Disrupting Whiteness in Social Work

Sonia M. Tascón, Jim Ife, Sonia M. Tascón, Jim Ife

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000766479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Trabajo social

Focussing on the epistemic – the way in which knowledge is understood,

constructed,

transmitted and used – this book shows the way social work

knowledge has been constructed from within a white western paradigm, and

the need for a critique of whiteness within social work at this epistemic level.

Social work, emerging from the western Enlightenment world, has privileged

white western knowledge in ways that have been, until recently, largely unexamined

within its professional discourse. This imposition of white western

ways of knowing has led to a corresponding marginalisation of other forms

of knowledge. Drawing on views from social workers from Asia, the Pacific

region, Africa, Australia and Latin America, this book also includes a glossary

of over 40 commonly used social work terms, which are listed with their epistemological

assumptions identified. Opening up a debate about the received

wisdom of much social work language as well as challenging the epistemological

assumptions behind conventional social work practice, this book will be

of interest to all scholars and students of social work as well as practitioners

seeking

to develop genuinely decolonised forms of practice.

1 Disrupting white epistemologies

De-binarising social work

Sonia Tascón

Prolegomenon

In 1994 I began my journey as a social worker. I did not realise then how white social work is, although I was possibly one of the very few persons of colour in the student group; in the staff group there were none (well, one, but he was not a social worker). In 2001, I returned to university to do a PhD, and the situation had changed little, although there were a number of international students doing higher degrees while paying full fees for the privilege. I left social work for a long while, and I returned to a social work Lecturer position in 2015 because I did not find elsewhere the concern for social justice that had first drawn me to the discipline/profession. In 2017 I then found myself in a university established in the largest, most diverse region of Australia, and yet very few of the permanent staff were non-Anglo-Australians, while over 80% of the students (domestic and international) were. I had written about whiteness from the research I carried out in 2001–2006 because some of the treatment of refugees I had studied reflected my own experience as a migrant to a country that was still operating on a policy of assimilation when we arrived in 1971. I asked myself in 2019: had things changed much in social work, after various social work scholars had written about whiteness throughout the 2000s (Bessarab 2000; Bennett & Zubrzycki 2003; Green & Baldry 2008; Bennett, Zubrzycki & Bacon 2011; Bennett et al. 2013; Zubrzycki et al. 2014)? And as I then turned back to critical race and whiteness as a framework for my thinking, I noticed that it was not now so much used by social work scholars. Why, when it raises important questions about who benefits the most from the way things are? Why was white privilege left off the agenda? I think it has to do with the binary nature of the way much of the framework presented its work, and so its explanatory power was lost. That binary, created by the powerful white Western-North¹ to control Others, was being turned around to attack their power, but did so in a divisive manner. The problem lies in the way the binary got configured in Western modernity, not as a yin-yang of complementarity, but to mimic a warlike stance of radical opposition between conflicting parties, where only one side could be victorious; social work scholars possibly found it too divisive as a result. So, is whiteness still a useful idea to discuss for the purpose of decolonisation? If we are to decolonise epistemologically, do we not need to ask what/whose ideas we are decolonising from? And, if whiteness can be uncoupled from its binary nature, could we not return to use it to decolonise because it does enable us to turn the gaze around and ask: who/what are we decolonising from? More importantly, who benefits the most, so that they should be required to do the heavy lifting of the changes required? In what follows, I will not be focusing specifically on the whiteness question but leave that as an open question as to its ongoing usefulness for social work should its frame be de-binarised. I will, instead, turn my attention to the foundational, organising principle that has made whiteness divisive – to the logic of modernity’s binary – as well as making modern European colonialism as epistemically violent as it has been. Modernity’s binary, as other authors in this volume mention, is at the very heart of Western European colonisation, and therefore, in order for us to truly decolonise, this remains a central, seminal, way of thinking that has to be disrupted and rethought.

1 I realise I am conflating different frameworks in the use of these terms, but I do so purposely because they each attempt to arrive at a similar racialised analysis, but from different perspectives.

