Social Work with Minority Groups

Prospera Tedam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000460865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

This book brings together several valuable papers from different parts of the world, addressing social work with minorities in the areas of disability, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Collectively, these make an important contribution to developing theory, and practice awareness of how social work education with minority groups is framed, evidenced, and experienced.
The perspectives and different strands of work presented within this book offer new insights and a better understanding of how a diverse set of social justice issues confronting social work education have led to the development of different types of interventions both in the classroom and in practice contexts.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Social Work Education.

How is ‘racism’ understood in literature about black and minority ethnic social work students in Britain? A conceptual review

Dharman Jeyasingham

and Julie Morton

ABSTRACT

This conceptual review interrogates a body of literature concerned with black and minority ethnic (BME) social work students in Britain since 2008. This period has coincided with an increasing focus on diversity in Higher Education, but also lower prominence being given to race in social work. In social work education, there has been increased attention to the needs and experiences of BME students. While most of this literature acknowledges racism, what constitutes racism and how it can be understood usually remain implicit. This review aimed to explore influential concepts in the literature and the ways these affected how racism is understood and identified. A search was carried out for articles in peer-reviewed academic journals between 2008 and 2018. In this article, we discuss four recurring concepts of racism in this literature: subtle racism, institutional racism, cultural difference and pedagogical solutions. The article analyses the assumptions underpinning these concepts, and the implications for how racism has been understood and investigated in this literature. The subsequent discussion calls for a more reflexive approach and identifies questions that future research could explore, which could lead to improved understandings of racism in social work education.

Introduction

There is widespread recognition that social workers in Britain serve a diverse population. At the same time, discussion about race and racism is less prominent in social work practice and education in Britain now than in the past (Lavalette & Penketh, 2013; Williams & Parrott, 2013). Some discussions of social work practice have maintained a useful focus on race (Bhatti-Sinclair, 2011; Singh et al., 2013). However, in social work education policy, the anti-racism of the 1990s has been displaced by a discourse of diversity, equality and cultural competence (Singh, 2013). This is evident in the current version of the Professional Capabilities Framework, which influences social work curricula in England, where race is referred to simply as one dimension of diversity (British Association of Social Workers (BASW) England, 2018, p. 14). This version of diversity produces a focus on experience and identity, rather than power and inequality as they operate in material and historical contexts (Singh, 2013). The changing focus in social work has coincided with an institutional response in universities that is driven by economic and business imperatives rather than a moral case for increasing diversity (Clifford & Royce, 2008). As Sara Ahmed (2012), (2015) has argued, when diversity functions as evidence of institutional inclusivity, as it does in contemporary British universities, an environment is created which is potentially more hostile to black and minority ethnic (BME) staff and students, because it becomes more difficult to articulate the effects of whiteness or raise issues of racism.

In this increasingly complex and constraining context for discussion about race, our initial searches identified the emergence of a body of literature and research since 2008, focusing on BME students of social work. This literature evidences educators’ ongoing commitment to respond positively to a diverse student population. However, this does not, in itself, ensure greater insights into how race functions in contemporary social work education contexts. We believe it is important to subject this body of work to critical review and that a conceptual review of this literature is timely.

Methodology

The purpose of this review was to identify dominant conceptual frames implicit in literature about BME students. Conceptual reviews are a way of revealing the combinations of tacit assumptions, unarticulated understandings and formal definitions in play in discussions about a topic. These influences mean that, while several texts appear to discuss the same issue, they might also understand it through different frames. Conceptual reviews are increasingly used in health and social care and take different forms, including those that review specific bodies of literature as we have done here (see also Bonavigo, Sandhu, Pascolo-Fabrici, & Priebe, 2016) and those that focus on themes or concepts, rather than the texts themselves (Mohatt, Thompson, Thai, & Tebes, 2014).

We reviewed literature about BME students on social work programmes in Britain, seeking to include all peer-reviewed academic journals of the topic published from January 2008 to June 2018. We used three databases (Academic Search Premier, EBSCO and ASSIA), and the following keyword terms: black social work student*, social work education black, minorit* social work student*, rac* social work student*, rac* social work education, ethnic* social work education, ethnic* social work student*. We also carried out further hand searches of the contents pages of those journals that, between them, had published most of the relevant literature (Social Work Education, Journal of Practice Teaching & Learning, British Journal of Social Work and Journal of Social Work).

Terminology

We refer to ‘Black and Minority Ethnic’ or ‘BME’ because this is the most common terminology used to refer to the group of students on which the review focuses. We recognize the limitations of any one term for identifying those people who are at risk of experiencing racism, and we have included literature that uses other equivalent terms or refers to other groups within the category of BME students, for instance, Black African students.

Findings and analysis

The search identified 18 articles that met our criteria. The process of analysis was inductive and interpretive—as any analysis of concepts must be, given they are implicit and inferred. Analysis was informed by a meta-ethnographic method (Noblit & Hare, 1988) in which an interpretive paradigm is extended to literature review. This allowed for a reconceptualization of the original questions addressed in research (Neal-Jackson, 2018). This meant identifying concepts that were influential in the articles but neither explicit nor the objects of inquiry. Practical methods employed to achieve this were initial reading of all articles, noting key themes and the concepts of racism used, developing and, finally, refining the analysis of recurring concepts through re-reading and discussion.

