Narratives of Uprooting Anti-Black Racism in Higher Education: Developing a Power, Race, Oppression, and Privilege Framework in Social Work

ABSTRACT

Social work is in a crucial position to reshape its current teachings centering dominant culture’s practices focused on white supremacist theoretical frameworks. Rethinking the social work curriculum requires decolonizing the way we teach and practice, not as a metaphor, but as a concerted effort to incorporate anti-racist and liberation-based ideologies with an emphasis on centering the voices of Black people, folks Indigenous to the Americas, and non-Black People of Color. Through the narratives of students, faculty, and alumni, we highlight our stories in creating, evaluating, and maintaining a course on decolonizing social work education at a predominantly white institution (PWI). We provide an overview of a collaborative effort to create and develop the power, race, oppression, and privilege (PROP) framework. Through the eyes of the PROP Collective, included here are: the history and content of the Foundations of Social Work/Decolonizing Social Work (DSW) course or the “PROP class,” student activism, course suffusion, teaching and learning methodologies, and yearly reflections toward improvement, facilitator support, and ongoing multidisciplinary collaborative effort to improve the course.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• decolonizing
• social work
• social work education
• anti-black racism
• white supremacy culture

Land acknowledgment

We begin as we do the Foundations of Social Work Practice: Decolonizing Social Work (DSW) course on which this journal contribution is based. The school of social work is located in Mannahatta on Lenapehoking, which is part of the homelands of the Lenape (https://thelenapecenter.com/lenapehoking/).

“Let us respectfully acknowledge the Lenape people who were and are the stewards and protectors of this land we occupy at this moment. We would like to pay respect to the Lenape elders, past, present, and future, who are the keepers of their language and culture. We recognize that this land we are meeting on was unlawfully and brutally seized from its rightful inhabitants through genocide, displacement, and continued colonization and occupation. We would also like to acknowledge the lives of the enslaved Africans and their descendants whose forced labor contributed to the wealth of this University and this nation. We honor their sacrifice and recognize the violent and brutal nature of their capture, trade, and travail. We recognize that a nation was built on their backs, a sacrifice that has not been remunerated nor adequately regarded to date. We acknowledge that the Lenape includes Black Indigenous People, who were a part of the first nation tribes and fought wars by their side against the colonialists. They were the Seminoles, the Muscogee (Creek), the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Chickasaw Indian tribes. Please take a moment to consider the lives, culture, and legacy of these groups as we aspire to honor them and pay our respect for their contributions to our school and our society.” - Dr. Jalana Harris and Alisa Graham

In acknowledging Indigenous nations, we show respect and take meaningful steps in correcting and salvaging the stories and practices that were erased by settler colonialists, forcible entry and violent acquisition of land, elimination, and genocide of Indigenous people, forced assimilation, forced adoption of Indigenous children, creation of oppressive laws and policies and the normalization of whiteness and patriarchy. Students involved in the development of this course, predominantly Students of Color, made the distinct suggestion to include a concerted commitment to the liberation of Indigenous people and recognition of the history of genocide while simultaneously leaning into collaboration with indigenous communities. Land acknowledgment is not a metaphor (Baker, Coumans & Whitney, 2022; Tuck & Yang, 2012). It directly responds to the ongoing colonization process and acknowledges the continuing violence against Native communities. By doing so, we are honoring and recognizing our combined history of oppression and unification in healing.

From acknowledgments to action

Land acknowledgment has promoted deeper understanding and led to transformative conversations on the purpose, the necessity of acknowledging Indigenous communities, and the ongoing debate highlighting the challenges of a land acknowledgment as performative (Blenkinsop & Fettes, 2020; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Initially, students questioned the words as empty, shortsighted, and meaningless if not led with actionable steps.

Recognizing the history of genocide and systemic dislocation of Indigenous people is a remedial step. Taking purposeful action means joining, building relationships, and supporting Indigenous communities. Student inquiries, curiosity, and growing introspection led to further engagement and collaboration with the Lenape Center and other First Nations organizations and tribes. Co-founders of the Lenape Center have been invited to teach a class on Lenapehoking (Baker et al., 2022), shared land acknowledgment at ceremonies, and graciously hosted social work interns. Beyond placing a plaque on the campus grounds, the university must work towards understanding and acknowledging the role of displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples and incorporating reparative actions, such as targeted scholarships for Indigenous students and an increase in Indigenous faculty on campus in various roles.

Growing awareness of the scope of anti-Black racism globally led to the further incorporation of the acknowledgment of the lives of enslaved Black people and the use of their forced labor to build many academic institutions in the United States (U.S.). As Professor Lenard highlights, there has been a continual erasure and omission of Black stories in the foundation of building many educational institutions within the U.S., in particular, those who, as she notes, “lay those cobblestones on the quads and walkways we walk each day.” Wilder (2013) exposes the truth by acknowledging, as a part of U.S. history, slave ownership by predominantly white institutions, built on the back of enslaved Africans, and only very recently being acknowledged by prominent colleges and academic institutions as part of recognition and atonement.

Narrative 1. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 1, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

Introduction

In creating a course on decolonizing social work, we intentionally acknowledge colonialism and name anti-Blackness in partnership with white supremacy for two reasons: 1) Whiteness and white people are often centered in racial justice work. We name and acknowledge white supremacy while also naming Blackness – calling out the target of white supremacy. 2) While many rest in the Black/white dichotomy, viewing anti-Blackness and white supremacy as poles on a spectrum invites a more nuanced and expansive conversation, which is neither binary nor monolithic (Jones & Okun, 2001). We are grounded in the understanding that the oppression that Asian folx, folx Indigenous to the Americas, queer folx of all races, folx of larger body sizes, folx with disabilities, folx with darker complexions, and people experiencing marginalization of all types are impacted in a way that is rooted in, connected to, and in direct relation to anti-Blackness and its manifestation both globally and within the U.S.

