Episode 27
Guests: Charla Cannon Yearwood, LSW and Laura Hoge, LCSW
Host: Shimon Cohen, LCSW
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In this episode, I talk with Charla Cannon Yearwood and Laura Hoge, two members of SWCAREs – Social Work Coalition for Anti-Racist Educators. Charla is a clinical assistant professor of field at Indiana University School of Social Work. Laura is a psychotherapist, community organizer, activist, and has been an adjunct professor at multiple universities. Charla and Laura talk about SWCAREs’ mission to dismantle white supremacy in social work education and why this mission is needed. They explain what they mean by white supremacy in social work and provide historical and current examples ranging from leaving out Black and other social work leaders of color from history, to practices that do more harm than good to communities of color, to how boundaries and other ethics often seem to be designed by white social workers for white social workers. There is so much covered in this episode and it is just the start of these explicit conversations on the podcast. I hope this conversation inspires you to action.
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Twitter: @swcares2 @CharlaYearwood @LauraHoge
Music credit:
“District Four” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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TRANSCRIPT
SHIMON COHEN: Welcome to Doin’ the Work Frontline Stories of Social Change where we bring you stories of real people working to address real issues. I am your host Shimon Cohen. Thank you to FIU’s Disability Resource Center for providing transcription services. In this episode I talk with Charla Cannon Yearwood and Laura Hoge two members of SWCAREs – Social Work Coalition for Anti-Racist Educators. Charla is a Clinical Assistant Professor of field at Indiana University School of Social Work. Laura is a psychotherapist, community organizer, activist and has been an adjunct professor at multiple universities. Charla and Laura talk about SWCAREs’ mission to dismantle white supremacy in social work education and why this mission is needed. They explain what they mean by white supremacy in social work and provide historical and current examples ranging from leaving out Black and other social work leaders of color from history to practices that do more harm than good to communities of color to how boundaries seem to be designed by white social workers for white social workers. There’s so much covered in this episode, and it’s just the start of these explicit conversations on the podcast. I hope this conversation inspires you to action.
Hey Charla, hey Laura. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Let’s just jump right into this because this is a huge topic. It could be, a whole podcast in and of itself could be dedicated to this topic or a series or whatever, but let’s just jump right in and start with talking about what do you mean when you talk about white supremacy in social work?
LAURA HOGE: That’s a big question. Charla, you want to try and take that one?
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: I would say what we mean is white supremacy is a part of culture as a whole. Not just American culture really at this point. It’s the world’s culture. Just like patriarchy, it is a belief system, it is a part of every aspect of our life, and that includes social work. And we want to make sure to look at and consider how white supremacy is influencing social work not just every other system that exists.
LAURA HOGE: Right. The only thing I would add to that is just that not only how it exists in practice, but how it exists in how we educate practitioners, right? And so you know, we are a group of people that came together just with a common shared interest and general frustration about how we’re seeing, you know, our field in many ways acting outside our purpose and values, you know, and what can we do as a group to influence our field in a way that then trickles out into the way we practice from education all the way into the field.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: To build on that, what we see is that social work is really good at addressing the ways that white supremacy influences and impacts other systems, how it impacts our political system, how it impacts the criminal justice system. But we’re not always looking at how does it impact our own profession and the work we’re doing. So we wanted to make sure to put an emphasis and focus on ourselves, take the time to actually assess the work that we’re doing and look at ways we can change how we practice, how we teach, and how we’re preparing social workers so that we can actually dismantle the system.
SHIMON COHEN: Just to put out there as well that, you know, when the term white supremacy gets talked about, I think for most people the first thing that comes to mind are racist white nationalists, the KKK, neo-Nazis. So you know, that’s clearly not what’s being talked about here.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: No. That’s not what we’re talking about in social work. What we’re talking about begins with the social work history of how our profession was found, recognizing and understanding the impact that social work had in the removal acts, Indigenous children being taken from their families and they were re‑educated in boarding schools. That is the beginning of our child welfare system. And if we’re not learning about that and recognizing that, we can misunderstand the ways that our profession interacts with those communities and those cultures. And so we want to again, look at, analyze and assess and understand how we have been complicit in white supremacy, how we remain complicit, and look to change the way we’re doing things.
