Trying Out A
New Recipe
Stirring the Pot on Personal Identity and Race
By Robert Schachter, DSW, ACSW, Executive Director, NYC NASW
I
recently went to a social work related workshop where I was asked as a participant
to bring something personal and cultural that had meaning to me to share with
the rest of the group. We were told it could be anything: a poem, a photo, a
piece of jewelry, etc.
Well, there we were, at a point midway through the workshop. When I got my chance, I produced a black and white photo I had enlarged especially for the occasion. It showed a relaxed, smiling young man leaning against a house, arms crossed, wearing what looks like army pants because of the big pockets, a sleeveless t-shirt, and a hat that one might associate with being at the beach.
I said that this photo was probably taken in the early 1940’s when my dad was in his 20’s, sometime right after marrying my mom, who was 17 or 18 at the time. They were living for awhile at Fort Mead, Maryland.
My dad was a master sergeant and in the military police during World War II, but he never did go overseas. He primarily guarded prisoners of war. The point for me, however, was not simply the immediate content of the photo, which has always held a mysterious appeal for me, perhaps because it was taken right before I was born.
Given where I am at this point in
my life, following 35 years of adulthood during which there has been a continuous
process of learning about myself, the photo became for me, in the context of
the workshop, a new window into where I emerged from.
The photo elicited a deeper sense that my father’s parents, who made their
own way to the United States from Eastern Europe as teenagers, about the age
of my 16 year old son, must have been pretty anxious about how they would survive,
an anxiety that probably influenced their coping patterns for a long time to
come.
I surmise that this anxiety was passed onto my dad, which manifested itself in numerous ways, including eventually wanting to secure for himself what he felt would be a reliable career in accounting, and to making sure that his son could make his way in the world.
The photo elicited insights into four generations, beyond anything I had seen within my family at an earlier time. It also foretold opportunities and struggles yet to come.
My colleague, a woman who is about
my own age, went next. She had not brought any “thing” with her;
she had a story to tell. She was one of the youngest of about a dozen children
who grew up on a farm as share croppers, picking cotton in North Carolina. She
did this until she was in her early teens.
Eventually, the family moved to New
York and her older siblings secured jobs in the civil service, which years later
enabled them to retire with relatively good pensions. One major point that my
colleague shared was how close her family has been, and even now, as the family
has grown in size with children and grandchildren, most everyone still lives
in close proximity to one another.
The other point that she shared with
us was that while working the farm, a tremendous amount of money was made, well
into the millions. That money was not for the family, however. It went to the
owner of the farm. The knowledge of the wealth that her family’s labor
created for someone else is a persistent thought for her.
Two workshop participants, two stories,
two families, two social workers.
The workshop was titled “Undoing Racism”, co-sponsored by Fordham University School of Social Service, NASW, and the Anti-Racist Alliance. Over 50 people, mostly social workers, attended including several members of the Chapter Board of Directors, senior faculty from each of the five graduate schools of social work, and practitioners. There was also a leading psychiatrist, two or three psychologists, as well as social work administrators and trainers.
The Illusion of Time
Weeks prior to the workshop, and
in anticipation of it, I was moved to read a book, The Souls of Black Folk,
written by W.E.B. Du Bois, first published in 1903.
Du Bois, a leading sociologist of his day and the first black person to obtain a Ph.D. from Harvard, wrote the book 40 years after the Civil War and looked back on the period following Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of millions of slaves in the United States.
The book is so beautifully written
it flows like poetry, and illuminates both the individual lives of the freed
slaves and life in the aggregate. For now, I’d like to highlight two key
points.
First, Du Bois tells us from the vantage
point of 100 years ago that to address the needs of the freed slaves required
an effort by the national government of unprecedented, massive proportions,
yet the program of creating the Freedman’s Bureau was resisted in Congress.
The result was that the program that was created was seriously under funded
and limited in scope. Yet in spite of that, Du Bois said it was of enormous
importance.
Du Bois referred to the administering
of the Freedman’s Bureau throughout the hundreds of counties of the South
as “social work”.
That one point expanded my understanding
of the potential of our profession. While I was aware that some colleagues had
written dissertations on the Bureau, I had no clear understanding that social
work might have been related to the goal of helping the freed slaves move toward
full participation in the U.S. community.
Here is a significant root of our
profession, yet I am only becoming aware of it in my 25th year since starting
a masters program in social work.
The second point that Du Bois made
had to do with the comparison between slavery and share cropping. While slavery
ended in 1863, the economic system that followed was such that former slaves
were often tied to farming and being in such debt to white land owners and merchants,
that their freedom was virtually non-existent.
When I think about my colleague speaking
about growing up as a share cropper, Du Bois’ point reverberates through
me.
So, here is a question: is slavery a thing of the distant past? Or is the experience
of time something of an illusion where in one moment an event seems long ago,
in another moment it mixes with the present?
The Effect of Anticipation
What is interesting to me as I reflect on all of this is that by anticipating
attending a workshop titled “ Undoing Racism”, and being asked to
share something personal and cultural, an opening was created within myself.
Some form of change was initiated even before getting to the place of the meeting.
Reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic
rose to the top of my reading list. And an examination of a photo yielded new
understanding of my own family while serving as a bridge to connecting on an
intimate level with my colleague’s different experience of the world.
Yet, all of this was prelude to a
workshop that moved beyond notions of cultural sensitivity and cultural competence
to arriving at a shared definition of racism based on enormous and pervasive
societal realities that are present in the lives of our clients, their communities,
as well as in our agencies and ourselves.
Central to the discussion was the
analysis of the historical evolution of institutional power and the distribution
of opportunities and resources on the basis of race, from the dawn of our country
into the present.
Several of my colleagues, all of whom
are familiar with the issue of racism, have said that the workshop pulled together
multiple dimensions of racism in a way that was previously not well integrated
for them.
For me, I am left thinking about whether
a new movement within social work is unfolding wherein practitioners, academicians,
and administrators join together to address the systemic aspects of racism,
thereby permitting some new approaches to practice to unfold.
There are several people I know who believe that this is precisely what is beginning to happen.