The course is meant to disrupt systemic oppression rooted in slavery in the U.S. and European colonialism globally that are infused into educational practices and norms. PROP seeks to intervene and interrupt systemic oppression and explore how white supremacy has been positioned as a dominant system contingent upon preserving a global anti-Black state across geographical locations. Social work engages across the social service spectrum in political and cultural domains. Through this lens, Blackness becomes a (universal) antithesis of whiteness, the root of white disdain and oppression.

Black feminism is a particularly important frame for understanding anti-Blackness and Black liberation as a lynchpin for our collective liberation (Collins et al., 2014). As the Combahee River Collective (1977) notes, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression (pg5).”

As the PROP Collective, we began the writing process with reconnection and processing our experiences over the past six years. Staying true to our stories, narratives, and exploration of self and group experiences, we offer this contribution as an approach to decolonizing social work education through creating an MSW course centered on dismantling anti-Black racism and white supremacy in practice and in academic writing (Jones & Okun, 2001). Our collective intention in sharing the story of the creation of the PROP class is to offer the reader insight into the process, the challenges, and the successes in developing a course centered on decolonizing the profession of social work. We hope to inspire others to develop their own anti-racism course for all social work students, and our story offers insights, steps, and a map forward.

We will describe the evolution of the course ending with a look toward the future of decolonizing social work as a profession through Afrofuturism and radical imagination. Social work is located across multiple critical systems that ground and perpetuate social oppression. Our profession is in a powerful position to repair historical harms and support liberation. These lessons are relevant beyond social work to any discipline or practice that claims a commitment to social justice. Officially named Foundations of Social Work: Decolonizing Social Work to emphasize the rooted intentions of the course, moving forward in this article, the course will be referred to as the “PROP” class giving honor to its genesis and the lovingly colloquial name that lingers.

Starting with ourselves: open mic

An essential and transformative element of the course involves weekly storytelling through open mics, a personal and creative medium that offers a platform for expression, such as oral history and storytelling, thereby celebrating non-Eurocentric learning methodologies. Open mics offer participants a way to share their internal processes and self-exploration, having a deeper understanding of anti-Black racism and a commitment to anti-racist practice while unlocking the various nuances of their social identities.

Given the experiential nature of the class, this article is written in a narrative, self-reflective, and group-processing manner. In open mic form, we share our narratives here and throughout this contribution. The group of us – the PROP Collective – encompass various positionalities, hold multiple roles, and engage in this process from different angles as students, faculty, administrators, and alumni. For some of the PROP Collective, recalling and writing these experiences of fighting against oppressive systems activated memories of struggle, which impacted memory and the capacity to put the experience into words. The consequences of these reflections are different for students and faculty of color, particularly for Black folx. Writing this article as a collective has helped us appreciate how far we have come and brought healing for some.

Each “writing” session was free-flowing, expressive, and deeply personal. In capturing honesty, authenticity, and vulnerability, this contribution mirrors the class, embracing the messiness and discomfort of learning and transforming. Readers may leave thinking, “What the **** just happened?” It is essential to sit in the discomfort of ambiguity and not knowing. Facilitating this class is not about having an exact roadmap but being responsive to complex discourse and relinquishing the need for perfection rooted in white supremacy culture (Jones & Okun, 2001; Okun, 2021).

Open mic encourages people to share parts of their personal process in understanding anti-Black racism, intersectionality, and uprooting systems of oppression, including the complexity of juxtaposed privileged and oppressed identities (Hardy, 2016; Tatum et al., 2000). For example, a student may describe Jewish and white identities to the class as targeted and privileged while exploring the overlay of white supremacy and anti-Blackness (Hardy, 2016; Kliman, 2022). Class participants use varying forms of expression, including poetry, narrative, Kahoot games, meditation, art, exercise, music, song, etc. Open mics offer insight into one’s journey, as we intend to do with this contribution describing our own personal journey through developing an anti-racist course at a PWI.

We share authors’ own Open Mics here and throughout this contribution.

Narrative 2. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 2, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

Narrative 3. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 3, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

Preparing the room: setting the tone

Each class begins with Setting the Tone, a musical selection that intentionally sets the stage for narrative sharing, honoring space, and disrupting dominant pedagogical teaching approaches. By starting this article similarly, we invite the reader to prioritize being present and creating the space to center collective experiences through music. Music feeds our souls, tells a story, and drives change and truth-telling. Music made and performed by Black artists from across the diaspora is powerful, offering a critical lens to racial trauma, Black resistance, and activism, and embraces Black joy by centering Black voices as a component of learning, appreciation, and, subsequently, deeper self-awareness. Setting the Tone is a weekly classroom activity involving participants listening to a preselected song from a Black musician and discussing thoughts, feelings, and relation to class content. Immersing the classroom in Black culture de-centers white dominant ways of knowing, filling the room with Black music, literature, and scholarship. This approach draws on Freire’s use of codification and themes, sharing symbols of people’s oppressive experience while implying the emancipatory acts ahead (Burstow, 1991).

Processing the Setting the Tone songs can occur in the whole class or affinity groups, which can be particularly helpful for Students of Color to talk through their experiences. In contrast, white students can discuss their reactions without burdening Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students. Limited representation of Black and non-Black Students of Color in a class and overrepresentation of white students create an even more intensive burden on BlPOC students to explain the song’s impact.

