Space for Uprooting Whiteness: Tensions, Limitations and Possibilities

Background: Anti-racist pedagogy within social work often begins and ends with a narrow understanding of whiteness as an identity, identifies white reconstruction as its end goal, and relies upon the suffering of People of Color, especially when incorporating intergroup dialogic practices. In October 2019, 26 white-identifying students at Columbia School of Social Work (CSSW) began to meet in a Space for Uprooting Whiteness (SfUW), a biweekly intragroup dialogic space where white-identifying students examined and uprooted their everyday relationship to whiteness. The SfUW diverges from other, more traditional dialogic spaces, not only in its emphasis on intragroup practice, but also in its attention to white positionality rather than identity, and its orientation towards white abolition, rather than reconstruction. In this paper, we leverage narrative interviews with SfUW participants to answer the following research questions: How did participants experience the space? What were the possibilities and limitations of space?

Method: We drew on 7 narrative interviews conducted with participants of the SfUW in 2021. We conducted three rounds of narrative thematic analysis, beginning with an inductive reading of a single participant’s transcript. We memoed after our inductive reading of the transcript, using these memos and our research questions to create a unique codebook for the participant. In the second round of analysis, we coded the participant’s transcript. We repeated this process for all 7 participants, thematically analyzing within participant narratives. The final round of analysis consisted of comparing across participant codebooks, analytic memos, and coded transcripts.

Findings: Across participant narratives we interpreted 4 major themes: 1) the structure of the SfUW, 2) participants’ motivation for attending SfUW, 3) the skills and learnings participants gained as a result of being in the SfUW, and 4) contradiction and tensions that surfaced in the participants’ narrative retelling of their experience in SfUW. Participants’ learned foundational knowledge about whiteness in the space (whiteness as a skin color vs. whiteness as a power structure) as well as increased their ability to reflect and apply a historical-structural racial analysis to formative experiences in their own lives. This included creating new stories about generational wealth and social work identity. The structure of SfUW, particularly accountability partners, supported participants in applying a racial analysis to their social work practice. In retelling stories about how they translated learnings into tangible behavioral shifts, participants metabolized ongoing tensions between their reconstructionist motivations for entering the space and their evolving abolitionist analyses.

Conclusion: Despite the field’s professed commitment to social justice, White supremacy continues to shape social work education and practice. The SfUW represents one experimental intervention into this reality, replete with limitations but also with possibilities. Participants’ narrative accounts of the SfUW underscore the need for social work education on whiteness, not as an identity or skin color, but as a structural arrangement of power. Narrative accounts of the SfUW also emphasize the need for critical consciousness raising, on-groups for practicing social workers and students to create and tell new stories about self, community, action, and power.