The storming of Washington, DC: the city of love against the city of white supremacy

On January 6, 2021, supporters of then-President Donald Trump attended a “Stop the Steal” rally hosted by the former President and his allies. They proceeded to march to the U.S. Capitol, with some illegally entering the building while the U.S. Congress was in session to certify the electoral college victory of President-elect Joe Biden (Swasey et al., 2021). This insurrection left 5 dead and over 140 officers injured (Wise, 2021). On the same day, Vice President Mike Pence said:

The Capitol is secured and the people’s work continues. We condemn the violence that took place here in the strongest possible terms. We grieve the loss of life in these hallowed halls, as well as the injuries suffered by those who defended our Capitol today … And as we reconvene in this chamber, the world will again witness the resilience and strength of our democracy, for even in the wake of unprecedented violence and vandalism at this Capitol, the elected representatives of the people of the United States have assembled again on the very same day to support and defend the constitution of the United States. (Pence, 2021)

The U.S. House of Representatives moved quickly to impeach then President Trump, but the second impeachment trial in the Senate ended with a 57–43 acquittal, with some senators arguing that it was unconstitutional to convict a president after he leaves office (Levine & Gambino, 2021). Trump’s defense team primarily focused on the argument that his words to “fight like hell” (Levine & Gambino, 2021, para. 9) were constitutionally protected and cited as precedent a case filed against former civil rights veteran Julian Bond (Shirek, 2021).

It should be no surprise that those who participated in the Capitol riot have a fealty to former President Trump as a figurehead representing their angst and ideals. Indeed, the Capitol Dome contains a fresco “Apotheosis of Washington” as well as commemorations of the Roman Dictator Cincinnatus (Ahrens, 1973). We are reminded in these paintings that the United States is not a democracy, but a republic and the ruling class will cling to power through dictatorship if necessary. Congress unveiled this painting in 1866 as part of the reopening of the second dome after the Civil War (Ahrens, 1973, p. 201). It was the first full year of emancipation, but also the year Johnson ordered the return of confiscated land back to plantation owners, hence breaking the Federal government’s promise to give land to former enslaved people (Baradaran, 2017). While the 15th amendment opened up elections for Black men, it also launched a reaction of white supremacy built on stealing elections with Jim Crow laws, enforcing Jim Crow with terrorism from the Ku Klux Klan, and the abandonment of Black people by northern liberals in the interest of preserving the union (Baradaran, 2017). In other words, Cincinnatus. How should social work respond to a world reenacting Cincinnatus in the form of white supremacy? The response must include an analysis of and response to white supremacy.

As editors of the Journal of Community Practice, we also condemn this insurrection as well as the conditions of white supremacy that made it possible. We also condemn any actual or implied support of these actions by social workers. In this editorial, we reflect on how this insurrection came to transpire within the context of white supremacy. Additionally, we juxtapose this against any role that social work might play both dismantling and being complicit with white supremacy. Finally, we examine the work of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars to look for leadership in the wisdom they provide on how to move forward at this time of deep social and political division. Indeed, community social worker Yusef Shakur writes, “Racism and white supremacy is the greatest threat to humanity and we all have an obligation to fight against it” (Shakur, 2013, p. 353).

White supremacy as colonial occupation and cultural appropriation

Then after a time, your criminal acts will fade into respect-

ability and your children and their children and their children

can sit on those possessions, not as descendants of murders

and thieves … which they are … but as upstanding and righteous

citizens.

That is of course if all those dark people forget …

–Pamela Brown Goodacre (2013, p. 32) from “Flipping the Script: A Letter to the Editor on the Florida Riots”

The hundreds of individuals captured by surveillance cameras and social media have become the new faces of white supremacy in the United States. As much as some would like to argue that the mob was comprised of folks who were not reflective of the larger society, the events of January 6 were reflective of what has become commonplace within modern white supremacy. Among the insurrectionists are current and former police officers and military personnel, politicians, business owners, laborers, and the unemployed (Ruby & Pape, 2021). Many became regular participants at rallies held in support of former President Trump throughout his presidency. Since the November elections, these rallies shifted to increasingly vitriolic gatherings fueled by massive disinformation campaigns about election fraud (Zaru, 2021).