Introduction

Social work was born white. It emerged in the Anglosphere – UK and US – from deep within the European Enlightenment. This was its origin story. That place and time comprised both seed and soil for that which we now know as the profession of social work. Although most, if not all, cultural traditions have an ethic of care, which involves communal or familial bonds of obligation, this was the context for the emergence of a professionalised set of activities that centred on distant caring; that is, the care of strangers in a nonreciprocal relational arrangement bound by values and techniques of distance. The relationship that distant caring presumes was made necessary by its time and place, due to a set of material circumstances that were shaped by, and in turn developed, ideas, principles, and ideologies that had been debated in Western Europe over centuries, and culminated in what has been called the episteme of Western modernity² (Foucault 1970; Ife 2012, 2016, 2018; Ablett & Morley 2016).

2 I will not capitalise either of these terms from here on, as they are well enough known and understood without that.

I want to pay close attention to one of the most profoundly foundational principles upon which modernity established itself. This principle has not only organised relationships differently; it has also enabled the inequalities that were created, internal and external, to be perpetuated and reproduced seamlessly. It is a principle so foundational that it is, possibly, the hardest to notice, and yet, epistemologically, most significant. That epistemic principle is the binary. Its work is so insidious that even in the areas in which we are moving in this book, colonisation and whiteness, we have to rely on its precepts to disseminate these operations: white vs black, colonised vs coloniser³. This way of thinking constructed the notion of individualised subjectivity for the first time and imagined intersubjectivity as autonomous beings in incommensurate and separate, even distant while parallel, existences. This is but one way of viewing human being, and as such I consider Western modernity to be but another cultural framework, and not universal, even if in many aspects of our lives, personal and political, professional, and in geopolitics (and I include human rights in this), it is disseminated as such. And as such, the binary is but a contextualised epistemological principle that was born of the needs and cataclysmic changes of its place and times. Yet it has gone on to shape the profession itself, and until we acknowledge its work and free ourselves from its work, we will continue to perpetuate and reproduce (as ways of doing) knowledges (as ways of knowing) that have become hidden to us as a result, including other knowledges outside the cultural group within which social work was formed. This, because the binary shaped social work from its inceptionary origins as shaped largely through practice (or doing) and not thinking. There is a profoundly justified reason why this occurred, and I will cover this more fully below. What I propose is that we need to bring in, or back, profound thinking, not as the disembodied, abstract thinking that social work rejected, but the kind that the poets, bards, performers and artists do: a type of thinking that imagines, dreams, explores, yearns, wonders, unfolds, unpacks, eats, sings, draws and photographs, sits in silence and contemplates, creates and, most importantly, loves (familial-ly, communal-ly, sexual-ly, romantical-ly, friend-ly …), all from a place where the body and mind travel together.

3 I realise that post-modern scholarship has carried out a great deal of analysis in this area, and I am not seeking to explore all of that work. I am solely interested in the ways in which the binary has operated in shaping our professional discourses about who we are and what we know and do.

The binary and whiteness

The binary is not new or exclusive to the Enlightenment and Western modernity. As I mentioned above, the idea of Yin and Yang entered Chinese thinking in the 3rd century and was a belief that ‘all things exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites’ (Cartwright 2018). Conceiving of the world as separated dualities was seen, even there and then, as a useful way to organise, explain and understand the world. In relation specifically to that which concerns me in this chapter, namely knowledge and action (or practice), the Stanford Encyclopedia describes Chinese thought as undergoing rigorous disputes:

as to which of the elements forming the binary categorical pair of knowledge and action (zhi, xing) had priority, [this] constituted one of the crucial debates in traditional, as well as modern Chinese epistemology.

(Rošker 2018)

The difference with that Chinese tradition, however, and the way in which the binary gets configured in Western modernity, is that the dual contrasts operate as inseparable and necessary aspects of each other. Thus, the same Stanford Encyclopedia (Rošker 2018) goes on to name Chinese philosophies as founded on ‘relational epistemologies’. In the realm of knowledge and action, Chinese thought held that:

Knowledge (zhi) was … necessarily and inextricably linked to human activities and the implementation of social practice (xing): any separation of knowledge and (social) practice was equated with the separation of human beings from the world in which they have found themselves. The close proximity between knowledge and action was seen as the close proximity between an individual and the world, because action was a means for his/her self-transformation and the transformation of the world in the world. Hence, the unity or non-unity of knowledge and action was always a measure of the unity or non-unity of humanity and the world.

