White Social Workers Research Articles

Reconstructing the Bicultural Worker within Health and Human Service Organisations

ABSTRACT Limited literature considers the role and contribution of bicultural workers in Australia. This article explores how bicultural workers are constructed by social workers within health and human service organisations, through the lens of Whiteness. Eight White social workers participated in this multimethod qualitative study. Data were analysed using a critical approach to narrative analysis. The findings suggest that bicultural workers can be constructed as inferior and of less value than other employees, and as a “resource” to be “used” within organisations. These findings are consistent with previous literature, which highlighted how bicultural workers, or similar, are treated and how they experience workplaces differently to other employees within mainstream White Western organisations. It is concluded that we need to reconstruct the bicultural worker role in a way that meaningfully privileges their expertise, skillset, and diversity. IMPLICATIONS Social workers’ constructions of bicultural workers appear to relate to what expertise is privileged within the West. Cultural othering of bicultural workers may contribute to diminishing their role and the credibility and capabilities of organisations. Ensuring bicultural workers receive career pathway progression and professional development could help facilitate their repositioning within organisations.

For White Social Workers: RE/UN/DIScover Heuristic for Dual Awareness in Ongoing Anti-Racist Practice

Although many White social workers engage in ongoing anti-racist actions, they may still be complicit in perpetuating and reinforcing racism and White Supremacy Culture. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) social workers, activists, and scholars have described the numerous ways in which the harmful impacts of White Supremacy Culture appear in the well-intentioned efforts of White people who seek to be anti-racist. White social workers are thus responsible for engaging in intentional ongoing practices to identify, interrupt, and shift their interpersonal oppressive uses of power in their practice. The RE/UN/DIScover heuristic is an iterative, embodied set of three practices for working with one’s experiences of shame and internalized dominance, habitual not-seeing, and in-the-moment activations. Literature theorizing White Supremacy ideology and culture frames the description of the RE/UN/DIScover heuristic. This paper describes several heuristic applications, including prompts for engaging in REcover, UNcover and DIScover practices and two composite examples. These applications illustrate how to use the heuristic practices with dual awareness of self and one’s social work practice in the moment and over time. White social workers are encouraged to learn and use the RE/UN/DIScover heuristic practices to guide their efforts to more fully live into their anti-racist commitments in moments of not-seeing and moments of activation.

Teaching Anti-Racism to White Social Work Students

Social work education has traditionally been focused on Whiteness with evidence-based anti-racism practices not commonly taught in social work courses. Utilizing the six anti-racism intervention categories found in the literature review, while incorporating the anti-racism frameworks of learning/unlearning socially conditioned racism, this practice application article focuses on developing an anti-racism MSW course for a university. Additionally, suggestions to infuse anti-racism practices throughout the entirety of an MSW program are introduced. This approach will allow students to develop a more anti-racist mindset throughout their MSW studies. A two-day anti-racism workshop is also proposed which can be used for students or professionals in schools, organizations and companies for community teaching or continuing education.

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

The Racial Projects of White Social Work Students

Despite a theoretical shift toward anti-racism, racial projects within social work assert public positions against structural racism, while upholding mechanisms that perpetuate its existence. Analyzing the perceptions and intentions of incoming white liberal social work students is necessary for any effort to deconstruct racial projects in the social work profession. The sample used in the present study is composed of a white (n = 139), mostly liberal-identified (84%) group of incoming first year MSW students. Students were asked to provide open-ended responses to a vignette about a Black mother engaging with Child Protective Services (CPS). The vignette was designed to assess structural analysis and decision-making in response to real-world examples of racism and anti-Blackness. The study employed semantic thematic analysis to describe the ways social work students make meaning of the vignette and how this process informs their proposed actions. Students varied significantly on the level of analysis they provided in response to the vignette. The analysis examines patterns of racial projects across 3 main response categories: 1) Descriptive, 2) Analytical, and 3) Action. This analysis is important for informing pedagogical innovations aimed at training anti-racist and anti-oppressive social workers.