Setting the Tone creates a container at the start of class in which the suffering, pain, and trauma of People of Color, past and present, shares space with the beauty, joy, and promise of past, present, and future. In pieces like Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday and Float by Janelle Monae, we are held by the duality of Blackness and the experiences of marginalized people across the globe. The selection of music honors the diversity of Black experiences, filled with accomplishments, deep spirituality, exhilaration, and beauty.

Week two’s Setting the Tone selection, Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give it Up, is a joyous, celebratory essence of Black experience with references to enjoying life and having fun. Knowing racism is damaging and horrific, highlighting the enormous strength, joy, and Black liberation in the fight for liberty and justice is essential. Over the past several years, the Black Joy movement has been a concerted, purposeful effort to expand the Black experience beyond sorrow to emphasize resistance, resilience, and reclaiming Black humanity (Nichols, n.d.).

Week three’s class session begins a more profound reflection, analysis, and understanding of whiteness, white supremacy, and white privilege. Strange Fruit offers a critical reflection on the history of racism in the US (Miller & Garran, 2017). Billie Holiday, jazz vocalist and icon, offers painful historical commentary impacting students differentially – from those with limited knowledge of Jim Crow laws and lynching of Black bodies to those with a visceral awareness and personal experience with racialized violence. Some BIPOC students shared this song as a critical point in the course because, although intense, it is important for understanding anti-Black racism in the U.S. Some white participants resisted the depth and pain in the song, while others felt guilt over their ancestors’ actions and their complacency and complicity. Facilitators hold space for reactions, questions, and responses, starting with some preparation through meditation, journaling, check-ins, and an introduction to the song’s historical context.

Through course evaluation, student and facilitator feedback led to new musical selections increasingly incorporating a reality of joy, liberation, and Black humanity. Future selections will emphasize the freedom in Black existence not necessarily attached to fighting or activism but to the absoluteness of being unapologetically human, as described in Float by Janelle Monae. Float offers a ballad rooted in levity, fun, and freedom. The song represents so much of who we are – just being “light as a feather” and having a good time. We plan to include Float as a partnership and modeling of duality with Strange Fruit, possibly played in the same class session, offering a more balanced approach to discussing anti-Black racism.

Across the history of this PWI, many Students of Color have had painful experiences as they navigated the white dominant space, which led to protest and activism over many years. Strange Fruit captures the pain felt by Black Americans during the tumultuous and liberating era of the U.S. civil rights movement. Black students felt strangled and hopeless by the inherent burden of white supremacy structures (Jones & Okun, 2001; Okun, 2021). These levels of racial microaggressions led to student activism and the creation of the PROP course. Coming together in activism at the school included difficult times and some of the best times. We created families, nourished friendships, and realized cross-racial solidarity in powerful and joyous ways. In honoring the future, particularly Black futurism and what is to come, we set the tone for finding joy, family, and connections that liberate us, as conveyed by Got to Give it Up and other musical selections.

Student activism at roots: demands

Having now set the tone of how Black students named the white supremacist undertones of being at a PWI, we can describe the roots of activism that led to the development of the PROP course. Feeling oppressed, demoralized, and let down by their program, in the Fall of 2015, during a Women of Color support space, there was yet another conversation of the frustrations, pain, and anger at the constant level of microaggressions and overall ineptitude that were becoming all too familiar, exhausting for students to bear. The experience of this racialized trauma within an oppressive PWI led to activism that demanded the creation of a more inclusive, safe environment for learning that allowed BIPOC students to be unapologetically their whole selves. The Women of Color support space group listed challenges they were experiencing in their classrooms and school community. This soon transformed into a list of demands. As this was the final Women of Color support space of the Fall semester, the women maintained contact throughout their winter break and began their organizing movement. Throughout their weeks off campus, students shared their list with various student groups and collectives of peers across marginalized identities. Ultimately these efforts led to forming a coalition of students who created and organized to bring change around a comprehensive list of demands that would remain a living document. One of the demands involved the creation of a required course on racism. Given the ongoing climate of microaggressions in classrooms, in people’s internships, and on campus, the need to advance social work students’ ability to understand racism and then advocate against systemic racism was clear. An immersive classroom experience would lead to a commitment to undoing harm and adequately educating students and future social workers to better serve community members impacted by injustices (Finn, 2021; Morgaine & Capous-Desyllas, 2020).

Subsequently, the group of students, who joined together in a shared struggle, held a Town Hall to share the list of demands with the general school, specifically the deans and leadership. Calling out each of the over thirty demands, a collective of diverse students stood at the lecture hall podium and stated, “We demand … ..” Each person calls out each statement, one by one, and then raises their fists in unison. They closed with the NASW Code of Ethics. In the end, the packed room fell silent. Not one Dean or faculty member made a comment, questioned, or offered mere acknowledgment of what was just heard and witnessed. You could hear a pin drop as the 15+ students walked out in tears.

Narrative 4. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 4, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

Following months of direct actions, disruptions, and resistance, school leadership agreed to engage in dialogue with students in service of change. Several committees were created to address different aspects of the demands list, meetings with students and leadership, and coming together in a plan of action. It required developing strategies and a timeline to address student concerns and demands regarding issues of inclusion and justice. Activism on this level, among tenured and adjunct faculty, administrators, and students, required accountability, collaboration, and holding to a structure that would not drop the ball. None of this was easy.

Consisting of administration, staff, and former and current students, the Anti-Oppressive Accountability Task Force (AOA) created a structural accountability system for school leadership to address the demands. However, student efforts accomplished most of the work and change. AOA is an example of how the institutionalization of social justice often impedes large-scale change from happening meaningfully. Recognizing that the AOA process and structure worked to downplay student concerns and minimize the effect of their actions, student activism persisted. Direct organizing efforts such as student-led town halls, student testimonies during presentations, flyering and public outcries against injustice were shown to be more impactful methods of change, subverting administration, institutional politics, and rules. With this concerted push, the demand to create a course centered on racism was realized. It is essential to recognize and remember that Women of Color originated and led the Student Demand movement and created the course.