For example, photos of Jacob Chansley, a White man known as “Q Shaman” depicting him wearing a Viking hat, Carhartt overalls, and Nordic tattoos on his bare chest including the Knot of the Slain, Tree of Life, and Thor’s Hammer (Kelly, 2021a) underscore how individuals in extremist movements are appropriating an array of cultural symbols. These symbols so blatantly on display in photographs of Q Shaman and others involved in the insurrection at the Capitol also are part of Fascist Death Metal and other elements of far right youth culture (Kelly, 2021b). Cultural appropriation is a structural process that involves profiting from someone else’s culture while simultaneously reflecting an act of cultural erasure and assimilation (Ziff & Rao, 1997). One archetypical example is the use of the swastika by the Third Reich. In this act, an Indigenous symbol of good luck is turned inward on itself to be a sign of exclusionary benefits, occupation, and racialized purity. The symbols adorning the chest of Q Shaman also constitute a form of appropriation. This assault on the Capitol is no less significant than the Sack of Rome in the year 410 by the Goths (Jenson, 2007).

Social work as a response to white supremacy, social work as complicit

Social work and social workers have an obligation to provide a counter-response to the white supremacy and cultural appropriation witnessed on January 6. Globally, members of the profession share codes of ethics that embrace social justice, human rights, and respect for Indigenous wisdom (International Federation of Social Workers et al., 2012). Part of this respect is to avoid cultural appropriation. The global agenda for social work acknowledges the need to respond to violence resulting from inequality and environmental change. Social workers are expected to respond to and prevent violence, not participate in it. Harry Specht (1969), writing in response to activities by student protests in the 1960s, argued that social work authority comes from education, technical expertise, and ultimately social welfare intuitions aligned with state power. Specht also questioned the effectiveness of violent disruption, pointing out that power shifts the conversation from the policy positions expressed by the movement to violent tactics – a pattern well understood by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Although Specht was writing about the left, we can see how this could apply to the right as well. Specht recommended reform within our social institutions, warning that democratic institutions are essential to social work and without democracy, there is no profession.

There is some historical evidence that non-democratic governments would have no need for social work. For example, China abolished social work as a profession in 1949 because the Communist Party believed that revolution made it unnecessary (Healy & Thomas, 2020). Fascist and apartheid governments, on the other hand, embraced social work because the skills social workers possessed were quite applicable to their genocidal and inequality-generating ends. Nazi Germany used social workers to assess client fitness for society, sterilizing or shipping anyone identified as undesirable to concentration camps (Healy & Thomas, 2020). Capitalizing on populist sentiments, both fascist Italy and apartheid South Africa developed social work training programs to address the problems of poor Whites – indeed Apartheid Prime Minister Verwoerd rose to fame as a social work educator (Healy & Thomas, 2020). Unfortunately, these episodes are not limited to history. Even today, some social workers in Italy embrace right-wing populism intertwined with traditional family values, anger toward migrants, and technocratic neutrality (Fazzi & Nothdurfter, 2020). This should be no surprise; after all, social work and right-wing populism share two common values: a skepticism of globalization and a robust welfare state.

Why has there been such a resurgence of right-wing populism? In his classic work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich (1980) argued that fascism arose as part of a process of urbanization where conservative, rural dwellers move to the city to join the industrial labor force and find themselves lost. However, the lack of leadership from the social democratic left fails to provide an outlet for their anger. The fascist leader uses mass mobilization rhetoric to appeal to emotion by making vague promises of a better future under strong leadership. The leader appeals to agrarian roots in the soil as well as the mythology of racial purity that the state should enforce. In Nazi Germany, for example, Hitler issued an edict that forbade the sale of farmland; such lands could only be inherited in an attempt to preserve the fatherland. However, Reich believed that it was a mass psychology rather than the material conditions stratified by class that allows fascism to take root by providing a national father figure that agrarian and unskilled industrial workers could identify with and follow. The skilled workers and professionals, on the other hand, identify with their skills and thus are not mobilized in this way, but can be controlled through terror. Despite promises to workers that he would protect their rights, Hitler concurrently promised foreign capital investors that their money and investments would be safe from takeovers by labor or communists. According to Reich, the populist knows – perhaps that their fascist leadership really will not protect workers’ rights, but the seduction of anger against outsiders and undesirables trumps any rational calculation of personal benefit. Thus, they have a right to Bread and Circus not as a matter of human rights, but by pure blood and loyalty to the leader.