The problem of professionalism: How White social workers enact Whiteness in their work with people of refugee background

Within Australia, Whiteness is embedded within social work, requiring us to turn the lens in on ourselves as a profession. This article presents research data exploring how Whiteness is enacted within the practices of White Australian social workers who work with refugee arrived communities. Eight social workers with experience working with people of refugee background participated in this multimethod qualitative study. Data was analysed using a critical approach to narrative analysis. Participants told narratives of how their Whiteness was enacted through their powerful positions within relationships with clients. The reported experiences of social workers in this project also relate to the pressures, desires and often failures to be professional, as it is defined within White Western social work. The findings suggest that to disrupt Whiteness, we need to challenge the need for professionalism when working with people of refugee background. It is argued that this could be achieved through a focus on relationality, dialogue and two-way care.

Intricate Intimacies: Reading the Transatlantic Queer in Dinaw Mengestu's All Our Names

Intricate Intimacies:Reading the Transatlantic Queer in Dinaw Mengestu's All Our Names Cajetan Iheka (bio) Abstract In Dinaw Mengestu's dual first-person narrative All Our Names (2014), narrator Isaac recounts his departure from a conflict-ridden Ethiopia to Uganda, where he meets the original Isaac from whom he takes the name and passport that eventually enable him to escape from a tumultuous Uganda to the United States. Once in the U.S., the newly minted narrator Isaac begins a romantic relationship with the second narrator, Helen, a white social worker, who assists him on arrival. In the 1970s setting of the novel, narrator Isaac and Helen's interracial romance is fraught, and the text is attentive to the racist complications that the couple face, reminding readers that Africa is unexceptional in the perpetration of violence against Black people. In charting geographies of unfreedom that stretch from Uganda to the United States, Mengestu's novel challenges the overdetermination of African spaces as sites of barbarity and violence. Linking the African space to the American context is the obvious romance between narrator Isaac and Helen, but the novel encodes a more cryptic relationship as well. Mengestu orchestrates interlocking triangles of desire: first with narrator Isaac, the original Isaac, and Joseph, their benefactor in Uganda, and later with Helen, narrator Isaac, and the original Isaac, from whom the narrator derives his travel documents and new identity. As I argue, at the heart of Mengestu's textualization of transcontinental geographies of unfreedom for Black people is a queer script that articulates a repressive infrastructure and repressed desires. Extending the queer archive in African literary criticism and intervening in the reading debate, I read Mengestu's depiction of intricate intimacies as a lesson for recalibrating reading practices against binaries and in praise of queer assemblages of disparate methods as text and context demand. In its depiction of mobilities, dinaw mengestu's novel All Our Names resembles contemporaneous writing by other diasporic African writers such as Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah, Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go, and NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names.1 These tales feature Africa-born protagonists relocating to Euro-America to escape the crises of postcoloniality on the continent, and they devote considerable narrative space to the immigrants' experience in their new location. Mengestu's dual first-person narrative portrays the narrator Isaac recounting his life experience: departure from a conflict-ridden Ethiopia to Uganda, where he meets a boy named Isaac (hereafter original Isaac), from whom he takes the name and passport that eventually enable him to escape from a tumultuous Uganda to the US. Once in the US, the newly minted narrator Isaac begins a romantic relationship with the second narrator, Helen, a white social worker, who assists him on arrival. In the 1970s setting of the novel, narrator Isaac and Helen's interracial romance is fraught, and the text is attentive to the racist complications that the couple faces, reminding readers that Africa is unexceptional in the perpetration of violence against Black people. I am interested in Mengestu's novel for how it complicates the unique association of Africa with stupendous violence in the colonial imaginary. In charting geographies of unfreedom that stretch from Uganda to the US, Mengestu's novel challenges the overdetermination of African spaces as sites of barbarity and violence. Against the tendency to dismiss recent African writing as "postcolonial exotic" or "poverty porn" for its negative portrayals of African life, Mengestu's riposte is to forge a narrative wherein violence is inscribed on Black bodies across the Atlantic, marking the continental space as ordinary and comparable to spaces outside of it.2 Linking the African space to the US context is the obvious romance between the narrator Isaac and Helen, but the novel encodes a more cryptic relationship as well. Mengestu orchestrates interlocking triangles of desire: first with the narrator Isaac, the original Isaac, and [End Page 85] Joseph, their benefactor in Uganda; and later with Helen, the narrator Isaac, and the original Isaac, from whom the narrator derives his travel documents and new identity. As I will argue, at the heart of Mengestu's textualization of transcontinental geographies of unfreedom...