Narrative 5. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 5, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

PROP collective: creating the course

Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn and Dr. Ovita F. Williams collaborated with several alums hired to teach the course on curriculum design, which would ultimately create a course on the historical legacy of racism at a PWI school of social work. The philosophy of co-learning and enterprise led the way for establishing a more equitable course design that involved students’ contributions. Over the years, ongoing development of the course deliberately included students and student feedback and the significance of different sources of knowledge coming together. The pedagogy around the instructor’s position as not the expert or authority but as a facilitator and co-learner has been integral to the vision and the emphasis on collaboration. Mutuality and collaboration are central themes of the PROP lens; therefore, modeling our commitment to these two elements in direct practice and community care, we replaced Hepworth et al. (2012) with Finn’s (2021) and Morgaine and Capous-Desyllas’ Anti Oppressive Social Work Practice (2020), both texts that centralize a social justice and anti-oppressive approach to direct practice. It was important to ensure language and practice behaviors represented a more equitable design and moderation of the class. For example, students are referred to as participants, and professors as facilitators.

Narrative 6. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 6, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

In the kitchen of Dr. Cogburn’s apartment, Dr. Williams and alums Ms. Corriders, Ms. Altaha, and Ms. Eke, as the course design instructional team, met to discuss how we would have students design the course on racism. As we began, it was immediately a consensus that we would be collaborators and not instructors, offering a wide brim for people to design and bring their perspectives to the table. Our initial class of fifteen participants included a core getting-to-know-you exercise, the Story of Your Name, an integral part of the current PROP class. The activity offers the opportunity to bring in people’s stories, narratives, positionality, and lived experiences. An essential component of discussions on racism and other forms of oppression is not waiting for an explosive event but building relationships by starting with our narratives and exploring our identities (Bertrand-Finch et al., 2019). This “icebreaker” brings nuances of our social identities and themes associated with assimilation, acculturation, immigration, gender, religion, ethnicity, class, and family backgrounds. A discussion on pronunciation and decisions people make to change names that are more Eurocentric in spelling and dictation is a commentary on white supremacy culture (Okun, 2021). We had intentional group building and identity exercises to build the class, engaging with one another in profound ways, mirroring the design, experiential, and didactic.

Encouraging collaboration, small groups of students developed their own syllabi and offered various approaches to teaching about racism. Each model was integrated into a more extensive syllabus. The course on racism was going to be called power, race, oppression, and privilege (PROP). Readings, assignments, and objectives focused on a history of anti-Black racism in the US, intersectional forms of oppression, white privilege, white supremacy, and centered Black voices. It is important to add that this school was one of the last major local social work programs to incorporate a course on racism for MSW students.

By the end of our deep and thought-provoking fifteen weeks together, which included seeking advice from students at other local social work schools who developed well-established anti-racism courses, the students, alums, and facilitators presented the completed two-semester course to the Dean’s Office. Immediately, the response was that the course would not be able to be delivered to students for the upcoming Fall semester. Within 24 hours of this rejection by school leadership, students, supportive faculty allies, and others raised immediate protests against the refusal of the enormous commitment and work of a predominantly BIPOC group, developing and delivering a timely and thorough course design to fulfill student and ethical demands.

Activism and development within a PWI are a crucial point of discussion here. The very essence of decolonizing social work is even more evident in a PWI. Hence, the activism within required a concerted effort, allyship, and ongoing pushing back and pushing forward. Students involved in developing the PROP course utilized an upcoming public event to make a demand statement to the Interim Dean, other faculty, and staff. This moment forced the Dean into a public response, agreeing to reconsider the course addition for the upcoming school term. Ongoing student activism and limited but select faculty advocacy led to an administrative reversal and approval of the course to be implemented that Fall semester.

The newly informally created PROP Development Team negotiated a strategic compromise with school leadership: The PROP course would be offered without delay for the upcoming school year, but it would be a part of the existing Foundations of Social Work direct practice course. While this was not ideal, the Team resolved that the class would not exist without this strategic compromise. Although this was a difficult compromise, having it as a required part of Foundations ensured that every incoming student would be exposed to the material.

What happened next: developing the course

Organizational support and resistance

To influence school culture and climate, the PROP Team and course conveners spent two years providing extensive training, workshops, and discussions in faculty meetings, training people on the PROP framework. There were key stakeholders in the school community with significant power who avoided discussing anti-Black racism and even racism, for that matter. One respected senior white faculty member wished to take the “R” for racism from the acronym “PROP.” There was a denial that the structural white supremacy issues at the school were real, that the team and supporters were overemphasizing race at the exclusion of other oppressions. Centering anti-Black racism was “too much.”

Institutional pushback prevented the original vision of the course from becoming a reality. Instead, to restructure and integrate the original course development into the preexisting Foundations course, the institution created and supported the formal PROP Development team to intertwine the core social work direct practice skills with a PROP framework. With compensation and general institutional support, this team, composed of professors and students, developed the full course. Integrating Foundations and PROP took a herculean force which included adding the direct practice skills, learning objectives, PROP highlights, exercises, and elements that would offer skills development over one semester. Renaming the original PROP course to Foundations of Social Work: Decolonizing Social Work, the revamped foundational class was permanently required of all newly admitted MSW students.