LAURA HOGE: Right. And also when we talk about systems, I guess for me as a white person showing up in a field that’s dominated by white women, I think where the work becomes complicated and really essential is in how do we sort of look inward to our own internal system and how does racism show up in our life. Like, we are not trying to dismantle racism in other, we being me, white women. Like, how can we learn to dismantle it in ourselves and sort of understand that it’s an ongoing process and the absence of that commitment leads to perpetuating white supremacy wherever we’re placed in the field. We become more aligned with oppressive systems if we’re not really examining the way the systems manifest in us without our consent. Right? And that work has to really be intentional, and it’s often uncomfortable, which leads to an obstacle to that work. If we’re not doing that work, then our actions tend to be out of line with our values. We see that. We have social workers right now that work in the criminal justice system, that work in adoption. We’ve been separating families for a very long time, this isn’t new at the border, right? So how has our idea of being helpful and of service, how have we missed the way we’ve really caused harm masquerading as help.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: I think that if we can get folks to begin to understand that this is not a judgment, but it is an analysis, and building up understanding so that we can enact change and do something different. To recognize that there’s white supremacy influencing social work is not to say social work is bad or social workers are bad or they’re not doing good work. But it is saying that this is part of the air that we breathe, and if we want to dismantle these systems, if we want to actually support the communities that are marginalized, then we need to be looking at our own practice and having some uncomfortable conversations.
LAURA HOGE: Yep.
SHIMON COHEN: Yeah. And I want to get into some, you know, kind of like tangible things people can do. But before we get to that, I do want to go back to some of the history here. And if you could talk about, you know, some other ways that social work has been historically, you know, come at the work from a white supremacist model and talk about some of the historical challenges to white supremacy, because whenever there’s white supremacy there’s resistance to white supremacy, and we’ve got to talk about that, too.
LAURA HOGE: I mean, what comes up for me is, I mean, the fact that my students didn’t know who Ida B. Wells was until I told them, tragedy, right? I mean, we celebrate Jane Addams as the mother of social work and I think that, you know, there’s a lot of good work that has been done, but we also critically, in the institutions I’ve taught at, critically sort of examined the impact of marginalizing Black women and the suffrage movement, right? And how do we have these conversations like Charla said, without sort of taking a broad brush, sort of dismantling the field. It’s being able to challenge ourselves and lean into the discomfort and the messiness of like, I’m not sure how to move forward, because we need to do that in order to embrace a very intentional and effective education process and an effective, effective work really, in the field.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: When I look at social work history and how it’s often taught and how we talk about Jane Addams as creating and leading this profession, I think we’re missing out on the social justice movement aspect of our profession, and we are defining our profession in really loose ways. Is it based on degree that defines you as a social worker or not a social worker? And if so, what privileges and rights come with that, and how is that, you know, a part of this messiness of white supremacy? But we’re not talking about the founding of the Urban League and the Urban League was founded around the same time with leadership that graduated from Columbia with what became the social work program. So the history exists of nonwhite people, Black people being a part of the founding and creation of social work and the direction it’s gone, but it’s not what we’re teaching in our classrooms when we talk about the history of social work. And I think that there’s some understanding that when we don’t highlight the impact and the contributions of Black people, of nonwhite people in these spaces, we are teaching a lesson of who owns it, who is responsible for it, and who is the savior, and who is the, who is being taken care of.
And there’s a lot of saviorism and those kind of ideas that are very entrenched in social work practice. So again, that’s part of what we want to address and why we think it’s so important that we develop a history that is rich and shows the diversity of our profession.
SHIMON COHEN: I’m going to put something out there that I have been thinking about. Is it just me or like, what is up with the term pioneer?
