Continuing to Address Whiteness Behaviors Through Culturally Responsive Practice

In antioppressive social work practice, what happens to normality and morality when Whiteness behaviors are blind and willful? There is something marked and tainted in the “invisible whiteness of being,” because to deny the existence of Whiteness is to believe there is only one worldview and ideology, and that we now exist in a life of postcolonization. That idea makes more provocative the thinking around willful blindness. This chapter uses identity stories from Australia and Āotearoa to critique the way that human services and social work education curriculum is developed. In the “normality” of Whiteness situations, for First Nations Peoples, there is a recursive nature to the way that daily life is never without some form of experience of racism, inequity, negligence, and abrogation of human rights. Wherever there are power dynamics in relationships, privilege becomes the other side of the Whiteness coin; with a flip of that coin, what elements of power and privilege are dealt to the individual and different cultural groups?