Much ink has been spilled about last year’s “Whitelash” study by Quinn Hafen and Marie Villescas Zamzow, which was ultimately withdrawn following scrutiny. Less discussed is that Zamzow—along with a new set of “anti-racist” researchers—produced additional work that raises concerns about the direction of social work education and its application.  

In 2024, six social workers from Colorado State University (CSU) published an activist paper on an “education” workshop series they devised to resocialize rural Colorado community members towards “taking antiracist action” and “interrupting systems of White supremacy.” The paper is titled, “Leveraging Human-Centered Design to Promote Community-Level Antiracism Efforts: A Pilot Study of the Innovation Change Lab.”

The team launched their workshops through an affiliation with CSU’s Extension network, a sprawling partnership between Colorado communities across all 64 counties and researchers from CSU. The network is well-known throughout the state for its historic 100-plus years of expertise in farming, ranching, and agricultural management.  

Among the network’s programs, the team collaborated with an Extension agent from the Family Leadership Training Institute (FLTI) to recruit rural community leaders as participants (participants’ respective leadership roles in the community were undisclosed). The Eagle County location, where the trainings took place in 2021, bills itself as a “first-of-its-kind family civics program.” 

Over the course of six “education” workshops, the authors sought to teach families how to act against apparent “racial inequities,” dividing U.S. society into two permanently opposing groups: white people and people of color. They followed the biases of prominent anti-racists, citing Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and clearly discounting perspectives from one group in particular: the term “communities of color” is mentioned seven times in the paper while “white communities” or “communities of whiteness” are not mentioned once. 

Central to the workshop curriculum was the “Cycle of Socialization,” a far-leftist ideological model of socialization that claims to explain how color evasion, or treating people independently of their race, “is solidified in white peoples’ consciousness,” as Villescas Zamzow and the other seven authors wrote. They continued, “We postulated that the Cycle of Socialization is a useful tool to help reduce defensiveness among white participants, as it shows their ignorance is not their fault, but rather a product of how they were socialized.” 

Participants, in other words, were psychologically manipulated with the Cycle both to accept the authors’ understanding of racial difference and to change their attitudes under the guise of “education,” which instead shamed and finger-pointed directly at white individuals.

The team did not stop there, however.

“In turn,” the authors follow up, “the Cycle … reinforces white folks’ responsibility to make change by interrupting the status quo via the Cycle of Liberation.” Three times, the authors cited a 2017 article on “anti-racist moral education,” indicating they understood their dual mission as laying bare this “responsibility” and taking the lead on morally reeducating Colorado communities.  

Not only was blame laid at the feet of white individuals, but racism appeared to be in every corner of society. Tiffany Jones, the lead author of “Leveraging Human-Centered Design to Promote Community-Level Antiracism Efforts” and Associate Professor in CSU’s School of Social Work (the School), was quoted in a 2023 podcast interview with CSU’s College of Health and Human Services explaining “de-centering Whiteness”: “I think it’s just until you prove something is not racist, we need to assume it is.”

After the six-week workshop ended, white participants found themselves singled out according to their race, overlooking the fact that racism can take place between any two individuals. “While this white participant still has learning to do,” the authors write, “being asked to have conversations with folks of color about their experiences with racism was powerful for him.”  

A different white male participant “showed growth in the cognitive elements of critical consciousness, with potential progress toward taking antiracist action, though he does not name specific actions he plans to take.” “Growth” was ideologically pre-determined, appearing psychologically dependent on participants recognizing their white fragility, white privilege, intersectional identities, and anti-racist orientation—all to “lead to the disruption of whiteness as normal.”   

Both the paper and a celebratory write-up disclose that the project was funded by an internal grant from the School and a CSU “Extension Mini-Grant.” Depending on how grant funding was allocated by the larger CSU system, it is possible that the authors—in partnership with CSU’s Extension Office—used federal funds, state funds, or student tuition dollars to discriminate against white Colorado community members on the basis of their race.   

These ideas appear to have seeped out further into the Colorado communities.

The CSU write-up about the study revealed plans to further roll out the group’s anti-racist training in a second rural community and an unnamed school district, the latter with help from a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation.

Jones, for leading the project, received an “Outstanding Researcher” award from the School.