LAURA HOGE: I don’t think I’ve heard that.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: I’ve heard of social work pioneers, I guess. And the word pioneer gives me thoughts and feelings of colonizers.
LAURA HOGE: Yeah. I mean, I will say, like, you know, I can only speak to the institutions that I have been teaching and I do think it’s a definitely, a widespread problem. I’ve heard it, this talked about quite a bit, but I do think there are institutions that are addressing this. I think there’s some really good work coming out of Texas and I do think that, I do sort of want to acknowledge that there is a movement to address these things, and I don’t want to erase that work.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: Absolutely. That actually speaks to me of another challenge within social work that perpetuates the white supremacy, and that is in publications and whose voice is the loudest in telling our story. I think there are a lot of social workers of color. Black and Latina, Latino faculty who are doing research who are developing work around the history of social work, around the best practices working with non‑white communities, and that material is not distributed the same way because of the entrenchment of white supremacy within our profession. You know, there’s a lot of work on what white supremacy culture is and the written word and certain types of research, certain practices. And we maintain that. And that’s how we distribute what is social work, what is our history. And so that’s another, again, another piece that we need to challenge and address so that we can get to a place where we are a profession actually living out its core values and the code of ethics.
LAURA HOGE: Yeah.
SHIMON COHEN: So let’s talk about SWCAREs and how you all came to be and what kind of work you’re doing.
LAURA HOGE: Yeah, so I mean, I think, I came out, I joined the group a little bit later. I’m not sure if we joined around the same time Charla, but essentially we’re yeah, we’re you know, a bunch of folks who just are really interested in addressing the racism that we see in our white supremacy culture, that we see in our institutions, and you know, our roles at gatekeepers, wanting to be really intentional there. So the coalition was built, you know, just through a mutual shared interest.
I think we all share a very similar view of wanting to be multi‑disciplinary and like, sort of understanding our impact, the impact our field has had on other fields and on, you know, understanding, amplifying voices of, you know, first‑person experiences and just in any way help support our profession from a strengths‑based perspective of how can we do this work. How can we sort of dig in together and link up and understand how to move forward with an awareness that the work is going to be uncomfortable and somewhat messy, but also a commitment to sort of making sure that the impact that our profession has is in line with, you know, who we say we are and who we really want to be. So you know, we’re a relatively new organization. I think we’re still kind of figuring out how to best show up. But I think that that would sort of speak to our values. You can see more about our mission and values if you went to our website which is SWCAREs.org. It’s much more explicitly spelled out who we want to be and how we want to support institutions and practitioners.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: It began with a couple of faculty members who had an interest in addressing and looking to study and understand the way white supremacy shows up in social work and wanting to build on anti‑racism skills. And then from there, relationships have been forged with others who are like minded. And we continue to look to grow, but we also want to be really intentional about understanding what our purpose and goals are. Right now we’re looking to develop trainings, put together workshops, create publications, share publications, get information out to educators so that they have the skills and tools to be able to help foster conversations around how white supremacy influences our profession both for their research, for our professional understanding and for students’ growth and learning.
SHIMON COHEN: So I’m really hoping that this episode can serve as a training tool, a teaching tool. And you know, I think one way to do that is to just get into some of the ways as you say that white supremacy shows up in social work. You know, if we can just, if you can just go through some concrete examples so that people, you know, listening to the podcast can start to learn from that.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: I will say that some of the ways that white supremacy shows up in social work, to begin we often talk about issues in silos. We will talk about clinical practice. We will talk about macro practice, we will talk about criminal justice, we will talk about schools and then we will talk about diversity and inclusion separately. We want to get to a place of understanding that white supremacy is part of the air that we breathe and influences every part of our practice no matter where we’re practicing.
And so when you understand the issues of every practice area, you can see that there’s elements of white supremacy, a part of the challenges that they’re facing and we’re not always on the forefront of addressing those.