(Cheng 1989, p. 207 cited in Rošker 2018)

In that binary thinking, the sides are complementary and in need one of the other to understand the entirety. As it comes to be conceived during the European Enlightenment and the episteme of modernity, however, the binary adopts the thinking of war. This is where the world is explained and understood as contesting binary oppositions, one of which will be victorious. It is from the ancient Greeks that we get this conception of the binary, and particularly from Plato. As I have covered elsewhere (Tascón 2019), Platonic philosophy was wide-ranging, but a most seminal and influential doctrine centred on the belief that existence is composed of shadows and pure forms. Platonic forms are ideal and pure knowledge, are so abstracted from our physical world that they can only be grasped through pure intellectual activity, while our material reality is but a shadow image of the pure forms. Pure forms are not of the material world; indeed, they would be tarnished by its ever-changing nature, as forms are universal and eternal in nature, if they have a ‘nature’ per se (Saitta & Zucker 2013). Plato, and then modernity, manifest this way of dividing knowledge from experience, as incommensurable from the world of everyday life, or what Edmund Husserl went on to call the lifeworld (Husserl 1954). That way of thinking divides knowledge from everyday knowing and becomes abstracted from the very life that social workers deal with in their everyday practices. Epistemically, there is nothing more powerful than eternal-ness and universality: that an idea, person or object can be ever-present and all-encompassing, forever and permanently existing. In this way of thinking, on that side is pure knowledge and truth, while on the other lie shadows, uncertainty and non-truth. There is nothing in between. In later modernity, when Science and its methods almost completely invade our ways of knowing, eternality and universality become possible through a further disconnection from experience and embodied being, via the achievement of ‘objectivity’. For social workers who deal with everyday life and the messiness of everyday people, that schism became a problem.

The dual nature of knowledge that began with the Greeks goes on to be shaped more fully and rigidly in Western modernity, and this is where social work enters the scene as a profession. The separation of knowledge from everyday life also shaped our understanding of the godly, as singular and abstracted from our lives. Where religious traditions until that moment had created beings that were tied to our lives in various ways (for example, gods or spirit beings become rocks and mountains in some traditions; in others, the gods engaged in sexual activity with humans and conceived demigods), this way of thinking was a radical break and made possible the incommensurability of modernity’s binary, as oppositions.

Modernity’s binary became a war zone instead of an explanatory frame for harmony and wholeness. Foucault writes of this epistemic shift as a radical break from thinking through similitudes to imagining life through individuations and separations (Foucault 1970). Similitudes imagined all life as being connected, so that each part, while distinct and classifiable, contains other parts in some measure. So, in this world view the sky is a distinct entity, while also indistinguishable from the sea as they merge in the horizon; the dawn and the sunset but a breath away from each other; and a person may be likened to a tiger, or a bear, or a gazelle, depending on the feature used to make the comparison. In a world of similitudes, metaphor forms the communicative bridge for the connections, where the similarities are created to connect. It is interesting that metaphorical language is almost completely lost in modernity, as scientific language imposes itself on all activities, including (especially) the professions, and metaphor is relegated to the artistic and both are marginalised. Indigenous peoples around the world, but also many other traditions, have retained this inclination towards similitudes and metaphor. I remember hearing a Colombian song some years ago that brought this into relief for me. The song, called Décimas by Carlos Vives and Martin Madera (2001), centres on the ways in which New Orleans is like Barranquilla (a city in Colombia⁴), and then goes through a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 Disrupting white epistemologies: De-binarising social work
• 2 Whiteness from within
• 3 Acknowledgements in Aboriginal social work research: How to counteract neo-colonial academic complacency
• 4 Afrocentric ways of ‘doing’ social work
• 5 Decolonising social work through learning from experiences of older women and social policy makers in Uganda
• 6 To know is to exist: Epistemic resistance
• 7 Supporting the development of Pacific social work across Oceania – critical reflections and lessons learnt towards disrupting whiteness in the region
• 8 Cake art as social work: Creative, sensory and relational knowing
• 9 Refractory interventions: The incubation of Rival epistemologies in the margins of Brazilian social work
• 10 Navigating intersectional being while doing community development
• 11 Approaches to social work from a decolonialist and intersectional perspective: A Latin American and Caribbean view
• 12 Decolonising social work vocabulary
• Contributors
• Index