Actions that White Social Work Educators can do now for Racial Justice
Editor’s Note: This blog post was written in collaboration with my good colleague, Dr. Melanie Sage of the University of Buffalo’s School of Social Work . Many thanks to our colleagues who reviewed and made helpful suggestions for this post prior to publication.
This blog post is inspired by the list 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice by Corinne Shutack. We wrote this blog post as a way to begin our own work toward becoming anti-racist social work professors, to analyze our own practice, and to set our own goals. As we began identifying resources, we realized we should use our privilege to share with our communities through this blog and via Twitter (@laurelhitchcock & @melaniesage). We use the term BIPOC in this article to refer to Black,Indigenous, and People of Color.
We are not experts, which perhaps makes it even more important that we share and model this work. Please note that these are not the ten most important things, but they are things on our minds right now. (Please contact us if we’ve made a mistake.)
- Learn about and teach about the history of social work, including its roots in White Saviorism. Read more about definitions of white saviors. Bring more history into your classrooms. Often, efforts of social work were built to assimilate communities to white standards, such as in the case of child welfare agencies involved in removing children from their homes and placing them in boarding schools, or with white families, without due process. Social workers were even involved in the Holocaust as well as eugenics, and not in the ways you think. Examine ways in which our profession continues to assimilate with a white standard, in language, definitions of professionalism, and our roles as gatekeepers in education, hiring, and service delivery. Consider that Indigenous children in the US are still taken into foster care at up to 17 times their rate in the population, and that many social workers participate in service learning or mission work overseas with inadequate knowledge of the values of the communities they serve.
- Acknowledge that systematic racism is part of academia, social work education, and the social work profession. Speak about it, write about it, retweet it, organize around it. You can do this in your classroom, community, or nationally. Look for models; for instance, the Social Work PhD students at Pitt and University at Buffalo who wrote letters to CSWE advocating for anti-racist curriculum, and the Social Work Deans, Alan Dettlaff and Laura Abrams, who penned a letter to NASW and wrote an op-ed about the role of social workers in reforming criminal justice and there is a video of a debate on what social workers roles should be with police. Look to SWCAREs, a group which includes social work practitioners and educators, who are organizing resources in this space. If you are a social worker who falls somewhere between practitioner or student and dean, you can take some kind of action to contribute to better understanding of racism in our profession.
- Practice self-awareness and do your own internal work to overcome bias. Begin with thinking about your own blind spots. You can take the implicit association test and analyze the ways you uphold white supremacy culture. Think about the ways you practice tokenism or treat BIPOC contributions; for instance, do you only include them during a week on “diversity,” and do you make assumptions about your BIPOC students? There are so many good resources (books, movies, podcasts, etc.) available to gain insight on racism, implicit bias, lived experiences of people of color, white privilege, and race-based power differentials. Explore how deeply-embedded racism is in our everyday language and think about the words you use. The goal is to open up to the fact that white supremacy is real, that all races practice bias, prejudice, and discrimination, and that systemic racism is still practiced in public and private organizations. Prioritize writing by BIPOC authors as you learn. One place to start is with a 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge. If you start a book group to learn with others, consider good ground rules.
- Decolonize your pedagogy. Ask yourself these ten crucial questions to challenge your assumptions and practices about how you teach. Specifically, think about all the implicit ways of being, doing and knowing that you bring to the classroom. Write out your answers to each question to discover the hidden practices that you bring into the classroom. Ideally, do this with a friend and discuss and reflect on your answers. And consider that our discussions of decolonization can themselves become vague metaphors that can obscure the specific justice issues that distinguish decolonization from other racial justice work (Tuck & Yang, 2012).
- Incorporate works by BIPOC people in your courses. Include works that highlight positive outcomes as well as the disparities. Be careful of falling into the trap of focusing only on risk factors and disparate outcomes in BIPOC communities. Include Black Feminist Theory (another), learn about Womanist Theory, and the important contributions of BIPOC scholars and activists to the field of social work. As another a starting place, check out the Black American Feminisms: A Multidisciplinary Bibliography.
- Remember and pronounce your students’ and colleagues’ names correctly. This is one simple way to show respect and inclusivity to your students and peers. This article – Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly – offers examples of practices you can employ from asking “How would you like me to say your name?” to word association tricks.
