Race(ing) Social Work in Australia: Three Critical Recognitions for Dismantling Racism

This chapter takes as its starting point the paradoxical nature of Australian social work practice wherein the discourse of anti-racist (and anti-oppressive) practice co-exists with the reality of pervasive racism in a whitewashed profession. As a profession whose core is working with and advocating for historically oppressed and marginalized groups, it follows that proclamations of anti-racist practice predominate. The main contention in this chapter is that while the discourse of anti-racism in Australian social work practice continues, in reality, the crucial foundational work needed to dismantle racism within the profession has still not been done. Using a framework of “racism as violence,” it argues that central to this foundational work are three critical recognitions of racism as: (1) systemic violence that broadly underpins social work practice; (2) ideological violence of an invisible White, western worldview and White racial framework that continues to inform social work practice; and (3) structural violence embedded in “normalized” racist structures, policies, and practices that still exist at the core of social work practice and benefit racially privileged (White) people. In the end, this chapter is a call for explicit, intentional, and widespread analytical discussion of racism within the profession. These analyses must center and be informed by the “voice of color” as articulated in Critical Race Theory – i.e., by racially marginalized social workers with lived experiences of racism. Such analyses immanently advocate for a critically reflective, structurally focused anti-racism as the only way to dismantle racism in Australian social work.