Theorization of Whiteness in Social Work

Background and Purpose: Whiteness, and consequently the notion of race more broadly, originated in colonial Anglo-America during the late 17^th century. Invented as a tool of class oppression effected primarily through the institution of African chattel slavery, whiteness—with the inseparable and co-constitutive corollary of white supremacy—has since achieved global reach, as well as material and ideological hegemony. Singular amid this international ubiquity, the attendant social, political, and economic violence of whiteness prove incomparably severe, durable, and insidious in the United States. By the continuation of its existence alone, whiteness guarantees to non-white people in the United States comparatively restricted access to participation in society and to the realization of humanity. That is, whiteness—maintained and deployed institutionally and systematically—ensures material and ideological inequity between whites and non-whites, to the inordinate benefit of the former and at the dehumanizing expense of the latter. No scholarship has yet reviewed social work’s theorization of whiteness in a way that rigorously accounts for this history. The current project takes up this task.

Methods: This project utilizes qualitative historical and historiographical analytical methods to discern the ways that social work has theorized whiteness to date. Specifically, the project applies hermeneutic analysis and qualitative coding—thematic and in vivo—to social work literature that engages the theoretical conceptualization or deployment of specific interpretations of the phenomenon of whiteness.

Findings: Two thematic contradictions in the theorization of whiteness emerge from the social work literature. First, as dated misperceptions of race as biological, cultural, or otherwise immutable lose credibility in the face of increasing popular understanding of the socially constructed nature of race, proponents of social constructionism still overlook the logical conclusion that whiteness can be socially deconstructed. Some fail unwittingly to see this possibility through the sociopolitical veil of whiteness; some choose self-servingly to reject this possibility, preserving their possessive investment in whiteness; and still others mistake the practical improbability of deconstruction for theoretical impossibility of deconstruction, in effect simply taking a different route only to reify whiteness as ineradicable in the end. The second contradiction is that contemporary whiteness now grows increasingly detached from its historical origins, conceived as transhistorical despite its relatively recent genesis within the scope of human history. The past shows whiteness—that is not to say white people—to never observably have been, in and of itself, anything other than oppressive and false. Nonetheless, the dominant conceptualization of whiteness as preceding history rather than produced by history renders whiteness ontologically vacant, and therefore definable only according to the temporally and contextually conditional narratives strategically imposed by those with the sociopolitical power to contest the parameters of institutionally sanctioned mechanisms of racialization.

Conclusion and Implications: Social work theorizes whiteness in ways that largely eschew empirical evidence of the material and ideological histories of whiteness. If this remains unaddressed, social work will merely continue to propagate whiteness as a catalyst of racial inequity. If serious about pursuing racial justice, social work faces the evident imperative to directly confront its complicity in upholding hegemonic whiteness, the cornerstone of racial inequity.