“Why Don’t We Learn About the Black Social Work Pioneers?” The Erasure of Black Social Workers’ Histories and Contributions—Implications for Social Work Education

ABSTRACT

While there is mounting research on the well-known white founders of social work, documentation of Black social work pioneers and their contributions is scarce – in both social work education and the broader telling of the profession’s history. Given the systemic exclusion of Black social workers in the dominant narrative of social work history, there is a critical need to understand how social work education perpetuates and centers whiteness in the teaching of historical and contemporary social work. This article uses Critical Race Theory to interrogate the role of racism and white supremacy in maintaining the Eurocentric hegemony undergirding the pedagogical and epistemological canons of social work. Moreover, the authors call for a radical shift from social work’s white-centered discourse and curricula to an equitable praxis, centering Black social work pioneers and their contributions to the profession. Implications for decolonizing pedagogy and anti-racist practice in social work education are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social work education
• pioneers
• black social workers
• critical race theory
• white supremacy

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