Abstract
The year 2022 came to a close with the sudden and swift removal of Professor Alan Dettlaff, a respected child welfare scholar and leader in the growing abolitionist movement, from his position as Dean of the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work (Flaherty, 2023). While this was one of the more prominent dismissals in academic social work, it put in stark human terms the impact of a renewed and effective onslaught of political repression in education. An academic social work community quickly gathered over the holidays to support Dr. Dettlaff and forge a public response and call to action. Dr. Terri Friedline and Dean Beth Angell of the University of Michigan's School of Social Work (2023) hosted a national forum in early January 2023 called Social Work and Abolition in the New Year to add transparency to the University of Houston's dismissal of Dr. Dettlaff from his leadership position. The panelists, including two members of Affilia's editorial leadership team, stood in support of Dr. Dettlaff, denouncing alarming efforts to silence and root out critical frameworks and those who speak out against racism and other systems of oppression. Dr. Dettlaff's censure demonstrates that while lukewarm anti-racism might be tolerated or applauded, bold challenges to the institutions that uphold racism including policing, prisons, and the child welfare system—increasingly identified as the pillars of carceral social work—are not.
Alan Dettlaff's removal, of course, is just one result of the ongoing evisceration of racial and gender justice advances that have been made since the civil right era. In the summer of 2020, the global protests against police murders of Black and Brown people raised widespread public demands to “defund the police” that, for some, extended to calls to abolish policing, prisons, and the punishing systems represented, in part, by social work. The backlash has been swift. Today, the daily postings of new state legislation and school board policies quashing even the mention of race or gender beyond the binary—followed by silencing, admonishments, dismissals, and even threats to life—have become shockingly commonplace. We are aware that many of us as writers and readers of Affilia have been directly impacted by these frightening trends.
We write this editorial as a tribute to Alan Dettlaff and the many of us who continue to champion critical thinking, scholarship, teaching, policies, and practice—even in the face of such threats—and to those of us who may do so with increasing wariness and even retreat. This piece further serves as an acknowledgment of the soberness of these times and as a call for solidarity. As we use these pages to document the terror of this moment of backlash and attack, we echo the recent Social Welfare History Group bibliography, “Red Scares, Political Repression, and Social Work: Why Now?” (Abramovitz et al., 2023) by asking if these current trends constitute a modern-day red scare. This timely bibliography traces the evolution of red scares in the United States from the first red scare during the period following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Great Depression (notably the period that saw the birth of the U.S. social welfare system, such as it is), to the second red scare during the period of McCarthyism (notably the period of civil rights organizing and early stirrings of second-wave feminism). The bibliography goes on to document how “panics over progressive political ideas and critiques of the status quo continue to generate backlash and repression in the United States,” to ask if the “past is prologue,” and to encourage us to see today's events as a continuation of the same forces that fueled the red scares of the past (p. 2). We turn to the outspoken and courageous activists of our past and present to strengthen the resolve of our Affilia community to use words and actions to fight today for the world we wish to live in tomorrow.
The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 left the United States reeling—and often responding. There was a proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; anti-racist ideas and language made their way into new venues. This movement provided a mirror for many people and created a window of opportunity. Still, some questioned the depth of change. Seasoned organizers likely knew to take the moment for what it was, and to hold on for the backlash.
The virulent attack on gains towards equity is not new—nor is the tactic to manipulate the language of fairness, protection, and reason to assuage underlying fears that invariably accompany perceptions of privileges that may also be lost. Critical race theory and other liberatory theories building from some of these formative tenets remind us that racism and other forms of oppression are intertwined and are deeply and often invisibly embedded into the very fabric of how we think, live, and breathe. Racism and oppression have shaped foundational values and policies and can even be imbued within our notions of common sense. This foundation has often limited social change to that which can be tolerated by those in power—and racist elites can violently reassert, in egregious ways, oppressive and seemingly anachronistic power structures when deemed necessary or possible.
