'The Mirage of Action': Exploring the Social Work Professions' Perpetuation of White Supremacy Through 'Well-Intentioned' Actions (original) (raw)
Related papers
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...
Dismantling White Supremacy in Social Work Education
Advances in Social Work, 2021
We are excited to share this special edition of Advances in Social Work with you. When we distributed a call for abstracts, we were inundated – in a good way – with proposals. The need for social workers to discuss the role that white supremacy occupies within our history, education, and practice was obvious. Because of the number of abstracts received, we made the decision to publish a double edition so that the important information contained in these articles can be widely shared. The submissions fell into three general themes--historical, instructional, and institutional examinations. Each set of articles offers much for us to reflect and act upon moving forward. There is a reckoning happening and we are thrilled that this special edition is part of that reckoning. In all, we hope that this special issue will help advance our conversations in social work education around white supremacy and how it influences our practice, research, and education. Recognizing that our Code of Eth...
Dismantling Privilege and White Supremacy in Social Work Education
Advances in Social Work, 2021
The primary aim of social work is eliminating social inequalities by advocating for racial, social, and economic justice for individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. This commitment and promise starts in the classroom by providing opportunities for students and faculty to interact with each other and promote the core tenets of the profession. As the social work practices are shaped by the values promoted by the mainstream society, many argue that the profession is biased and does not meet the needs of Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC). This issue is explored in the present study by interviewing six Black female social work faculty, aiming to elucidate their experiences in academia and the social work educational environment when interacting with their White counterparts, their students, and the administration. The findings yielded by this investigation have implications for academia, as well as social work education programs and their leadership.
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.
2013
Social work imagines itself as a site of goodness and justice. My thesis illustrates the ways in which commitments to the profession’s social justice-oriented ideals are ruptured when racialized social workers name the operation of racism within everyday sites of professional practice. I show how colonial and imperial constructions of helping (moral superiority and goodness) continue to shape the hegemonic scripts about the role and practices of social work, reinscribing white dominance in social work knowledge production. Historically, racialized bodies have been constituted as Others, subjects to be regulated, controlled and ‘saved’ within the colonial project. I examine the dilemmas that emerge when racialized Others become the helpers and attempt to perform a normative identity that is constructed through white dominance. In this study, I provide a detailed analysis of twenty-three semi-structured interviews with racialized social workers. I trace the production of the professio...
This article examines the ways in which racialized social workers negotiate the values and practices of a social work profession that is constituted through scripts of whiteness. In particular, I examine how social work imagines itself as a site of social justice and goodness, and the processes through which racialized workers’ desires to be good collide with the racist encounters experienced in everyday sites of practice. I build upon scholarship that critiques the centralization of whiteness in social work and makes visible the liberal foundations of the profession that are implicated in constituting colonial and imperial practices of moral superiority. I argue that the professional values and practices committed to the goals of social justice are the same values and practices that reinstall whiteness and underpin incidents of racial violence. Historically, racialized bodies have been constituted as the Other—subjects to be regulated, controlled, and saved within the colonial project by white, bourgeois subjects. This article, based on interviews with racialized social workers in Canada, examines the dilemmas that emerge when racialized Others become the helpers and perform an identity that historically was never meant for them. Keywords: race, racism, whiteness, colonialism, critical social work
Whitewashing of Social Work History
Advances in Social Work
Severe racial inequity has characterized the incorporation of ethnic minorities’ contributions to U.S. history and advancements (Sandoval et al., 2016). These disparities are inextricably connected to White Supremacist ideologies and practices, and are perpetuated in higher education through textbooks, pedagogy, and research. Social work, like many disciplines, teaches about its early roots with a whitewashed historical lens. Indeed, review of the social work literature reveals the scarcity of attributions to Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC). Without a more racially diverse perspective on social work’s history, social work scholars promote and sustain White Supremacy. The implications of this are crucial since social work education is predominantly populated by privileged White students who adopt this mentality, unaware of Black, Brown, Latino, Asian, Native or Other ethnic “Jane Addams” who have massively promoted the social welfare of communities for decades wi...
Social work imagines itself as a site of goodness and justice. My thesis illustrates the ways in which commitments to the profession's social justice-oriented ideals are ruptured when racialized social workers name the operation of racism within everyday sites of professional practice. I show how colonial and imperial constructions of helping (moral superiority and goodness) continue to shape the hegemonic scripts about the role and practices of social work, reinscribing white dominance in social work knowledge production. Historically, racialized bodies have been constituted as Others, subjects to be regulated, controlled and 'saved' within the colonial project. I examine the dilemmas that emerge when racialized Others become the helpers and attempt to perform a normative identity that is constructed through white dominance.
Critical Multiculturalism, Whiteness, and Social Work
Journal of Progressive Human Services, 2006
In this paper, I suggest that most cultural diversity classes in social work are taught from a liberal or conservative multicultural perspective that precludes a power analysis and a critical discussion of whiteness. In order to undo this status quo, social educators and practitioners need to incorporate critical multiculturalismas a tool in subverting racism. A critical multicultural practice includes an analysis of whiteness and a commitment on the part of white social workers to take up an antiracist practice. Pedagogical strategies are described that unmask whiteness. Finally, Stephen Madigan's oppositional whiteness, illustrated in a case vignette, is illustrated as an antiracist practice in which a white social worker/therapist situates his own privilege and becomes an ally.
Anti-racist social work in a 'post-race' society? Interrogating the amorphous other
Anti-racist social work is at a crossroads: while on the one hand, racial binaries such as black/white, us/other and slave/master can be useful political tools to understand institutional racism, current contexts of multiculturalism raise questions about the continued relevance of race as a category for analysis. 'Newer' forms of racialised identities are emerging that need to be incorporated into a broader conceptualisation of non-colour-based race theory. In this article, these contradictions are explicated through a phenomenological study of embodied reflections on race, ethnicity and self-identity among social work students. Frantz Fanon's 'fact of blackness' provides an epistemic guide to this phenomenological study, providing a multi-layered examination of social work students' experiential accounts of their embodied identities, their colour, race, blackness, whiteness and sexuality and what this means for self-identity. Tentative student discourses provide powerful insights into the urgent need for a radical turn in (re)locating culture and race studies in social work curriculum.