Woke Disrupter

This article examines one of the most dangerous personifications of white supremacy, the Woke Vigilante - the “liberal do-gooder” and the social work profession’s role in their creation. White supremacy is frequently named to identify overt racism and discrimination by hate groups, ultra conservatives and increasingly throughout the government. There is another breed of white supremacy which lies beneath the surface and believes itself to be an ally, this is the Woke Vigilante. Unexamined social work education provides the right ingredients with the moral authority to turn white social workers into Woke Vigilantes. This conceptual article highlights the ways in which social work education currently addresses competencies of diversity and difference, as well as social justice. The authors then present a persuasive argument for white academic social workers to alter course and promote teaching and practice skills which incorporate social justice skills at all levels of practice, in other words social justice meta-practice skills. The danger of white supremacy when it is disguised as the Woke Vigilante may be best captured by Malcolm X when he spoke of the white liberals who disguise themselves as friends to the Black man only as a means to benefit their own self-interest without genuinely asking or listening to that which the Black community actually wants (X, 1963). Social work is all too familiar with the white liberal and must consider this a call to action, as well as a forewarning against further perpetuation of white hegemonic societal structures giving license to white do-gooders eager to go into Black communities and effect change. Authors present a resolve for white social workers to adopt the role of the Woke Disrupter.

Uprooting (Our) Whiteness

Social work education reinforces hegemonic Whiteness through pedagogies and practices that rely on an entitlement to and harvesting of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’s lived experiences for the purpose of its tacit audience: White students. Despite this exploitative and harmful reliance on objectified lived experiences, White students continue to lack critical understanding of their racial positionality and connections to racism. Uprooting Whiteness requires sitting with what it means for White people to be “a White problem.” Drawing on the work of Yancy, we (group co-facilitators; our dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion; and three MSW student participants) describe the creation, organization, facilitation, and experiences of the first year of the Space for Uprooting Whiteness—a biweekly space where White social work students examine and uproot their relationship to White supremacy and domination. We argue for White social workers to take collective responsibility for racism in and beyond our institutions—requiring interrogation of our everyday practices and their (inter)dependence with and on systems of domination. This paper ends with three experiential narratives from student participants in the space and implications of critical intragroup dialogic pedagogy among White students in social work education and beyond.

Social Work Educators as White Allies?

White educators represent the majority of social work faculty. Current research suggests that many White social work educators are not prepared to address racism in classroom discussions and model antiracist behavior. An integrative literature review was conducted by the co-authors—a White man and Black woman, both social work educators—to examine how recent literature characterizes the “White ally” educator and explore concepts designed to prepare White faculty for purposive action to dismantle White Supremacy. Integrative review is a methodology used to summarize empirical/theoretical literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon. Twenty-two articles met inclusion criteria for this review. The analysis involved two steps: First, a synthesis and integrative model of the literature on educators as White allies. Second, an application of the critical race theory concepts interest convergence and anti-essentialism. The integrative model of the White ally educator suggests a White identity process; necessitating critical self-reflection and multi-level, antiracist action. Critical examination of the literature troubles the concept of “White ally,” pointing to the potential re-centering of Whiteness. Further research is needed to help social work educators recognize racism in their work and prepare future social workers to engage in antiracist social work practice.

“Did you get placed with all white ladies in your group?”: reflections on co-creating an anti-racist social work (virtual) classroom

ABSTRACT As a white social work instructor and therapist committed to anti-racist practice, I reflect on my experiences teaching group work virtually during a pandemic. I provide an example of how I inadvertently perpetuated white supremacy through a mistake I made in creating groups that isolated students of color. I discuss how I addressed this mistake with the class and worked with the students to co-create an anti-racist and anti-oppressive classroom setting through our group process. I offer strategies for how I will continue to deepen group processes centered in anti-racist practices, such as building trust through transparency, acknowledging mistakes, including opportunities for race caucuses, and creating continual optional check-ins with students of color in order to maximize and center their learning in my courses.

Black Lives Matter, and Yes, You are Racist: The Parallelism of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.

