Credentialing Whiteness, Social Work, and Racial Capitalism: Bridging the Personal, Professional, and Institutional

Background: Social work depends heavily on professional credentialing. There are organizations and institutional processes dedicated to developing and maintaining professional competencies and evaluations. After George Floyd’s murder, social work began to pay greater attention to racism throughout the profession. New anti-racism statements popped up everywhere, curricula shifted, and focus was given to whether white students understood their privilege and role in perpetuating racism. In this study we leverage narrative interviews conducted during the height of these racialized professional and educational shifts, when mainstream professional interests of white social workers briefly converged with racial awareness development, to answer: 1) How do white social work students relate to whiteness? 2) What boundaries are engaged to stabilize or upset these relations? 3) What are the implications of white social workers’ boundary maintenance in social work?

Method: In-depth, semi-structured narrative interviews were conducted in the Spring of 2021 with 24 self-identifying white MSW students at Columbia’s School of Social Work (CSSW). CSSW was home to a biweekly dialogic space where white students examined and uprooted their everyday relationship to whiteness, called the Space for Uprooting Whiteness. For comparison, we recruited three groups of students: 1) those who had never expressed interest in attending the space (n = 8), 2) those who expressed interest but never came (n = 9), and 3) those who attended the space over 10 times (n = 7). The authors conducted three rounds of narrative thematic analysis, individually memoing and discussing after coding each transcript, while building and adapting a final codebook. The final round of analysis involved comparisons between participants, analytic memos, and coded transcripts.

Findings: We found that white students engaged in a process of triangulation, describing personal narratives, recalling people and places, and expressing ideas and emotions for the purpose of racialized credentialing--demonstrating and securing a credential related to racial awareness. Typically studied as an internal psychological process, we instead conceptualize triangulation as a dialectical process between the personal and structural, situated institutionally. Students often drew from three elemental scripts when triangulating: temporality, spatiality, and affectivity. These scripts served as narrative mechanisms of racial boundary maintenance. For example, students used temporality to differentiate between their past (racist) self and their current self. When utilizing spatiality, students described a racial awakening when leaving white spaces and coming into contact with people of Color. While admitting their white privilege, students evaded any affectively positive associations with whiteness and focused solely on negative experiences. Triangulation often served as a performative replacement for genuine vulnerability and reflection about whiteness, which are rarely credentialed in the social work profession.

Conclusion: In the wake of George Floyd, white students credentialed themselves as competent social workers through practices of racial triangulation. Students developed personal narratives around their relationship to whiteness that were (at least briefly) institutionally and professionally valued--narratives unavailable to students who are not categorized as white. We empirically show a dialectic relationship between personal narratives of whiteness and perceived institutional value, resulting in credentialing whiteness and a form of racial capital.