Tag Archives: history

Is social work an anachronistic profession?

Posted on May 17, 2012 by | 2 Comments

In this final post taken from the ideas of The Spirit Level, I’ve been thinking about the evidence from past societies about greater equality, and about how social work values are often in tension, if not outright conflict, with societal ones, and, I guess, about what that says about our profession, and where we fit.

See, if societies grow progressively (no pun intended) less egalitarian as they develop, and if social work’s collective beliefs about the distribution of resources more closely mirror those of the past than today, then what’s the future for our profession? And, of course, for society too?

Evidence suggests that hunter/gatherer societies were more cooperative and less hierarchical because of a clearer sense of interdependence; as natural resources are depleted, will we regain an understanding of just how much we need each other? Will social work values, then, that are obviously more well-suited to ‘flatter’ societal power structures, come back in style?

Or are social workers destined to cope within a dominant value structure that doesn’t reflect our understanding about the way that wealth should be distributed or, perhaps more importantly, about the negative consequences of tremendous inequality?

If that’s the case, then how will we, as social workers, respond? Will we cave to societal norms that devalue redistribution? Will we seek status in order to thrive within that power dynamic, rather than resisting it? Will we spend increasing professional energy dealing with the symptoms of inequality?

Or will we rise to the challenge of turning the tide?

Does it matter, I guess, if we’re ‘out of touch’, if we are true to our value code? Do we, in fact, gain some maneuvering room if we’re operating a bit outside the system? Is there some advantage in being seen, in fact, as distinct, because it helps us to attract social workers who are not only clear about the mandates of the profession with which they are affiliating, but also obviously comfortable with the idea of standing apart?

Will history come around to us, again?

Will we concede?

Or are we content to be anachronistic, since we believe it to be right?

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Taxes Matter. For Real.

Posted on April 16, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Source, The New York Times

I love those moments in class when you can almost see the lightbulbs going off for my students, when something clicks in a way that you know means that they not only know more, but really understand more, and that that understanding will influence the way that they practice social work.

It’s a beautiful thing.

It’s tax time.

Or, here at Classroom to Capitol, the time each year when we celebrate all that a robust public infrastructure and strong social contract can do for us.

They’re basically the same thing.

And so this year’s reminder that taxes matter come from my students, and from one of those lightbulb moments, when a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and asked, “Why do all of these charts about income inequality start in 1979? What changed in the 1980s that made such a difference?”

And we talked about Reagan.

And about taxes.

And the class grew animated as, together, they realized that we make intentional choices about how we want to redistribute income, or not, and that those choices have lasting repercussions.

And that, if we’re not careful, we can forget how we got here, and start thinking that, for example, a rising income gap is “inevitable”, when we know that it’s anything but.

Here in Kansas, there has been a lot of talk this year about taxes–what kinds we have, how many of them, how much they should raise, and, of course, what we should do with them. It’s a discussion that is unfamiliar for many social work advocates, but it’s one that sorely demands our input, because the past 30 years don’t lie: not all taxes are created equal.

On this tax day, when you’re done celebrating how wonderful it is to live in a place where most people pay their taxes because we mostly still believe that having government services is important, take a minute to think about how the charts might look different if we’d made a different set of choices. And about how we could bend those curves still today.

And about the fact that, for real, taxes matter.

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But our path can’t be that easy, or why advocates can’t be Amazon

Posted on April 10, 2012 by | 6 Comments

Even I, who have not watched television since the 2008 Olympics, have seen those “easy button” commercials. And my husband and I joke about how Amazon.com makes it so easy to order (just 1-click! great!) that we end up buying way more than we really needed (and paying more; we’ll do just about anything to get stuff delivered).

We know that there are two ways to shape behavior: the hard way, which requires motivating people to do something different, even something that they may not really want to do; and the ‘easy’ way, which relies instead on changing the context in which behavior happens, so that we reset the default.

I still think that there’s a lot that we can do to make it as easy as possible for people to advocate, and I still think that’s a fundamentally good idea. There are enough barriers to action naturally that we need to make sure that we’re not constructing any more.

But, the more that I think about it, the more convinced I am that, unfortunately, we just can’t make activism too easy.

If our targets–those decision-makers we want to listen to us and to our concerns–know that it’s that easy, I worry that our impact will be sorely diluted. I mean, the movements that have really changed societies (and, in the process, laws) have required far more than a click from people. And that has been precisely their power, the ability to demand much of people who, in the process, discover much about themselves and their leadership.

