Abstract
The presence of racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse people continues to be a thorn in the side of social work theory, research, and practice. Social work’s struggle with culture is at times painfully clear, especially when we examine the profession’s conceptualization of culture throughout its history. Culture has been positioned as a problem, solution, and strength and understood through structures that are fundamentally biased (Abrams & Moio, 2009).
This conceptualization of culture is influenced by the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which it is situated. For instance, in the 19th century, orphan asylums and orphan trains were early child welfare solutions that also managed the anti-American nature of immigrant children (who largely were not Anglo Saxon or Protestant; Nelson, 2003). Charles Loring Brace, director of the Children’s Aid Society (CAS), intervened in a social problem with the best intention by “emigrating” poor children out of eastern cities, much to the displeasure of the Catholic Church, which believed that this was a process that converted Catholic children to Protestantism (Cook, 1995). CAS used descriptions of children that elicited pity or fear as tools to garner support for its work (Cook, 1995). Still, CAS used the best technology available and, with the best intentions, attempted to save children to the best of its ability.
Even as we glance back with pride at the settlement house tradition, we must also recognize that the social context influenced this tradition. It was believed that the immigrant “other” inhibited the growth of the (American) community. In fact, the settlement house movement was in part a vehicle for the transmission of acculturation to “American” values (Iglehart & Becerra, 2011; Reisch, 2008). The individual’s problems were attributed to cultural backwardness. This perspective was reserved not just for immigrants but was applied to all those who were not part of the dominant culture, although the rhetoric was perhaps kinder to immigrants than to nonwhite residents (Iglehart & Becerra, 2011).
Ultimately, even as we trace social work education’s treatment of race, ethnicity, and culture, we see that it was not long ago that a basic understanding of cultural difference was rooted in and then transmitted to students through an essentialist curriculum (Abrams & Moio, 2009). Students learned about the culture of Asians on one day, for example, and Latinos on another. A critical analysis of power and structural oppression as it was related to underrepresented people was often absent for racial and ethnic groups. The curriculum of the late 1970s and early 1980s concretized a process of learning about difference that re-created learning about culture as a binary endeavor. In other words, culture and ethnicity were understood from the perspective of what Americans were not, since being American does not have to be defined and is just understood because of its position as the referent group. Park (2006) described this dynamic as “a valorization of one group [as] concomitant with the problematization of another … . The binaries that marked distinctions of desirability and undesirability were not stable indicators. They were instead, tractable devices which could be used to denigrate or glorify any group” (pp. 174–175). This was the fundamental belief system from which the discourse on early immigrants and those representing cultures other than Anglo Saxon Protestants was constructed and has been threaded through the work of modern social work.
As social work has engaged in its construction, deconstruction, and then reconstruction of its understanding of culture as a construct and, somewhat lamely, inserted concepts of structural oppression (Curry-Stevens, Lee, Datta, Hill, & Edwards, 2008), it has simultaneously been fulfilling its mandate to intervene in social ills and developing a body of knowledge on the basis of research. It is therefore not a surprise that much of our knowledge base is tainted by hegemony, although benevolent in nature.
Consequently, people who have been historically underrepresented and marginalized are understood not only apart from structural oppression, but through a lens that is colored with structural power imbalances and then are defined by observances of clinical populations as the markers of the manifestation of normative cultural values (Shdaimah, 2009). So, for instance, scholarship that refers to parenting in Latino families is by and large based on Latino families who have accessed social services because of their struggles and troubles (often with parenting; Cabrera & Bradley, 2012). Cultural values, such as familism and machismo, are then defined, often under the disguise of nonbiased evidence, with troubling overlays of individualistic oriented values. Familism is then described as the vehicle by which Latino families prohibit the advancement of their family members beyond the family norm. Machismo is defined as Latino male aggression and sexist domination over women (as if it does not occur or have a unique word to encapsulate this phenomenon within the dominant cultural paradigm). The resulting effect is both that families who are struggling and troubled are being intervened with using hegemonic tools that are veiled in the cloak of objectivity and science developed with the best intentions.
So, how do we move forward, and what are our responsibilities as social work scholars and educators? First, we must begin to support and encourage social work scholarship that examines culture and its manifestations in normative populations and be open to having the inherent bias revealed to us as social work scholars. Second, we have an obligation to be the voice of accountability and challenge the assumptions that research is neutral and not based on inherent bias, regardless of the type of research method. Third, we must provide tools for students to understand how to critically evaluate interventions for the social structural inequalities that are inherent in our institutions and begin to shift the focus from theories and constructs that apply individualist paradigms to collectivist populations. Social work is not new at taking on profound, systemic bias or admittedly are we necessarily proficient in our efforts. Nonetheless, as a profession, we have a history of opening the dialogue and being the gentle consciousness to move toward a more equitable future.