scholarly journals Toward a Historically Accountable Critical Whiteness Curriculum for Social Work

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 616-635
Author(s):  
Joshua R. Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Curricular Development ◽  
Critical Whiteness ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
Consistent Response

Whiteness—distinct from individuals who identify as white—is a social construction; and social constructions, by definition, can be disassembled. Whiteness is also wholly constituted by and inseparable from white supremacy, and thus exists purely as racial injustice. These are historical facts. Consequently, racial justice demands that whiteness be dismantled and abolished. Social work, as a profession committed to racial justice, is directly implicated in this imperative. Yet, due to misunderstanding and unawareness, the above facts register with most social workers as exaggerated claims, baseless untruths, or ideological propaganda. Social work requires a historically accountable critical whiteness curriculum in order to correct this pervasive misunderstanding and to facilitate informed participation in the pursuit of racial justice in a way that accurately apprehends the nature of whiteness. This curriculum, introduced here, explores the history and invention of whiteness in global, U.S., and social work contexts; examines the integral role of education in deploying and maintaining whiteness; and considers reconstruction and abolition as alternative modes of responding to whiteness as a social problem. The curriculum ultimately shows abolition to be the only historically and theoretically consistent response to whiteness, leading to a call for abolition as praxis and for further curricular development.

LIVING HISTORIES OF WHITE SUPREMACIST POLICING

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Ward
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Law Enforcement Officers ◽  
Community Relations ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Transformative Justice ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Police Community Relations

AbstractProminent U.S. police officials have advocated greater acknowledgement of the role of law enforcement in historical racial injustice, including violence, in hopes of transforming police community relations. While an encouraging development, these calls for transformative justice understate the scope of this historical and contemporary problem, neglecting the often extralegal nature of police involved violence and injustice, its array of spectacular and more subtle forms, and the layered roles of state and non-state actors in perpetrating and sanctioning White supremacist violence. Drawing on historical records of racist violence implicating police, this paper analyzes overlapping aspects of White supremacy in policing, including racist ideologies and political acts of law enforcement officers and officials, and more routine underpolicing of White supremacism by legal authorities. This backdrop of normative racist violence - physical, cultural, and structural – must inform a contemporary transformative justice agenda, including demands for explicit and robust protection from White supremacism in policing.

scholarly journals Moving From Multiculturalism to Critical Race Theory Within a School of Social Work

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 876-897
Author(s):  
Saanà A. Polk ◽  
Nicole Vazquez ◽  
Mimi E. Kim ◽  
Yolanda R. Green
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Transformational Change ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Personnel Practices ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
School Of Social Work

The continued presence of racism and white supremacy has risen to a crisis level as today’s global pandemic, police abuse targeting Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) communities, and mass urban uprisings rock the nation. This article presents a case study of a West Coast school of social work that has carried out a five-year systematic campaign to move all levels of the program beyond a multicultural orientation towards critical race theory. This study reveals the results of a self-organized cross-racial committee within a school of social work, motivated by an ambitious goal to implement a racial justice orientation throughout the school’s personnel, practices, policies, and curricula. The committee has been further characterized by its commitment to engage across the power-laden divisions of field faculty, tenure track faculty, and administrative staff. The article offers documented stages of development, narratives from across differences of identity and professional role, and thick descriptions of strategies that led to the adoption and infusion of an intersectional critical race analysis throughout the school’s curricula. The organic development of the campaign and the leveraging of opportunities throughout the campus and across campuses offer important lessons for other schools of social work undergoing transformational change.

scholarly journals Towards Abolition: Undoing the Colonized Curriculum

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Angela Maria Leslie ◽  
Vajra M. Watson ◽  
Rose M. Borunda ◽  
Kate E. M. Bosworth ◽  
Tatianna J. Grant
Keyword(s):  
Online Learning ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Educational Achievement ◽  
Health Indicators ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
White People ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact

Racial injustice has traditionally been observed from the viewpoint of its impact and outcomes. Subsequently, educators and policy makers have generally focused on outcomes; unequal oppor-tunity structures, disparities in educational achievement, the school-to-prison pipeline, dispropor-tional health indicators, incarceration rates, and harsher punishment in school and judicial sys-tems, are just a few of the contexts by which this nation’s racialized roots can be measured for present day mistreatment and disparate outcomes for minoritized populations. As policy makers and educators look to the impact of racial injustice, a true ontological vantage would reveal the cause as well as the perpetuation of these outcomes. As the current COVID-19 pandemic contin-ues, and with increased interest in online learning, it is vital that teachers and professors seek new pedagogy and tools to teach about racism. Our study examined whether a virtual 1-hour presen-tation on white humanists influences students’ understanding of racial justice. Our research demonstrates that a colonized curriculum impacts student’s outlook on the world and themselves. Inversely, when we expose students to humanists throughout history, we are able to show that white people have a legacy and responsibility to fight for racial justice. This provides students with alternative models – beyond those that perpetuate white supremacy.

