Pandemics,Protests,and Feminist Politics of Resistance

I am going to join all the ones I left at the shore.

I am going home soon.

I am going wherever I want to go, wherever the hell I want,

somewhere, uncertain.

I am going forward.

I am going where you are going

if where you are going is free.

—Beltrán (2019, p. 148)

In These Dangerous Times

Four years ago, February 2017, the then incoming editor-in-chief team, Drs. Rupaleem Bhuyan, Yoosun Park, and Stephanie Wahab, reflected that their initial enthusiasm to lead Affilia forward into its next chapter had been tempered by the shocking election of Donald Trump. Anticipating what it would mean to foster “feminism in these dangerous times,” they identified their mission thus:

As social work anticipates a Trump agenda—part of a world-wide resurgence of white supremacist antidemocratic neoliberal agendas that disenfranchise so many—we must refuse further cooptation by state systems that perpetuate violence and oppression. We invite you to join us in our effort—to rethink, to reexamine, to challenge, and decenter, and thus reshape the discourses of social work in these dangerous times. (Park et al., 2017, p. 9)

When this editorial is published in 2021, we, the incoming editor-in-chief team, Drs. Sara Goodkind, Mimi E. Kim, and Jennifer R. Zelnick, enter our new role having survived and resisted 4 years of the Trump administration, the resurgence of forces that have at times felt like a tidal wave of change and a riptide of backlash, nearly a year of a global pandemic of COVID-19, and reverberating pandemics of racial hatred and violence. During these 4 years, Affilia created a shelter from the storm, publishing issues that interrogated social work—introducing unconventional inquiry within familiar social work settings like foster care and violence intervention; centering intersecting identities with regard to gender, race, ability, sexuality, immigration status, and other orientations, moving further beyond binary conceptualizations; and illuminating the insidious neoliberal context and its tendency to individualize, pathologize, and evaporate concepts of shared mission and fate. This work culminated in Affilia’s landmark 2020 “Special Topic on Anticarceral Feminisms: Imagining a World Without Prisons” (O’Brien et al., 2020), which powerfully and provocatively brought together theory, empirical study, and practical observations that could move us from “what is” (the role of social work in enacting and preserving a carceral system) to “what could be” (a world without prisons). Global protests over racial violence that were sparked by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery—following on the heels of so many others over such a long time. These events erupted a few short months after Affilia’s first issue on anticarceral feminisms was published, speaking to its timeliness as many people looked for answers to how to challenge and dismantle the systems that supported the institutions and structures of violence and white supremacy—including those embedded within social work.

The election of 2020 was unlike any in history; yet, many of its tropes were tried and true echoes from the past. Charges of socialism harken the Red Scare over 70 years ago; condemnations of “antifa” recall similar provocations regarding the threat of anarchism over 100 years ago. Despite the fact that these charges were often hurled at fairly mainstream Democratic Party planks (e.g., expanding Medicare, preserving Social Security), the power of ideas percolating in the streets has been undeniable. The political extremes that competing discourses represent, while not unknown in our U.S. history, are nonetheless unprecedented in their scope and vigor in most of our lifetimes.

The Maelstrom: Exposing the Divides of Social Work

Social work has found itself positioned at the center of some of these clashing claims. The global protests, the resonance of a radical #BlackLivesMatter anti-law enforcement critique and platform, and the wave of local demands to “defund the police” were tied early in the summer of 2020 protests to appeals to social work as a progressive noncarceral alternative. A punctilious series of articles starting with the National Association of Social Work (NASW) support for social work’s accommodating role aside law enforcement (McClain, 2020) echoed the themes raised in Affilia’s anticarceral feminist special topic series. Mainstream social work, largely unaware of the deeply troubled assumptions underlying social work’s historic position in support of the legitimacy of state institutions of mass incarceration, championed its role in supporting while perhaps softening the hard edge of law enforcement. In contrast, a hidden but emerging anticarceral social work found a more public voice in its pronouncements against social work’s public defense of the criminal legal system as well as its long-held collaborative role (Abrams & Dettlaff, 2020; Dettlaff & Weber, 2020). Since that time, abolitionist social work has sharpened and emboldened its stance with a series of webinars, social media sites, and a trickle of journal articles giving shape to this newly articulated political position (Jacobs et al., 2020; Social Service Workers United-Chicago, 2020). Although often unacknowledged, the long legacy of activism and evidence of scholarship defining anticarceral and abolition feminism and largely led by feminists of color have been positioned at the forefront of this most recent wave of radical social work (Richie & Martensen, 2020).