Over three months, the PROP Summer Development Team produced the PROP-infused Foundations syllabus, with a detailed activity experiential guide, step by step weekly guidelines for facilitators. Continuing with the power-sharing required by critical consciousness and exemplified during the course creation, students were leaders in the integration efforts. At the time, it may not have felt gratifying for students. In retrospect, alums on this article feel grateful to be able to take the torch and run with it, making an enormous contribution to the existence and development of PROP and the course. As a collective, we agree that honoring students as a critical piece of the movement and their perspectives were and remain paramount to the ongoing development of the course.

As faculty, it was challenging for us to relinquish power or share knowledge and leadership in this effort with students. For some, it was very difficult to acknowledge we had to sit with what we did not know. It was a humbling and intensely vulnerable experience that challenged everything about how we were supposed to teach. The first time this newly reinvented and reimagined course was offered, true to the impetus for creating it, students were asked to come in and train prospective faculty, some of whom had been teaching the previous Foundations course for decades. As one PROP Development team student trainer said to the group of experienced instructors, “Throw out all your power points. Throw out everything you did before. That caused harm. We have to do things differently – follow the guide.” It was a powerful and terrifying moment for many facilitators, and some instructors decided this was not for them. Letting go of that power and illusion of expertise was fundamentally destabilizing. For those who stayed, it has been revolutionary to our teaching practice, aligning our teaching to the values of liberation social work. As bell hooks (1994) taught us, teaching to transgress requires deeper awareness and accountability as framed by the core PROP elements outlined below. Facilitators began to listen and open up our consciousness and hearts to accept we were causing harm by the way we were previously teaching social work and getting rid of the necessity to be the expert-led to create the space to be a co-learner and not the good white savior (Cole, 2012). For some white instructors, this allowed us to participate authentically in continuing to learn together in this course and to support the change efforts at this PWI.

Narrative 7. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 7, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

The “good white people”

With the full syllabus and experiential guide completed, the PROP Development Team conducted a two-day intensive, experiential training session with all who would facilitate the course in the Fall, a mixed group of BIPOC, non-BIPOC, and white-identified professors. As an immersive and modeling training session, the PROP Team hoped to support facilitators in PROP’s concept and learning objectives. It allowed people to practice incorporating a PROP framework into their Foundations course materials. The PROP Development Team shared examples of their open mics and a few Setting the Tone songs, discussing how best to integrate and build on meaningful conversations with class participants.

The PROP Team recalls overall reactions ranging from excitement to confusion to unsteadiness and discomfort from instructors (facilitators), particularly discussing anti-Black racism. Student facilitators of this two-day training session were met with a group of instructors who did not have a baseline knowledge of how to teach a class on racism. In hindsight, a four-week intensive would have been more substantial and productive than offering a minimal knowledge and facilitation baseline training agenda.

All eyes were on this class, and many did not want it to succeed. The heavy lift of the summer training session was a challenge. The Development Team had to work to dismantle white liberalism and facilitate co-learning around power sharing and other anti-oppressive teaching techniques. Seen as an elite group of white liberals or “good white people,” several potential PROP course facilitators resisted the shift in ideology and the massive break needed to divest from a lens of white supremacy at a PWI. Susan recalls I was terrified because I did not want to be found out as racist as I was/am, and I realized again and again how racist I was/am. The individual journey was a shock to my system and continues to be. How we taught, developed, researched, and functioned as a school would need to shift. Uprooting anti-Black racism and white supremacy could not be the sole obligation of a single course. It had to be a complete culture shift – people had to move from being good enough to be coconspirators in dismantling and disrupting the whole institution (Carten & Pender Green, 2016).

The domino effect: unraveling white liberals

Centering the course on anti-Black racism was met with deep resentment and resistance. Conversations in school-wide committee meetings exemplified an unraveling not about the course but people’s lack of awareness about and the need to dismantle oppressive structures within the school. Resulting advocacy centered around formally establishing PROP as a focus to be infused into all parts of the curriculum, institutionalizing the core tenets that explicitly demand attention to uprooting systems of anti-Black racism and white supremacy at the school. Ultimately, the higher education system must do the same in its core workings, critical self-analysis, and immediate, urgent change from within (Carten & Pender Green, 2016).

Narrative 8. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 8, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

When white liberals begin to unravel, anti-racism is working. This unraveling indicates that you have pushed them beyond symbolism, gestures, and superficial engagement and past the point of comfort. For us, this manifested in our white colleagues’ bouts of white fragility exploding in myriad ways – through outbursts of rage, centering their pain at realizing how they caused harm, and even crossing boundaries to demand comfort without consent from colleagues and Students of Color, all to ease their discomfort (Anderson, 2016; DiAngelo, 2018). This discomfort envelopes people to the point of breakage or reckoning with white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018). Initially, there was a belief by many with close proximity to whiteness that social work as a field was absolute and its teachings were meant to remain intact without question. The tension involved convincing people that change was necessary and realizing that these people did not inherently understand racism; nevertheless, they were in positions to evaluate and make decisions about the extent of institutional transformation. The ripple effect of integrating PROP into the curricula, through the course and beyond, created aftershocks for white people at the institution. Many continued to resist, remain misinformed, and refuse to acknowledge that the school had to change and that the course was a necessary step toward that change. A PWI is based on a system of anti-Black racism that keeps good white liberalism and color blindness in place. Dismantling this oppression meant a seismic shift from every individual to the whole community. We had to examine how the school was not equipped to internally support a course centering anti-Black racism and decolonization of social work practice. This inherently white-identified profession has sought to hide its white supremacist practices (Yearwood et al., 2021). Though there have been some advancements addressed later, this culture and climate, in many ways, persists even as this is written.

