The Publisher Blinks: Why the Whitelash Study Was Pulled at the Last Minute

After peer review and near-publication, only an IRB review forced a rethink

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The controversy over the Whitelash paper isn’t just about one flawed study. It’s about what happens when academia trades truth for ideology, and society is expected to nod along. Over the past four decades, academia has been at the forefront of eroding the underpinnings of scientific inquiry, enlightenment values, and high trust in the community.

Any way you slice it, reform is coming.

Whether that change is delivered by new law, or from market pressures that demand both a real education for tuition dollars spent, and truthful knowledge from research grants, even academia is subject to the crushing chastisement of reality.

And it may be that the message is beginning to sink in, as word from the publisher has now come out.

The Publisher’s Response

In the run-up to writing my post last week, where I uncovered the abuse that the Critical Social Justice jargon is designed to hide, I reached out to the publisher of the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research (JSSWR). JSSWR is considered one of the top journals in social work, and thus publication, and even near publication, should be considered an endorsement of the potential importance of the work.

After my piece was published, I heard from Tiffany Adams (she/her), the Director of Marketing and Communications for the University of Chicago Press Journals, the parent publisher of the JSSWR.

According to Ms Adams, the editors for the JSSWR maintain editorial independence over which peer-reviewed articles appear in the journal. She also related that the Whitelash study had not been formally published in the journal, but was available under the JSSWR’s “just accepted” tab of their webpage. The study was removed when the journal’s editors were notified that it was undergoing an additional internal review board (IRB) review.

IRB reviews are required by federal regulations for research that involves human subjects and are designed to protect the rights and welfare of people participating in research studies. According to the Whitelash study, the first ethics board found it exempt from the IRB requirement due to it being written in an autoethnographic format, which is its own huge oversight.

The results of that IRB review are not currently public, but the fact that this was the reason the article was pulled is telling, and also an encouraging indication that change may be on the horizon.

What the Whitelash Study Did in Plain Language

To be clear about exactly what is now under review, let’s go over the details of what happened during the Whitelash study, without all the jargon.

The Whitelash study was based on the premise that white people have so thoroughly succeeded in world history in part because they have built every institution and idea in such a way that white people always have an easier time getting through life. This is what they call white supremacy. 

The only way people of color can succeed and get ahead is for white people to actively get out of the way, ignore their own needs, and provide for the needs of people of color. In this view, everyone considered white is racist and will protect this advantage with everything from overt racism to displaying negative emotions unless they are forcibly trained to see the advantage they have and become actively anti-racist.

The instructors see their position as teachers as a legitimate point from which to fight white superiority (or supremacy) by using their authority to pressure white students to submit to the notion that they are inherently racist and advantaged.

Quinn Hafen and Marie Villescas used 10 recorded processing sessions where they discussed the student feedback to instruction on white people’s inherent racism and responsibility as white people for past injustices like slavery or current police brutality, even when inflicted by other black or brown officers.

What they noticed was that when white students were pressured to accept this belief to the extent they felt sad, guilty, angry, or ashamed that they would “lash out” to reestablish “white comfort.”

In this worldview, white comfort is objectionable because if a white person is comfortable, they are not actively handicapping themselves in favor of black and brown people. White students are expected to “embrace discomfort,” holding back their own needs and desires, actively favoring those of black and brown people.

Hafen and Villescas saw “whitelash,” where white students expressed their hostility to this worldview, as the central barrier to white students choking back their own feelings and needs, prompting the professor’s efforts to ramp up their tension by putting students under more pressure. That’s what the pedagogy of discomfort is.

In this view, emotions are racialized and socially produced, specific to a person’s social location in a racial hierarchy. Thus, any time a white person is crying or otherwise showing outward signs of distress, it is a hallmark of their ‘white privilege’ being challenged, not a legitimate gesture of distress.

Such painful feelings in white people are considered a good thing, which should be encouraged until the white person recognizes they have special privileges due to being white, and they agree to contain any pain because that is the only thing that can make up for the evils of the past, like slavery.

Black and brown students, for their part, are encouraged to interpret small gestures by others as proof of negative judgments, naturally without reality testing like asking the person with curiosity about their behavior.

Hafen and Villescas thought that co-teaching as two racially different people would make their ability to pressure white students more effective. But they also saw a risk that by focusing so much on the whitelash reactions from white students, that was drawing time and attention away from black and brown students.

They produced their “study” by writing down their own personal thoughts and feelings. No control group, no experimentation. Because of this methodology, the ethics board judged that it was “not human subjects research,” at least until near publication.

The study covered two courses Hafen and Villescas taught together, and though the name of the class is not mentioned, this is what they covered: 

In both courses we taught together, we incorporated readings, documentaries, podcasts, and media highlighting the lived experiences of People of Color. This included content on settler colonialism and the genocide of Indigenous peoples; white supremacy, racism, and chattel slavery; and mass incarceration and police brutality. We also discussed social work’s role in perpetuating whiteness, and we critiqued Robin DiAngelo’s (2018) conceptualization of white fragility (see Brown, 2018). This material was intended to catalyze students’ critical awareness of institutional and structural racism, thus forming the foundation for anti-racist social work practice.

