In what has been the month of May we have been witness to numerous violent acts of white supremacy in our society:
The murder of Ahmaud Arbrey at the hands of white supremacists who were not charged with anything until the video was shared and people cried out in outrage. The police and district attorney in that Georgia town did not see anything wrong with the killing; the killing of Breonna Taylor in her own home as the police mistakenly stormed her apartment on a botched warrant looking for a suspect already in custody; the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis as he repeatedly begged for his life saying he could not breathe, harking back to the killing of Eric Garner. By the way, Ramsey Orta who filmed the murder of Eric Garner at the hands of the police is still in jail as a punishment for having filmed the incident; and, the racist incident in Central Park where a white woman told the police that “An African American man had threatened her” (he had not) knowing that the possible consequences could lead to Christian Cooper’s death, as it has in so many other cases – (remember Emmett Till, for example).

And these are only the cases we know of.

It becomes more obvious every day that the concept of diversity is hollow and allows us to feel good about ourselves but it does not change the structures that created white supremacy and that perpetuate it. It is not enough. As Angela Davis has said “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”

Being anti-racist means that we are more than outraged and we do more than study the issue and talk about it. It means that we take action. That we become not allies, but accomplices. That we speak out. That we protect. That we interrogate social work itself, whose roots in the U.S. are firmly in white supremacy and the social Darwinist movement of Herbert Spencer.

We have a lot of work to do. It will not be easy, and, of course, the Coronavirus is making it more difficult, but we must persist. Maybe this is the time for us to learn more about the history of white supremacy in the United States and elsewhere? Maybe this is the time to look for grassroots organizations that are fighting in the trenches to see how we can support them? Maybe this is the time to learn how to decolonize social work – get rid of theories and practices that are rooted in a white European framework and look for more theories and practices rooted in indigenous ways. Or maybe we will choose to do something else. But we must do something.

I think we can remember the words of Alicia Garza, one of the founders of #BlackLivesMatter: “When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. #BlackLivesMatter doesn’t mean your life isn’t important–it means that Black lives, which are seen as without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation. Given the disproportionate impact state violence has on Black lives, we understand that when Black people in this country get free, the benefits will be wide reaching and transformative for society as a whole. When Black people get free, everybody gets free.”

See below for some books that might be helpful summer reading.

Stay well, stay united, and stay steadfast in your commitment to being part of changing the injustices in our world.

Baptist, E. E. (2014). The half has never been told: Slavery and the making of American capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Bonilla-Silva, E. (2016) Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (5th Ed.).

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Butler, O. (1979). Kindred. Boston: Beacon Books.

Coates. T. (2015). Between the world and me. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Glaude, E. S. (2016). Democracy in Black: How race still enslaves the American soul. New York: Crown Publishers.

Hill, M. L. (2017). Nobody: Casualties of America’s war on the vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and beyond. New York: Atria Books.

Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be anti-racist. New York: Random House.

Kendi, I. X. (2016. Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. New York: Bold Type Books

King, M.L. (1963). Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Love, B. L. (2019).We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Boston: Beacon Books.

Morris, M. (2016). Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in schools. New York: The New Press.

Oluo, I. (2018). So you want to talk about race. New York: Seal Press.

Reynolds, J. & Kendi, I. X. (2020). Stamped: Racism, antiracism, and you. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. New York: Liveright.

Saad, L. (2020). Me and white supremacy: Combat racism, change the world, and become a good ancestor. Sourcebooks.

Taylor, K. Y. (2019). Race for profit: How banks and the real estate industry undermined black homeownership. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.

Taylor, K. Y. (2016). From #blacklivesmatter to Black liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

The 1619 Project. (2019). Retrieved from https://pulitzercenter.org/…/full_issue_of_the_1619_project…
(also available as a podcast)