Narrative 9. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 9, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

Narrative 10. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 10, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

Peer support

The enormity of maintaining a container for people to hold space for difficult conversations around racism, the ability to manage the classroom dynamics, and the time to relay important social work information required a level of uniformity across sections, maintaining consistency and ensuring that instructors felt equipped. Faculty conveners led bimonthly facilitator peer support spaces to speak with class facilitators individually and as a group and manage critical incidents that emerged in the classroom and often spilled out in the school.

Some themes that emerged in our facilitator peer support groups included: how BIPOC students experience being traumatized by white fragility in predominantly white classrooms; students with proximity to whiteness expressing anger and outrage at being revealed as racist; Black faculty emotional labor and concern of the consequences of pushing back on white students; BIPOC and non-Black POC students feeling the course was centering white students’ learning and teaching about racism; white faculty’s struggles to hold the nuanced conversations related to race; BIPOC students unsure of why this course is for them; managing difficult conversations that emerged; the sheer enormity of the material; balancing teaching anti-racism and practice skills in a foundations class; and facilitating the affinity space discussions.

As a required course, over twenty-five sections are offered every fall, requiring the highest number of assigned “facilitators” or instructors for any course. Few full-time faculty agreed to teach the course; some self-selected not to teach, some declined, and others never offered. With course implementation came an expectation that facilitators have an understanding of structural racism and how it differs from interpersonal, institutional, and systemic racism (Hinson & Bradley, 2006; Menendian, 2023), as well as openness to examining awareness of their own racial identity, positionality, and impact/use of self in a classroom space where power should be shared. Given that we are each on our own journey, we know that we are all at different stages of this awareness and make mistakes, all experiencing challenges in the classroom, and all need training, accountability, retraining, and support/supervision. The challenges for instructors relate to navigating their intersectional identities and how students perceive them.

Narrative 11. Please see the online full text version to access Narrative 11, or the audio can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026

Decolonizing social work/foundations of social work practice: the “PROP” class

This experiential course allows space for challenging conversations to emerge among participants, creating the facilitative conditions to build a class community that allows authentic relationships between participants and facilitators. A key difference of this class format is the integration exercises that help to engage students in a variety of ways – verbal, somatic, intellectual, self-reflective, emotional – and thereby shift some of the most entrenched habits instilled by white supremacy culture (Jones & Okun, 2001; Okun, 2021), much of which must first be surfaced, then addressed.

Over the fourteen-week semester, participants are carried through a three-hour weekly class emphasizing self-awareness, group discussions, processing, healing, and exploration of identities through the PROP framework, and applying this learning into practice skills. Exploring the nuances of privilege and targeted identities (Hardy, 2016), participants learn direct practice skills of pre-engagement, engagement, teaching and learning, action and accompaniment, evaluation, and transitions (Finn, 2021; Morgaine & Capous-Desyllas, 2020).

The syllabus is divided into 3 Modules: A) Historical Context of Anti-Black Racism, B) Self-awareness and Use of Self, and C) Skills, Implementation, and Application. It encourages students to learn social work practice skills with multicultural communities within the structural, historical, and socio-cultural context of white supremacy and anti-Black racism.

Course materials intentionally moved away from published literature, theory, and research as primary learning modalities and scholarship to ancestral, non-dominant materials for consumption and critical thinking. The PROP Team included podcasts, videos, blogs, posts, and other mediums to support a cross-liberation of inclusive contributions, intentionally decolonizing the classroom through expanded considerations on the praxis of learning. For example, facilitators are not lecturers, but guides, facilitators of critical conversations, and collaborators with participants, not students. We attempted to shift the power dynamics in the classroom by conscientiously changing our language.

Core elements of the PROP approach

Anti-Black racism

The course centers on recognizing and undoing anti-Black racism – framed as systemic oppression rooted in slavery in the U.S. and European colonialism globally. Through this lens, the course explores the dynamic social and political meanings of “Black” and “white” historically and across geographical contexts through a perspective of a spectrum where anti-Blackness and white supremacy are at either pole. The focus of the course rests on the premise that all oppressions are rooted in a global legacy of white supremacy that has historically relied on the preservation of anti-Blackness, which impacts not only Black people in America but folks of all races globally, albeit the impacts of said anti-Blackness vary based on people’s vast social identities. The course explores how white supremacy has been positioned as a dominant system contingent upon preserving a global anti-Black state across geographical, political, and cultural domains.

Social justice as a core principle in the code of ethics

The course builds the necessary skills to be ethical social workers, including (but not limited to): language use, accountability, social justice, probing questions, active listening, empathy, cultural competence, and anti-oppressive theory.

Self-awareness & self-reflection

A critical exploration of self offers a deeper understanding and challenges one’s role in maintaining oppressive systems. Awareness of one’s behavior and impact on practice allows for examination of how positionality impacts actions, thoughts, and biases.

Radical healing, imagination, and transformation (added Fall 2022)

The course provides an understanding and application of ways to connect centering on collective healing, radical self-care, rest, pedagogies of healing, teaching to transgress (hooks, 1994), and sharing power in the classroom and community practice. The course encourages radical imagination. “Radical imagination is the audacity to live in the world as it is and dream something different coupled with the willingness to believe it is possible even if you cannot see it” (Aloziem, 2022).

Coalition building/action

The course encourages a lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, support, and accountability with oppressed communities, walking alongside all stakeholders toward systemic change. This sentiment is reflected in the words of Queensland Aboriginal Women Activists, as quoted by Lilla Watson (n.d..), “If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time … But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

PROP: foundations of the helping process

The course uses Janet Finn’s Just Practice (2021) to integrate the introduction and strengthening of social work practice skills within a PROP and social justice framework. Finn’s framework builds upon five key concepts: meaning, context, power, history, and possibility. It expands the traditional assessment to intervention to evaluation model to include six core processes: 1) engagement, 2) teaching/learning, 3) action and accompaniment, 4) evaluation, 5) reflection, and 6) celebration. Finn’s approach operationalizes anti-oppressive practice by examining power dynamics in the helping relationship and social workers’ roles in practice settings.

