This is the last of the pieces inspired by A Problem from Hell, and it’s a theme that I’ve touched on here before–how we respectfully tread into others’ lives, in our advocacy and our direct practice, and how we must honor the stories we are allowed to know.
I think there’s some intentional appropriation of others’ narratives, which came up in And Their Children After Them, too. Agee, the original author in whose footsteps the book follows, was described by the subjects of the book as though he “didn’t talk with them. He didn’t even talk down to them. He talked at them, as if they were objects” (p. 39). He never sent them a copy of the book, and it was a long time before they were even aware of its existence.
To protect themselves in an inherently exploitative relationship, the families hid much of themselves from the author and photographer. That way, they retained some ownership rights to their own stories. As the now-grown children explained, “There was a lot that they didn’t show and he never learned”. Largely derided by the author as simple-minded, their careful deceptions prove that they were considerably smarter than he assumed (p. 56). Still, as people in positions of relatively little power, in society, they had little recourse when a stranger wanted to tell their story.
And, of course, the terms of the telling were far from equitable. The author, while he didn’t get paid much for the work, got other rewards–prestige, attention…and those who laid out their lives and their hardship got nothing. As one family member recognized, “She went home to a job in a textile factory that does not pay in one month what the picture of her would sell for in that Birmingham gallery” (p. 175).
But it’s not always about such opportunistic exploitation.
Sometimes, I think, it’s a neglect (not benign), born of paternalism, that, while perhaps more understandable, is no less harmful. Like the anecdote that the UN Press Office did not initially translate its press releases into Serbo-Croatian during The Hague proceedings following the Bosnian genocide (p. 497). So, in other words, that people were unable to understand the process that was supposed to bring restorative justice, for themselves and their people. Because it wasn’t a priority to make sure that they could.
I encountered this quite a bit in some work I did last summer, exploring the advocacy capacity of the ‘healthy eating/active living’ network in the Kansas City area. Some of the grassroots groups–neighborhood organizations working in communities of color, faith-based groups organizing African Americans, coalitions representing Latino immigrants–stated that they perceived that others wanted to claim that they were working with them, to be able to take credit for any advances made, or even just to give themselves additional credibility for trying to engage these priority populations. But, often, that doesn’t include really sharing power, or building structures that put affected individuals at the center. One neighborhood group told me that ‘on the grant applications, everyone’s our friend’, even if that doesn’t always yield fruitful partnerships.
Of course, our sincere hesitation about taking over others’ stories cannot mean that we cease to tell them. One organization I was working with was reluctant to use clients’ stories in their advocacy because they said it would feel like ‘using’ them…but, then, their advocacy freely incorporated composite stories (because all advocacy needs narrative), which can have the tendency to aggregate and distort individuals’ stories, in ways that are no less alienating.
The answer, instead of hiding behind a veil of anonymity, is to change our processes.
We need to make it clear that people continue to own their stories–and to receive proper credit flowing from them. People should be encouraged, and facilitated, to do their own telling—we don’t need nearly as many ‘spokespeople’ as we think we do, on others’ behalf. And we need to respect, and acknowledge, people’s needs to be selective about which stories are told, and how, and why.
We need to treat stories as carefully as though they were our own.
While always–ALWAYS–remembering that they are not.
Classroom to Capitol 
Starting in the Classroom: Safe Spaces
One of the parts of my teaching that I take most seriously is my obligation to create a ‘safe space’ in which my students can grapple with their professional ethics and the conflicts between these ethical standards and students’ own personal values and beliefs.
This is true in most social work classes, I think, and there’s certainly a strong practice component of these concerns; students want to talk, for example, about what they’ll do if a client wants advice about getting an abortion, if they are opposed personally.
But there is an undeniable policy element here, too, as students grapple not just with how they feel about these ‘hot button’ issues, but how that needs to translate to their support or opposition for specific social policies, and, then, even for candidates.
As a professor, I struggle with the balance between making sure that students feel that they can authentically question the different venues through which to achieve given policy aims…and my desire to see the social work profession articulate a compelling, and even a commanding, commitment to policy ‘goods’, because that’s precisely what I believe our profession, and our social policy, needs.
And this means that, even within our classroom, different ethical principles can collide, particularly our desire to support the individual self-determination of all human beings (yes, including social work professionals) and our need to be a more effective voice for policies capable of delivering greater social justice, which demands a more unified front.
I don’t have the answers for this, but I hope that it’s a case of where being transparent and wrestling with these questions alongside my students gets us at least focused on the issue in a constructive way.
We have to come to terms, after all, with the messiness of trying to bring a diverse group of professionals to consensus on a variety of policy issues (and, surely, questions about taxation and criminal justice and foreign policy and public assistance are no less thorny than marriage equality or reproductive rights), but also with the real risk of our irrelevance if we conclude that we can’t deal with these divides and, so we must stay largely out of the political arena.
And that’s where I think my classroom comes in. I hope it can be a laboratory for democracy, a safe place to prepare ourselves for advocacy, which is inherently risky.
I hope that it can help my students to construct a mutual aid group, of sorts, as we navigate the policy arena together.
Because we can’t hide, within the four walls of our classrooms.
But hopefully we can sharpen our skills and focus on our values and gird ourselves for debate, here.
And then feel ready to engage. Where we need to be.
Together.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged ethics, social work, students