Strategies to Eliminate Racism at the Source: A Collective Brainstorming Workshop

Overview: For over a century, the strategic question of how to eliminate racism comes back time and again to the issue of addressing racism with white people. The purpose of this workshop is to develop and share strategies to work towards the elimination of racism with white people and communities.Proposal text: Recently the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare adopted its 13th Grand Challenge: Eliminating Racism (Grand Challenges for Social Work, 2020). The Grand Challenges serve as visionary yet practical goals to guide all social welfare practice and research (Barth et al., 2019). How can social work live up to the grand challenge of eliminating racism?

Social work education commonly frames racism as expressing itself at personal, institutional, and cultural levels. When it comes to strategies for addressing racism, however, many of the current educational practices narrowly focus on the individual level, like racial bias trainings (Corley and Young, 2018). Individual change alone cannot foster the resources and power needed to undermine a system as embedded as white supremacy. To achieve liberation, change must happen from the personal to societal levels simultaneously (Social Justice Leadership, 2010). As such, for social workers fighting racism, a structural and power analysis is needed, lest interventions only provide band-aids to deeper wounds and fissures.

Both inside social work spaces and the broader community, this strategic question of how to eliminate racism comes back time and again to the issue of addressing racism with white people. What can it look like for white people to do this work for racial justice? Generations of Black movement leaders – Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and contemporary Black Lives Matter organizer and social worker Charlene Carruthers – have been calling on the white community to organize white people in the fight against white supremacy. Social workers, particularly those of us who are white or benefit from proximity to whiteness, must respond to this call. We must grapple with how to hold in tension the work of internal transformation, building antiracist social work education, practice, and research, and affecting change in the broader community.

This workshop will begin with the assertion that social work needs to develop strategies and interventions to work towards the elimination of racism with white people and communities. We will begin with an activity to support participants in clarifying their own aims and connecting them to others in the space. Next, we will provide overarching frameworks (structural racism, racial positionality, power analysis, mutual interest, and accountability) to center the group and build a common language. Our core activity will involve brainstorming specific strategies and interventions aimed at eliminating racism at the source. To ground the conversation, the facilitators will give examples from their own work. We will break into four small groups to focus the conversation on a specific aspect of social work: education, professional practice, research, and broader community-level change. We will end with large group share-outs and focus on commitments to move this work forward within our field and our home institutions and organizations. Participants will have the opportunity to share contact information so we can begin to build a network of people working to address racism at the source.