I don’t know what the tipping point is, certainly, that spot at which advocacy becomes too easy to be very meaningful. And I’m not going to stop thinking about how we need to build cultures within our organizations and our movements that create as many entry points as possible, that provide people with activism mentors, and that integrate advocacy into people’s lives to the greatest extent possible. To do otherwise is to pretend that “real” advocates will do anything, against any odds, and that kind of martyr complex doesn’t do anyone any favors.

But I’m also not going to spend a lot of time figuring out how to “amazon” our advocacy efforts, how to strip them down to such a low threshold of engagement that we are asking very little of those we want to move.

Because, really, are we moving them much, in the ’1-click’ school of activism?

I get it, I do, that building activist structures is probably easier than helping people connect meaningfully with a cause, and with each other, and overcoming the powerful inertia built into our psyche and our culture in order to bring people together for transformation.

I guess I’m just concluding that our world is a little different than buying books (and loaf pans and tape refills and everything else my husband finds for us on Amazon). Here, there has to be some sacrifice, because the advocacy is a signal to those in power of what we’re willing to expend to address the problems that motivate our action.

There has to be some struggle.

And that doesn’t come with free shipping.

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The solace in standing on the right side

Posted on March 1, 2012 by | 3 Comments

At Sam’s parent-teacher conferences last fall, his teacher said that sometimes he has trouble in class because “he always thinks he’s right.”

My husband just gave me that knowing look, as in ‘we know where he got that trait.’

Yeah, okay. I can own that.

But, truly, I can acknowledge that some of the positions I take may not be right, at least not in a “so the other side is wrong” way. I get that there are legitimate questions about the best way to support working families, for example, or what optimal energy policy looks like, or the precise mix of taxes that create a strong revenue foundation. And, so, within my worldview, there’s room to admit that I don’t have any lock on absolute truth in those questions, where there’s at least an element of technical knowledge, not just moral judgment.

And that’s what politics should be about, in my opinion–vigorous debates about the best ways to attain what should be universally-heralded goals. As in, we all want to make sure all children are well-nourished and well-educated, but what are the best ways to attain those ideals?

This post isn’t about those issues, the ones where people can have open and pretty dignified debate, and where there’s a pretty decent chance that the truth is somewhere in the middle of their respective positions.

This is about those issues where there’s clearly no middle ground, and where what’s at stake is really too sacred to be left to compromise.

It’s about the struggle of oppressed peoples for freedom, about the search for equality under the law, and about the human need to be recognized as fully human, even when that’s not yet where political consensus comes down.

When I was leafing through a magazine shortly after baby Evelyn was born last summer (the great side benefit of hours spent nursing!), I came across this quote from Chris Matthews that I liked so much it has been taped to my office wall ever since:

“Over time, people who advance liberties tend to win the argument, whether it’s for women, African Americans, immigrants, or the gay community. In the end, America takes the side of the people looking for rights. That’s one of the wonders of this country. Eventually, we live up to our ideals.”

I don’t know, quite honestly, that I’d be quite so generous in my assessment, but I think his basic premise is not only pretty accurate but very comforting. In essence, it’s a restatement of the famous quote attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” (1967 address to the SCLC).

And it reminds us that, even when we seem to be losing today, today is, after all, only today, and the odds are still in our favor. What was unthinkable a few generations ago is now enshrined in laws, however imperfect they may be, and today’s most heated struggles–for equality for GLBTQ communities, for the civil rights of immigrants–may be case studies in tomorrow’s history books.

I can’t always be certain I’m correct, as much as I might like to posture otherwise.

But we can know when we stand with right.

And, in the middle of lonely and seemingly hopeless battles, that feels good.

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Posted in Inspiration and Examples

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Remember: We’re the Sunflower State

Posted on January 17, 2012 by | Leave a comment

This Sunflower hangs on a gate at my house, as a reminder of what we must be.

These are tough times, Kansans.

The economy isn’t great (although we ended last year with a healthy balance, thanks to some pretty drastic funding cuts whose effects will be felt for generations).

We’re in the middle of redistricting, which is ugly in the best of circumstances and potentially explosive with a polity as divided as ours today.

We face battles in this new legislative session around Arizona-style “show me your papers” legislation, raids of the Children’s Initiative Fund, an attack on our revenue foundation, and more cuts compounding the cuts.

It’s a good thing we’re the Sunflower State.

