Disrupting White Supremacy

Abstract

Social workers must participate in ongoing anti-racist and culturally attuned approaches to disrupt white supremacy in our profession, institutions, and society. Our social work mission, values, and ethics demand that we engage in social work education, practice, and scholarship that seeks social justice for all people. In line with these expectations, social work doctoral education is tasked with training the next generation of social work scholars by providing doctoral education that is responsive to society's most pressing social problems. While disrupting white supremacy is an aspirational goal, we argue that white supremacy infiltrates social work education, manifests itself in diverse ways over time, often isolating Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). We use testimonios to explore these issues and describe four BIPOC women’s experiences navigating their social work doctoral programs. From these insights, we contend that social work doctoral education continues to uphold white supremacy by promoting Western epistemologies and theories above other equally valid forms of knowledge, including non-Western schools of thought created by and for BIPOC scholars. We provide recommendations for alternative theories and epistemologies for social work curricula and offer implications to support BIPOC students in social work doctoral education.

A New World Cannot be Built Alone: An Abolitionist Framework for Collective Action in Social Work

“…"Racism is entrenched in social work practice and education" (Haley in Bullock et al, 2023) as the University and the profession have historically been hostile, harmful, and exclusionary toward Black women, LGBTQIA+ people, folks with disabilities, and others (Jackson et al, 2022;Mackey et al, 2022;Patton, 2016;Stovall, 2018), including gatekeeping who had access to professional credentials (Harty, 2023). All of this is made more so with this rising tide of legislation that ensures that social work educators -and, by extension, their students -continue to uphold and reproduce harm in the very communities that we claim to be serving.…”

“…Many of these implemented and proposed "corrective" policies directly impact social work education and educators. As social work academics, we [the authors] know that the academy has historically been hostile, harmful, and exclusionary toward Black women, LGBTQIA+ people, folks with disabilities, and others (Jackson et al, 2022;Mackey et al, 2022;Patton, 2016;Stovall, 2018). We acknowledge that while we have variably felt the impacts of this hostility, we must reckon with our own capacity to do harm.…”