The following was written last summer but never published. This contains brief descriptions of structural racism and quotes of racist sentiments.
“The problem with Black Lives Matter,” my professor said, “is too many chiefs, not enough Indians.” My breath caught in my throat. He explained that the movement’s lack of clarity of purpose made it “evolve” into All Lives Matter. With my background in social movement studies I have no objection to seriously critiquing movements. But the professor went out of his way to dismiss an antiracist movement with which he was so unfamiliar that he could not differentiate between the movement and its reaction. Co-founder Patrisse Cullors was at that time enrolled in that same university, a high-profile private school that strongly emphasizes its alumni network. Cullors’ paradigm-shifting artistic and political work in community justice, mental health, queer and trans justice, and justice for Black women should make the school proud. So it was odd to hear her work dismissed, particularly in such racist language, in a foundational lecture on antiracism.
As we move together toward abolition, social workers have emerged in the popular imagination as a panacea to the problem of state-sponsored violence against Black and other marginalized communities. It isn’t hard to see why. Social work centers an explicit commitment to social justice and to a person-in-environment view that honors the dignity and worth of people in hard situations. I encountered this view of social work when I was already working in research and policy leadership around health equity, and I was enthralled. Up close, social workers have a lot in common with cops, and it would be a serious mistake to imagine that replacing police with social workers would by itself solve the problem of state-sponsored racism.
Like police, social workers are socialized with a professional identity as beleaguered hero. This hero identity is articulated in Anna Scheyett’s popular TED talk and Holly A. Hartman’s poem, “Social Workers are Everyday Heroes.” Hartman describes social workers as underappreciated except by the exceptionally vulnerable people we serve. Each line sketches a vignette of an abject help-needer, virtuous social worker, and the conclusion, “we are their heroes.” The hero identity, for police and social workers alike, soothes and hides an ego wound. Social workers are routinely expected to carry impossible caseloads. We are warned that no matter what good we do, we will only ever be seen as child-snatchers, but if we don’t remove the child and the child is killed by his abusers, we’ll be blamed for that too. We’re taught that social workers are stigmatized. We do not sit seriously with why communities are sometimes afraid of the power we exercise. We practice feeling wounded by their fear. We practice a defensiveness that responds to fear with disgust, with resentment, with demands for gratitude.
The hero fantasy creates a therapeutic dynamic that is both dehumanizing and threatening to clients, particularly those who cannot access help elsewhere. In her analysis of care relationships and disability, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describes the elusive miracle of being helped well as a queer and disabled woman of color. She speaks repeatedly of the humiliation of demands for gratitude without agency. She grieves the way abusive “care” becomes fear of care, refusal to ask for or accept any help at all. When abusive care becomes criminal and a social worker faces penalty my classmates predictably rail against the punishment. I see posts like “it’s sad that this child died, but I just don’t think she should face charges, even if she did falsify her records.” Their defensiveness is reflexive. Or rather, practiced.
The chilling effect the hero identity has on accountability scales all the way up to “refugee support” social workers who meet with unaccompanied minors at the US border and encourage them to open up about their experiences knowing that their therapy notes will be read and used by immigration prosecutors. And it scales all the way down to “too many chiefs, not enough Indians.” When I and my peers have named everyday racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, antisemitism, ableism, and just plain bad science we have been warned not to run afoul of the National Association of Social Workers’ prohibition on “unwarranted criticism.” Most recently, an incoming dean cited this prohibition in a public letter explicitly advising antiracist students to tolerate others’ political beliefs. I have never seen another social worker cite the NASW’s instruction that social workers must create environments that are intolerant to racism, but I have seen many cite NASW’s value of “tolerance” to quiet antiracism. When all unpleasant feedback is framed as “stigma,” attack, and false accusation, social workers are denied the value of our colleagues’ ethical reflections. It becomes harder to learn about other perspectives, to correct our own behavior, and to live and practice in line with the values of our profession. As we are seeing on the national stage, when criticism is censured either criticism dries up or trust does. When good faith feedback is punished, the hurt no longer feels like a mistake.
Moreover, when good faith feedback is punished, the only accountability structures we have are the most formal and, in most cases, the most punitive. These structures individualize problems and deal out penalties, emphasizing secrecy and shame and discouraging people from acknowledging their mistakes or learning from the mistakes of others. Punishment renews the hero’s sense of injury. As in the criminal-carceral system, punishments are distributed unevenly and along predictable fault lines; bias exists in reporting, investigating, and determining institutional responses to clinical errors and misbehavior. These differences become behavioral records that become persistently all-white leadership. Individualizing and punitive responses to problems unfairly blame individuals for institutional problems. Errors are inevitable, but there would be fewer if we had ethical case loads, genuinely liberatory education that models accountability and investment in underserved populations, and adequate time with each case to connect, review, consult, reflectively document, and research. The harm of our mistakes would be mitigated if we trained together in giving and receiving ethical feedback including when it is not solicited. If we treat ethical boundary-setting and objection as critical social work skills and a collaborative investment in communities of practice. When Superman destroys a whole city fighting for justice, he doesn’t have to answer to anybody, because he’s a hero. Social work can’t work like that. And not just us. Atul Gawande finds a troubling God complex in his fellow surgeons. Brené Brown finds it in husbands. Others find it in parents, in teachers, in bureaucrats, in anyone with power over others.
We should certainly abolish police and prisons, because individualizing and punishing social problems is unjust and doesn’t work. But we need parents and schools and hospitals. We need people who can sit with problems so big we fear only a hero can face them. Let’s give up being pretend heroes and cherish what we are. Fallible, tender, human. Let’s be willing to hear that we have made a serious mistake or hurt someone. Let’s be unwilling to accept impossible caseloads, dangerous policies, and collaborations that hurt our clients, and joyfully willing to set serious ethical boundaries so we can begin to be fully, functionally accountable for actions that are legitimately within our control and not for conditions that aren’t. Let’s be neighbors.
Han Koehle 