Our review identified a number of significant terms and concepts in the literature, which were undefined and presented as self-evident in most texts. This finding is important in itself, and contrasts with discussions about the same topic in other countries (see, for example, Jeffery, 2005; Razack, 2001). In what follows, we discuss four recurring and central concepts in the literature: subtle racism, institutional racism, cultural difference and pedagogical solutions.

Subtle racism

A recurrent concept in the literature is the subtlety of the racism experienced by BME social work students. For example, Masocha (2015, p. 638) notes that racism ‘permeates through everyday life, social structures and practices’, and this enables it to operate in ‘subtle and insidious ways’, most of which are ‘not readily recognizable’. In their discussion of BME social work students’ experiences in Scotland, Hillen and Levy (2015, p. 793) give a number of examples of the ‘complexities and subtleties’ of racism: BME students ‘being laughed at for their pronunciation’ in class and being rejected by potential placement providers ‘in ways that suggested discrimination’ (Hillen and Levy p. 793). Similarly, Thomas et al. (2011, p. 47) article on supporting BME students in practice placements discusses how subtle aspects of social interactions work to marginalize students. They give examples of ‘irritation in the tone of voice being used, being ignored within the team, or not greeted as other members of staff are’ as ways that BME students are marginalized. ‘Overt and subtle processes’ are also an overarching theme in the Goldsmiths study of diversity on eight social work programmes (Bernard et al., 2011, p. 25).

Subtle racism is not seen as a lesser form of racism but as a primary mode through which racism operates. For example, Tedam’s discussion of Black African students’ experiences of racism on placement (2014b, p. 139) refers to the significance of ‘subtle put-downs … used as a means to perpetuate disregard for, and to undermine, minority groups’, while Thomas et al. (2011, p. 47) refer to the “‘dripping tap’ effect” of repeated differential treatment, leading to “appalling experiences” for some BME students, who fail placements because of racist treatment. Focusing on subtle racism enables authors to find evidence of the pervasiveness and normalization of racialized inequalities in BME students’ everyday experiences on social work programmes.

Social changes across the West since the 1970s, such as anti-racist activism and legislation outlawing some expressions of racism, have had a significant influence on how racism is manifested and experienced. Consequently, the subtlety of modern racisms has become a major focus of research in the social sciences, such as the subtle ways through which white identities continue to have privileged status, the invisibility of systems that reproduce racial inequalities, the promotion of superficial diversity as evidence of racial equality and the re-articulation of racism as justifiable concern about cultural differences (Bonilla-Silva, 2001). However, these aspects of subtle racism are not explored in most of the literature reviewed. Instead, the focus is more often on the subtle ways BME students are marginalized, demeaned or have their identity negated in social interactions, showing the influence of recent writing on microaggressions (e.g. Sue, Bucceri, Lin, Nadal, & Torino, 2007). This literature makes two central assertions: that subtle forms of hostility can be more damaging than overtly racist statements, and that microaggressions occur whenever the victim experiences an interaction as about racism. Microaggressions literature is explicitly referenced by Masocha (2015) and Tedam (2014a, 2014b), but other authors similarly focus on subtle features of social interaction that are used to exclude, demean or negate BME people.

Microaggressions as a concept has been heavily criticised, by those who are dismissive of work on racism more generally (e.g. Nagai, 2017) but also writers concerned about its effectiveness as a frame for analysing the subtlety of contemporary racism (e.g. Lilienfeld, 2017; Wong, Derthick, David, Saw, & Okazaki, 2014). These critiques identify the lack of rigorous methodological grounding or evidence base for the concept, its use of ‘aggression’ as a frame for interpreting interpersonal relations even when racializing behaviors are unintentional, its focus on reports by victims as the sole required evidence of microaggression and its alleged effect of encouraging a ‘victim culture’. In our view, microaggression is an inadequate frame for conceptualizing subtle racism in social work education because it does not account for the significance of social and institutional contexts and, on its own, fails to encapsulate the many ways that contemporary racism operates in liberal institutions. Key elements in the microaggressions literature – the emphasis on psychological harm caused by subtle racism, the requirement to identify victims and perpetrators and the significance given to victim experience as the determining factor—pervade most of the literature we reviewed. Focusing on these elements shifts attention away from the subtle ways racism occurs in social work education in the UK. Examples are the mundane talk about cultural difference that is normative in many social work contexts, which does not feature clear victims or perpetrators, and practices that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 How is ‘racism’ understood in literature about black and minority ethnic social work students in Britain? A conceptual review
• 2 Culturally responsive social work practice with D/deaf clients
• 3 Do we practice (or teach) what we preach? Developing a more inclusive learning environment to better prepare social work students for practice through improving the exploration of their different ethnicities within teaching, learning and assessment opportunities
• 4 Teaching cultural humility for social workers serving LGBTQI Aboriginal communities in Australia
• 5 Racial microaggressions and black social work students: a call to social work educators for proactive models informed by social justice
• 6 What do we know the experiences and outcomes of anti-racist social work education? An empirical case study evidencing contested engagement and transformative learning
• 7 Challenging implicit bias: preparing students to practice with African American families
• 8 Decrypting cultural nuances: using drama techniques from the theatre of the oppressed to strengthen cross cultural communication in social work students
• Conclusion
• Index