"You Against Me, You Ain't for Me": Black Women Reimagining Social Work Beyond Carceral Care

Background and Purpose: This paper draws from a larger critical qualitative study examining how formerly incarcerated Black women conceptualize mental well-being and envision their futures beyond incarceration. During collective conversations, collaborators reflected on their experiences with the social work profession - emotionally charged narratives revealed deep-seated distrust, racialized surveillance, and systemic harm. In response to this emergent theme, this paper applies a Black feminist polyethnographic lens to explore how Black women speak back to social work and envision its transformation. While the broader study employed endarkened storywork to explore wellness and futurity, this analysis centers the intersection of collaborators' narratives and the researcher's reflexivity as a Black mixed-race social worker reckoning with her profession's role in carceral systems. Grounded in Black feminist thought, this paper foregrounds the women's call to refuse carceral care and reimagine social work as a site of justice and relational accountability.

Methods: This paper uses Black feminist polyethnography as a dialogic, layered, and reflexive approach. I draw on my experiences and relationships with collaborators to analyze how their narratives about social workers intersected with my own reflections as a social worker, critically examining the profession's role in systems of punishment and control. I reviewed video recordings, transcripts, and reflexive memos to deepen this engagement. Collaborators' voices were central in this stage of analysis. The paper's structure reflects the relational foundation built through endarkened storywork and treats storytelling as both a source of knowledge and a way of understanding the dynamics that shaped this study.

Results: Findings reveal deep mistrust of social workers, whom collaborators described as extensions of policing and child protective surveillance. Social workers were often perceived as arriving with prewritten narratives and intentions to remove children, reinforcing racialized assumptions about Black motherhood. Collaborators emphasized a lack of cultural resonance and relational depth, often noting that social workers were white and unfamiliar with incarceration, substance use, or structural violence. Positive encounters were rare and attributed to luck. Collaborators critiqued rigid, protocol-driven training that lacked empathy and ignored the compounding oppressions they faced. They also positioned social workers within a broader web of institutional harm - including healthcare, courts, and corrections - and called for greater representation, accountability, and engagement with system-impacted communities.

Conclusion and Implications: This study underscores the urgent need for transformative change in social work education, policy, and practice. Social workers must critically interrogate their role in carceral ecosystems and move beyond procedural adherence to build trust-centered relationships with Black women post-incarceration. Training must include real-world engagement with directly impacted individuals to confront bias and institutional complicity. Policies should support culturally grounded, relational, and justice-oriented approaches that prioritize family preservation, dignity, and collective well-being. By centering these voices, the study contributes to ongoing efforts to realign research, policy, and practice in ways shaped by those most harmed by institutional neglect and overreach. This research affirms the power of relational methodologies to elevate marginalized voices and calls on the profession to reckon with its past to lead meaningful and lasting change.