Sunflowers were adopted as a symbol of the women’s suffrage movement by Kansas suffragettes, I think mainly to ensconce their movement fully within the social mainstream. It has been used in advocacy campaigns repeatedly since, according to my research, because sunflowers can take the heat.

And they always face the sun.

And that’s what we need today.

As advocates, we’ve never felt more heat. The stakes are high, and the threats are real.

But we know what our vision looks like, too, and that’s the promise, the sun, towards which we must set our sights, unwilting, unbending.

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The Legacy of Brown: We Must Not be Bought

Posted on January 16, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Not long ago, I stood with my oldest son at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in front of a photo that contrasted a segregated school for African Americans in South Carolina (one-room schoolhouse with sagging shingles and missing boards) with a rather opulent school (large brick building) for white students.

The “unequal” part was obvious, and even more glaring than the “separate”.

Looking at those pictures, I remembered a section of The Race Beat, a book I read recently about journalists who covered the civil rights movement, that described the efforts of some segregationists in both the North and South who were eager to spend more on schools for children of color, especially in the lead-up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Because they were willing to pay a lot to maintain the status quo.

That’s how much maintaining an oppressive system was worth.

Holding hands with my son, who started Kindergarten in public school this year, I was thinking about those brave parents, the ones whose names are on the collection of lawsuits that, together, became known as Brown v. Board. And wondering whether they were ever tempted, as I would have been, if my child had been in that rickety schoolbuilding, to take the money.

Even knowing what it cost.

Obviously, our entire country has benefitted tremendously from their refusal to be bought. They understood that separate could never be equal, and they knew that their little boys and girls deserved integrated schools and the access to power and full participation that only integration can bring, rather than a spiffed-up segregated school, with better-paid teachers and textbooks in the classrooms.

They were right, and they were patient in that impatient about injustice but amazingly able to wait for real solutions way, and their intransigence was a witness that sparked the greatest movement for social equality our country has ever seen.

And the next thing I thought, as my son’s attention moved on to the next part of the exhibit, was…

I hope we can be as brave. And as tough. And as smart.

Times are tough, these days, for social service nonprofit organizations and for many of those we serve. We’re perennially out of money, and in begging-mode, and we are confronting serious challenges in a political context that’s often impervious to our sufferings.

That’s a dangerous combination, because it can breed a desperation that can push us to accept compromises that we know take us backwards, concessions that violate our most honored principles.

I see it when private organizations join together to pay for public services that the state has abandoned–we’re reaching for a Band-Aid because the need is so urgent, but we’re excusing public abdication of responsibilities core to our social contract.

I see it when organizations scramble to align themselves with even objectionable programming opportunities (“marriage promotion“, anyone?), because they’re trying to find ways to stay afloat, and to curry favor with government officials.

I even see it in myself, when I’m reluctant to take an Administration on on one front because we’re still negotiating on another–no, it’s not money at stake, but something arguably more valuable–my integrity.

I’m sure Linda Brown’s parents wanted her to go to a nice school. They may have even been approached with offers of upgrades, if they would just “be quiet”.

We need to all be thankful that they did not.

And we must, in the words of the song to which my 3 oldest kids and I danced in the gallery of the Brown site, in what used to be a school only for children with a certain color skin, we must not be moved.

Or bought.

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Truth and the cult of objectivity

Posted on January 5, 2012 by | Leave a comment

This is going to be one of those not-quite-fully-developed posts, where there are just too many ideas in my head to say something terrifically cogent. As usual, that’s where you all come in.

But my core message (in case it doesn’t come through clearly!) is this:

We can’t let our obsession with objectivity, and our equation of it with “fairness” or “even-handed treatment”, obscure our search for truth.

I thought about this the other day when I was internally railing against coverage of our nation’s ongoing immigration debate. I was reading yet another article that quoted some immigrant students’ stories of their own lives and hopes for meaningful reform in the coming year, followed by a few quotes from a restrictionist group about how the “pro-illegal immigrant” groups were hoping to blackmail members of Congress with electoral threats related to the 2012 elections and the rising prominence of Latino voters. Or some nonsense like that–I kind of stopped reading.

And it reminded me of part of The Race Beat, where some of the reporters charged with covering the civil rights movement found it increasingly difficult to do so to their editors’ satisfaction, because the issue had crystallized to such an extent that, truly, there wasn’t a legitimate “other side.” In their quest to provide the balance that their newsrooms demanded, they were giving voice to actors who truly didn’t have a real place in the debate, morally or politically. I mean, people of color were being killed for trying to register to vote, and we’re somehow supposed to give credence to an alternative explanation–something other than the evil of racism? Really?

