Who Is the White Antiracist Social Work Student? an Investigation of Individual Characteristics and Competencies

Aims: Addressing persistent racial and ethnic disparities in health and human service systems requires scrutiny of policies and practices within those systems. Social workers have professional responsibilities to build individual-level capacities to address racism and other forms of discrimination.

Methods: Using the Psychosocial Costs of Racism to Whites Scale, this study examines differences in characteristics between students categorized as antiracist and those categorized as non-antiracist. White graduate-level social work students (N = 186) were recruited from Master of Social Work programs across the midwestern United States to construct a geographically representative sample. Cluster analysis was used to categorize participants into orientations toward racism based on combinations of subscale scores for White empathy, White guilt, and White fear.

Results: Participants across the groups Oblivious (n = 33), Empathetic but unaccountable (n = 23), Antiracist (n = 25), Fearful guilt (n = 49), and Insensitive and afraid (n = 56) differed on a range of demographic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal characteristics.

Conclusions: Results indicate that antiracist students in this sample differed in important ways from their non-antiracist peers. The findings could be used to inform professional social work education and training efforts to advance antiracist skills.