- Use trauma-informed teaching principles in all your courses. Incorporating a trauma-informed approach into your teaching means acknowledging and understanding the ways that violence, victimization and other forms of trauma affect individuals and communities. First, consider how the trauma of racial injustice and white supremacy has affected you, your students and the larger learning environment when you teach. Next incorporate different trauma-informed teaching strategies such as giving time in class to discuss difficult topics that are coming in the news or in your community or having regular check-ins with students to see how they are doing related to racial justice. To learn more, watch this recording about Trauma-informed Teaching and learning online. You can download the handouts from this presentation here. Also interrogate the meaning of safe spaces, and consider whose safety is prioritized when you try to design safety in your classroom. Check out this article about the impossibility of safety for some marginalized students.
- When teaching about race, consider teaching strategies from the Color Insight approach. Promoted in legal education, the Color Insight approach encourages the acknowledgement and discussion of race in all contexts, including teaching about whiteness, as a way to explore how individuals, communities, policies and society are affected by racism. This approach is designed to counteract the effects of colorblindness, a common framework used when we (the authors of this blog post) were growing up. One of the problems with colorblindness is that by not acknowledging race, students, especially white students, do not learn about white privilege and do not learn how to talk about race, particularly in their work settings. We can give students opportunities to have meaningful discussions and tools to help them have future discussions in the workplace. One specific strategy from the Color Insight approach involves creating common ground through perspective taking using different theories such as critical race theory, feminist theory, and social justice. Check out Melanie Hobson’s Ted Talk, Color Brave.
- Cite BIPOC Scholars. This is one way to begin to assess your scholarship for racially systemic thinking and bias. Cite Black Women Collective provides resources such as five guiding principles to citation and a bi-weekly podcast on this topic by a Black feminist anthropologist Christen A. Smith.
- Collaborate on scholarship with BIPOC Scholars. Learn about BIPOC scholars who work in the same area as you. Invite them to write with you, submit grant applications together, and publish. This is not charity; having diversity of authors in ways of seeing the world and analyzing social problems will improve the work. Also, research shows Black people in the academy are often asked to take on additional service roles, which can interfere with their academic scholarship. They may be overlooked regarding opportunities to join in scholarship because of explicit or implicit bias. Working with Black scholars may also help you identify your own racial biases in thinking, but remember it is not the responsibility of your BIPOC colleagues to educate you (See Action Item #3).
Bonus: This may even offer an opportunity to build authentic cross-racial friendships, which can be complicated and means being vulnerable to a lot of possibilities; for instance, worrying about getting it wrong (“White Perfectionism”) and being corrected, seeing or hearing first-hand accounts of racism faced by someone you care about, finding out that living in white culture may be exhausting for your friend, and realizing that you will be left out of and/or never fully understand some BIPOC experiences. (If you have not had these experiences, you may have a superficial friendship).
- Create space, unique support, and responsive resources for BIPOC students, faculty and staff: This one comes from Jasmine Roberts in her article – White Academia: Do Better. Giving communities their own space is designed to promote well-being among people of color and address the isolating effects of being the only BIPOC person in the room, on the committee, etc.
This is not by any means a comprehensive list. Yet still, it is a long list and each action step may take time. You might choose one thing you can start on right away, and keep on doing your own work. Consider setting calendar reminders or finding an accountability buddy so this work doesn’t fall by the side. Perhaps choose one of these things each month and deeply explore the links and readings. Do not let perfection get in the way of progress. If you face critique, hear it and, when necessary, self-correct. By leaving this work to “experts” or those who know more than us, we ignore our own obligations to do better, and neglect our own learning. Also, we need to be modeling for our social work students, our profession, colleagues, our friends, and the communities we serve, showing and sharing the personal and professional vulnerabilities of social justice work. Consider this a call from your white colleagues who are also moving toward better ways of doing our knowing our biases and doing our own work.
Please join us. Do you have other ideas or insights? Consider adding to this list by posting a comment to this blog post.
How to cite this Post:
Hitchcock, L.I. & Sage, M. (2020, August 17). Actions that White Social Work Educators can do now for Racial Justice [Blog Post]. Retrieved from the Teaching and Learning in Social Work Blog: https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2020/08/16/actions-that-white-social-work-educators-can-do-now-for-racial-justice/