So, in schools, when there is a high suspension rate for Black and Brown students, how are school social workers actively addressing and looking to impact and influence training and education for teachers so that they are not, so that they understand and recognize their biases and so that we can create healthy, safe school environments for students. Many of the clinical practices that we use were created by and for white males. And we are using them in pathologizing communities of color with this material. It’s focused on individualism. We talk about self-care versus community care. These are all examples of how we as social workers say we’re addressing issues, but aren’t necessarily touching the messy parts.
An easy example is what’s happening at the border. There are social workers who are a part of removing children from families. And I understand that they’re probably reconciling in their mind that otherwise these children will be in cages, where else are they going to go? So I’m placing them in a foster care home, I’m trying to find them the best placement. They feel like they’re in the trenches doing the work, but how much pushback are they giving to the fact that this is a disgusting and disturbing process and it operates outside of our code of ethics. And how are we holding those social workers accountable in those spaces or supporting those social workers in those spaces so that we can dismantle the white supremacy that exists at the border or in schools in clinical practice.
LAURA HOGE: Yeah. I mean, for me what it really comes down to is if we’re not, if we’re only focused on needs assessments right, if we’re only focused on filling needs or meeting needs and we’re not focused on closing the gap that, you know, if we’re focused on filling gaps, right, we’re not focused on closing gaps we are, we become like, exploitive. Right? We are making a living off of the pain caused by an oppressive system without really challenging the power that caused that pain to begin with.
So you know, what I have done in some of my classes, and this has been pretty interesting, is I’ve challenged people, you know, part of the curriculum is that we have to do these needs assessments, and I don’t allow them without an analysis of power. So if there’s any kind of assignment that I give my students I’m always asking them to look at it from two different levels, right? Like, we do want to meet peoples’ needs right? People need housing, people need food, people sometimes need foster care, right? But how are we dismantling the power that’s causing those needs to begin with? How are we looking at policies that are leaving families in poverty, and how does that impact their children, their rights being terminated, right? How are we looking at the fact that there’s policies now that are going to be taking away access to food for families that are poor.
We need to be looking at who benefits from the needs that exist. Because if we’re not doing that work how are we not aligned with oppressive systems, right? And I get it. I get that it feels right. Like, it’s intuitive to say okay, like, I want to be working and helping to make sure these children are being fed. I get that. Like, absolutely. But if that’s all we’re doing then we’re not really creating, helping to create sustainable change and that’s not really very empowering. In fact it’s quite infantilizing. And I know that’s not our intention, but it ends up being the impact.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: A great quote that I heard that speaks to it for me is we, can’t program our way out of poverty. We can’t just put after school programs in a community and all of a sudden there’s not going to be poverty that exists. We really have to understand the powers and the systems that make that community impoverished. And sometimes, although we do a really good job in social work of talking about understanding the system that leads to this community being impoverished, we don’t necessarily put that understanding into practice, especially beyond school and education. So your work begins to be focused on creating a new workshop, getting new volunteers, putting a new activity in place for this community, and really it’s just mandating and creating jobs for privileged folks who already have education and access to the resources and aren’t in the same, aren’t a part of the community that you are then serving. So we need to be looking at what is creating the need for after‑school programs to be rolled out in one community over the other and how are we being complicit or aiding into that system when we are part of community groups that offer funding, yes, but they also give the rich and powerful in your city a pat on the back to feel like they’re actually addressing issues that they’re creating. We just need to be a little bit more intentional and not afraid to disrupt the system.
LAURA HOGE: Right.
SHIMON COHEN: You know, when you are talking about people who are not part of the communities, there’s also in terms of social work students and social workers who come from the very communities that they are gonna go back and work in, a lot of my students, and you know, what can happen is that they get trained in such a way that they feel torn between their community and now this professional way of having to be. And I was wondering if you had some thoughts about that.