I’m not arguing that we’re in exactly the same place with immigrants’ rights. I don’t get into the “whose injustice is worse?” game. Ever.

But I do think that we’re beginning to find ourselves facing some of the same quandries, at least with elements of this debate. Who do you find who is a legitimate voice arguing that amazingly bright and hard-working immigrant youth should be rounded up and sent “back” to a foreign country? Who represents the “other side” in a question about how we should handle the deportation proceedings of mothers with young U.S. citizen children? Where do you put a shrill nativist voice clamoring for sealed borders and harsh detention conditions? And why can’t we have this national conversation without including them?

Truth obviously means being open to inquiry, curious about alternative views, and willing to engage in an earnest dialogue, including with people who disagree with us. But, in order to fuel the knowledge on which we rely for those conversations, I just don’t think there’s any rule that we should have to try to give equal time to those whose views masquerade as opinion, when they are really dangerous attempts to dress hatred up as dissent.

Objectivity is just not necessarily a virtue.

Our values are a valid lens through which to view our world.

And giving more attention to those voices our values compel us to heed does not mean that we’re so hopelessly biased that we cannot think.

That might make me a terrible newspaper editor.

But I think it serves me fairly well as a seeker of truth.

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Even when we don’t like the outcome…

Posted on November 7, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

Maybe you’re not like me, but some moments stick in my mind, serving as powerful lessons of critical truths, primarily because…

I was so totally, abjectly, entirely wrong.

One of those moments came back to me last week when I was talking with some students about judicial policymaking and the significant strides for social justice that have been made through the court system (yes, I have the coolest job ever).

One of my students responded pretty vociferously that such decisions, while fortunate and even laudable from our particular perspective, are still concerning, because they happen in an “undemocratic” judicial system over which we have very little influence, in terms of the traditional levers of public pressure. She raised the Citizens United ruling on campaign finance as a glaring example of how court decisions can, in their trademark “fly in the face of public opinion” way, just as easily go against us, as for us.

And she’s not wrong, of course. From Plessy v. Ferguson to the present day, the annals of judicial policymaking in the United States (whether or not the courts want to acknowledge it as, in fact, “judicial policymaking”) are littered with cases that, from the perspective of social work values or our vision of justice, went the “wrong way.”

And yet.

The moment that came back to me was when, as I crafted the press release about the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s lawsuit against Kansas’ instate tuition law for immigrant students, I was powerfully reminded of the role that our judicial institutions play in protecting the rights of the vulnerable, and serving as a true check on other forms of power. I thought that my line, in the release, about opposing this “appeal to the courts to overturn legislation adopted democratically by elected Kansans” was a strong argument. After all, what’s not to like about majority rule?

A lot, actually.

One of our partners on the legislative advocacy to pass the instate tuition law was quick to call me, in response to the draft I circulated. He pointed out that we were, at the same time, hoping that the Kansas Supreme Court would call the legislature on its woefully inadequate school finance formula, in particular the way that it fails our lowest-income districts. He (pretty kindly, it must be said) noted that the instate tuition case would be heard down the street from the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic site, a brick and mortar representation of how majority rule can be so dangerous, and how courts can, in fact, spark a revolution.

He didn’t say, and he didn’t have to, that we can’t have it both ways.

Our judicial system is an indispensable part of our governance, when we celebrate it (thanks, SCOTUS, by the way, for refusing to hear the appeal of the California instate tuition lawsuit last summer!) and when we loathe it.

And access to that judicial system, and continual attention to its integrity, must continue to be rallying points for social justice advocates. Like it or not.

I took that line out of the press release.

And we won the case. And the appeal.

But even when we lose, I’m glad the courts are there.

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Kiss me, I’m Mexican?

Posted on March 17, 2011 by | 2 Comments

After you put on your green shirt and your “Top ‘o the Morning” button, check out this political cartoon, from the 19th Century.

Any guesses as to the not-very-subtle message here?

Maybe it will be easier to decipher if we shift the thinking forward to, say, 2011.

It looks like “America” is one big happy place, with people from all over the world coming together in a diverse and prosperous stew, except for the troublemakers from one part of the world, who are loud, prone to violence, and, most significantly, refusing to assimilate. They look not quite human, really, certainly not at all like “us”.

