Racial inequality negatively influences the lives of people of color in the United States. Although race refers to differential concentrations of specific genes, the impacts are confined to physical characteristics such as skin color, hair type, and eye color. Rather than designating meaningful biological categories, race is a social construct. Yet, where there are inevitable intersections with institutional structures and interpersonal health relationships, race and racism produce inequities.
Racism occurs within and permeates the overarching political, social, cultural, and economic systems of American society. It can take several forms: structural, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized. Institutional racism in the healthcare system yields adverse effects on the physical and mental health and well-being of racialized individuals and communities. These inequities are well documented.
Recommendations are offered for creating a fairer and more just healthcare system in America. Equality and equity in the country’s healthcare system will be achieved only if racism is challenged in all its forms.
Article
Institutional Racism and Effects on Health and Well-Being
Valire Carr Copeland, Betty Braxter, and Sandra Wexler
Article
Child Protection
Brett Drake and Melissa Jonson-Reid
All children require a safe and nurturing environment for optimal development. Child maltreatment is among the most serious societal problems, with severe behavioral, health, and economic costs. Preventing and responding to child maltreatment is therefore among the most critical services a society can provide. Child protection in the United States is handled by many agencies in a general sense, including law enforcement and health departments. The main agency tasked with protecting children is the Child Protective Services (CPS) system, which is charged with supporting the safety and well-being of children who may be at risk of child maltreatment. Child maltreatment is a common societal problem, with various national studies suggesting that up to a third of children may experience maltreatment before turning 18. CPS contacts about 4% of all children in the United States each year. Among children contacted, about one fifth are substantiated and a very small proportion of all children reported are placed in foster care. CPS serves poor persons at higher rates than wealthier persons, consistent with the higher need for protection faced by those under economic stress. Similarly, Black children are contacted by CPS at a rate almost twice that of White children, consistent with increased risks and stressors faced by that population, largely associated with historical and current racism, particularly as manifested in economic racial stratification. Child welfare practice innovations include, among other things, the increased use of “differential response” programs, in which situations presenting fewer safety risks are handled with less emphasis on investigation, and an increased awareness of the need for preventative services, including services aimed at supporting those under severe economic stress.
Article
Comparative Social Welfare
Neil Gilbert and C. Taylor Brown
Comparative social welfare or comparative social policy may be defined as the comparative study of welfare states, policies, and programs. Social workers have been instrumental in the development of the field of comparative social welfare and continue to make significant contributions to its international knowledge and practice base. With roots in Europe and the United States in the 1960s, comparative social welfare research evolved from descriptive case studies of welfare programs to causal and quantitative studies, all aimed at understanding and improving domestic social welfare policy through comparison with other nations. The 1990s marked a significant increase in the number of studies on comparative social welfare motivated largely by interest from the European Union, though the field has benefited from contributions by a global community of scholars since then. Although the field continues to evolve, comparative social welfare can roughly be split between theoretical studies of welfare state development and empirical studies of welfare policies, programs, and outcomes. Studies in comparative social welfare can be classified by their method of comparison, nature of comparison, and level of comparison.
Article
The Movement for Black Lives
Troy D. Harden and Aislinn Pulley
The phrase “Black Lives Matter” has become an identifiable phrase across the globe. Accelerated by social media in an online platform and social action, it is marked by a mass of not only Black folks, but a multiracial collective that has also manifested in direct action protests against police violence toward Black people. Initially a hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, the phrase emerged into one of the most significant social movements in modern times. The Black Lives Matter Movement, along with the term Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), has centered on the historically ignored killings of Black men, women, and youth at the hands of state-sanctioned violence in public discourse, and offers an inclusive approach to organizing for social change.
Article
Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings
Maryanne Loughry
The integration of psychosocial support into emergency responses is a recent development. In the 1990s, the need to address the mental health and psychosocial well-being of individuals and communities affected by emergencies became clear following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia (1991–1992) and the Rwandan genocide (1994). Prior to this, mental health in emergencies was primarily addressed in clinical settings. However, the humanitarian field was divided between the medical sector, which asserted that psychiatric clinical intervention was best, and many nonmedical actors, who preferred a person-in-environment approach. The need for consensus resulted in the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) working group’s establishment of the framework of Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS), which combined both approaches. The IASC Guidelines on MHPSS in Emergency Settings, published in 2007, are widely recognized as explaining how best to administer psychosocial support in emergencies. This ended decades of tension between mental health and psychosocial experts in emergency and humanitarian settings.
Article
Reparations
V. Nikki Jones and Cathy G. McElderry
Reparations are a form of redress for harms or wrongdoings committed against individuals and their descendants in the interest of justice and individual and collective healing and restoration. Reparations entail material and non-material restitution. A framework for effective and equitable reparations includes comprehensive, targeted, and backward- and forward-looking measures that are corrective, restorative, and evidence-based. Various arguments in opposition and support of reparations exist. In the United States, most of the arguments against relate to liability, practicality, and lack of public support. Those who oppose reparations argue that current citizens are not financially liable for past injustices, reparations are unattainable due to statute of limitations (i.e., enslaved people are no longer living), and reparations remain politically divisive. In contrast, reparationists assert that taxpayers are responsible for the acts committed by the government. The U.S. government has a history of making reparations for harm, which is indicative of the practicality of this framework. Public division does not negate government accountability in the interest of justice. Advancing reparations aligns with the mission of social work to enhance human well-being and achieve the goals of justice, human rights, and dismantling systemic and structural inequities.