LAURA HOGE: You know, as Charla was talking what I was thinking about is also just how yeah, we, how, you know, we also make higher education very inaccessible to communities that tend to be more marginalized, right? I mean, I think about what’s required for me. I’m a psychotherapist, so as a clinician on top of, if I were to go to school full time, which I wasn’t really able to do, I would also have to do an internship. And if I was also feeding a family there’s no way I could have done that. Right? We make it almost impossible for people with lived experience to really be able to, you know, get that title protection, right? And so then how does lived experience really become a part of the conversation? If it’s not really intentionally created, it’s not always present. So I do think, you know, when I think about my students who are mostly Black and Brown, there is that experience that you are describing. That’s what I’ve, that’s certainly been vocalized in some of my classes and it’s just like, you know, usually it’s in the context of conversations about ethical dilemmas, right?
Because it’s like, okay, but like, my pastor actually knows way better how to make a connection, has buy in in this community, doesn’t have title protection. So you know, but should be making a living, probably does it better than half the students in class, rightfully so. So it does become a bit of an ethical dilemma just because to practice really in the best interest of the community comes into conflict with what we would consider to be, you know, standards of practice, I guess.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: Absolutely. Laura and I had a conversation earlier today where I was talking to her about ethical dilemmas that I have faced as a Black woman in social work. And that my instinctual way to relate to, connect to community would not fly with some of our colleagues. They would see it as poor boundaries, it would be examples of ethical dilemmas. It wouldn’t be acceptable. But it is the only way that I can build the relationships necessary to do the work. And it also is culturally intuitive to me and to the people who I’m serving. So that’s another area where that white supremacy creeps into our practice.
Though I would say that some ways that we interpret and talk about the code of ethics is from a perspective, a point of view that the client and the social worker are on two different plains, they’re from two different communities, they’re not connected and that there shouldn’t be an overlap and that there’s one that naturally exists. That in and of itself is problematic. If we do, and it’s totally fine to be a part of the neighborhood.
I use an example in my classes sometimes of living in a neighborhood where I also work at a community center in that neighborhood, and the neighborhood kid wants to cut my grass. Is he a client? Is he my neighbor? Where do these lines cross? Am I paying a client to do a service for me? That’s part of community. And it’s a beautiful thing, it’s a good thing, it’s a cultural thing and social work can give the message that that’s not okay. That’s one of the ways that white supremacy shows up in our profession.
SHIMON COHEN: Yeah. I know from my experience as a white man doing cross cultural work, a lot of the ways that, especially when I was going into peoples’ homes, if I didn’t eat the food that they offered me, there was no way they were signing up their kids to come hang out at our youth program. Like, it was not gonna happen. So I ate the food, like, I mean, oh my God. It was as though the world ended in some textbook somewhere.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: Absolutely.
SHIMON COHEN: The other thing I wanted to talk about is the deficit way of looking at things that, you know, I think is connected to white supremacy and perfectionism. But this, you know, you brought up pathologizing communities of color and there’s a way that, you know, our education, our social work education looks at communities of color, communities in poverty, from everything that’s wrong rather than everything that’s going well. And it happens with our students, too, the way certain students are looked at as well through a deficit lens.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: One of the things that we talk about in SWCAREs is that oftentimes programs, social work programs have a course on diversity, have a course on marginalized identities. And we don’t have a course on white people. We don’t have anything where we’re studying and understanding white people, the way that white people operate, the way white people influence the world and culture, challenges, we don’t talk about that. And by not talking about that, we are making white normal. And everything that is covered in diversity class, them, those, diversity, the issue. That in and of itself is a strong message to our students that they have special needs. These marginalized people, these Black, Brown, Queer, women, they are special. And we have to treat them special. We need to do things special for them. But never anything about whiteness or how white needs to be treated, cared for, addressed, anything. So we want to balance out the conversation, and address whiteness head on as a culture. As an identity. And what whiteness needs, because that speaks to how we begin to pathologize marginalized communities, because it’s them that have an issue. But we’re never talking about things that are quote, unquote, normal for white folks. That’s not necessarily normal for everyone.
