Abstract
In its current form, the field of social work does not reflect the ongoing reality of Black death and the embeddedness of anti-Blackness in everyday life. This omission leads to catastrophic failures of the profession’s most essential tasks: the advancement of social justice and future social workers’ education. This paper will discuss why the police’s ongoing murder of Black people will not be resolved by simply replacing the police with social workers. We will argue that social workers serving Black people must anchor their work in theoretical perspectives articulated by Black people. Finally, we challenge social work to live up to its social justice mission by divesting from systems of social control and anchoring their work in theoretical perspectives articulated by Black people.
Highlights
In its current form, the field of social work does not reflect the ongoing reality of Black death and the embeddedness of anti-Blackness in everyday life
We argue that calling the police on a Black child - especially during this #BlackLivesMatter moment, when police brutality is so widely publicized - is nothing less than an act of antiblack violence, which implicates the entire social work profession
We suggest that whatever protocols led a school social worker to take these actions function for the expedient control of Black bodies, rather than this child’s safety
Summary
Afro-pessimism is concerned with what Saidiya Hartman (2008) calls the “afterlife of slavery” (p. 6). In the wake of her death, reporters and commentators online speculated about what she might have done to deserve her death This story is not unlike six-year old Nadia King’s, whose brush with police was justified because she was “out of control.”. Highly visible spectacles of Black suffering with the same ongoing catastrophe that began with slavery She referred to the coverage of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Haiti’s 2010 earthquake as examples of the media reducing Black suffering to the same anonymous and inhuman spectacle yet again, even now. King’s suffering is unsurprising because she is a Black child; it is only possible that she could suffer this way because she is Black These spectacles of suffering contribute to an endless reified status of social dishonor, which Ray et al (2017) described as “Blacks’ low status in every corner of society” These spectacles of suffering contribute to an endless reified status of social dishonor, which Ray et al (2017) described as “Blacks’ low status in every corner of society” (p. 150)
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