Reducing Police Brutality in African American Communities: Potential Roles for Social Workers in Congregations

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 66-84
Author(s):  
Betty Wilson ◽  
Terry A. Wolfer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
General Public ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Religious Congregations ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
African American Communities ◽  
White Congregations

In the last decade, there have been a shocking number of police killings of unarmed African Americans, and advancements in technology have made these incidents more visible to the general public. The increasing public awareness of police brutality in African American communities creates a critical and urgent need to understand and improve police-community relationships. Congregational social workers (and other social workers who are part of religious congregations) have a potentially significant role in addressing the problem of police brutality. This manuscript explores and describes possible contributions by social workers, with differential consideration for those in predominantly Black or White congregations.

Eugene Kinckle Jones

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix L. Armfield
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Work ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Urban League ◽  
The Great Migration

A leading African American intellectual of the early twentieth century, Eugene Kinckle Jones (1885–1954) was instrumental in professionalizing black social work in America. In his role as executive secretary of the National Urban League, Jones worked closely with social reformers who advocated on behalf of African Americans and against racial discrimination in the United States. Coinciding with the Great Migration of African Americans to northern urban centers, Jones' activities on behalf of the Urban League included campaigning for equal hiring practices, advocating for the inclusion of black workers in labor unions, and promoting the importance of vocational training and social work for members of the black community. Drawing on rich interviews with Jones' colleagues and associates, as well as recently opened family and Urban League papers, the book freshly examines the growth of African American communities and the new roles played by social workers. In calling attention to the need for black social workers in the midst of the Great Migration, Jones and his colleagues sought to address problems stemming from race and class conflicts from within the community. This book blends the biography of a significant black leader with an in-depth discussion of the roles of black institutions and organizations to study the evolution of African American life immediately before the civil rights era.

Savior of the Race: The Messianic Burdens of Black Masculinity

Exchange ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald B. Neal
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
African American Communities

Abstract This paper is concerned with the messianic construction of manhood within African American communities in North America and its normative imprint in shaping and measuring masculinity among African Americans. In this essay, messianic manhood is treated as a utopian construction of masculinity that is found in liberal and conservative constructions of Protestant Christianity. In examining this tradition of manhood, representative messianic men are interrogated who have participated in and have been shaped by this tradition. Overall, messianic manhood is inconceivable apart from an oral tradition of preaching and singing where the person of Jesus is understood as Lord, savior, and ally of the oppressed.

And Justice for All?

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-121
Author(s):  
Monika Gosin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Local Government ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Group Membership ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Preferential Treatment ◽  
The Real ◽  
Cuban Immigration ◽  
White Racial Frame

Chapter 3 analyzes African-American responses to the Mariel boatlift in the Miami Times, a local black newspaper. The boatlift immediately followed the McDuffie Riot, an African-American uprising against the latest incident of police brutality. As the local government turned their attention to the large Cuban influx, some African-Americans feared Miami’s white dominant infrastructure would continue to ignore their concerns. The chapter reveals that the Times endorsed the idea that blacks and white Anglo were the “real Americans” and that Cubans, constructed as white, were receiving preferential treatment over black Haitian migrants. The chapter argues that the seeming disdain for Cuban immigration was a symptom of a pressing desire to challenge white supremacy and promote greater equality for all blacks in U.S. culture. However, the larger presence of Afro-Cubans among the new Cuban refugees forced African-Americans to reexamine modes of solidarity that decide group membership according to a black/white racial frame.

The Formation of the Black Medical Movement and Its Implications for Social Work, Part I: African American Physicians

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabienne Snowden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Work ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Medical Training ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Practice Research ◽  
The World ◽  
African American Communities

“The world cannot progress beyond its present impasse...unless we begin to learn again what really happened in the world...to give credit where credit is due and have a different conception of the human being regardless of the race or color of that human.”-Sertima, 1986Background:Health deficits have been present among Black and African American communities since having been brought to and enslaved in the United States. Black Americans have a legacy of finding ways to make ways to acquire the resources and access to medical care desperately needed among their communities. However, the narrative of how these communities gained access to medical methods, education, and training is largely neglected in the context of social work or in social work education.Objective:This historical review examines the efforts and accomplishments of African Americans to acquire medical training and resources to address the health disparities among their own and neighboring communities in need.Methods:Thematic analysis is used to investigate the existence of efforts of African Americans to acquire access to medical resources.Findings:The findings of this analysis identify that the efforts and achievements of Blacks and African Americans to acquire medical training and resources culminate in the Black Medical Movement (1788-Present).Conclusions:This existence of the Black Medical Movement presents at least four implications for the social work profession. A brief background of the genesis of health deficits among African American communities of provided, then followed by a description of the Black Medical Movement from its inception to present. This analysis concludes with a call to interrupt systems of oppression by using the presented findings to inform social work ways of knowing, practice, research, and approaches to social justice.

scholarly journals Time to Tell

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-151
Author(s):  
Dennis Ray Knight
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
African American Communities

If he is known for anything other than his writings, James Baldwin is best known for his work as a civil rights activist. What is often overlooked is Baldwin’s work toward uniting two under-represented and oppressed groups: African Americans and homosexuals. With his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin began a career of speaking about and for homosexuals and their relationship with the institutions of African-American communities. Through its focus on a sensitive, church-going teenager, Go Tell It on the Mountain dramatizes the strain imposed upon homosexual members of African-American communities within the Pentecostal Church through its religious beliefs.