The United States of America is at a crossroads, one that we have been at before. This is not the first time that we have battled a pandemic while experiencing an economic downturn, state sanctioned violence and racial terror against Blacks, the boiling over of racial tensions encouraged by the president of the United States, and a movement focused on forcing America to reckon with its endemic racism, anti-Blackness, and state-sanctioned violence against Blacks. This article provides a brief overview of that history and its striking parallel to what is happening today. It pushes White social workers to understand how they are beneficiaries of racism. It reminds social workers of their ethical obligation to be change agents. Finally, it provides basic suggestions for those who are willing to see their complicity and are still willing to work on dismantling the injustice that impacts Black people in America.

Confronting Whiteness: White U.S. Social Work Students’ Experiences Studying Abroad in West Africa

ABSTRACT Inadequate attention to race, racism, and Whiteness in social work education ineffectively prepares White students to work with historically excluded racial and ethnic groups, and undermines the profession’s fundamental commitment to social justice. This article presents experiences of eight White social work students confronting race, racism and Whiteness during a study abroad program in West Africa. The students’ learning experiences included exposure to historical White dominance and exploitation through visiting former slave trade sites, connecting with modern African culture, and interactions and dialogue with their African American and African peers. This case study uncovers a continuum of students’ reactions and outcomes, including avoidance, defensiveness, White humility, and a pull toward anti-racism advocacy. As a co-creator in this work, the White researcher exposes her experiences relating to the students. Findings suggest that engagement with critical Whiteness pedagogy and skilled management of students’ emotional responses are crucial teaching strategies for social work educators.

Working Our Way Out of Privilege: Lessons from South Africa on Preparing White Americans for a National Transitional Justice Process

This study utilized difference-in-differences analysis to determine likelihood of confidence in four major public institutions over three periods of time in South Africa and the United States, two prior to South Africa’s transitional justice process and one after. Results indicate that Black South African confidence rose while White South African confidence dropped drastically. American confidence levels, for both races, remained relatively consistent over all three time periods. The drastic drop in White South African likelihood of confidence points to possible feelings of loss related to power and privilege. These results provide insight for social workers interested in addressing racial injustice in the United States, particularly for White social workers seeking to prepare White individuals for what a transitional justice process may look like and the resulting feelings of loss from the creation of a more equitable state.

Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Among Social Work Students: Exploration of Individual and Social Network Correlates

ABSTRACT Racial attitudes can be shaped by personal attributes and social network properties. Literature on White social work students’ racial attitudes remains scarce. The purposes of this study are to explore racial attitudes among social work students and identify personal and social network correlates of such attitudes. One hundred and sixty-three White social work students in a major Midwest public university were recruited via social work electronic mailing list to complete an anonymous online survey measuring personal-level characteristics (e.g., demographic information and racial attitudes as measured by the color-blind racial attitude scale) and social network composition (e.g., information regarding network diversity). Descriptive analysis and linear regression models were conducted for the study. Social work students demonstrated moderately low levels of color-blind racial attitudes. Age was positively associated with unawareness of institutional and blatant racism. Identifying as politically liberal was associated with lower unawareness of racial privilege, institutional racism, and blatant racism. Having more social network members to talk to about topics related to race and ethnicity was associated with lower unawareness of blatant racism. Being familiar with a campus antidiscrimination protest was negatively associated with unawareness of racial privilege and blatant racism. Implications for social work educators are discussed.

Reflexivity, Ethics, and Divergent Perspectives: A Transformational Journey of Social Work Educators

Using classroom vignettes, this article portrays the experiences of four White social work educators with minority-view inclusion and conflict management that is a result of divergent perspectives in the classroom. The use of reflexivity is explored as a strategy for understanding educators' biases and assumptions in teaching. In addition, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics is applied as it refers to helping social work students learn to think critically to meet the needs and rights of clients and to address social inequalities, diversity, privilege, and oppression. The authors provide recommendations based on their experiences and reflections.

