Ethan Freedman
Social Welfare Policy: SOCWT6801
Dr. Tiffany Younger
September 26, 2024
As I attempt to find a landing zone after launching into academic social work in efforts to obtain a Master's, Wright et al., (2021) orient me quickly with the notion that "social work, like other academic disciplines, depends on history for training and equipping students." To know one's very own past is one thing, but to know the history of a discipline in which you situate is to know how that very theory of knowledge was developed. Studying epistemology of academic disciplines often requires uplifting a harmful hegemonic system of production that oppresses marginalized identities and theories of knowledge. Many historians ignore, but Elliot and Hughes (2019) never forget "The Full Story of Slavery" and how it applies to resisting power wielding ideologies like what Wright et al. (2021) unpacks pertaining to undoing "The White Washing of Social Work History."
Highlighting McNutt and Hoefer allows for a deeper look into how studying history can appear as if "fundamentally nothing has changed" because we are in a societal transition into the "information age" where information is the most "dominant" and growing form of power (2021; p. 67-68). In conjunction with Jimenez et al., (2014) who posit racism as a "discourse of privilege and denigration" McNutt and Hoefer's words are worth considering alongside Rebecca Romanow's "Introduction: The Post Colonial As Queer Space" where histories of knowing are normalized through mimicry that render invisible alternative narratives of disciplined knowledge production–a methodology of power that an information society perpetuates.
Elliot and Hugh's (2019) creatively approached the notion that America is built on a bulldozed history of violence and oppression of people of color. By rewriting narratives of history from the embodied stories of those who faced experiences of racism upfront, their work centers understandings of pivotal events that were once incomprehensible because they were rendered unseen by dominating narratives. Not knowing Rhoda Phillips was the first enslaved person by purchase at the age of one year old, or Nat Turner's "Liberation Theology" separated itself from white dominant Christian faith–is a result of being subject to white centered narratives.
Like many scholarly narrations, academic social work was built on monotonous histories and fresh students are inquiring stories "that reinforces the stereotype and serves white supremacy" because white people perpetuate partisan beliefs (Wright et al., 2021). "Social work must be accountable to telling the complete narrative of institutionalized racism and how it pushed people of color into downcast roles since its inception" (Wright et al., 2021). Social Work is "intertwined" with prejudice, and understanding how "white supremacy focuses on the written word" is one moral of the rest of this paper. We must analyze the academic disciplines we situate ourselves in for dominating voices and integrate those whose echoes of oppression and subjected experiences require remembering for the full encompassing historical narrative–specifically people of color.
A unique take on the society's epistemological approach to knowing the past and present moment comes from McNutt and Hoefer (2021), who allude to the idea that "change is so subtle sometimes it is difficult to notice." At one moment in time, the type of knowledge that was valuable to the mainstream world was agrarian, it then shifted to industrial, and McNutt and Hoefer suppose that we are in another "great societal transition" (2021, p. 68). An "information society" finds the largest source of value comes from new technologies where "knowledge work," or specialized and trained work," establishes deeper understandings of the very discipline it sources from in efforts to compound knowledge and solidify it. Social welfare is not immune from societal changes and information societies led to technological developments that contributed to the "globalization of social processes" and "growth of information economics" (McNtt and Hoefer, 2021; p. 70). Out of a new system of capital came new jobs that replaced dormant roles in highly globalized areas like the U.S., Europe, and Asia, shipping manufacturing jobs across seas. From the spread of destructive forms of production by globalized information economies where "people can do knowledge work where they live," temporary or niche job arrangements replace highly specialized forms of work because an information economy is "vastly different"–as well are the social institutions within it (McNtt and Hoefer, 2021; p. 78-79).
The government has more information technologies than anyone with larger tech companies helping push political information that is "ultimately about values," but families and schools are also entrapped in these information centered approaches (2021; p. 82-83). Social welfare now is "not adequate" for it is responding to a system that has evolved towards information societies with families, technologies, governments, and social welfare (2021; p. 82-83). Social welfare can change significantly as other institutions begin to change, and social workers are on the frontlines of putting theory into practice by centering neglected historical narratives.
However, to truly wield change, Jimenez et al. (2014) reminds that "racism is much more than the sum of individual prejudices and attitudes; it is systemic, institutional, and sustained by a collective discourse of privilege and denigration," and "like all social constructions, is fluid, contingent, and contested." While their work looks at powers of prejudice historically operated in the U.S., Jimenez et al., (2014) understands this discourse interacts with "capitalistic ideology and policy that promotes discrimination" and results in "acceptance of social constructions" that perpetuate harm. According to Romanow (2006), "the colonial project aimed to construct malleable native subjects through a process that would expose them" to none other than the white supremecist education system, language, and discourse. Pedagogy was created to push ideals and mimicry is a methodology of power that exists to create a "reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite, and results in a form of mimicry, where the desire to emerge as 'authentic' through mimicry... is the final irony of partial representation" (Romanow, 2006; pg. 28). The histories that are brushed over, neglected, or simply unknown in the present moment are lost in a process of mimicry that is resembled by schooling systems producing children on stagnant curricula, or the language we have to address topics feeling unfit for the solutions that we must radically imagine. Because "the identity of the other is re-formed and reproduced in the very construction of the act of mimicking," dominant ways of knowing and being are reinforced and idealized" (Romanow, 2006; pg. 29).
While Romanow's work applies to behaviors of gender roles, capitalism, and policy, language is the essence of mimicry as it is the foundation of our education system, the root of constructions about how knowledge is developed, and the very tool we use to tell less considered narratives. Social workers consistently matriculate into society, and for a majority of the time the repetition of knowledge produced before them went unquestioned. Bringing in lesser known histories exposes the dominion of academic disciplines including social work; however, it is social workers who are capable of equipping themselves with the tools to undo deeply ingrained systems of harm by centering marginalized voices and people of color. Many say that mimicry is a form of complementing, but in the information society in which we find ourselves–the same society built on white ideologies of racism, oppression, and prejudice–repetitive information, language, and narratives are at the core of what we should be questioning.
Acknowledgements:
I acknowledge the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory on which we learn, work, and resource from at Columbia University School of Social Work is land of the Lenape and Wappinger indigenous peoples. This land has never been ceded. Let us commit ourselves to the struggle against the forces that have dispossessed the Lenape, Wappinger, and other indigenous people of their lands.
Citations
Elliot, M & Hughes, J. (2019). Four hundred years after enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia, most Americans still don't know the full story of slavery. NYT 1619 Project.
Jimenez, J. A.,Mayers Pasztor, E, Chambers, R. M. & Pearlman Fujii, C. (2014). Discrimination And social justice in the United States. Ch 5. In Social Policy and Social Change: Toward the Creation of Social and Economic Justice, 2nd edition. SAGE Publications, Inc;
McNutt, J.G & Hoefer, R. (2021). Social Welfare Policy: Responding to a Changing World. Chapter 4:The Coming of the information Society Oxford University Press, New York
Romanow, R. (2006). Introduction: The Postcolonial as Queer Space. The Postcolonial body in Queer Space and Time
Wright, K.C., Carr, K.A., Akin, B.A. (2021). The whitewashing of social work history. How Dismantling Racism in Social Work Education Begins With an Equitable History of the Profession Links to an external site.. Advances in Social Work, 21 (2/3)