The Bakke decision, reversing affirmative action across the University of California system, was passed in 1978, 45 years ago. As an elite power structure invested in the erasure of affirmative action ensured, this decision has remained a bedrock of racist ideologies and policies that continue to animate U.S. political consciousness. As the nationwide and global embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement opened widespread public conversations about the depth and magnitude of racism that permeate U.S. society and education systems, it also asked people with privilege to question what deep change might mean. Meaningful social change, after all, stands to shake up all of us—in ways that are materially, symbolically, and psychologically liberating—and in ways that may be profoundly unsettling. Intersectionality reminds us that any of us may be experiencing these different effects in multiple ways. The architects of backlash, or what political scientist Velma Weaver (2007) astutely refers to as frontlash, are operating a long game, ready to take advantage of moments of political anxieties, moral panics, financial precarity, and now pandemics to erode public reckonings to pitchforks, tiki torches, and legislative action.
Perhaps the clearest, organized backlash against the 2020 awakening has been in state politics, notably Florida. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is staking out the “anti-woke” territory in the Republican party, and explicitly targeting education. In December 2021, Governor DeSantis announced a legislative proposal for the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act, colloquially known as the “anti-woke” law (DeSantis, 2021). A DeSantis press release explained the act would, “… take on both corporate wokeness and Critical Race Theory. [This] proposal builds on actions Governor DeSantis has already taken to ban Critical Race Theory and the New York Times’ 1619 project in Florida's schools” (para. 1). DeSantis signed the W.O.K.E. Act into law on March 22, 2022. In November 2022, a federal judge blocked the law from taking effect in higher education (American Civil Liberties Union, 2022).
A week after signing the W.O.K.E. Act, DeSantis signed HB 1557 (2022), the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill “prohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels or in a specified manner” (p. 1). Despite legal challenges to these laws, which have been charged with violating the First Amendment among other legal issues, DeSantis has continued with efforts to violate free speech and human rights. Under DeSantis, the Florida Department of Education (2023) has banned the newly developed African American Studies AP course in Florida high schools. And finally, in a stunning application of double speak, on January 31, 2023, DeSantis announced: … a proposed overhaul of the state's higher education system that would eliminate what he called “ideological conformity.” If enacted, courses in Western civilization would be mandated, diversity and equity programs would be eliminated, and the protections of tenure would be reduced. (Saul et al., 2023, para. 3)
These flagrant acts, reverberating in state legislatures and school boards across the country, require a response. These acts demonstrate the interconnectedness of oppressions to which our title refers.
At Affilia, intersectionality has been a bedrock concept. Though not always used the same way, and in danger of becoming an overused placeholder, this concept and, more importantly, the scholarship behind it have been critical in our commitment to envision a critical feminism for this moment. In fact, Florida's Department of Education is in some ways a distorted mirror image of many of our beliefs. When asked to explain their opposition to the African American Studies AP course, the department … singled out activists like Angela Davis, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for being “a self-avowed Communist and Marxist”; Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor at Columbia Law School and the U.C.L.A. School of Law, who it said was “known as the founder of intersectionality”; and the feminist writer bell hooks, for using language like “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” (Fawcett & Hartocollis, 2023, para. 4)
What we found even more alarming was the College Board's seemingly swift capitulation to Florida's position, announcing only a few days later that contemporary topics would be optional, and several scholars would be eliminated from the curriculum (as we prepare this for publication, the situation regarding the African American AP course has become murkier and nuanced). A week later, criticism has begun to mount against even diversity, equity, and inclusion activities on college campuses.
The backlash to progressive ideas in education also extends to publishing in academic social work. At Affilia, we have been in the crosshairs of the reactionary backlash to critical and progressive ideas before. In 2018, conservative activists targeted Affilia and other feminist and anti-racist journals in a hoax for which they fabricated data and manuscripts to bait journals into publishing what they would surely now call “woke” articles (Park et al., 2020). Using rhetoric focused on protecting academic freedom, such efforts undermine free inquiry and further fray trust in institutions. This hoax is emblematic of these proliferating attempts to silence critical voices. Masquerading as protecting freedom, they present a liberatory facade behind which lurks a repressive and intrusive state.
The recent proposal before the Florida High School Athletic Association that would constitute surveillance of girls’ menstrual cycles is just one small example of the increasing efforts to legislate and thus control the bodies of girls, women, and anyone who can become pregnant. Disturbingly, current legislation attempts to recruit academics into these efforts. As Witt et al. (2022) described in the pages of Affilia, Idaho and Missouri both have laws that impinge on academic freedom by restricting the information faculty can offer students, such that faculty are not allowed to provide information that could be interpreted as “promoting” abortion.
