Ideological Costs of Social Work: The Neoliberal Racial Projects of Black Social Work Students

Background: Racial projects articulate and translate the linkages between race, social structures, and their meaning in everyday discursive and ideological practice (Omi & Winant, 2014). The neoliberal racial project privatizes and individualizes understandings of race, while fashioning structural racism as unrecognizable (Giroux, 2003; Martin, 2013). The present study argues that the neoliberal racial project is fundamental to social work education and informs the perceived roles and intentions of liberal social work students. Despite a theoretical shift toward anti-racism, manifestation of the neoliberal racial project within social work asserts public positions against structural racism, while upholding mechanisms that perpetuate its existence (Singh, 2014). Analyzing the perceptions and intentions is necessary for efforts to deconstruct manifestations of the neoliberal racial project in future social workers and the profession as a whole. Building off foundational research examining incoming white liberal social work students (Cogburn et al., 2022), this study analyzes how incoming Black liberal social work students draw upon racial ideologies and projects.

Methods: A group of incoming first year Black, mostly liberal-identifying MSW students (N = 49) provided open-ended responses to a vignette about a Black mother engaging with Child Protective Services. The vignette explores structural analysis and decision-making in response to real-world examples of structural racism and anti-Blackness. These data are from a larger multi-methodological, longitudinal study examining the effects of an immersive virtual experience of racism on empathy, structural analysis and decision making. We focused on how social work students make sense of race and racism and how this informed their proposed actions.

Results: We utilized the thematic coding scheme developed to examine white students to understand how Black students may differ. More than half (n = 25) of Black participants made no mention of race, racism, or whiteness in their vignette responses. Additionally, a majority (n = 30) of the participants took a neutral critiquer approach to the vignette rather than committing to any action-oriented response (e.g., advocate, service provider). Perhaps most surprisingly, there is not one instance of participants including themselves or their own experiences in their vignette responses, nor are there responses that might be considered empathetic, sympathetic, or feeling-focused.

Conclusion: This work highlights ways that neoliberal racial projects are infused in social work education and dually impact students from privileged and marginalized backgrounds. While anti-racist approaches commonly assume white students as the sole audience, this study provides key insights into how incoming Black liberal social work students make meaning of race and racism in everyday practice and alludes to gaps in student understandings of structural racism and their efficacy for anti-oppressive practice. Moving forward, social work education must take into account a misalignment in student knowledge and skills as anti-oppressive practitioners when training future social workers. Analyzing the perceptions and intentions of incoming liberal social work students is necessary for any effort to deconstruct manifestations of the neoliberal racial project in future social workers and the profession as a whole. This analysis is important for informing pedagogical innovations aimed at training anti-racist and anti-oppressive social workers.