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The current political climate and reversals of gains made during the Civil Rights Movement underscore the urgent need for preparing emerging social workers to effectively address white supremacy in social work practice. Antiracism education in social work aims to ensure competent antiracist social work practice towards the goal of eradicating white supremacy in all its forms. Given the widening racial disparities evident in income, health and educational outcomes, it is essential to examine the degree to which social work education adequately prepares emerging social work practitioners to engage in antiracist social work practice. This paper presents findings of a systematic review of social work research assessing antiracism as a learning outcome. After reviewing more than 150 studies published between 2008 and 2018, none of them focused on assessing antiracism as a learning outcome. Our review demonstrates that despite the importance of antiracist social work practice, published research on assessment of antiracism as a learning outcome is sparse and is not antiracism-focused as much as it is antiracism-inclusive. More attention to identifying and disseminating best practices for assessing student competence in antiracism practice is required to defeat white supremacy.

Throughout its history, social work has shaped and been shaped by social movements. What might #BlackLivesMatter mean for 21st century social work and what might social work mean for the Movement? This paper describes the Movement and applies insights from Young’s 1965 essay ‘‘Civil Rights and a Militant Profession’’to identify a set of questions for social workers to explore. These include questions about making alliances and contributing competencies, overcoming apathy, misconceptions and exploitation, and fulfilling the obligations of clinical practice for social justice.

This study develops and validates the Anti-Racism Efficacy Scale (A-RES), a 4-item measure that examines (1) competence, or self-rated ability to challenge racism and (2) impact, the degree to which an individual believes they may create change in working against racism. Drawing on a sample of 1322 college students, including 26.6% White, 20.6% Black, 17.1% Latinx, 25.3% Asian or Pacific Islander, 1.2% American Indian, and 9.3% indicating either nothing, other or more than one racial grouping, we test for measurement invariance, conduct a factor analysis, and use ANOVA to compare factor scores by racial grouping. Past literature on antiracism has either not focused explicitly on efficacy, or has not developed means to measure it. The A-RES scale assesses the extent to which individuals feel they are capable of exerting some impact on racism in society.

This study uses a combination of machine-learning and fine-tuned qualitative analysis to explore the online disinhibition effect in Twitter-based discourse around #BlackLivesMatter. Our analysis shows that uncivil tweets in the nonmobile dataset are twice as likely to be overtly racist and challenge Black Lives Matter. And in both nonmobile and mobile tweets, uncivil language is deployed in a variety of ways that are sometimes consistent with how we understand the online disinhibition effect, but sometimes not. As such, this study advances our understanding of instances where actors indulge in the more harmful forms of disinhibition such as personal attacks, vulgar language, and hate speech, which are often termed “toxic disinhibition.” In sum, these findings add nuance to the way we understand the online disinhibition effect and responds to a vital gap in the existing body of knowledge.