scholarly journals Feeding Revolution: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Food

2014 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 43-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Potorti
Keyword(s):  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Food Programs ◽  
To Come ◽  
Practical Agenda ◽  
Black Panther

This chapter examines the role of food in the symbolic politics and practical agenda of the Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in the late 1960s in Oakland, California.  Situating hunger and the politics of food at the center of drives for racial justice, it argues that the BPP’s anti-hunger efforts and food-centered campaigns were driven by an implicit understanding of the power of food in battles over racialized definitions of personhood, a forum for both enforcing and resisting hegemonic authority.  From this vantage, the Panthers and their allies in the East Bay community utilized the Party’s popular food programs, specifically its Free Breakfast for School Children Program, as staging grounds to prepare for a revolutionary overthrow of the socio-economic order.  In addition to strengthening the physical bodies of African Americans to ensure their “survival pending revolution,” the food programs served a deeper organizing function by encouraging community members to come together to meet an immediate, practical need and, in doing so, to visualize themselves as part of a larger movement for change.  The Panthers’ subsequent demands for consumer rights and calls for conscientious consumption (both as purchasers and eaters of food) highlighted the role of food politics in perpetuating racial injustice while demonstrating the capacity for food-related protest to challenge structures of hunger and patterns of widespread malnourishment.

White Privilege

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Justice Movements

The term “white privilege” attempts to make visible de facto systems of white advantage. Problems with the concept exist, however, affecting its ability to adequately capture contemporary forms of racial injustice. Examining the advantages and disadvantages of the concept of white privilege involves comparing it to alternatives such as (global) white supremacy and (human/black) rights discourse. These comparisons suggest that the concept of white privilege should be modified to white class privilege and that, to be maximally effective, racial justice movements need the concept of white class privilege in addition to that of human rights and white supremacy.

“A Problem of Humanity”: The Human Rights Framework and the Struggle for Racial Justice

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 338-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael L. Rosino
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Racial Injustice

While the historical and ongoing symbolic and material inequalities and violence faced by African Americans can be understood as a human rights violation, the efficacy of the human rights framework for addressing racial injustice in the United States remains contested. In this article, I examine the relationship between the emergence and dominance of the geopolitical doctrine of human rights and the struggle for racial justice in the United States. Through historical, legal, and sociological analysis of relevant issues and cases, I discern the benefits and limitations of the human rights framework for achieving racial justice and elucidate dynamics between relevant institutional, political, and social actors. I argue that the human rights framework opens international pathways for information, accountability, and symbolic politics conducive to combating racial injustice, particularly regarding overt manifestations of oppression and violence, but enduring issues such as the role of the state in racial politics and the dehumanization of people of color present hindrances.

Religion of the Field Negro

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent W. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black Religion ◽  
Grassroots Organizing ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Neoliberal Economics ◽  
Theological Vision

This book argues that black theology has lost its direction. To reclaim its original power and to advance racial justice struggles today, black theology must fully embrace blackness and theology. Multiculturalism and religious pluralism have boxed in black theology, forcing it to speak in terms dictated by white supremacy. While critics have argued that secularism is entangled with the disciplining impulses of modernity, with neoliberal economics, and with Western imperialism, relatively little attention has been paid to the effects of secularism on black religion. Drawing on critics of secularism in other fields, this book probes the subtle ways in which religion is excluded and managed in black culture. Using Barack Obama, Huey Newton, and Steve Biko as case studies, the book shows how the criticism of secularism is the prerequisite of all criticism, and it shows how criticism and grassroots organizing must go hand in hand. Weaving together theological sources, critical theory, and cultural analysis, this book addresses questions about race and justice, love and hope, theorizing and organizing, and the role of whites in black struggle. The insights of James Cone are developed together with those of James Baldwin, Sylvia Wynter, and Achille Mbembe, all in the service of developing a political-theological vision that motivates challenges to white supremacy.

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