'Whatever community is, this is not it':Notting Hill and the Reconstruction of 'Race' in Britain after 1958

The impact of the 1958 Notting Hill riots tends to figure in histories of the political right, as a galvanizing force for anti-immigrant sentiment—or as radical catalyst in the transnational history of the Black Atlantic. Meanwhile, the generation of black and white social workers and activists who flocked to Notting Hill after the riots have largely been left out of the history of the British left. This article treats Notting Hill after 1958 as an important locale of new progressive thinking and action. It seeks to consider the political work that the idea of “community” did in Notting Hill, allowing us consider how the politics of antiracism relates in complex ways to the reformulation of progressive politics in postwar Britain. It reveals how black activists came to reappropriate the language of “community” to critique the ameliorative, welfarist approach to antiracism. It also unearths the forgotten eclectic beginnings of Britain's New Left. By excavating the history of community work and New Left activism “from below,” this article traces the ways in which a motley group of Methodist ministers, Christian Workers, students, social workers, and community leaders tested the limits of the liberal paternalism and “universalism” of the postwar social democratic state.

Child-rearing practices: cross cultural perspectives of African asylum-seeking families and child protection social workers in Ireland

ABSTRACT This paper is located within a conceptual framework of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism as seen through Critical Race Theory (CRT), cultural and racial politics of child protection/welfare social work. It reports on the findings of a broad qualitative study which explored the interactions of Black African asylum-seeking families with White child protection/welfare social workers in Ireland. The Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) was used to collect data, which was analysed using a framework analysis approach to produce themes. The paper focusses on the intercultural differences between mostly Black African asylum-seeking families and White social workers regarding child rearing practices in Ireland. A mixture of practice protocol, personal beliefs, racialised cultural understanding of normativity and mutual suspicions surface as central to the behaviours of social workers and ASF. Asylum seeking families reportedly perceive social workers as professionals who are disrespectful of their traditional child-rearing practices purportedly on assumptions of own racial/cultural superiority. Given the diversity of issues that are associated with Europe in relation to asylum seekers from the African continent, the lessons learned from this research could have widespread applications in affected countries.

The Center for Regional and Tribal Child Welfare Studies: Reducing disparities through indigenous social work education

This research addresses one of the most pressing and controversial issues facing child welfare policymakers and practitioners today: the dramatic overrepresentation of Indigenous families in North American public child welfare systems. Effective, inclusive education is one necessary component of efforts to reduce such disparities. Yet recruiting students from various cultural communities to the field and educating white social work students and professionals to practice in culturally responsive ways are ongoing challenges. In this ethnography, we examine an apparently successful model of inclusive education: the Center for Regional and Tribal Child Welfare Studies (the Center) at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, School of Social Work. For over a decade, the Center has graduated Indigenous and non-Indigenous child welfare workers with MSWs now practicing within tribal communities, as well as provided continuing education for child welfare professionals. At the Center, Indigenous scholars and social workers, tribal leaders and their allies design and sustain a model of honoring and integrating Indigenous worldviews with Western social work. Experiential learning – engaging the “heart and head” – is a cornerstone of the Center's educational practices. Students and professional colleagues are approached with a “good heart” as “relatives” with positive intentions. They learn about the spirituality, language, culture and history of Indigenous people. The strengths-based curriculum also includes challenging content on the legacy of genocide and historical trauma on Indigenous families and communities, as well as contemporary laws and policies such as the Indian Child Welfare Act. The educational worldview and practices of the Center provide understanding for social work, generally, and child welfare, specifically, that supports effective practice and policy within diverse communities.

“Whatever Community Is, This Is Not It”: Notting Hill and the Reconstruction of “Race” in Britain after 1958

AbstractThe impact of the 1958 Notting Hill riots tends to figure in histories of the political right, as a galvanizing force for anti-immigrant sentiment—or as radical catalyst in the transnational history of the Black Atlantic. Meanwhile, the generation of black and white social workers and activists who flocked to Notting Hill after the riots have largely been left out of the history of the British left. This article treats Notting Hill after 1958 as an important locale of new progressive thinking and action. It seeks to consider the political work that the idea of “community” did in Notting Hill, allowing us consider how the politics of antiracism relates in complex ways to the reformulation of progressive politics in postwar Britain. It reveals how black activists came to reappropriate the language of “community” to critique the ameliorative, welfarist approach to antiracism. It also unearths the forgotten eclectic beginnings of Britain's New Left. By excavating the history of community work and New Left activism “from below,” this article traces the ways in which a motley group of Methodist ministers, Christian Workers, students, social workers, and community leaders tested the limits of the liberal paternalism and “universalism” of the postwar social democratic state.