Activities and assignments

Integration of the foundational helping process and the growth of student self-awareness of racial and intersectional identities are promoted through targeted, scripted weekly role-play assignments, practicing in vivo concepts, and understanding with peer and facilitator coaching and feedback. Several sessions utilize affinity spaces, or break-out groups intended to be processing spaces for course-related content, encouraging deeper engagement while minimizing harm: by separating white students who historically harm through statements made before (and sometimes even if) familiar with their white racial identity and whiteness, from “BIPOC” or “POC” or “Global Majority” (a self-defined, preferred term by one such group) students. Feedback from BIPOC students state the space gives them a “much-needed respite” from having to code switch, educate, and care for white people in the classroom and institutional space.

A significant issue that persists at a PWI with majority white students (a phenomenon that is slowly shifting!) BIPOC students are often put in a single affinity space, representing Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, and often multi-racial students, with great diversity in each subgroup. While less than ideal, the Global Majority group is often described as an opportunity to “step back,” “breath,” and “laugh,” and has been described as “a healing space.” White-identified students often report that the affinity spaces are understandably very uncomfortable as they explore the harm they have caused and continue to cause through microaggressions, ignorance, and a lack of attention and understanding of the ways that their socialization within white supremacy culture (Jones & Okun, 2001; Okun, 2021) and their white privilege and fragility show up in the work and in peer engagement. Yet, white-identified students have shared that having these spaces to dig in without the fear of harming others has been a necessary, if painful, part of moving further on their journey to aspiring anti-racist allies/accomplices. Another challenge involves assessing and monitoring white affinity spaces to ensure that participants stay focused on individual and collective white racial identity development (Helms, 1990) and accountability measures but not externalize issues of oppression to the institution or society, or “other white people,” as so often happens, where we defer to a “good white person” versus “bad white person” dichotomy or white savior complex and neoliberalism ideals. Instructors who identify as white are present in the white affinity group as coaches and models; however, white instructors have shared feelings of ambivalence around intruding into POC affinity groups.

Weekly journal prompts emphasize individual self-reflection and processing. They support growth, awareness, and examination of bias while committing to ending anti-Black racism.

Culminating the class, the Self-Awareness Synthesis Project (SASP) leaves the door open for participants to submit a final project summarizing how the PROP framework has inspired and expanded individual and group growth and understanding, leaving room for further evolvement. Group podcasts, self-portraits, poems, meditation, card games, photography montages, dance sequences, song lyrics, blogs, and more bring joy and celebration to every class.

Reflections over time

Students have always informally reported to peers, facilitators, and, since 2020, the Action Lab (an interdisciplinary student-driven lab for addressing anti-Black racism at CSSW) about their experience in the PROP class. In addition, and consistent with best practices, there is a built-in, annual process evaluation of the course. Feedback loops include yearly student and facilitator focus groups. These are led by student and faculty researchers who consistently provide input and analysis of student and facilitator experience in the classroom to identify missing course elements and strengthen the course’s responsiveness to students’ needs. This feedback is integrated into the following year’s syllabus and facilitator training sessions, ultimately informing PROP integration across the curriculum. Evaluations are carried out with PROP in mind, centering the views of Black students, as well as students with other historically marginalized identities, stepping away from the institution’s typical top-down approach, implementing new and creative forms of data collection and analysis, and always putting the oppressed before the oppressor (Freire, 2005).

Process evaluations

We share findings from two of the annual process evaluations: after year 1, Spring of 2018, when students and course conveners conducted a series of focus groups with students and facilitators to assess the initial implementation and impact, and last year, Spring of 2022, after year 5. Retroactive IRB review and approval of IRB exemption status was secured allowing the course evaluation data including focus group findings to be reported. Thematic analysis of open-ended responses in 2018 regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the course found that 1) students expressed not leaving with enough clinical practice skills, 2) there were too many readings in the course, and 3) the course still lacked “inclusivity” of identities and some forms of oppression outside of race and racism. It also found that facilitators’ skills greatly impacted participant experience: stronger facilitators were able to increase inclusivity and cohesion. In contrast, less experienced facilitators may have exacerbated feelings of lack of inclusivity. Consequently, in 2019, readings were reduced and sometimes replaced with video or audio assets, content on other marginalized identities was increased, and role plays attending to issues of anti-Black racism and anti-oppressive practice while strengthening clinical skills-building were included.

In the Spring of 2022, BIPOC and white students shared that harm was still being caused in PROP classrooms. The evaluation targeted an exploration of these concerns. Fourteen students and eight facilitators participated in five focus groups: one intergroup (BIPOC and white) focus group of facilitators and four racial affinity focus groups (two BIPOC focus groups and two white focus groups). Of the fourteen students, seven identified as white, two as Black, two as AAPI, one as Latinx, and one as mixed race. Student researchers conducted a thematic analysis. In addition, a survey was sent out through the student union to the entire student body. A total of 58 students responded. Combined findings were shared with the school’s Curriculum Committee to generalize the concerns BIPOC students shared to other areas of the school’s broader curriculum and invite school-wide dialogue about them.

