The Utility of Diversity, or Futility of Diversity: Supervising the Black Social Worker

There’s an element of social location within the helping professions which undermine the anti-oppressive lens through which social workers can be agents of social change. Failure to acknowledge foundational oppression and unpack the invisible knapsack of privilege, conceptualizing the opposite framework of disadvantage is to ignore the elephant in the room. As one group is privileged and the other attuned and hyper-sensitive to the racial landscape, feelings of inadequacy and marginality aren’t reserved for client populations of color, but black social workers in the helping process as well.

A prominent text used in training new field instructors captures the sentiment perfectly by referencing how cultural competence is not a personal element that comes naturally and requires a higher level of professionalism and sophistication, yet how these same professionals are trained isn’t clear in social work education or practice.

You can teach social workers how to better understand disadvantaged populations, disenfranchised clients, and impoverished persons. You can instruct student social workers in how to identify their own beliefs and biases, and navigate them to ensure the needs of their clients are met.  What has not been conveyed is the perspective of the singular minority professional they may find sitting at a table amongst other social workers who do not look like them. And it’s that person’s perspective that is potentially and callously disregarded. The skill set necessary to tread those professional waters and boundaries is all too often ignored, if even identified as an issue at all.

The reality of internalized racism bridges the gap between structural definitions of racism and the daily experiences of racism on a micro level. There doesn’t need to exist specific instances of discrimination in order for people of color to feel the impact of racial oppression.

Microaggressions among well- meaning social workers exposed to elements of power, privilege, and oppression, social justice, and human rights are manipulated by the historical self, paralleling the marginalized clients experience by the social worker of color. Theoretical models of interventions designed to elucidate a natural response to societal stressors based on race for clients must be the same interventions laying the foundation for supervision with black social workers. I maintain that elements of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, Critical Race Theory, Social Identity Theory, and constructs like De-Blacking need to become integral components of clinical supervision in order to resolve the practice related implications of ignored bias on a professional level.

Methods of adaptive survival behaviors in professional contexts, the socially constructed self, and race related stress will be discussed as foundational elements of supervision with black social workers.