Naming White Supremacy in the Social Work Curriculum

On April 27, 2018, in Montgomery, AL, it became clear to me that I needed to sharpen my view of racism. The day before, along with several thousand people, I had attended a summit hosted by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) and their founding director, Bryan Stevenson. The summit included national leaders who fight in the same areas as EJI—to end mass incarceration, secure legal reforms, provide legal representation to those who would go without, and do something that sounds more nebulous: “change the narrative about race.”

More than a conference, the summit was a celebration of the opening of the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the victims of racial terror, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and its companion, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. By the end of the day on April 27, I knew that I needed to change how I narrate race. No longer was it enough for me to use words that I am comfortable with, like “oppression” and “privilege.” I needed to include the more uncomfortable phrase: “white supremacy.”

In this in brief, I argue that social work must do the same. First, I set the context by offering a brief description of my experience. I then look at what is included in the phrase “white supremacy” that is unique and explore the role of memory, truth telling, and accountability as part of a way forward.

April 27, 2018

I began my day at the Memorial for Peace and Justice. Here, highly evocative representational art pieces documenting racial terror, from the transatlantic slave trade to police violence, surround the centerpiece of the memorial, a rectangular pavilion. The pavilion contains 800 coffin-shaped steel columns that when weathered will look bloodstained. Together, the columns hold the names of 4,400 people lynched. While visually striking, the memorial is much more—it is a conceptual installation that “contextualize[s] racial terror” (EJI, n.d.).

The pavilion is open and surrounded by corridors that are walkways. The visitor enters into first corridor to find rows of columns mounted to the floor. Their immobility is striking. A right-hand turn takes the visitor to the next corridor. Here, the columns are mounted from the ceiling and lowered to about eye level by a metal rod. As one walks down the corridor, the floor descends and the columns begin to rise. In the next corridor, the walls are flanked by plaques with short narratives about the “causes” of murders. One plaque reads, “Mary Turner was lynched, with her unborn child, at Folsom Bridge at the Brooks-Lowndes County line in Georgia in 1918 for complaining about the recent lynching of her husband, Hayes Turner” (National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, AL). As I read the plaques, there came a moment when I recognized my positionality relative to the columns. Once again, they were level with each other, but this time, mounted above my head. I had become one of the inhuman spectators found in the old photographs of public lynchings. Outside the pavilion, a path leads to its center. Standing in the center, I was surrounded by columns with the victims’ names facing me. Stevenson, who conceptualized the project with EJI staff, noted that it is here you “might feel judged yourself” (Robertson, 2018, April 25).

I then walked to EJI’s Legacy Museum. The museum illustrates the continuum between slavery and mass incarceration as solid, clear, and irrefutable and one that is linked, created, nurtured, and maintained by white supremacy. Alexander (2012) warned in her talk at the summit and in her landmark book, The New Jim Crow: Colorblindness in the Time of Mass Incarceration, that if we do not address racism there will always be a new Jim Crow. By the time I exited the museum, this had a larger meaning for me.

Naming White Supremacy

Beyond my university classes, I teach in a prison and have worked for the defense on a number of death penalty cases. My complicity in mass incarceration should be somewhat mitigated. But what I have not done is challenge the direction of my white gaze and look hard at the hegemonic and destructive qualities of whiteness, nor do I often call them out publicly as white supremacy. I have not, as Stevenson explains, sought to confront the “narrative of racial difference that is the ideology of white supremacy” (Stevenson, 2018, April 27).

In Montgomery, I listened to the ease with which scholars, lawyers, and activists use the phrase white supremacy. I thought about how white supremacy is built on a narrative of difference, hegemonic views, terrorism, whiteness, white logics, and knowledge production, and how this configuring is a bit different than words that are commonly used in social work such as “institutional racism,” “privilege,” and “oppression.” The following illustrates these differences and explores how white supremacy complements the individual terms while noting its unique meaning and potential for sharpening our discussions.

