ABSTRACT

The social work profession adheres to the values of social justice and equity, yet extensive literature suggests that anti-racism education in social work has room for growth. Research demonstrates that social work practitioners and educators often fail to recognize (1) how structural oppression creates racial inequities and (2) how social workers maintain and reproduce hegemonic power structures. Critical whiteness theory (CWT) seeks to reveal the invisible role of whiteness in constructing racial inequities. As a subject area, critical whiteness studies emerged in the late 1990s as an expansion of critical race theory. A variety of disciplines have incorporated critical whiteness studies as a framework for anti-racism education; however, CWT remains relatively absent from the social work literature. This paper proposes the incorporation of CWT in social work education as a tool to facilitate critical self-reflexivity and combat structural racism within the profession. Engaging with the concepts of white normativity, white ignorance, and white complicity allows social work educators and students to acknowledge and interrogate the formative ways in which social work pedagogy maintains and reproduces white supremacy.

摘要

社会工作专业坚持社会正义和公平的价值观，但大量文献表明社会工作中的反种族主义教育有发展空间。研究表明，社会工作从业者和教育工作者往往无法认识到 (1) 结构性压迫如何造成种族不平等，以及 (2) 社会工作者如何维持和再生产霸权权力结构。批判白度理论 (CWT) 试图揭示白度在构建种族不平等中的无形作用。作为一个学科领域，批判白度研究出现于 1990 年代后期，是批判种族理论的扩展。许多学科都将批判性白人研究作为反种族主义教育的框架；然而，CWT 在社会工作文献中仍然相对缺席。本文提议将 CWT 纳入社会工作教育，作为促进批判性自我反省和打击行业内结构性种族主义的工具。参与的概念白人规范性、白人无知和白人同谋使社会工作教育者和学生能够承认和质疑社会工作教学法维持和再现白人至上的形成方式。