The Maintenance of the Dominance of Whiteness in Australian Social Work

Whiteness is invisibly, but strategically, embedded within Australian social work. Using Frankenberg’s (Frankenberg, The social construction of Whiteness: White women, race matters. Routledge, London, 1993) conception of Whiteness as simultaneously a location of structural privilege, a set of unnamed cultural practices and a standpoint from which non-White people are viewed, and Whiteness’ ubiquitous presence is manifested and replicated within social work practice, curriculum, and education. This is a problem both for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people whose lived realities frequently enforce interactions with social work and for the discipline/profession itself. In this chapter, the dominance of Whiteness and the structural processes that maintain this are explored through an examination of social work curricula and our experiences of social work education as Aboriginal academics and students.