While Reich wrote from the left, Hayek (2001) penned the anti-fascist The Road to Serfdom in defense of liberalism, warning of strong man politics but also condemning the left. What would we find out about social workers in the United States if we were to ask? Would we find any posting their opinions on Parler or other similar social media sites? Would we see social workers captured in photos of the Capitol insurrection?

As noted earlier, Harry Specht (1969) argued that violence had no place in social work (1969) because the profession derives its authority from the state. However, there is a considerable contradiction between the social control function of social work, a set of skills very desirable to fascists, and the social justice function of social work. Support of the Capitol insurrection by social workers is wrong because it is violent. Further, racism and white supremacist ideology is contrary to human rights and thus contrary to social work. An authentic social work response would be rooted in the struggle of Black, Indigenous, and people of color to decolonize the profession and society.

Dismantling white supremacy: the beloved community as growing souls

In order to craft a social work response, it is critical to understand white supremacy from the perspective of those potentially most harmed by it. In particular, W.E.B. Du Bois (2003) writes as a scholar well versed in the language and ideas of Whites. He points out that prior to the 19th century, Europeans regarded skin color as just that; it was not until more recently when whiteness became “the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” (Du Bois, 2003, p. 44). He argued that the European conquests amounted to little more than murder, rape, and plunder and that European culture and science is built on this violence. For Du Bois (2003), white supremacy is like Prometheus, the Greek god of fire made captive to his nephew Zeus. In the original myth, Zeus sends an eagle to eat Prometheus’ entrails, but in Du Bois (2003), Prometheus eats his own entrails each time the Black man asserts himself. In other words, Du Bois viewed white supremacy as an inward turning of the soul that inevitably leads to self-destruction. The concept of humanity turned inward originates from the work of Black African philosopher Augustine (Jenson, 2007, p. 7). In contrast, the Civil Rights movement and successor movements grow souls out toward a beloved community.

The 1960s saw a series of challenges to white supremacy after years of organizing against it. Piven and Cloward (1979) argued that despite the formal end of enslavement in the mid-1800s, the plantation economy of the South consolidated white power through the Democratic party and regular acts of terror and lynching by working-class Whites. However, industry shifts in the early 20th century led to a mechanization of farms that provided an opportunity for civil rights organizing in cities. In particular, the Montgomery Bus Boycott organized in part by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks in 1955 constituted one of the first major movement victories (Piven & Cloward, 1979, p. 208). The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) affiliated movements emerged with two complementary tactics, one wing organized direct action marches and sit-in strikes that sought to pit the local establishment in direct conflict with the Federal government, and the other a voter mobilization project much needed by the Kennedy administration (Piven & Cloward, 1979, p. 231). After the bombing of a Birmingham church by white terrorists and the assassination of President Kennedy, President Johnson put his weight behind the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Piven & Cloward, 1979, p. 245). In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. turned his attention to the Vietnam War and urban inequality by making connections between racism, materialism, and war (G. L. Boggs & Kurashige, 2012, p. 74). King also met with youth involved in a civil uprising in Watts, which led him to write more about urban inequality (G. L. Boggs & Kurashige, 2012). Labor and Black power activist James Boggs also wrote about this so-called urban crisis in his criticism of the Kerner Report, the official recommendations to the US Government on how to address urban inequality and racism:

As long as the economic system of expansion by all means necessary (i.e., capitalism) and the philosophy corresponding to this system (i.e., materialism, individualism, and opportunism), continue to exist, the country will still continue to produce a working class that is racist, i.e., determined to maintain its economic and social mobility at the expense of Blacks. (J. Boggs, 1970, pp. 159–160)

Since the 1960s, rather than heed the tepid recommendations of the Kerner report, the Federal government dismantled the welfare state program by program which led to the halt of efforts promoting desegregation and racial equity (Abramovitz & Smith, 2020). Once again, social workers and community practitioners are called to continue this struggle against white supremacy.

South Africa provides some examples of how social work can be part of the solution to end white supremacy. Although apartheid social work existed in South Africa, there also was resistance led by Black social workers, such as Kuzwayo and Winnie Mandela (Healy & Thomas, 2020). Kuzwayo left teaching high school for social work after the apartheid government institutionalized a system of inferior education for Black South Africans. Although she did not have the ability to change apartheid from the inside, Kuzwayo combined her work with the YWCA with efforts initiated by the African National Congress. After decades of struggle and time spent in prison, she became a member of parliament (Healy & Thomas, 2020). Social Workers who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color can stand with this international tradition to decolonize the profession and broader society.

