Uprooting (Our) Whiteness

Abstract

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.

The Racial Projects of White Social Work Students

“…The use of emotion in this case may reflect an attempt by the student to more closely align themselves with the experience of oppression rather than the role of oppression. The practice of centering personal emotions (and in turn centering the self) in response to racism may reflect attempts by students to remove or minimize their proximity to the source of harm and may also undermine the possibility of fostering a trusting relationship with Ms. L (e.g., Frey et al, 2021).…”

“…Within this theme, students offered elaborate critiques of various actors within the vignette without identifying any definitive actions. Meaningful reflection on the actions one would take as a social worker should involve careful consideration of the problem being addressed as well as reflection about one's own positionality (Frey et al, 2021).…”

“…On the contrary, several student responses suggested attempts to distance or failing to include oneself in whiteness (e.g., see Participant #18's example in the Neutral Critiquer category: "countless white people" "their children" "some of them"). This suggests that white social work students can employ racial frames that seemingly acknowledge structural inequity, allude to anti-Blackness and the function of whiteness all while completely ignoring their role as white social work students in upholding whiteness and racist systems (Abrams & Gibson, 2007;Frey et al, 2021).…”

“…These calls are not new (McMahon & Allen-Meares, 1992;National Association of Black Social Workers, 1968), but are growing as part of a global movement in social work to take ownership of our commitments to racial justice (American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare [AASWSW], 2021; NASW [Code of Ethics], 2020; Rao et al, 2021) and to move beyond superficial solutions to racial inequities in our societies (Absolon, 2019;Coxshall, 2020;Lerner, 2021;Social Work Policy Institute, 2014). Calls for a reckoning with whiteness have also become more central in the discourse championing an anti-racist evolution in social work (Frey et al, 2021;Singh, 2014). Gregory (2021) specifically calls for social work in the United States to take "an honest, rigorous, critical account of its own whiteness" (p. 33).…”

“…Members of actively constructed and brutally maintained dominant groups (e.g., white people) may practice and conceptualize social work, race, and racism differently than people who experience the brunt of that social domination. These differences in social position have implications for the types of racial projects that undergird our education and training, the ways social work is practiced and in turn, the specific educational and training tasks that need to be engaged (Dyer, 1997;Frey et al, 2021;Morrison, 1992;Roediger, 1998). Our analysis focused on understanding the racial projects white social work students bring to their social work training, which can help to inform the development of decolonized and anti-racist social work curriculum.…”