SHIMON COHEN: Right.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: We will say, but they do this when talking about Black or Brown folks. And it’s perpetuating white supremacy. It’s saying that they’re different, they need special treatment, they need to be cared for differently. You are going to school to learn how to do for Black and Brown people, and it’s not needed. It’s not necessary and again, we talk about these things theoretically really well. But the LGBTQ community does not need something to be great and to grow. The straight community needs to get off their backs and move out of the way. And just the same, Black and Brown communities don’t need a fix so that they can thrive and do well. They need white people to move, get out of the way and stop oppressing them. But we’re not talking about that. We’re just talking about how we can save and feel good about giving little tokens of whatever to these communities versus how we can get out of the way so that those communities can actually be as great as they are.
LAURA HOGE: I mean, I think also it doesn’t always show up as a deficit, too right? You see communities that are seen as other, them, being exoticized as well, right? And so I think, you know, when you say deficit, I am very much in line with what Charla’s saying in that it’s more sort of like, normal and them. Right? What is, you know, white being seen as sort of the default and everything else, you know, something, just something else that needs to be assimilated in a lot of ways, right? And I’m glad you mentioned queer folk and you know trans people. It’s not lost on me in this conversation that I have, in my master’s degree program I had to sort of create my own specialty. I specialize in LGBTQ issues quote, unquote, right? So in order to really, you know, have a specialty, I had to learn about those people, quote, unquote, of which I am a part you know, so, yeah.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: Yeah. I will speak to my own experience in my MSW program. I only heard my community talked about in a deficit language. Even when the theories and everything that we talked about were, let’s talk about things using strengths‑based approach. It still was a condescending idea of look, they have strong families. Like I think, what if they have strong families? It was uncomfortable. It’s disappointing, it’s frustrating. Because when you read the code of ethics, when you read the values of our profession, we know this stuff on paper so well. We understand theoretically that we should be strengths based, that it is not a deficit of marginalized communities, but that it is others who oppress. We understand systems. But we don’t practice in a way that shows our understanding and we don’t assess our own profession and our own teaching in a way that shows that understanding.
SHIMON COHEN: Yeah, and I think, you know, back to what you had said earlier in terms of like, who gets to be considered a social worker, you know, as you’re talking I’m thinking about community activists, you know, going way back. Like the Black Panther Party and how they created the free breakfast programs that are now in every school that the government took, adopted that. But at the same time destroyed them. They had, you know, sickle cell anemia clinics in the street, healthcare in the community. I’ve never heard of them being talked about as social workers.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: That history, those conversations are again, part of what’s missing from our curriculum. Social work students come from everywhere with all kinds of backgrounds. And so we don’t know that they know that information already. And that just needs to be a part of the way that we shape everyone’s understanding of who we are as a profession.
LAURA HOGE: Yeah.
SHIMON COHEN: You know, as we’re kind of wrapping things up here, I just want to give you another opportunity to just kind of put out there whatever you want to put out about this topic, SWCAREs, the work that you are doing. This is your platform.
LAURA HOGE: Sure. I mean, I think, you know, there are a few things that have been sort of rallying around as we’re talking. But one point that I think that is important to make is that we don’t, our organization isn’t acting from like, a position of scarcity, right? Like, we are trying to build coalitions. We’re not trying to sort of build ourselves as some sort of like, all knowing, you know, organization, right? And so, you know, we’re all about shared power, we’re all about collaboration, we’re all about feedback, right? You know, one thing that I think that we prioritize is that, is just a desire to have difficult conversations, right? And a desire to talk openly about sort of the messiness of that and help one another to lead into that discomfort and embrace this, you know, and see this work as radical, right? See that discomfort as radical. I was talking to a colleague earlier you know, and that was something that he had said, is like, you know, we have to be able to reframe that as a radical act. And I do think our field is positioned to do that work. We’ve got some emotions to kind of get past for sure, but I do really believe in our field. I believe that we are able to really roll up our sleeves and dig in together. And that’s really what we’re hoping to do.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: Yes. I would agree. Social Work CAREs is looking to address the way that white supremacy is woven throughout our profession. We are not looking to fault anyone or say that anyone is practicing inappropriately. We are just looking to push our profession and the way that we educate to the next level and live up to the values and ideas that our code of ethics outline. We are not all knowing at all. We really want to gather information that other people already have in the place where people can get that shared information. We can help distribute it and hold our profession accountable as a collective.
