Culturally Responsive Practice with Black Youth: Implications for Anti-Racist Social Work.

Overview: This presentation provides context to how identity, culture, and development in racialized environments of the U.S., inform the lived experiences of 21st century Black American youth. This presentation also reviews the state of culturally responsive interventions with Black American youth and concludes with implications for anti-racist practice and policy.Proposal text: As a hallmark akin to social work, the profession ethically mandates its practitioners to demonstrate cultural humility by engaging critical self-reflection of their own biases and active engagement in conscious self-correction to advance practice. Moreover, social workers are professionally mandated to demonstrate knowledge of how culture, ethnicity, and social experiences shape the human experience of their clients. Therefore, understanding how competing paradigms, group-level experiences, policies, and cultural factors akin to communities of African descent is imperative for social workers to fulfill ethical responsibilities delineated by standards of practice when working with Black American youth.

Responsively, this oral presentation provides important context to how policies, health disparities, culture, and youth development in the historically racialized environment of the U.S. inform the lived experiences of 21st century Black American youth. Example areas of this presentation will include how structural and micro-level manifestations (e.g., educational, and criminal Justice level biases) of systemic racism contributes to dehumanization practices that hinder Black youths’ positive development. This presentation also reviews the current state of culturally responsive interventions with Black American youth—the importance of ancestral memory, family structures, language, socialization, religiosity, and collectivism as indicators of their positive development.

Our presentation will conclude with a discussion of the benefits of the Afrocentric Paradigm to advancing anti-racist practice and education for social workers seeking to promote more culturally responsive approaches of engagement and policy advocacy with Black Youth.