As I thought about institutional racism and its use in the policy texts I have reviewed for classes, I also thought of the scholarship of Spade (2015) regarding violence and the limits of law. In social work, institutional racism is often aligned with system change, and yet the nature of the system to be changed is often fragmented and solutions are instrumental (Payne, 2005). For example, if as a nation we chose to, we could stop targeting African Americans and people of color in the criminal justice system through legal and policy reform as well as new initiatives such as restorative justice. However, as Alexander (2012) and Spade (2015) point out, instrumental change will only affect the ways in which nonwhite bodies are terrorized and enslaved; it will not change the urge for dominance and the context that allows it.

Leonardo (2004) explains the difference between white privilege and white supremacy by stating that white privilege is a product of white supremacy, as it is white supremacy that leads to white privilege. Discussion of white privilege leads to the idea of remediation, so that the problem is solved when no one group has access to unearned privileges; however, once again, the process of domination may still exist and play out in other ways. While white privilege is unearned and happens without individual consent, the structures that give rise to the privilege and maintain it are not inherent in social work’s discussions.

Frye’s (1983) essay Oppression set the stage for discussion of the concept. She describes oppression as an “enclosing structure of forces and barriers which tends to the immobilization and reduction of a group or category of people” (p. 11). Young (1990) argues that a universal definition of oppression does not exist, but the experience occurs through organized tyranny or everyday “practices of a well-intentioned liberal society” (p. 41). Her discussion of oppression lends itself to an intersectional analysis. While oppression is an important concept, particularly because it supports an intersectional analysis, existing discussions of it are largely one-dimensional. For example, the subject tends to be oppressed people rather than analysis of the mechanisms of oppression. Frye’s language of “enclosing structure of forces and barriers” is vague, and the structures and forces are not explicated. A force or structure needs to be named and identified for it to be dismantled, as Lavoie (2012) argues that without naming, a phenomenon becomes invisible.

In contrast, for Stevenson (2018, April 27), the great evil of American slavery is “the ideology that black people are not like white people.” Stevenson describes the United States as a postgenocidal country in which the colonial narrative of difference became a central justification of genocide of Native Americans. This narrative now exists as an ongoing practice that continues to shape racial, ethnic, and gender positionalities. It is not simply a set of past events but a living cultural matrix of values in which the other is not fully human. As Yancy (2018) explains, it is the system of white supremacy “that constituted white people according to the complex power relationships endemic to that system” (p. 71). Two important conditions that these power relationships hold—whiteness and white logic—are also scant in social work literature. These ideas need to be deconstructed so that their connection to white supremacy is clear, and in the academy, we must ask ourselves about our own involvement.

Changing Narratives

Casting a Critical Eye to Whiteness and White Logics

Yancy (2018) argues that white supremacy is supported by ideologies, knowledge, and institutions, which are all grounded in whiteness. Although these areas may be multiracial, white people’s dominance in them, as well as the historical, cultural, structural, and social context on which their logics are built, supports the accuracy of Yancy’s claim (Ahmed, 2007). Yancy (2018) describes whiteness as a transcendental norm.

To interrogate whiteness, one must begin by seeing the relationship between it and white hegemony, colonialism, white logic, and knowledge production. As Leonardo (2007) states, “Whiteness is nowhere since it is unmarked, and everywhere since it is the standard by which other groups are judged” (p. 63). Whiteness is a historical and social construct that dominates colonial settler societies like the United States. It is not unidimensional. Rather, the privilege it confers exacts a cost. Yancy reminds white people that “your comfort is linked to our pain and suffering” (p. 22).

White hegemony involves the idea that what is white is normal and everything else is other and less than. Adrienne Rich explained that whites “speak, imagine and think as if whiteness described the world” (quoted in Applebaum, 2008, p. 294). White logics are those that white people and institutions use when turning their gaze on people of color. Bonilla-Silva (2008) describes white logic “as the context in which White Supremacy has defined the techniques and process of reasoning about social facts. White logic assumes a historical posture that grants eternal objectivity to the view of elite Whites…” (p. 17).

As Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi (2008) book White Logic White Methods makes clear, the academy operates as a central location for these logics, and the findings from these logics and methods are used to define and prescribe solutions to the plight of the other. The academy also perpetuates a production of knowledge based on white logics. For example, Hinton (2016) in her book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America describes the role that academics and policy makers used during the War on Poverty to locate concerns about youth delinquency in the realm of “cultural pathology.” One way that this occurred is through the situating of delinquency as an urban issue rather than a suburban and rural one despite evidence that delinquency was rising in the latter areas (Hinton, 2016).

Pedagogy

Leonardo’s (2004) call for “a critical pedagogy of white racial supremacy that moves from a theoretical orientation of unearned privileges to analysis of the processes of domination” (p. 137) holds meaning for the social work curriculum. This critical pedagogy would, for example, question why people of color had so little input in the development of strategies affecting black youth and explore the implications of this. Additionally, such a curriculum would give as much attention to Ida B. Wells and other women of color who shaped social work as is given to Jane Adams. Thus, supporting hooks’s (1984) articulation of a black feminist process in which black women move from the margins to the center. This process also involves me as white person thinking about my own privileged position and ways that I can reshape my relationship to the academy and my colleagues.

Gray, Coates, Yellow Bird, and Hetherington (2013) argue that social work needs to be decolonized. Ahmed (2007) reminds us we must know that the way in which our bodies move through the world is impacted by colonialism, as colonialism “makes the world white” (p. 153). Our social welfare history books should unveil the implications of the United States as a colonial settler nation as well as give more attention to the work of African American women.

Social work is not alone in its lack of comfort with the phrase white supremacy, but it is uniquely positioned; in its discussion of diversity and difference, the Council on Social Work Education makes space for an analysis of white supremacy. The Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards, Competency 2, states that social workers “understand the forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination and recognize the extent to which a culture’s structures and values, including social, economic, political, and cultural exclusions, may oppress, marginalize, alienate, or create privilege and power” (Council on Social Work Education, 2015) White supremacy is indeed a powerful mechanism of oppression that the field of social work needs to acknowledge and explore.

Truth Telling

In my earlier telling of my experience at the monument, I left out the last corridor. This corridor contains sacred soil, all of it collected from lynching sites. The soil is placed in a glass jar and labeled with the name of the person murdered. The soil in some ways is the embodiment of EJI’s vision of the memorial as a place for truth telling, accountability, and public remembrance. Each of the coffin-shaped columns is duplicated and placed outside the pavilion, where they look like photographs of coffins waiting to be retrieved upon return from war. The names of people and the county where they were lynched are inscribed. EJI has created a process in which communities are given the opportunity to engage in public commemorations, including soil collection and the resurrection of historical monuments on lynching sites, that will then allow them to ask EJI for a copy of their column. As EJI (n.d.) explains by working with communities in collecting soil and erecting historic markers, “a more complete and honest story about our history” is being told.

There is literature that discusses the importance of truth telling in cases of state violence and collective trauma. Truth and reconciliation commissions and memorials hold power in part because they shed light on acts of violence and suffering; they bring together the liminal space between the “suffering of victims and the forgetfulness of perpetrators” (Nytagodien & Neal, 2004, p. 465). Indeed, violence cannot be repaired without accountability from those who perpetuate injustice, and victims’ pain validated and acknowledged as indicated in the restorative justice and peace-building literature, memorializing pain is an important step toward acknowledging and owning one’s accountability (Zehr, 2004).

EJI is leading a charge for truth telling and accountability; to support their effort, truth must be told about the narrative of racial difference. That truth is one in which enslavement and racial terror are not only horrors found in the past but also significant ways in which whiteness and hegemony continue to be enshrined. Social workers need to be intentional in unmasking the subtle and even invisible ways in which white supremacy occurs and the harm that it creates. Lack of recognition can no longer be an excuse to uphold the narrative of racial difference no matter how obscured by whiteness. With its emphasis on social justice, social work can be a leader in truth telling by identifying and challenging the narrative of white supremacy. We must work in ways that hold ourselves and our profession accountable.