Central themes that emerged included 1) a need to center BIPOC students’ needs (i.e., including readings on Black joy, cross-cultural solidarity building, reducing harm and retraumatization of students of color in the classroom), 2) facilitation skill training in dialoguing across difference, 3) co-facilitation as a teaching modality, and 4) the imbalance of class racial demographics leading to lack of inclusivity, solidarity, and alliance. Harm caused to BIPOC students during discussions remains a perennial concern throughout the emergence of the course and one that continues to require keen attention (Mills, 2020).

As a result of the 2022 evaluation, material was added to the syllabus on Black Joy and Afrofuturism (Strong & Chaplin, 2019) to reflect the importance of “freedom dreaming” (Kelley, 2002, 2022; Love, 2019). Exercises and assignments were crafted through a restorative, trauma/PROP-informed lens, focusing on the needs of BIPOC students. Readings have also changed to address the experiences of Asian and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), and international students, disability justice, gender and sexuality inclusion, and anti-Semitism. During the summer of 2022, facilitators participated in a two-day intensive workshop on managing intergroup racial conversations and teaching anti-racist social work practice. Facilitators were coached to hold space for BIPOC participants to experience a sense of belonging, and less burden to educate, which mitigates racialized trauma (Hardy, 2022) and increases a sense of humanity. These findings lead to the addition of generative and celebratory readings and music on Black liberation and joy, such as those described earlier in the Setting the Tone section of this manuscript.

One of the main suggested changes that would benefit the course is co-facilitation. Since the course’s inception, the PROP Collective has advocated for co-facilitators; however, the institution feels it is not financially feasible. Co-facilitation would allow for an even richer discussion and remove some of the burdens of the single facilitator, especially when that facilitator is a person of color (Echavarria & Williams, 2022). Co-facilitation also provides an opportunity for deeper learning across identities, “co-facilitators can support and challenge participants from their own identities groups empathically and, at the same time, model for participants ways of connecting across social boundaries” (Nagda & Maxwell, 2011).

Institutional evaluation

From 2017–2019 as part of the re-accreditation process, CSSW incorporated student assessment of course learning outcomes for all courses. To follow are a short list of the PROP course’s learning outcomes with the percentage endorsement from over 300 students each Fall semester from 2017–2019: The course “describes anti-Black racism and its impact on all systems” (90, 92, 95%), “increases self-awareness and use of self in all facets of an anti-oppressive social work practice” (86, 92, 95%),” “analyzes systems of oppression in both historical and contemporary manifestations” (86, 88, 95%) and “engages others individuals, organizations, and systems in a constructive and deconstructive dialogue about forms of oppression, discrimination, and prejudice” (79, 88, 90%). We believe these increasing scores demonstrate improvements in overall learning outcomes for our students, but a more formal outcome assessment is needed.

PROP suffusion

Developing and implementing the course is one of many achievements in response to the Demands movement, but suffusing a PROP framework across the school was another hurdle. Course convenors were asked to work with faculty, students, and staff to intentionally “suffuse” PROP into all course syllabi. It was clear that changing syllabi, course objectives, readings, and assignments alone will not achieve suffusion of PROP principles or spirit. We have been attempting to shift and change the culture of our community and institution, which includes increasing the knowledge and skills of faculty, administration, and students. Not only should our classrooms reflect critical race theory (Bell, 1970; Crenshaw, 2011; Du Bois, 1908) and challenging dialogs (Hardy, 2016; Kang & O’Neill, 2018), but indeed, our course convening meetings, our faculty, committee and administrative meetings, our policy level decision making, our communications, and more are required to reflect these changes to transform the curriculum. This commitment was, is, and will remain a considerable challenge. It requires accepting discomfort, critical dialogues and conversations, and disagreement. We must learn what harm reduction, accountability, and transformative justice means (Brown, 2021). It requires us to engage and not avoid conflict. Many of these elements are inconsistent with what is “typical” in an academic setting. However, dismantling the predominantly white space of the academy requires it, so we persist.

Radical imagination and Afrofuturism

Imagining a course decolonizing social work as a profession took the enormous dreaming and creativity of a group of people who would no longer stand for the status quo. Through activism, community collaboration, steadfast belief, and radical imagination, the development of the PROP lens became a reality through the original creation of the course. Radical imagination (Kelley, 2022) considers imagining a powerful social and revolutionary force that acknowledges and pushes beyond white dominant structures and recreates a world of possibilities beyond the proverbial box. The ideals of Afrofuturism “reclaims theorizing about the future” (Nelson, 2000), center our collective desire to grow, expand and be limitless – to envision beyond the realities forced on us and ask what we can become if our minds and spirit were not constrained? What can an anti-racist institution be? What would the core fabric and ideals be? Who would be represented? Doing “the work” is nothing less than asking, answering, and responding to these questions.

A course centering on decolonization cannot be the only place that addresses white supremacy, anti-Black racism, and all forms of oppression in higher education, particularly at a PWI. A singular class is not the solution. This contribution offers a complex application of these years of activism and development toward decolonizing social work. We want to take this momentum and see a way forward that dismantles and reforms social work as a profession through how we teach social work. We want to radically reimagine social work as a catalyst of systemic change and institutional transformation catalyst. White supremacy is at the foundation of everything, including the legacy of social work. Decolonizing the Foundations course creates the basis for change, a framework for analyzing this truth. Rewriting our competencies across all curricula and uprooting anti-Black racism and white supremacy culture in social work prepares all of us to embody and live liberatory practices. We must include Black joy, celebrations, cross-racial healing, coalition building, and solidarity building to be an integral part of our course teachings and our social work practice.

Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within. -Ruha Benjamin

Acknowledgments

We honor Dr. Ovita F. Williams, who graciously led the process of developing this text and who has been essential in sustaining decolonization efforts at the Columbia University School of Social Work and beyond.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00377317.2023.2266026