Article
Politics of Preserving Democracy in a Diverse Society
Charles E. Lewis Jr.
Democracy is a fragile political system that empowers citizens to participate in decision-making to determine how their society is governed, how legislators and other governmental officials are elected or selected, how resources are distributed, and what rights will be accorded to the citizenry. This is often spelled out in a founding document such as a constitution. Diversity is a challenge because differences in race, ethnicity, culture, values, customs, religion, and ideology may lead to conflicting or competing aspirations. As a nation of immigrants and one of the world's most diverse societies, the United States has experienced challenges keeping a peaceful coexistence among its various factions. Influential leaders such as former President Donald Trump have turned to populism to capture the allegiance of large segments of the populace by catering to their views. Attacks on democratic institutions like the media, the courts, and free and fair elections can erode trust in government and lead to autocratic forms of government.
Article
Global Development Actors (Public, Private, Corporate)
Smitha Rao, Javier Reyes-Martinez, and Carlos Andrade-Guzmán
The global development landscape has witnessed a transformation with previously held development roles and priorities changing and increasingly overlapping with others. This is compounded by the intersection of emergent challenges, such as the climate crisis and economic downturn, that create additional inequities, making the landscape increasingly complex to navigate. The social work profession has actively engaged with international entities through service provision, education, and advocacy. Social workers have historically recommended actions or changes on behalf of individuals, communities, and groups, guided by principles of social justice, dignity, and worth of each person, as well as the importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence while interfacing with development efforts in multiple other ways. Development as a topic on a global scale emerged in response to evolving conceptualizations beyond the idea of development as growth alone. For instance, originating from development economics and initially focused on modernizing new nation-states at the end of colonialism, social development aimed to achieve economic growth as the primary means of development. Practice and scholarship on development have also moved from an “international development” framework to a “global development” framing to highlight the interdependence among various societal actors rather than a linear pathway. Finally, sustainable development and its derivative, sustainability, have become central components of the current developmental discourse due to their commitment to addressing the present needs without jeopardizing future generations’ capacity to fulfill their own. To understand this complex landscape better, it is important to identify the various actors in global development and the differential goals, strengths, and constraints they bring to the table. The public sector is the traditional source of funding and action for global development projects worldwide, with governments at all levels playing a central role in resource provision, policy setting, and program implementation. The private sector, encompassing nongovernmental organizations, civil society and community-based organizations, philanthropic foundations and entities, and social entrepreneurs focused on social initiatives, has increasingly become involved in global development. Relatedly, the corporate sector, too, has emerged as a key player with a different structure and access to infrastructural and other resources. With individual strengths and constraints, these global development actors play specific roles and often collaborate to address social and developmental causes. At the same time, important complexities and shortcomings across these sectors need to be taken into cognizance to ensure continued efforts toward global development. The global development landscape offers numerous prospects for social workers to apply their knowledge and professional expertise. An understanding of this landscape equips social workers in developing a holistic approach to cross-sectoral development initiatives.
Article
Abolitionist Social Work
Noor Toraif and Justin C. Mueller
Abolitionist social work is a theoretical framework and political project within the field of social work and an extension of the project of carceral abolitionism more broadly. Abolitionists seek to abolish punishment, prisons, police, and other carceral systems because they view these as being inherently destructive systems. Abolitionists argue that these carceral systems cause physiological, cognitive, economic, and political harms for incarcerated people, their families, and their communities; reinforce White supremacy; disproportionately burden the poor and marginalized; and fail to produce justice and healing after social harms have occurred. In their place, abolitionists want to create material conditions, institutions, and forms of community that facilitate emancipation and human flourishing and consequently render prisons, police, and other carceral systems obsolete. Abolitionist social workers advance this project in multiple ways, including critiquing the ways that social work and social workers are complicit in supporting or reinforcing carceral systems, challenging the expansion of carceral systems and carceral logics into social service domains, dismantling punitive and carceral institutions and methods of responding to social harms, implementing nonpunitive and noncarceral institutions and methods of responding to social harms, and strengthening the ability of communities to design and implement their own responses to social conflict and harm in the place of carceral institutions. As a theoretical framework, abolitionist social work draws from and extends the work of other critical frameworks and discourses, including anticarceral social work, feminist social work, dis/ability critical race studies, and transformative justice.
Article
Climate Change and Macro Social Work
Kelly Smith
The compounding and escalating effects of environmental degradation, which include climate change, threaten the human-earth system with severe implications for the future of macro social work. Systems of power and oppression, including racial, economic, and gendered inequities, are exacerbated by environmental changes with significant impacts on human rights, public health, and various measures of well-being. While climate change is often not the root cause of inequality, it compounds existing inequities, making it substantially more difficult for marginalized populations to rebound from escalations of the myriad acute and chronic consequences due to climate change and environmental collapse. Experiences of environmental change consistently highlight the expanding resource and resiliency gaps among vulnerable populations, leading to disproportionate repercussions felt initially and, to an arduous degree, by marginalized groups. Simultaneously, these circumstances create opportunities for social workers to intervene and advance the causes of social justice. Macro-level interventions and climate solutions can emerge from social work development and support of policies and interventions that overcome short-term thinking to produce beneficial outcomes for populations and the environment by building capacity in the human-earth system and economic policy systems. Social work is ideally situated to confront climate change by balancing immediate needs with long-term ecological sustainability and relying on its historical understanding of systems to improve policy development and practical climate change mitigation approaches.
