Exploring the Role of United States Legal Discourse in Creating, Sustaining, and Disrupting Vestiges of Slavery (original) (raw)
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Critical Race Theory: A Content Analysis of the Social Work Literature
Journal of Sociological Research, 2017
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is both a theoretical and practical framework, which promotes a space to deeply engage in discourses of race. CRT highlights the importance of conceptualizing race, racism, power dynamics and structural inequalities. Although the social work profession emphasizes the importance of integrating cultural and racial diversity into social work education, practice and research, the integration of CRT within social work will promote racial competency essential for social work professionals. This article reviewed 14 social work peer-reviewed articles exploring the need to integrate Critical Race Theory.
Moving From Multiculturalism to Critical Race Theory Within a School of Social Work
Advances in Social Work
The continued presence of racism and white supremacy has risen to a crisis level as today’s global pandemic, police abuse targeting Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) communities, and mass urban uprisings rock the nation. This article presents a case study of a West Coast school of social work that has carried out a five-year systematic campaign to move all levels of the program beyond a multicultural orientation towards critical race theory. This study reveals the results of a self-organized cross-racial committee within a school of social work, motivated by an ambitious goal to implement a racial justice orientation throughout the school’s personnel, practices, policies, and curricula. The committee has been further characterized by its commitment to engage across the power-laden divisions of field faculty, tenure track faculty, and administrative staff. The article offers documented stages of development, narratives from across differences of identity and profess...
Navigating the Silences Social Worker Discourses Around Race
2020
This thesis explored social worker discourses to learn what they could reveal about professional workplace practices and experiences with race and racism. The study traced the subtle and elusive racism often found in everyday professional conversations that are not considered racist by dominant consensus. Using tools of thematic and critical discourse analysis (CDA), and van
If Not Now, When? A Call to End Social Work’s Tolerance of White Supremacy in the Academy
Critical Social Work
Despite ethical responsibilities to dismantle systems of oppression, White supremacy ideologies and practices are still inundated in social work academe to the detriment of Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Persons of Color (BILPOC) communities and faculty dedicated to teaching the next generation of critical scholars, activists, and clinicians. Four themes are introduced to exemplify how the academy remains overpowered by the need to sustain the status quo of White power. In the first theme, social work’s long-standing history of omitting BILPOC experiences in curricula is discussed. The second theme characterizes social work’s legacy of omission via inaction to address unjust governmental practices at the U.S. Southern border, thereby perpetuating the cycle of White power. Cementing these positions, we shift the discussion to the inherent pressures within the academy that prizes productivity above all else, perpetuating the culture of White supremacy. In turn, spaces to engage in cre...
Is There A Place For Us? Social Workers of Color As Outside Agitators Within the Profession
Advances in Social Work
The outside agitator narrative has been used to discredit and harm people of color for decades. Currently, it is being used as a forceful tactic to separate the movement for Black lives from the broader narrative that racism is deeply rooted in American social structures, institutions, and everyday life. This article examines the implications of how the profession of social work has similarly and simultaneously maintained a culture of white supremacy and racist ideologies in our work. As outsiders in a predominantly white profession, social workers of color act as outside agitators when dispelling myths and practices used in and for communities of color. By centering the lived experiences and knowledge of social workers of color, all social workers can increase their awareness of racism within our profession and work together to dismantle the culture of racism and white supremacy that persists within social work.
Advances in Social Work, 2021
This autoethnographic study highlights complex strategies for maintaining white supremacy used by "well-intentioned" heterocentric white female social workers that are enacted under the guise of practicing anti-racism in social work practice settings, classroom environments, policy initiatives, and advocacy work. Using autoethnography was both unplanned and deliberate. Unplanned, we needed a research method that allows us to explore the untouchable subject of heterocentric white female social workers and deliberate in that we could use our experiences to break ground and establish white supremacy among heterocentric white female social workers that espouse anti-racist values as an area of study. We draw on education, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines to name some of the ongoing challenges to dismantling racism, colonialist, and reformer narratives in social work, and identify strategies used by all white folx, but particularly heterocentric white female social workers to neutralize the suggestion or accusation of their acts as racism. We name three challenges to dismantling racism among heterocentric white female social workers: hiding behind the data, anti-racist book clubs, and crying and comfort. We conclude with further questions for those who hold power in the field and a reflection upon our own continued intersecting struggles with these concepts.
On Interrogating Racism: How the Project Came About?
periodika.osu.cz
This article reports findings that are part of a broader study exploring human service agencies' delivery efforts with "new immigrants" in a city in the North East of the United States. In this article, we specifically share our efforts to understand how human service agencies incorporate the concepts diversity and cultural competence in their everyday operations. We use a critical multicultural lens as a framework to approach the interrogation of the new racism-"colorblindness". This approach posits that clientprovider relationships are embedded in broader racialization and societal power differences; and that, to work towards justice, it is essential to deconstruct the racialized codes which are found in public institutions. Our findings suggest that colorblindness is the frame that is used to incorporate diversity and cultural competence in the selected human service agencies and the "select" agencies confirmed that they had limited know how and/or frames to interrogate the "new racism". In view of these findings we argue that the teaching of social work, agency policies responses and service delivery should engage critical inductive learning that incorporates self-critique, self-evaluation to unlearn and to redress power imbalances, paternalistic and insensitive ways that contribute to everyday racism.
Racialized Discourses: Writing Against an Essentialized Story About Racism
This paper is concerned with the ethics of knowledge production when conducting research on racial injustice. The discussion draws upon my doctoral research, in which I interviewed 23 racialized social workers in Toronto, Canada, about their encounters with racism in the workplace. The discussion centres on my role as a racialized researcher and the effects of any assumed " insider-ness " on how I heard and interpreted participant narratives. Although the workers and I shared experiences of racism, I could not assume " sameness, " nor could I adopt an authentic voice about how racism is experienced. This paper examines the significance of producing research about racial domination, but argues for an anti-essentialist stance. I explore the ethical dilemmas involved through examining the dominant assumptions underlying insider research. Only when we come to be very clear about how race is lived, in its multiple manifestations, only when we come to appreciate its often hidden epistemic effects and its power over collective imaginations of public space, can we entertain even the remote possibility of its eventual transformations. (Alcoff, 2002, p. 267) This paper is concerned with the ethics of knowledge production when conducting research on racial injustice. I specifically examine the ethical dilemmas that arise from the assumptions that constitute insider/outsider debates in research, and I make the argument that the danger for essentialism poses significant risks to research. The discussion draws upon my doctoral research, in which I interviewed 23 racialized social workers in Toronto, Canada, about their encounters with racism in the workplace. The study focused on the ways in which racialized workers negotiate professional practice within a white-normed profession, with a specific emphasis the ways in which racial injustice manifests in everyday social work. The stories shared by participants in this study were emotionally heavy, complicated, hard to tell (and hear). The workers shared narratives describing how clients would refuse to work with them, utter racist comments toward them, and in some situations, used physical violence (Badwall, 2014). Furthermore, they relayed how co-workers and managers responded to these acts, which more often than not resulted in no action or support. Instead, their stories reveal the ways in which social work values of helping,