Bearing Witness While Black

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allissa V. Richardson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
American People ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Black African ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
American Tradition

Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism tells the story of this century’s most powerful black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters, spurring a global debate on excessive police force, which disproportionately claimed the lives of African Americans. The book reveals how smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered black activists to create their own news outlets, continuing a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. It identifies three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people—slavery, lynching, and police brutality—and the journalism documenting their atrocities, generating a genealogy showing how slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the abolitionist movement; black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and civil rights movements; and smartphones of today powered the anti–police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, the book shows, is formidable and forever evolving. The text is informed by the author’s activism. Personal accounts of her teaching and her own experiences of police brutality are woven into the book to share how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices to speak up from the margins. Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.

The Relation between Perceived Treatment Discrimination and Job Satisfaction among African-American Accounting Professionals

2000 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen D. Moyes ◽  
Patricia A. Williams ◽  
Behnaz Z. Quigley
Keyword(s):  
Job Satisfaction ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Diversity Training ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Accounting Firms ◽  
Accounting Professionals ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Survey Results ◽  
Diversity Issues

This study examines the relation between perceived treatment discrimination and level of job satisfaction among African-American accounting professionals. Results of a survey of accounting graduates of a Historically and Predominantly Black University (HPBU) suggest a significant relation between these two factors. Unstructured interviews with African-American partners and managers in major accounting firms further support this finding. We conclude that although the profession actively recruits African-Americans, once inside the firm there continues to be diversity issues that need to be addressed. Not unexpectedly, survey results indicate that the majority of respondents who are most dissatisfied do not intend to remain in the profession. Evidence from the study also suggests a positive relation between percentage of African-Americans in the firm and job satisfaction. In addition, written comments from respondents and interviews with African-American practitioners indicate that ethnicity remains an issue in the workplace. Accounting firms are attempting to address this issue through mentoring and diversity training.

Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Free Black ◽  
African American Communities

This enlightening study employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, this book focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. This book foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the “geography of resistance” tells the new, powerful, and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.

scholarly journals The Excess Burden of Cytomegalovirus in African American Communities: A Geospatial Analysis

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul M. Lantos ◽  
Sallie R. Permar ◽  
Kate Hoffman ◽  
Geeta K. Swamy
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Opportunistic Infections ◽  
Cmv Infection ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic ◽  
High Prevalence ◽  
Duke University ◽  
African American Communities

Abstract Background.  Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a common cause of birth defects and hearing loss in infants and opportunistic infections in the immunocompromised. Previous studies have found higher CMV seroprevalence rates among minorities and among persons with lower socioeconomic status. No studies have investigated the geographic distribution of CMV and its relationship to age, race, and poverty in the community. Methods.  We identified patients from 6 North Carolina counties who were tested in the Duke University Health System for CMV immunoglobulin G. We performed spatial statistical analyses to analyze the distributions of seropositive and seronegative individuals. Results.  Of 1884 subjects, 90% were either white or African American. Cytomegalovirus seropositivity was significantly more common among African Americans (73% vs 42%; odds ratio, 3.31; 95% confidence interval, 2.7–4.1), and this disparity persisted across the life span. We identified clusters of high and low CMV odds, both of which were largely explained by race. Clusters of high CMV odds were found in communities with high proportions of African Americans. Conclusions.  Cytomegalovirus seropositivity is geographically clustered, and its distribution is strongly determined by a community's racial composition. African American communities have high prevalence rates of CMV infection, and there may be a disparate burden of CMV-associated morbidity in these communities.

scholarly journals ¡Venceremos! Harambee!: A Black & Puerto Rican Union?

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
Lauren O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
Community Activism ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dominant Narratives

In November of 1969, 2,700 members of Newark’s African American and Puerto Rican community assembled at the Black and Puerto Rican Political Convention to mobilize and strategize a plan to gain socio-political power. Unified through their discrimination in housing, employment, and police brutality, Newark’s communities of color resolved that the election of the city’s first Black mayor would provide a solution to many of their problems. Accordingly, the election of Kenneth Gibson validated the communities’ unified efforts and symbolized one of the most successful multiracial coalitions in Newark’s history. Although a monumental milestone, not all Newarkers remembered the convention as a symbol of hope and unity amongst Newark’s marginalized. For many Puerto Ricans, Gibson’s victory was the impetus for a major rift between Puerto Ricans and African Americans. While the history of the Black and Puerto Rican coalition is quite rich, it is largely unexamined within dominant narratives about the 1967 Newark Rebellion. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to excavate the details of the Black and Puerto Rican coalition in order to weave together a more complete, multiracial narrative about the Newark Rebellion that both includes and necessitates the legacy of Puerto Ricans within the long history of Newark community activism.

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