Originally posted on the The College Fix, August 8, 2025. Reprinted by permission.

Social work professors call out ‘whitelash’ in classrooms pushing anti-racism lessons

Two social work scholars argue that their “anti-racist education” efforts in the classroom faced “whitelash” from white students, who became emotionally distraught, pushed back by using “color-blind rhetoric,” or later wrote negative course reviews.

Quinn Hafen from the University of Wyoming and Marie Villescas from Colorado State University (CSU) recently published an article in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research detailing their experience creating a “pedagogy of discomfort” to challenge white supremacy in the classroom. The research was conducted at CSU. [Their] method was criticized by two scholars in interviews with The College Fix, who called the experiment somewhat abusive.

“[T]he more I reflect on that paper, the more I find it cruel to shame students based on immutable identities they hold, regardless of identity,” one observer said via email. “For the professors, it appeared that White and male students were their target.”

The College Fix reached out via email to both Hafen and Villescas regarding some of the concerns raised about their teaching methods. Hafen and Villescas did not reply.

‘White backlash’ and ‘white fragility’

Hafen and Villescas wrote in their July paper — which has been taken down from the journal’s website — that as “social work moves in the direction of anti-racist education and practice, social workers of color have urgently called attention to how theme [sic] profession continues to perpetuate white supremacy and harm BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).”

The two scholars wrote that when anti-racist educators attempt to bring attention to how their field advances white supremacy in the classroom, white students attempt to “re-establish the white supremacist status quo” through resistance and the espousal of “color-blind rhetoric.”

This “[r]etaliatory white backlash,” they wrote, is best referred to as “whitelash,” which they describe as intimately entwined with the socio-relational process of white emotionality and the maintenance of racial hierarchies.

Thus, in an attempt to “expose” and “disarm” this white resistance to anti-racist education, the scholarly duo documented their own exploration of the pedagogical strategies they utilized while co-teaching two different undergraduate social work courses in 2023.

Specifically, the strategies were “interracial teaching partnerships” and the “pedagogy of discomfort,” both of which the authors highlighted as having the potential to “promote student and instructor self-reflexivity and accountability” while “challenging the reproduction of whiteness in the classroom.”

The former they described as “an anti-racist pedagogical approach in which two or more racially diverse instructors co-teach a course.” The latter they characterized as a teaching method “that seeks to make visible the ways in which emotional comfort maintains structural oppression” and that “requires both instructors and students to embrace vulnerability and discomposure and question what they have been taught to see.”

Through assessments based on classroom surveys and their own self-reflection, they wrote that they found their white students did not always respond favorably to lessons on their “white fragility” and “social work’s role in perpetuating whiteness.”

Some white students, the scholars noted, became emotionally distraught during these and similar lessons while others pushed back or later wrote negative course reviews.

Through the documentation of their experiences and analyses, the scholars wrote, they hope to illustrate “how whitelash against anti-racism education can be transformed from an inevitable setback, into an opportunity to disrupt the social production of whiteness.”

Critics voice concerns

Yet, some social work scholars cited Hafen and Villescas’ teaching methods as grossly inappropriate for the undergraduate classroom.

Arnold Cantú, a practicing social worker who left a Colorado State University’s social work doctoral program over concerns regarding DEI’s intellectual hegemony in his now-former department, told The College Fix in a telephone interview that he was taken aback by how “brazen” Hafen and Villescas were in documenting their interactions with students and the uncomfortable positions in which they placed their students.

“Students voiced discomfort [with some of the lessons and teaching methods] and would push back, but...the authors would essentially reinterpret what the students were probably experiencing and feeling, which I think is incredibly repressive,” said Cantú.

Pointing to a description by Hafen and Villescas of the emotional learning component of their classes as “a form of resocialization,” Cantú stated this struck him as “eerie” and that “resocialization” is just a euphemism for “reeducation.”

The stated embrace of a “pedagogy of discomfort” and disregard for the emotional comfort of white students made their classroom descriptions reminiscent of “struggle sessions,” he added.

Furthermore, Cantú expressed concern that these kinds of lessons were being imposed at the undergraduate level.

“I worry especially about undergraduate students, seventeen, eighteen years old, right out of high school, and they’re confronted with this,” he said.

“I feel really, really bad and concerned for them to have to have this shoved down their throats,” he added. “There [are] obvious power imbalances: freshman students, undergraduate students, sophomore students, versus instructors and professors.

“I wonder if any of them eventually felt like they had to gaslight themselves to come around and be onboard with what was being taught despite the discomfort that was felt throughout,” he wrote.

Similarly, another recent graduate student in social work, who writes pseudonymously as “Jordan the Social Worker” and asked that his real name not be used for professional reasons, told The Fix that “most 18- and 19-year-olds are impressionable and have little job and life experience to understand how complex and messy and nuanced the real world is.”

“Most BSW (Bachelor of Social Work) students won’t have the background and exposure to know that there are counter-arguments and viewpoint differences around ‘White supremacy’ and ‘anti-oppression,’ for example, making them more open to being resocialized,” he said via email.

He said he found the pedagogy cruel to shame students based on immutable identities and it seemed white and male students were their target: “Aren’t social work and the other mental health professions supposed to be about defusing shame?”

The College Fix contributor Daniel Nuccio holds master’s degrees in both psychology and biology. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in biology at Northern Illinois University where he is studying the impact of social isolation on host-microbe interactions and learning new coding techniques to integrate into his research.

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