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.
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Institutional Racism and Effects on Health and Well-Being
Valire Carr Copeland, Betty Braxter, and Sandra Wexler
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Transformative Justice
Jelena Todic, Xhercis Méndez, Mel Webb, Calista Castellanos, Ruben Soto, Sheila M. McMahon, and M. Candace Christensen
Transformative justice (TJ) is a dynamic set of emergent strategies and abolitionist political commitments focused on responding to and transforming violence, harm, and abuse at the root. It encompasses values, beliefs, and community-based responses that aim to do so without resorting to further violence, punishment, or revenge and without relying on state mechanisms (e.g., prisons, police, courts) that produce and reproduce violence. TJ emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, led by and for communities most affected by criminalization and state-sponsored violence. This includes women of color, Indigenous communities, Black communities, people of color communities, immigrant communities, trans and queer communities, disabled communities, poor and low-income communities, sex workers, and youth. As such, TJ is deeply intertwined with the larger abolitionist movement. Its key concepts include recognizing structural violence as a root cause of interpersonal harm and focusing on trauma-informed care for healing justice. It also involves centering disability justice, adopting liberatory harm-reduction methods, and understanding accountability as a complex process involving individual and community aspects. Additionally, TJ embraces emergent strategy in social change, seeing everyday simple interactions as building blocks for complex systems that can foster more just and life-affirming worlds.
While most social workers face institutional constraints, such as mandatory reporting, that prevent them from practicing TJ, the principles of TJ can still inform social work. This TJ-informed social work approach involves shifting away from punitive and surveillance methods in social work to advocate for individual, organizational, community, and systemic changes consistent with liberatory harm reduction. Social workers can integrate TJ principles and practices within their professional roles to better align their practice with their ethical commitments. For example, social workers can differentiate between politicized and charity-based approaches to social services, learn about and integrate pod practices in their personal and professional lives, and commit to cultivating a TJ mindset. These actions could contribute to the broader aims of both social work and TJ while carefully avoiding the appropriation of TJ principles.
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Jakobsson, Harriet
Pia Aronsson
Harriet Jakobsson (1926–2010) was an international social worker was active in three central areas: activities in the voluntary sector (NGOs), training of social workers, and her own practical work in the field. Her driving force has been to work for the best interests of the child and ensure the child’s rights in society. Curiosity, creativity, and perseverance characterized her professional life.
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Racism and Accountable Policing for Black Adults in the United States
Robert O. Motley Jr. and Christopher Baidoo
Racism is a public health concern for Black adults in the United States given its prevalence and association with adverse health outcomes for this population. The frequency of high-profile cases involving police use of gratuitous violence against Black adults has raised concerns regarding racially discriminatory law enforcement practices. In this article, racism is defined and a discussion is offered on its impact on the health and well-being of Black adults in the United States; the intersection of racism and policing; contemporary racialized policing practices; emerging evidence on prevalence rates for exposure (direct and indirect) to perceived racism-based police violence and associated mental and behavioral health outcomes; and police accountability through executive, legislative, legal, and other remedies.
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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.
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Locating School Social Work in the Reconstruction Period
Samantha Guz
The origin of school social work in the United States is frequently traced back to the early 20th century’s visiting teachers movement. To expand on previous scholarship, school social work can be situated in the 19th century by focusing on the organizing impact of Black communities on public education during Reconstruction. First, history provides context for public education during chattel slavery and for the formation of racialized politics in education. This historical context primarily focuses on how access to education was used as a tool to stratify citizenship in the South. Next, the work of Southern Black communities, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Northern abolition organizations advanced efforts during Reconstruction, specifically the coalition-building to establish Freedmen’s Schools and the advocacy to make education a publicly funded institution. Thus, coalition-building and policy advocacy within school social work’s practice history have the potential to impact contemporary school social work practice.
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Racial Justice
Darcey H. Merritt, Rachel D. Ludeke, Krushika Uday Patankar, Muthoni Mahachi, and Morgan Buck
Racial justice remains a hot-button issue in the United States, particularly in the aftermath of several high-profile murders of Black and Brown people due to state-sanctioned violence. There is an increased need to explore how racial injustice remains prevalent intentionally and comprehensively in all aspects of micro, mezzo, and macro social work practice. Racism is pervasive in the social work profession, and it is therefore important to address the ways in which it underpins established human service systems (e.g., public assistance and child welfare).
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Social Work and Social Policy in Namibia
Priscilla A. Gibson, Janet Ananias, Rachel Freeman, and Namoonga Chilwalo
Social work and social policy are intertwined in the Republic of Namibia and heavily influenced by its complex colonial sociopolitical history, struggle for human rights, and progress toward social development. These factors inform how the social and human needs of Namibians are being met. A human rights lens was adopted in 1990 by a democratic government that guided the delivery of social services to a diverse ethnic population. Namibia has successfully integrated social work into its society, supported by (a) a social justice mandate, (b) a capacity-building framework, and (c) Vision 2030. Social and human service needs are provided naturally by indigenous families and communities, and formal services are provided by governmental and nongovernmental agencies. This article consists of an overview of the socio-historical and political contexts of social work and social policies in this emerging democracy, along with special attention to four challenging and interrelated areas of social work practice including poverty, language and national identity, intergenerational caregiving and the Coronavirus pandemic.
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Community Resilience
Cindy Sousa and Tamarah Moss
Community resilience describes the dynamic, ongoing process of coping and recovery in the face of collective stressors and trauma. Social and monetary capital, technological expertise, and strong physical and organizational infrastructure all undergird strong systematic responses to massive hardships. Other factors that underlie community resilience, such as shared philosophies; patterns and cultures of survival and meaning-making; emotional qualities such as optimism and trust; and norms around cooperation and interdependence, are more ethereal. Our world faces continual onslaughts to collective well-being. Thus, notions and practice models around community resilience are increasingly urgent to develop, with implications for macro practice across multiple methods - including community organization, policy practice, and management/administration.
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Grand Challenges for Social Work
Marilyn Louise Flynn, Richard P. Barth, Edwina Uehara, and Michael Sherraden
The Grand Challenges for Social Work (GCSW) derived from a commitment to strengthening society through science and has identified 13 grand challenges through an iterative process. The GCSW has, in turn, developed 13 grand challenge networks that bring together researchers and practitioners and focus their capacities around achieving innovative solutions to these challenges. These networks develop and disseminate interventions at all levels (including university-based interdisciplinary grand challenge entities), giving productive focus to the work of social work and our allies. The Grand Challenges for Social Work are helping to galvanize policy developments that draw on expertise from across the profession and exemplify social work’s scientific and pragmatic traditions and its capacity for broader societal impact.
