Racisms and microaggressions in social work: the experience of racialized practitioners in Canada

ABSTRACT

Rather than racism targeted toward service users, this paper adds to the sparse corpus of articles that reports on racism and microaggressions experienced by racialized social work practitioners. Based on two qualitative exploratory research studies in Canada, the findings suggest that racism continues to be a significant problem for racialized social workers. In addition to the oft-mentioned category of individual racism, four other “modern” forms of racism are explored: cultural racism, institutional racism, epistemological racism, and aversive racism. The importance of broadening the categories of racism is that these other forms are less familiar and thus are more likely to be unnoticed yet have profound effects on practitioners.

KEYWORDS:

• Racisms
• racialized practitioners
• impacts
• aversive racism
• qualitative research

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the scholars who provided invaluable input on this paper: Gail Baikie, Brenda Beagan, Kim Brooks, Tameera Mohamed, Sara Torres and Bea Waterfield. We are also grateful for the financial assistance from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, grants # 410-209-0101and # 435-2014-0234. And most especially, our gratitude goes to our research participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For instance, “minority” is often erroneous since individuals may make up a majority in a group and this term would be statistically inaccurate. Also, some people may not appear to be of a different color from white settlers (for example, Indigenous people) yet they are discriminated against on the basis of their race, so “people of color” does not seem to be the best label. Additionally, our rationale is that the term “racialized” implies processes of social construction rather than fixed essentialized categories.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [410-209-0101,435-2014-0234].