Unsurprisingly, they report that the students had negative reactions to the course, which the professors characterized as discomfort, frustration, and anger. At this point, the instructors asked students to identify where these negative emotions came from. It’s not clear what the context of that sharing was, but similar classes in counseling have students do this publicly in front of the whole class.

By Hafen’s and Villescas’s own account, this “caused a “mini crisis” in which students experienced heightened emotional reactivity.”

In the following paragraphs they describe the students as feeling shame, guilt and hostility, calling out the Hafen and Villescas as oppressive and engaging in reverse racism, to which the professors were exasperated that the students were not connecting that their shame and guilt was the appropriate response to the revelation that as white people they bear a generational debt for the history (slavery etc.) related in the course material.

The professors go on about how the white students seek to avoid this revelation and refocus on how this course material is harmful, which, from the perspective of the professors, was the students prioritizing white comfort.

To which, the instructors said they “doubled down,” setting a firm boundary that they would not allow white students to feel more comfortable. Instead, they refocused attention on the racial oppression of minorities. While Hafen wondered if they should have eased up, presumably to allow more time for white students to accept this hostile worldview, Villescas countered that easing up on the white students would be tantamount to a betrayal of minority students.

Hafen and Villescas discuss similar incidents with the same results, ultimately declaring that having these painful feelings of shame and guilt was the learning, and the professors complained that whenever they tried to reiterate that the white students were trying to reject the truth of the racial dynamics as envisioned by the faculty, the students rejected those notions with hostility.

At this point, the professors quote course evaluations where 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.” 

Villescase then relates that she gets similar comments every semester, characterizing white students who respond in this way as hateful and, by implication, bigots.

Hafen reframed the responses of the white students as a form of mob mentality and groupthink.

Ultimately, the pair concluded that this pressurizing environment they had created through the pedagogy of discomfort was effective at producing the type of learning they were trying to achieve, with Villescas noting that students of color immediately “had like, little half smiles–they leaned in, they were more excited.”

What the Whitelash Study Concluded

Throughout, the authors saw pushback from the white students as evidence of defensiveness, racial hate, and denial of that racial hate. Hafen and Villescas take the changing of these emotions into acceptance of their racialized worldview as foundational to achieving an anti-racist mindset. 

They surmise that by co-teaching, setting firm boundaries, and humiliating white students until they feel enough shame and guilt to comply, professors can achieve the “growth” They want to see in the world. White people setting aside their wants and needs in favor of black and brown people's wants and needs.

What Needs to Happen Now

The IRB review is a welcome development, but the fact that the Whitelash study got as far as it did, through an ethics review, through peer review, through however long it took to teach two classes, routine complaints from students of abuse, and accepted for publication is an indictment of the current system.

Villescas has been teaching in a similar fashion for over a decade. Multicultural counseling textbooks reflect a similar pedagogy going back at least a decade, countless clips from DEI trainings, and numerous whistleblowing students like myself have come forward calling out the abuse they’ve experienced at universities, which they have paid thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars to attend.

If higher ed wants to survive as an institution, professors like these should be fired.

The ethnic and gender studies departments, which have cultivated and pushed this ideology, should be shut down, at least in state schools where taxpayer dollars are being spent, and Pell grants and federally backed loans should be disallowed for any activist instruction, even in private schools.

Students who desire this kind of education should foot the bill for it.

Universities that turn a blind eye as long as tuition dollars keep rolling in should be subject to educational malpractice lawsuits. 

All those measures would be productive. But with colleges and universities still beholden to ideologically driven accreditation, real change will be hard to achieve without addressing its role.

Accreditors require these classes in training programs for social work to law school, and even some undergraduate degrees. Licensing boards require such education for people to work in their fields. With nearly a fifth of the workforce requiring licensing from the state, deregulation is long overdue.

Additionally, some K-12 school districts are making these ideological activist trainings a requirement for graduation in the form of Ethnic Studies requirements. That needs to stop.

Should our institutions continue to prey on students for tuition while providing abuse in the guise of instruction, higher ed shouldn’t be surprised if young people do what they did for millennia before modern universities grew to lofty heights, build new educational institutions, and find other ways to achieve their goals.

With the growth of Google Career Certificates, Udemy, and other certifications, some might say that’s already well underway.

Conclusion
The Whitelash paper is not just a misstep in social work research—it is a warning flare. When universities abandon truth for ideology, they don’t just fail their students; they corrode public trust in scholarship itself. The fact that this study advanced so far before being stopped shows how deep the rot runs. But reality is an unforgiving teacher. Whether through law, market forces, or the creation of alternative institutions, academia will have to face accountability. The only real question is whether universities will reform themselves—or whether the public will have to do it for them.

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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.