Eliminating Racism

Abstract

Eliminating racism to achieve racial equity is certainly a grand challenge. America was built on racism, white supremacy, and colonization; so, understanding history and context are essential to progress. The Grand Challenge to Eliminate Racism calls for the social work profession to focus on the centrality of racism, both within society and the profession. We reflect on the profession’s racist history and examine social work’s current positionality by reviewing the inclusion of race and racism across all grand challenges. Efforts to eliminate racism and white supremacy must focus on evidence and practice-based research that cultivate innovation to improve the conditions of daily life for all and facilitate change at the individual, organizational, community, professional, and societal levels. We prioritize personal awareness, antiracism workforce development that advances community empowerment, revision of social work education, and policy agendas that eliminate racism and white supremacy from organizations and include continuous evaluation with accountability.

Latina/o/x Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) in Social Work Praxis

“…As Teasley et al's (2021) call to action states, "the grand challenge to eliminate racism calls for the social work profession to focus on the centrality of racism and white supremacy, both within society and within the profession" (p. 1). Predominant Eurocentric definitions have shaped how social work understands race and racism.…”

“…If social work is committed to the Grand Challenge to Eliminate Racism, we call upon the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) to release statements addressing these recent assaults on CRT (and LatCrit by way of its extension of CRT) and join CRSSW in condemning the unfair attacks on CRT. As Teasley et al (2021) state, "Social work will have to address the racism in the room before meaningful change can happen, (p. 12), and "social workers must be equipped with tools to dismantle racism and white supremacy and build racial equity (p. 13)."…”

“…In its current form, social work education fails to examine how the profession has operated to maintain White supremacy and White privilege, and to sustain the current racial social order (Beck, 2019;Bussey, 2020;Ortega & Busch-Armendariz, 2013;Teasley et al, 2021). Given the profession's history of coexisting within patriarchal systems, social work pedagogy has invariably tended to practice white saviorism (Rangel, 2021).The profession's omission of the historical and contemporary context of a racialized America does not absolve us from self-critique.…”

Integrating Critical, Engaged, and Abolitionist Pedagogies to Advance Antiracist Social Work Education

“…As the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW) adds eliminating racism as the 13th grand challenge (Teasley et al, 2021) and all professional social work bodies explicitly commit to antiracism (Council on Social Work Education [CSWE], 2021; National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2021; Mendez et al, 2021), social work educators must reconsider the pedagogy we use to prepare social work practitioners for uprooting racism. Racism is "the totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination through mutually reinforcing systems of housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care, and criminal justice" (Bailey et al, 2017(Bailey et al, , p. 1453.…”

“…Racism also intersects with and mutually reinforces other forms of oppression (e.g., sexism, ableism, or heterosexism; Ahmed, 2016;Collins, 2019). As such, social work departments and social work education also embody and perpetuate racism (Olcoń et al, 2020;Teasley et al, 2021). To prepare antiracist social workers who can fully grasp and disrupt processes that produce and reproduce inequities at the micro (individual and interpersonal levels), mezzo (organizational and community levels), and macro (institutions and policies) levels of society, the social work pedagogy itself must be antiracist.…”