At Affilia, we continue to resist (Park et al., 2020). We recognize that women and people of color, and especially women and non-binary people of color, have long experienced greater surveillance and censorship, even within the academy (Vakalahi & Starks, 2010). Our Distinguished Feminist Scholarship and Praxis is Social Work award-winning article from 2022 by Jackson et al. (2022) documents gendered anti-blackness in predominantly white schools of social work. Written from an intersectional framework, this important piece would likely be banned under these new prohibitions based on its use of a novel methodology (Black Feminist Polyethnography), its unequivocal insistence on naming anti-Black racism, and its critical view of history.
In light of the environment for our teaching, research, and publishing that is taking shape, our upcoming special topics issue on critical feminism is important. It is guided by a vision with a purpose—to improve our research and practice to better reflect the voices, positions, and needs of progressive social workers and the people and communities that they work with and study. Ultimately, we aim to make the world a better place for all, to root out injustice, and to give us tools to create the world we want to live in. In this world, people's nuanced identities, historical oppressions, structural barriers, as well as strengths and ideas have a place. We agree with Kimberlé Crenshaw that “intersectionality is only controversial if you stand against multiracial democracy. To say that it needs to be removed from curricula because it's become politicized is to ignore the people who have done the politicizing and why” (as cited in Daniels, 2023, para. 13).
In the weeks we spent drafting this editorial, it was difficult to keep up with the daily developments and attacks that shifted from critical theory and anti-racism to diversity, equity, and inclusion and even the existence of gender studies programs. How can we actively push back against the co-optation of language, attacks on our ideas and values, our professions, academic and activist pursuits, our contributions?
Closing
In December of 2022, the swift dismissal of former Dean Alan Dettlaff for his bold abolitionist leadership exerted the blow that his critics within the school and outside of it intended. The message was sent that anti-racism in a softer and more benign form might be tolerated. It demonstrated that much of the field of social work cannot withstand vigorous self-reflection regarding the institutions that have served as our unquestioned pillars. In this case, Dr. Dettlaff's unyielding insistence on identifying and uprooting the racism embedded within institutions that historically and uniformly mete out oppressive practices and policies, so often in the name of social welfare and child protection, succumbed to the discipline of the profession, the state, and those who benefit from upholding the status quo. Even those who may not subscribe to such politics heard the clear message—that any one of us can lose standing, status, employment, and livelihood for taking a position against oppression. Individual acts by university officials, though powerful, are increasingly supported by a slew of school board pronouncements, legislative actions, and, as we must not forget, executive orders. The mere threat of such policies has left their chill. As the famous quote of German theologian Martin Niemöller referenced in our editorial's title so aptly states—what we choose now to shirk or ignore may be that which eventually comes for us (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022). First, they came for critical race theory … we are already threatened to silence the mere mention of race or gender. These tactics, somberly recounted in the Social Welfare History Group's recent red scare bibliography, mark the tenor and terror of these times.
While backlash and frontlash are not new, nor can we expect these dynamics to cease, the pace, virulence, and effectiveness of the political repression unleashed in this current moment are nonetheless alarming. The collective act of conceiving of and writing this editorial sharpened the importance of documenting the implications of political repression on social work and to call us towards more effective and strategic action. The same day that members of Affilia's leadership team joined a webinar responding to Dr. Dettlaff's dismissal, the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (2023) published an open letter “to national social work organizations to support abolitionist inquiry, scholarship, and praxis,” calling the University of Houston, the National Association of Social Work (NASW), the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), National Association of Deans and Directors (NADD), and Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education (GADE) to action. It has since garnered over 900 signatures.
These swift responses through forums and letters are necessary, but they are insufficient to match the forces of backlash and frontlash that are playing a well-funded and astutely strategized long game. Affilia is taking seriously the social work field's stance against feminism that animated its founding in 1986. In deepening our understanding of critical feminisms, expanding our notion of academic scholarship, and broadening the intersectional imperative that critical feminism calls forth, we join you in strengthening our resolve and set of strategies to fortify our fight not only against repression—but in the construction of an equitable, just, and sustainable future for all. In the meantime, Affilia will continue to be a home for critical research, come what may.