“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, October 6, 2013

Racism and Social Work

Here is an issue I care about a lot, which I was talking about with my mum, who is a psychoanalyst and was a manager of and then consultant concerning daycare centers for highly at-risk children.

The recent spate of horrible stories in the media coming out of the UK about small children who were killed or left to die share one thing in common: many many social workers saw what was happening, or could have. Why didn't they stop it?

The other common denominator is that the families concerned are either non-white or recent immigrants.

We conclude that a signal not to interfere with other culture out of some kind of strange upside down PC “respect” provides an outlet for implicit racism, both personal and structural.

Time to address this, people.

No comments: