Social Work & Racial Justice

Several University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work faculty members and alumni contributed to the recent book Social Work, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice: Reckoning With Our History, Interrogating Our Present, Re-Imagining Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2023). Edited by Laura S. Abrams, Sandra Edmonds Crewe, Alan J. Dettlaff and GSSW Dean Emeritus James Herbert Williams, the book explores social work’s complex history of upholding white supremacy alongside a goal of achieving racial justice and practicing within racist institutions and systems while simultaneously working to dismantle them.

Assistant Professor Autumn Asher BlackDeer coauthored the chapter “Remedying the Foundation of Social Work Education: Toward an Actionable Antiracist Pedagogy,” while Assistant Professor Tyrone Hamler coauthored “Radically Imagining Anti-Racist Social Work Research Using a Trauma-Informed, Socially-Just Framework.”

Alumni Laura Nissen (MSW ’89, PhD ’97), Finn Bell (MSW ’09), and Danielle Littman (PhD ’23) co-authored a chapter on “Using Futures Thinking to Imagine the Evolution of Antiracism Practice in Social Work: Four Scenarios That May or May Not Involve a Future for the Profession. Bell and Littman were inaugural Health Futures Fellows of the Portland State University Social Work Health Futures Lab established by Nissen.

The book’s authors critically examine social work’s history, values and mission; offer innovative strategies for education and practice; and call on social work to eliminate structural racism in education, research, practice, and social service institutions and systems. They challenge readers to conceptualize and enact an anti-racist future by reckoning with histories of oppression and resistance, de-centering whiteness, and forging new practices, policies and pedagogies that can lead to an anti-racist future.