‘Whitelash’: Professors say white students get angry, frustrated by ‘anti-racist education’
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 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.
The 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.”
1. In Sociology and related majors, whites often are targets, based only on the color of their skin.
2. Increasingly, white students are pushing back.
Whites don't like being targeted because of their skin color? Who could foresee that?
