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SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE BEHAVIORS

ANTI-RACIST AND ANTI-OPPRESSIVE SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE AT ALL LEVELS

Am I becoming a competent human when it comes to demonstrating anti-racist and anti-oppressive social work practice from working with individuals to working at policy levels?

I have learned over the past few years, as I have attended graduate school toward earning my MSW, that it is not sufficient to say and believe I am anti-racist and anti-oppressive. My actions must reflect these statements and beliefs. We are each at different places on our lived journeys and we each have had and will continue to have different lived experiences. Choosing this path of higher education is a huge personal step reflecting action I am taking in becoming competent as a human being and budding social worker, though for clarity, and to uphold the NASW Code of Ethics (National Association of Social Workers (NASW), 2021), it is important that I tell you I do not yet have my MSW degree and I am not yet a licensed social worker.

If you had known me when I was young, you would have known someone who was so fearful and anxious that she stopped participating in life at far too young an age. It was not until decades later that this little girl began to truly see some of the most horrific realities in our world. Before this time, I would have continued to kind of float through life realizing that individuals were often unaccepting and intolerant of those who were different than they were. And I accepted this because I was strongly influenced by a parental figure that this was normative. Sadly, in my demographic, it was. I did not realize that our society created racism and oppression. Now that I see this is true, and having much more education, I understand that society can also create anti-racism and anti-oppression and that each of us have responsibilities to act toward creating them. I am working diligently to live and work as an individual in our society who takes action against racism and oppression.

I am farther out of my comfort zone than I ever have been or ever believed I would be. I appreciate diversity, equity, and inclusion in practice and I take opportunities to engage with others on these topics whether with individuals, families, groups, organizations, or at the community, research, and policy levels.

I love to hear of the lived experiences of others and am fascinated by their different cultures, ethnicities, and religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. Understanding we are each different, unique, diverse, whatever word you want to use, is not enough. We need to have conversations with each other about how we are different and explore those uncomfortable spaces looking for meaning and connection. I do have those conversations with individuals and I often ask, when there is a need expressed, how I can help.

For example, almost three years ago, I met a man from Kenya where I work. His accent was and still is thick and it can be difficult to understand him. I asked him often about Kenya and he told me about his life and culture there. He thanked me for asking about his culture and said that I was the only person who had. He had moved himself, his wife, and his baby daughter just a few months prior and the family was living with other family members near where I live. We had become friends. We were talking one cold day before work began. There had been ice on the ground. My coworker did not have a car. Uber would not pick him up due to the ice and he had to miss a day of work. When I learned that he had been taking Uber to work each day, I had an idea that it was heavily impacting his weekly pay. In that moment, realizing that this man had a family to support and only a small amount of money coming in each week, I knew I wanted to help, and I saw a way to do it. I took that opportunity and offered to begin picking him up for work each day so he could save that money for building a life here with his family. He was grateful and we are still good friends. He has been promoted to Supervisor and now has his own apartment and car. Most of that is due to his hard work and support from his family both here and in Kenya. Though I believed my actions were minor, they were not minor to him and his family.

During this time, another supervisor, also from a foreign country, approached me and asked, “Do you really bring Tim* to work every day?” I told them I did. They said, “Why do you do that?” and then proceeded to say why they wouldn’t do it and that no one did that for them when they moved to this country. I said, “It was the right thing to do. It was an opportunity to help someone and it was something I was able to do fairly easily while making a big difference in his life.” I also remember thinking to myself, “I would have helped you as well.” Now this doesn’t translate into social work practice per se because I am not in practice yet. I offer it as an example of the helping professional in me who is alive, with a beating heart ready to step out and make that difference with others.

In my generalist internship placement, I worked with the daughter of a hospice patient. She was very down on herself, feeling like if she had only not done some things and had done others, maybe her family’s life would be better. She was feeling a lot of guilt. I sat with her in that space. There were so many other emotions she was feeling and she continued to berate herself. It was clear to me that she loved her mother. At one point she made a comment about herself and how she must appear in the eyes of others. I reflected back to her what I thought I had heard her say and she confirmed I had heard her correctly. I then told her that what I saw was a daughter who loved her mother. She expressed such gratitude to me through her tears, and we continued to talk and work together on her goal that day.

In my clinical internship, I co-facilitated a small journaling group of elementary school students who had been referred by their school counselor. These kids were all amazing and each could benefit from learning to self-reflect and write about their experiences and feelings. One of them in particular had lost her father to death fairly recently and was having a very difficult time navigating changed family life.

What is true of these experiences is that I saw and see each of these people as experts in their own lives. They are each in different places in their lives and they each have different and unique lived experiences. Each of the people I mentioned have different cultural backgrounds. I realize that I and my lived experiences are also different and unique. I have learned to be self-aware in working with others, and to value their intersectionality as well as my own. I try to learn as much as I can about the whole person or people I work with and to do research when I am presented with an aspect of humanity in them with which I am unfamiliar. The more informed with scholarly information surrounding identities and intersectionality of my clients, the more holistically I will be empowered to be a true helping professional to them.

Moving forward on my professional journey, I am excited to have the opportunities I know I will have to engage with humanity, working to challenge and remove barriers wherever they may exist.

*A fictitious name

References

National Association of Social Workers  (NASW). (2021). National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics.  https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English