Abstract
Social workers have been on the frontlines alongside marginalized communities since the profession’s emergence. This stance continues with supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement and centering the structural inequities that the COVID-19 pandemic highlights. A narrative that centers the history of social work’s concern for Black citizenship in the profession’s formation is neglected in the literature. This historical review traces the genesis of the profession’s work to expand access to the entitlements of citizenship among Black communities. Thematic analysis of secondary sources is used to investigate the formation of the profession and its work to ensure access to resources among Blacks communities. Study findings identify that the profession emerged from the bonds between the Abolitionist Movement and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, then moved away from working with Black people during the Settlement Movement and did not return to addressing the needs of these communities until the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement. Black social workers answered the call to support Black and non-Black communities in the absence of the profession’s national organization’s presence. Social work needs, kneads, and eats Black bodies by being in complicity with systems of oppression. The history of social work and its concern and lack of concern for Black citizenship is a pedagogical innovation that addresses the historical amnesia that White domination fosters. The findings of this analysis call social workers to task to disrupt White dominant epistemologies of ignorance by incorporating this historical context into their social work pedagogy.
Highlights
Social workers have been on the frontlines alongside marginalized communities since the profession’s emergence
This narrative includes that the formation of social work has its roots in communities organizing for the emancipation of enslaved Africans and their Black/African American descendants, and the equal rights of women
Reflective of the ideals of the abolitionist movement and despite the success of the Freedman’s Bureau (Dubois, 1935), by 1870, political administrations, buoyed by public opinion, had determined that African Americans were incapable of being assimilated into U.S nationhood (Dattel, 2009)
Summary
Social workers have been and continue to be on the front lines of supporting communities to pressure political administrations and organize for equitable access to the basic foundations of citizenship in the U.S (Hadden, 1998, 2019; Roberts, 1996; Rodriguez, 2020; Snowden, 2015, 2018; Tolliver, 1993). The work, ideals, and professional affiliations that this role has translated into have inextricably taken shape within the context of Eurocentric ideals of nationhood and have been in service to an exploitive market-based society (Roberts, 1996; Wilder, 2000) These ideals of U.S national identity continued to be core tenets of the forming and on-going professionalizing of the social work profession (Kennedy, 2008; NASW, 2020). The inclusion of narrative that centers the history of social work and its concern for the well-being of Black people in the profession’s formation is largely neglected in the formal preparation of social workers This narrative includes that the formation of social work has its roots in communities organizing for the emancipation of enslaved Africans and their Black/African American descendants, and the equal rights of women. The findings generated from this research serve as an opportunity for social workers to re-examine how they teach their positionality in all forms higher education classrooms
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