The Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois: Anti-Racist Practice in Social Work's Professional Education

Overview: This oral paper depicts how traits of intellectual prowess, humanitarianism, the belief in social equality, and activism influenced and framed the scholar-activism of W.E.B. Du Bois. The paper argues that these traits are essential for contemporary social work education and practice in implementing a prevailing anti-racist praxis.Proposal text: Within the realm of social work, there has been a multi-generational call to appropriately embed racial justice praxis within the professional organizing framework (Ladhani & Sitter, 2020; Tedam et al., 2013). An anti-racist framework for research and practice commits to demystifying, deconstructing, and dismantling racism as a human rights violation and as it manifests individually, institutionally, and structurally through a pervading reorientation of our professional consciousness (Kendi, 2019). Anti-racism contains a multitude of constructs and methodologies precious in the realization of social work’s Grand Challenges and ethical code. Pertinent theoretical frameworks from social science’s past give an avenue for the accomplishment of these aims in the profession’s contemporary.

W.E.B. Du Bois' commitment to scientific rigor, scholarship, and transformative social activism has provided a foundation for racial justice and effective social change for generations in various realms of social science. His approach involved challenging white supremacy and its functions by illuminating the total experience of Black and African American communities participating in his studies, exposing through microscopic empiricism how sociopolitical institutions impacted the well-being of historically marginalized populations (Young & Deskins, 2001). Du Bois extended the reach of contemporary social science to expose prevalent disparity in the lives of Black Americans, utilizing and augmenting many traditional methodologies of social science inquiry for use in researching racial disproportion in urban contexts (Morris, 2017). At the helm of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, Du Bois injected concepts of self-help, community empowerment, and grassroots engagement into the prevailing social work sensibility, providing the theoretical impetus for culturally sound mezzo and macro-level social work interventions sensibility (Bowles, Hopps, & Clayton, 2016). In the realm of epidemiology, his research has contributed to contemporary theoretical concepts of health determinant animating prevailing Western public health interventions (Jones-Eversley & Dean, 2018). Accordingly, Du Bois' social science innovations continues to be relevant in contemporary anti-racist praxis by offering an analytically critical organizing framework for a variety of professions under the social science umbrella, including social work.

The prevailing pandemic has revealed centuries-old, but modern-day impacts of institutional and structural racism on historically marginalized communities, exposing human rights atrocities as functions of disproportionality in outcomes of physical, mental, and social health (Hutchison, 2021; Lee & Johnstone, 2021; Starks, 2021). Social workers have the unique capacity and ethical basis to intercede these domestic human rights infringements, particularly through appropriate anti-racist training and discursive re-imagination. This presentation will address relevant aspects of Du Boisian social science inquiry within the anti-racist practice paradigm and the role of social work educators to integrate key findings and concepts into the curriculum to prepare social work students to work to fulfill their ethical call to dismantle racism and remedy its myriad impacts.