WHAT WE ARE DOING

The Department actively stands with all who advocate for racial justice and seek reform of all systems that oppress and institutionalize racism. As a department, we recognize the continuing need to confront our own biases in our efforts to challenge racial injustice at all levels.

• The calls for social workers to “act to prevent and eliminate domination of, exploitation of, and discrimination against any person, group, or class on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, political belief, religion, immigration status, or mental or physical ability.”
• Similarly, the , Principle E states “Psychologists respect the dignity and worth of all people, and the rights of individuals to privacy, confidentiality, and self-determination… Psychologists are aware of and respect cultural, individual, and role differences, including those based on age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language, and socioeconomic status, and consider these factors when working with members of such groups.”
• The lays out in Section 8.4, that it amounts to professional misconduct for a lawyer to “engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.”

We apply these policies using cultural humility (Yeager & Bauer-Wu, 2013): We strive to be life-long learners; we challenge racial barriers and power imbalances that result in systematic injustice; and we promote institutional accountability. Using this framework, here are some of the steps we plan to take that represent these efforts.

Lifelong Learning and Self-Reflection. We recognize and are committing to understanding better the myriad ways that systemic oppression affects our perceptions and lived experiences. We also acknowledge that oppression is existent in systemic structures, including in institutions of higher education and their academic programs. Therefore, we strive to be life-long learners and demonstrate our commitment to our professional and personal growth regarding adopting antiracist practices. For example, we:

• Call on all members of our community, especially our White community members, to educate themselves about racial justice and find opportunities to engage in work for social change.
• Collaborate with the Office of Social Justice and Diversity and other departments and offices to establish training and professional development opportunities for students, staff, and both full-time and part-time faculty.
• Look to the University Senate’s Land Acknowledgement Committee for guidance on how to recognize the presence of the university on unceded Lenape territory in ways that actively support decolonization.
• Continuously reflect, reevaluate, and revise our curriculum and course offerings to thoroughly incorporate topics relevant to challenges persistent in society today. This would include a more honest and critical discussion of the histories of our fields, including a recognition of the ways that helping professionals have both perpetuated and challenged racism within the profession.
• Organize resources and make them easily accessible for faculty, students, and staff.
• Ensure that our courses reflect Black and BIPOC scholarship, and model strategies for students to confront their biases and engage in anti-racist practice and policy.

Challenging Power Imbalances. We reaffirm our commitment to anti-racist policy and practice and always confront and challenge power imbalances that lead to unequal and disproportionate outcomes. With this in mind, we:

• Will form a Diversity Advocacy Workgroup, consisting of both faculty and staff student representation, to represent the Department’s continuing commitment to antiracism in teaching, hiring, and community outreach.
• Will have a diversity advocate serve on each search committee in our department. The primary responsibility of the diversity advocate is to be a vocal and responsible advocate for diversity and inclusion throughout the search process.
• Create a Canvas site with resources on antiracism available for all Department members.
• Empower diverse voices from our local communities, including our current and former students, staff, and faculty, and community stakeholders and give these voices space in a shared governance system.
• Seek direct ways for our efforts to have community impact, including community outreach with collaboration of the Center for Community Engagement to promote field work that addresses community-level needs.
• Ensure students have a safe space to communicate and discuss sensitive topics pertaining to racism and divisive hate on campus.
• Ensure students have equal opportunity to field placements and other professional growth opportunities.
• Commit to the recruitment, support, and retention of BIPOC faculty and staff at all levels of hiring in the department.

Maintaining Institutional Accountability. Finally, we will prioritize processes that are geared toward ensuring institutional accountability in addressing racial and socioeconomic disparities as outcomes to their practices. To do this, we:

• Actively engage in scholarship and evaluation of the racial disparities and social injustices in today’s world, with a particular emphasis on the domains of social services that target children, youth and families of color.
• Ensure our faculty members take part in university committees and outreach to address injustices and promote policy development and implementation that is fair and just.
• Encourage students, staff, faculty, and other members of the university community to speak up as agents of change and contact elected public representatives to influence policy issues.
• We commit to regular self-assessments, both internal and external, that evaluate the success of our efforts to promote racial justice both within and beyond the Department.

We take pride and are humbled by our responsibility of preparing the next generation of practitioners for the richly diverse world that they will inherit as graduates of our programs and experience as change agents in their professional careers. We also acknowledge it is our responsibility to maintain a culturally respectful and inclusive educational environment for all members of our department. Therefore, we embrace diversity and respect for all, while challenging epistemologies and policies that inadvertently promote racism and divisive hate in everything we do.

~ The Faculty and Staff of the Department of Social Work and Child Advocacy

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” —Nelson Mandela

References

Franklin, A. J., & Boyd-Franklin, N. (2000). Invisibility syndrome : A clinical model of the effects of racism on African-American males. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 70(1), 33–41.

McCoy, H. (2020). Black Lives Matter, and Yes, You are Racist: The Parallelism of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal. 37, 463-475.

Yeager, K. A., & Bauer-Wu, S. (2013). Cultural humility: essential foundation for clinical researchers. Applied Nursing Research, 26(4), 251–256.

The recent events at the Capitol do not reflect the values of faculty and staff in the Department of Social Work & Child Advocacy and they are the antithesis of the values that we try to engender in our students and graduates. As educators, we take inspiration from Dr. King, who that “the function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character -that is the goal of true education.” This is what we want for our students and how we frame the education that we provide for them in our department and in our communities.

We recognize the role of Whiteness in these events,both in the ways that they were carried out and in the ways that we interpret them. There were many symbols from the white nationalist movement, including anti-Black and anti-Semitic imagery, which we condemn. These are stark reminders that as a society, we have failed to effectively confront White supremacy.

As individuals and professionals who are dedicated to social justice through our chosen fields of social work and child advocacy, we use critical thinking skills to carefully evaluate claims of truth. We know that working towards social justice means reckoning with, not ignoring, the long history and continuing reality of racism and violence in this country.

As a bright light, we believe that we are living in a period of time that can be transformative for how we think and talk about history, racism, science, equality, and democracy. This is an opportunity for change. Even as we struggle with recent violent events, we embrace the opportunities that are presented to us today. Thus, we close with a quote from Dr. King, who in 1963, “Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away, that the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and that in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all of their scintillating beauty.”

~ The faculty and staff of the Department of Social Work & Child Advocacy

January 21, 2021