A possible solution may be found in the writings of the radical Black power activist, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., with his vision of a beloved community (G. L. Boggs & Kurashige, 2012). King’s beloved community was based on the Greek word for love, agape, the kind of love needed to create and sustain human relationships in the community. Indeed, this vision of the beloved community echoes Augustine, who writes “For if the will had remained steadfast in the love of that higher and changeless good by which it was illumined to intelligence and kindled into love, it would not have turned away to find satisfaction in itself, and so become frigid and benighted” (Augustine, 2014, p. 26). James and Grace Lee Boggs initially dismissed King as naive and sentimental and worked more extensively with Malcolm X. However, after a few decades of reflection, she found common ground in King’s work, noting that James Boggs also had believed that love for people and a place and that we had to love our country enough to change it. Grace Lee Boggs asks, “Is it possible that our relationships with one another today, not only inter- but intraracially, would be more harmonious if we had discovered how to blend Malcolm’s militancy with King’s vision of the beloved community?” (G. L. Boggs & Kurashige, 2012, p. 85).

To live this vision, the Boggses created Detroit Summer, a youth program that combined popular education, service-learning, the arts, and community development. She also highlighted the work of Yusef Shakur who after returning from incarceration became a Head Start teacher and raised money to make sure that every child could have a backpack with books (G. L. Boggs & Kurashige, 2012; Shakur, 2013). While in the process of becoming a social worker, Yusef Shakur became co-Director of Programs at the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion (Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion, 2020). Intergroup dialogue is one tool in social work’s toolkit to achieve this vision of the beloved community (Gutiérrez et al., 2005). This organization is dedicated to social justice and combating bias using methods such as intergroup dialogue, creating spaces where people with different identities to have respectful conversations across differences. In another example, the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond intentionally train White anti-racist organizers because “the balance of power lies with the privileged but the balance of knowledge rests with the oppressed” (Cushing et al., 2010, p. 4). Part of this process is for White organizers to be accountable to people of color, to act in solidarity with communities of color, and to bring the work to spaces that are not available to people of color.

Social workers need not only work in the community but address white supremacy in the workplace and schools of social work. Alfarano (2021) offers suggestions for social work to address white privilege in the workplace that includes advocating for policy change, making the profession more inclusive, and being open to uncomfortable conversations about structural racism. For instance, the Boston College School of Social Work, under the leadership of Dean Gautam N. Yadama, has responded as an institution by dismantling white supremacy in social work as part of their Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Initiative (Kornwitz, 2020). As part of their Latinx Leadership Initiative, they offer MSW students a dedicated Field of Practice in Latinx Communities. Courses are offered in Spanish and the initiative has produced 130 graduates to date (Boston College School of Social Work, 2021b). This year, they launched a Black Leadership Initiative with 15 students that includes an Afrocentric curriculum (Boston College School of Social Work, 2021a).

Initiatives such as these are critical for higher education, because faculty may reinforce white supremacist attitudes and behaviors if they invalidate microaggressions, avoid conversations about white privilege, fail to support faculty and students of color, or identify with a social justice mission without taking steps to bend the institution toward justice (Dutt-Ballerstadt, 2018). A response to longstanding health disparities underscored by the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular, has led to requirements for implicit bias training in some states (Slootmaker, 2020). While social workers may have an opportunity to conduct this training, we likely need to reflect deeply upon how we have internalized white supremacy in our professional and personal lives. To achieve this vision requires social workers to acknowledge privilege and their use of power.

White social workers also must remember that the actions of the Black power movement in the United States and the Anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa involved literally transferring power from Whites to Blacks through the ballot box. With this change in administration in the United States also comes changes in policy to advance human rights and promote social, economic, and environmental justice. Grace Lee Boggs noted that the songs of the Civil Rights movement “helped grow the souls of their supporters all over the world” (G. L. Boggs & Kurashige, 2012, p. 40). If white supremacy is the inward-turned soul of cultural appropriation, to overcome it social workers must become organizers of the beloved community and bend the arc of history toward social justice.