2.3 Integrating and Honoring BIPOC Contributions
In addition to individual scholars, many human services, social work, and advocacy organizations have worked to bring increased recognition to the roles of BIPOC in recent decades. For example, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) created the Academy for African-Centered Social Work. This organization emphasizes that the work of people of African ancestry has been excluded from social welfare history and from mainstream social work pedagogy and curricula.
Marginalization of past and present BIPOC social workers seriously minimizes their potential contributions to inform and strengthen current policy and practices.The NABSW has challenged the discipline to diversify curricula. They assert that failing to intentionally diversify educational materials leaves students to assume the main contributions to the discipline are White, which overtly and covertly reinforces White supremacy (Bent-Goodley et al., 2017).
The Role of Education
One approach to holding up the contributions of BIPOC lies in education. Currently, social welfare-involved work is not taught with an understanding of the ways that White supremacy is interwoven in its history. It seems that few social work education programs have exposed and dismantled the concept of the “great White hope,” yet this work needs to be done. Not only does there need to be a revision of who the discipline bestows the honor to as founders, but there also needs to be a greater understanding of ensuring that what is defined as social work or human services works. There needs to be a revision of what educational standards are and the Eurocentric lens used to measure them, as this continues to perpetuate White Supremacy (Wright et al., 2021).
For example, Jane Addams supported the eugenics movement and its scientific racism, which grew during the early twentieth century. It promoted the propagation of “wellborn” people and the prevention of childbearing among those who were determined to be defective mentally, morally, or physically (Kennedy, 2008).
Historical analysis of social welfare work’s White forerunners must also address the fact that Black activists and social services leaders of the Progressive Era were sidelined (McCutcheon, 2019). It is possible to see those identified as “founders” for what they were: individuals who sought to make change in one area of injustice while perpetuating injustice in another area. Maybe the answer is not to make them “angels” or “demons” but to live in the tension of their realities and what they prioritized. It requires telling their stories in the history books in light of such frictions.
It also calls for a radical review of who should be embraced as a founder of a discipline that is committed to equity and that “include[s] respecting the dignity and welfare of all people,” as stated in the Preamble of the National Organization for Human Services (NOHS) and the “inherent dignity and worth of all person