beliefs, habits, and practices that sustain their biases.”

When we planned for class, we had “real intentionality around keeping the tension, processing the feelings that come up, and processing the fragility that comes up” (Author 2). Ultimately, our goal was to foster a classroom environment in which both instructors and students sought to name racial tension and contend with their emotions as connected to structures of racial oppression.

In response to this pedagogy of discomfort, Author 2 observed that students of color immediately “had like, little half smiles–they leaned in, they were more excited.” In contrast, white students initially resisted learning, but when we pushed through white centering and desire for white comfort, white students experienced deep learning that challenged their assumptions.

As someone who has experienced a similar “educational” experience firsthand, including in a small group. I would absolutely call them abusive. It is not the place of higher education to pressure students to change their beliefs. That this is happening in a State School openly breaks Federal law and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The Tip of the Iceberg - From Pedagogy to Culture

 This Whitelash “study” reads like a justification for abuse. While the autoethnographic account of such behavior may be novel, the pedagogy is not. At one point in the study, Villescas even brags that she has students tell her every semester that they find her classroom harassing, with her as the instigator of the bullying. She has been teaching in higher education for 12 years.

As I mentioned above, I have experienced similar treatment in the counseling department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and I have documented textbooks teaching the same at hundreds of CACREP-accredited university counselor training programs.

Similar material can be found in the K-12 teacher education departments in universities across the U.S., where it can’t help but filter down into primary and secondary education. As numerous TikTok videos of grade school teachers bragging about indoctrinating children attest.

The effects of this are already leaking into our larger culture.

Without a firm statement on why the Whitelash study was pulled, it’s hard to say if that counts as progress, but what is clear is that reform is desperately needed.

In Sum

When the educational pathway to a career that had been based in the compassionate care of others now openly brags about bullying and harassing students, the situation is a crisis. Many have sat idle or even approved while linguistic games covered the growth of ideological curriculum and coercive pedagogy.

It would be hard to think of a more desperate cry for oversight and reform than the publication of the Whitelash study. The time for reform is now.

If you believe higher education should form capable adults—not break them down through ideological abuse—then I invite you to subscribe. Your support helps me keep investigating, exposing, and pushing for real reform in our universities. Together, we can reclaim education from activism and return it to truth, skill, and integrity.

Further Reading

The Quiet Collapse of Scientific Standards

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About

Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Tennessee. What I found instead was a program saturated in Critical Theories ideology—where my Buddhist practice was treated as invalidating and where dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy was met with hostility. After witnessing how this ideology undermined both ethics and the foundations of good clinical practice, I made the difficult decision to walk away.

Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to exposing the ideological capture of psychology, higher education, and related institutions. My investigative writing has appeared in Real Clear Education, Minding the Campus, The College Fix,  and has been republished by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. I also speak and consult on policy reform to help rebuild public trust in once-respected professions.

Occasionally, I’m accused of being funny.

When I’m not writing or digging into documents, you’ll find me in the garden, making art, walking my dog, or guiding my kids toward adulthood.