Teaching racial microaggressions: implications of critical race hypos for social work praxis

ABSTRACT

This article provides a conceptual understanding of racial microaggressions from a critical race theoretical (CRT) perspective, as relevant to the field of Social Work. To do this, we utilize Critical Race Hypos, hypothetical pedagogical tools developed from existing literature on racial microaggressions, and meant to engage critical dialogue on everyday racism in the lives of People of Color. We explain the pedagogical utility of Critical Race Hypos for engaging discussions about racial microaggressions in social work training. This article provides three Critical Race Hypos that focus on common questions about racial microaggressions set within the context of a social work graduate program classroom. The article concludes with implications of these hypos for social work theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical race theory
• racial microaggressions
• pedagogy
• praxis

Notes

1. For a more detailed description of these tenets, see Solorzano (1997). We also believe that social work has and will adopt additional tenets specific to the field (see Razack & Jeffery, 2002).

2. For over a decade, the field of Social Work has engaged with CRT in the training of social workers to better serve diverse communities by interrogating, critiquing, and extending the concepts of cultural competence, cultural sensitivity, multiculturalism, diversity, racial disparities, and racial inequalities. See, for example, the work Kolivoski, Weaver, and Constance-Huggins (2014) and Quinn and Grumbach (2015) who discuss some of these developments in social work scholarship.

3. For a “Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers,” see National Association of Social Workers (2008).

4. Bell (2008a, 2008b) also acknowledged the influence of Paulo Freire on his pedagogical strategies used in law classrooms, such as the racial hypos described here.

5. Derrick Bell’s use of racial hypos in the classroom did not include responses. Rather, the responses to and questions about Bell’s hypos were prompted by his law students. In our critical race hypos, we provide responses and imbed questions that commonly emerge in discussions about race, racism, and racial microaggressions to better illustrate the pedagogical implications of the hypo. We also call for additional responses beyond the ones we propose.

6. See Project Implicit, available at http://www.projectimplicit.net/index.html.

7. We intentionally state that “Communities of Color” (non-white racial groups) have never benefitted from white supremacy. Thus, we do not claim that individual People of Color have never benefitted from white supremacy. Manning Marable (2002) uses the term “race traitors” to describe individual People of Color who have used their positions of power to undermine the conditions of Communities of Color and thwart progress toward racial justice.

8. We use the term “arsenal of responses” based upon the ongoing discussions that have taken place for over 20 years in Dr. Solorzano’s graduate student seminar, Research Apprenticeship Course (RAC) in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In these discussions, generations of young scholars have theorized an “arsenal” of strategies to counter and challenge racism in research, teaching, and everyday interactions.

9. See Freire (1970).

10. See Gildersleeve et al., (2011).

11. Thank you so much Dr. Lara.

12. Critical Race Hypos could also be used to examine other types of microaggressions, including gender microaggressions, racist nativist microaggressions, and sexual orientation microaggressions.