The politics of resistance represented by Affilia further intersects with the rising public critique of the legacy of white supremacy within social work and the call for explicit anti-racist, decolonial social work (Richie & Martensen, 2020). Right wing attacks against even the mention of white privilege, implicit bias, critical race theory, bolstered by policies at the federal level aimed at criminalizing their very utterance, have attacked an even mildly progressive social work agenda. On September 4, 2020, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a memorandum directed to the heads of executive departments and agencies directing them to “cease and desist” from using taxpayer dollars to fund what the memo refers to as “divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions.” In addition, the memo directed agencies to identify contracts and related spending on training on “critical race theory” or “white privilege,” claiming that such training teaches that “the United States is an inherently racist and evil country” or that “any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil” (OMB, 2020).

Again, the political divides struck at the core of social work as scholarship, policy, and practice. On October 12, 2020, the Texas State Board of Social Work Examiners (TSBSWE), the state licensing board, voted to remove antidiscrimination protections for disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression after Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) claimed that the TSBSWE code went further than state law in defining protected groups. NASW/Texas (2020) quickly mobilized support from around the country, and this vote was reversed on October 27.

Such battles echo the themes of resistance that Affilia has been grappling with over the past 4 years and more and indicate that these are not abstract ideas but concrete spaces of social confrontation where we can deploy the kinds of carefully honed arguments and vision in the service of dismantling white supremacy in the workplace and society as a whole, protecting the rights of all people who use social work services, and maintaining the mission of our profession that is mandated to protect those rights.

Strengthening a Critical Feminist Politics of Resistance and Liberation

We begin our term by building upon our shelter from the storm, the edifice of critical feminist social work begun by our many predecessors, named and unknown, and continued in this most recent period by the outgoing editor-in-chief team, Drs. Bhuyan, Park, and Wahab with the support of the Associate Editor, Dr. Sheila Neysmith; Editorial Assistant, Brianna Suslovic; and Copy Editor, Dr. Salina Abji. Their unwavering commitment maintained Affilia as a haven during a time of epistemic violence, upholding critical feminisms as a bulwark against the ravages of the storm. Their attention to the development of a durable, yet flexible infrastructure assured the rising relevance and sustainability of Affilia. Through these dangerous times, Affilia provided a source of collective resolve, connection, and hope. The legacy of leadership by the editors-in-chief, the editorial board, the consulting editors, our many authors, and, not least, our global readership serves as scaffolding for feminist (re)building, revisioning, and political engagement so necessary as we attempt to emerge and recover from the pandemic, regroup from continual assaults on basic human rights, and address ongoing structural racism and its intersections with renewed energy and urgency. As they reminded us in their final editorial, “If social work’s recent awakening to structural oppression is to be taken seriously, this structural/institutional/systemic barrier to doing research that challenges the center should be contested; the link between structural inequality and epistemological dominance must be recognized and addressed.” (Park et al., 2020, p. 447)

As our incoming transition period coincided with the extraordinarily uncertain and prolonged outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, our articulation of the tone and content of this editorial was delayed. We write now with an oppressive regime still in power and the promise of change on the horizon. Yet, a review of these past years and the power of the mass global protests of the last few months remind us that we cannot be complacent or silent. The evidence that our voices and our actions can make a difference reinforces our conviction that theory and praxis are, indeed, intimately tied. We begin our editorial with the final lines of a poem that emerged from the Society for Social Work and Research session entitled “Scholarship as Resistance: Critical Feminist Research and Writing,” in a component led by Affilia Editorial Board member, Ramona Beltrán (2019). In the construction of a collective self-reflective poem, the prompt, “I refuse…” evoked the response, “refuse to be silent.” The lines that introduce this editorial move from refusal to embrace. What is it that we as critical feminists move toward? What is our vision? While the words expressed reflect the uncertainty of our times, they also demonstrate the need for collectivity, the value of interdependence, and a forward stance toward liberation.

Indeed, in our moment of exhale as we appear to be exiting a period of dizzying turmoil and the death of articulation of values and policies wholly antithetical to those we hold, we are guided by the wisdom of prison abolitionist, Gilmore (2020), who reminds us that we must hold fast to the vision of a world “where life is precious.” Just as America could not be made great (again), the return to Obama politics will not bring us such a world. As we write, Democrats emerge at the helm of an ever imperiled regime—led by one of the lead authors of carceral feminism and the first woman vice president, a person of color—and former prosecutor, reminding us that critical feminism cannot make facile assumptions of alignment under an overarching rubric of feminism and that female-identified gender is not synonymous with the feminism that we seek. COVID-19 surges onward. And millions are losing livelihood, homes, and futures under economic collapse. While such realities bring despair that casts a long shadow on our present moment of hope, we remind ourselves that we have faced these challenges before. As we look globally, we witness others in similar or more devastating states of despair—as well as regimes that serve as able examples of (visibly feminist) leadership. As we turn toward the future, our intention is to continue the work of this journal as an important source of critical feminist scholarship as imagined and achieved by our predecessors—and one worthy of a future clouded by uncertainty but grounded in the conviction that in a world “where life is precious, life is precious” (Gilmore, 2020).