Abstract
White supremacist ideology is the elephant in the social work classroom, negatively impacting educators’ abilities to facilitate discussion and learning. One of the most effective ways to dismantle and organize against white supremacy is to politicize the seemingly benign moments that occur in the classroom that can create discomfort for students and instructors. Politicization includes identifying and addressing both the racial (micro-) aggressions that occur in the classroom and the processes and institutional policies that create complacency and lull us to sleep. In this conceptual piece, we use a Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework to understand how white supremacy perpetuates itself in the classroom, with a particular focus on whiteness as property. As well, we explore what it means to decolonize the classroom. Using a vignette based on our teaching experiences, we use these two frameworks to analyze classroom dynamics and interactions, and discuss how implications for social work education include waking from the metaphorical sleep to recognize the pernicious effects of whiteness and white supremacy. Included are practical individual teaching, relational, and systemic suggestions to enact change.
Highlights
White supremacist ideology is the elephant in the social work classroom, negatively impacting educators’ abilities to facilitate discussion and learning
What happens when white supremacy, the large, stubborn, and ubiquitous elephant, makes itself visible in the social work classroom? What does the battle to wrestle the elephant look like for a racialized social work instructor? We use the term “racialized” or “racialization” to refer to the active process of being seen as a body belonging to a particular race, as a result being subjected to unequal treatment because of the color of one’s skin
What hooks offered was a shift in conversation, where white supremacy was not a far-right ideology that was reserved for Klan and Nazi activity, but part of unnamed culturally normative practices and relationships that racialize and negatively impact Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC); while for white people, white supremacy is upheld in individual attitudes and structural inequalities
Summary
Institutions are imagined with particular bodies, orientations, and ethics in mind, ones that center Western philosophical epistemologies and ontologies. Even before the 2020 uprising in support of racial justice in the United States, sparked by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, and the renewal of interest and focus on anti-Black racism, scholars were calling out and recognizing the pernicious nature of whiteness This includes the notion that white leaders and allies will need re-education to understand the impact of whiteness, power and privilege (as opposed to increasing tolerance, inclusivity or diversity) (Ash et al, 2020).
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