LAURA HOGE: Including ourselves, right?
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: Absolutely. Another big thing is that we need to have an understanding that social work is made up of majority white women, and there is a specific way that racism shows up and is perpetrated by white women, and we need to be honest about that, address that, face that, and fix it, because it is harming and hurting the communities that we say we want to serve in ways that would look different if we were a profession led by white men. And I don’t think that that is seen, talked about or addressed head on in the ways that it needs to be.
We are really comfortable with talking about patriarchy, we’re really comfortable or we’re growing in our comfort talking about LGBTQ issues, all things that still affect Black folks, all things that still affect other people of color groups. But we aren’t as comfortable with saying racism is a part of our profession. And that is because the white women who are the overwhelming majority in our profession don’t want to address that elephant in the room because that means addressing themselves. And we want to as a group be really explicit and say that we know that’s part of the issue. We’re willing to walk people through and work on that as a group, but it has to be something that everyone’s willing to face and address.
SHIMON COHEN: I’m trying to decide if I should ask a follow‑up to that or just kind of leave it, because that was kind of like the doorknob thing at the end of a session, where it’s like that could be a whole discussion in and of itself.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: Needs to be.
SHIMON COHEN: Well, I mean, why don’t we talk about it? Like, I mean, is the right question what are some of the ways that it shows up? I mean, you know, where’s the next, where do we go with that conversation?
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: I would really challenge everyone, but especially white folks, to build an understanding of their own culture. We are immersed in white culture. But I don’t think we have an understanding of white culture. The history of whiteness, how whiteness portrays itself, expresses itself, influences our everyday lives. When we do that we can see and understand that whiteness, I mean, whiteness positively privileges white women just like it does white men. No, white women do not have access to the same privileges that white men do, but they do have access to privileges that Black men don’t. We need to be honest about that, recognize that and look to understand how it’s still influencing our profession the way that, I don’t want to speak to what, there’s lots of research and other folks who are really strong experts in discussing the ways that white supremacy shows up from white women. There’s lots of articles and materials out there. You can find many of them on our Social Work CAREs website. But there are ways that white women perpetuate white supremacy. And that’s from Emmett Till to stories today of you know, a kid who accidentally brushes up against a white woman’s butt in a gas station. There are ways that white women perpetuate, Barbecue Becky, all of these things. There are ways that white women specifically perpetuate white supremacy. And that is still apparent in social work. And we need to be honest about that, and look to address that specific way that it shows up. And not just talk about talk about white supremacy, talk about racism, but get to walk away from the table with yeah, that’s what those people do.
SHIMON COHEN: That’s real. Thank you both so much for taking the time to come on here. You know, I don’t think there’s a good way to end this conversation. I think that this is a start. And I am not saying that this is the start. There’s been many conversations about this. But this is the first like, totally explicit conversation on the podcast about this. There’s definitely other episodes where white supremacy and racism have been discussed. But this, you know, I hope that this conversation sparks and inspires people, social workers, students, educators to really educate ourselves more about this and take action, you know, and have difficult conversations. I’m going to link the, you know, the Social Work CAREs website in the show notes so people can access that, and you know, just thank you both again, and thanks for doing the work in the community.
LAURA HOGE: Thank you. I really appreciate you letting us tell you a little bit about what we’re doing and for you contributing in so many ways to similar work.
CHARLA CANNON YEARWOOD: Absolutely. This was nerve racking but we did it. I’m hoping we get people to think. But I’m open to getting feedback and learning myself, so, thanks.
SHIMON COHEN: Thank you for listening to Doin’ the Work Front Line Stories of Social Change. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Please follow on Twitter and leave positive reviews on iTunes. If you are interested in being a guest or know someone who is doing great work, please get in touch and thank you for doing real work to make this world a better place.