They even insist on waving their own flags.

Now does it sound a bit more familiar?

Except, of course, that, in this cartoon, the anti-American, “bad immigrants” are the Irish, not today’s most common culprits, Mexicans (and the Latinos everyone assumes must be Mexican, even if they’re from Central or South America).

Yes, it’s true; at one point in our nation’s history, there were “No Irish” signs in shop windows, rampant anti-Irish employment discrimination, and widespread anti-Irish stereotypes. They were blamed for violence, bringing down wages, raising uneducated children, and other, assorted, generic anti-immigrant ills.

And that’s what I’m thinking about today, as my Internet browser banner displays four-leafed clovers and people take off work to drink green beer…about integration, and what becoming “American” really means, about how immigrants shape this country as they are simultaneously shaped by it, and about how what once seemed strange and fearsome and literally foreign can now be as co-opted and thoroughly distorted as the other elements we’ve woven into this American composite.

And about how THAT’S the real American way, to me, a sort of fluid and dynamic sense of “we”, rather than a strictly defined and unchanging identity to which one is forever bound…or from which one is forever excluded.

I mean, who among us doesn’t love a little Cinco de Mayo celebration, granted, but many in the U.S., particularly in the context of the current (ongoing) debate over immigration reform, continue to bristle at any notion of separateness, any claim to distinct ethnic and national identity, evidenced by Mexican immigrants in the U.S., inspiring loathing and disdain in a way that seeing an Irish flag at the front of a St. Patrick’s Day parade just doesn’t.

It reminds me of an incident during a debate on our instate tuition legislation in Kansas, when one of the bill’s opponents was in the middle of a particularly virulent outburst about how “these children” can’t speak English anyway, and how they are just waiting until they can go back to Mexico as rich landowners, or maybe it was something about La Reconquista (I’ve blocked some of this part out). A now-retired state legislator stood up and talked about her own Irish heritage, and about how culturally and politically acceptable it is to claim and celebrate that identity now, when it was not at one point in her family’s history.

And then she made the point that, to me, is really worth celebrating this St. Patrick’s Day:

It’s just as wrong now, with today’s population of new Americans, as it was then.

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Of economic justice and dreams unfulfilled

Posted on January 17, 2011 by | 1 Comment

When my oldest son and I were in Washington, D.C. for a vacation last fall, we passed a tour group at the Lincoln Memorial. There, we overheard the tour guide explain to his guests, “Here, a man said he had a dream. That dream came true.”

It struck me that this rather stunningly incomplete and, indeed, extraordinarily inaccurate, statement is, in fact, not that far from how many Americans perceive Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy: a sort of fuzzy, feel-good, “can’t we all just get along” dream, that, for the most part (since there aren’t many lynchings anymore, and African-Americans can use whichever public restroom they choose, and, for crying outloud, we have a black president) is a resoundingly successful piece of our country’s history. While we’re at it, much of that history counts the civil rights movement, and the gains it achieved, as a shared victory for Blacks and Whites alike, ignoring the years of violent, organized, and entrenched opposition and oppression endured by freedom fighters and ordinary folks.

I would certainly never seek to deny the tremendous progress we’ve made on racial justice, although King’s dream, as I understand it, is far from totally realized. But what I lament even more than the uncritical characterization of our society as “color-blind” is the almost complete forgetting of Dr. King’s stance on economic injustice and the violence that poverty wreaks on the lives of people of all racial backgrounds, even in this, the richest society in the world.

While not the Communist that many, including powerful figures in the U.S. government, tried to paint him, he had admittedly “anti-capitalistic feelings”, and he was as deeply troubled by unemployment, hunger, and economic desperation among African-American households and communities as by the overtly racist policies and practices to which they were subjected. He moved his entire family into a tenement in Chicago to dramatize the poor housing conditions, and, of course, he gave his life during a witness for the economic and human rights of garbage collectors in Memphis.

And that’s the part of Dr. King’s dream I’m spending the most time thinking about today, because it’s the part that we have not only failed to reach but, really, failed to keep reaching for. It’s the part that we’re all too willing to forget, to wash out of this memory we want to claim for ourselves, even though it was in the middle of this struggle that he gave his life.

This video clip features some of Dr. King’s thinking on poverty in the United States, and its evils, overlaid with video footage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, uninsured people waiting in line for health care, and other images of economic injustice in modern-day America.

This year, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, here’s to his dream.

All of it.

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