NASW Social Work Talks - EP56: Facing Racism, Moving Forward

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

Chad Dion Lassiter, MSW, is Executive Director at the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC), and president of the Black Men at Penn School of Social Work, Inc., at the University of Pennsylvania.  We speak with him about America's racism pandemic, and how the social work profession can best move forward through it. See the show notes for related resources.

Welcome to Social Work Talks. I'm your host, Greg Wright. NESW member Chad Dion Laster is an expert on improving race relations. He's a well-known expert who has appeared on Fox News, NBC, and ABC in his hometown of Philadelphia. He's also a regular contributor on CTV in Canada. Chad is here to talk about racial unrest in our nation and what social workers can do to address this problem. Welcome to Social Work Talks podcast, Chad. How are you doing, man? I'm doing okay this morning. How are you, Greg? Great. How did you become interested in the issue of racism?

on? Well, that's a great question. Growing up in the African-American community in the city of Philadelphia, I came of age during the crack era. My community was ravaged by the drug market. It was ravaged by the disease of poverty, a lot of structural inequality. So at a tender age, I would look at how certain communities throughout Philadelphia had less police officers in their communities how in my community we had a lot of police presence seemed like we were always under suspicion and surveillance I had friends who on the other side of the color line went to the better schools the school in my community was lacking a lot of resources so I've seen inequities at a tender age

didn't know how to situate it but recognize that there was a class of have and a class of have not realized that my white friends when I was growing up if they shoplifted or if they engaged in any form of deviant activity they would get a slap on the wrist and then people in my community who did the same thing they would end up in a juvenile justice system so I would say a combination of growing up in the African-American community, growing up in a racially conscious family who racially socialized us into understanding who we are as Black people in America from a strength based perspective. And then schooling at John C. Smith and certainly the Black church kind of

shaped my framework for understanding what my mission in life was going to be, which was attempting to address all forms of unlawful discrimination. Why is it so hard for our nation, for Black people, white people, brown people, to actually have a conversation about this issue? I mean, it's like a thousand-pound gorilla that's out there, and it's like we don't want to talk about it. I think that we do talk about it in the African-American community. I think that the nation as a whole is in denial. I think it's hard for the nation to deal with themes of white supremacy, themes of white violence, themes of white racism. Whiteness allows for the democracy to avoid the conversation. So whiteness allows for the mob to engage in their

behavior, but those of us who get mobbed, we're left with our own devices. We're left with dealing with the racial trauma. So the racial elephant in the room is the fact that one, as amazing as America may be to some, the birth certificate of America is that of white supremacy. The first 12 presidents of the United States of America on slate, we've been looking at 401 years of oppression. And so when you're not oppressed, when you're not marginalized, you don't have to really have a conversation about it unless you're racially conscious. Similar to men, breast cancer really doesn't impact us physically. And so you're not concerned about it until someone in your family or significant other family member comes down with breast cancer well in america why would

anyone in power want to listen to uh former people who had been enslaved to hear their narrative oftentimes people believe that we're buying into our own victimization but we're not there's correlations with regards to the overseer on the plantation slave patrols to the officers who occupy our community there's conversations that america doesn't want to have as it pertains to when colin kaepernick was taken a knee it was against the anthology of police brutality by some white officers and others it was not a dismissing of the flag but america is into the concept some in america are into the concept of patriotism right but if you trend on the african-american side of the color line um our fathers our uncles our aunts and others have

served in the united states armed services my dad served in vietnam three tours decorated veteran purple heart the data proves that but my dad suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder he was in the service for 25 years he came back to an america that did not embrace him and so we're comfortable having conversations that make us feel comfortable and we don't want want to have the uncomfortable conversation. That's why the media never mentions white-on-white violence. They talk about black-on-black violence, but black-on-black violence is an outgrowth of intraviolence. People kill people they're in close proximity to. So the problem in America is not black people. Black people have problems, but we are not a problem people. The problem in

America has been and will always continue to be, unless we dismantle it, white supremacy. And there are an equal amount of whites, Greg, who are actually fighting to dismantle systemic and structural oppression as well. Black men have been murdered by our police forces for generations. What is it about the murder of George Floyd, which has actually brought about all of this unrest going on? I was wondering what actually makes it different from all the others before? for me as a man of faith, and I respect people who are not people of faith, certainly, that this was a, what we call a zeitgeist. This was a moment. The last time I've seen a moment like this, and I'm only 47 years of age. I don't want to dismiss that. I'm only 47. I'm blessed to

be 47. The last time I saw a movement of this nature was when America elected President Barack Obama. And what I mean by that is that this is a moment in time where George Floyd, unfortunate that he was murdered by the state, but something larger than George Floyd, something larger than his humanity, chose George Floyd to bring about a global awareness of white supremacy and systemic racism. I think we had the coronavirus where 35 or so million people were unemployed, which means they were home. You saw this video of a officer who's a human being dehumanizing a human being who is in fact a human being. George Floyd just doesn't have a body, but he also has a soul. So when W.E.B. Du Bois talked about the souls of black folk, that

was a soul that was lying on that ground. So the officer has his knee and the neck of George Floyd and George Floyd says, you know, I can't breathe mama and I don't want to die. And everyone was looking at that. The pandemic around the globe had everyone at some point or time, they had to view that against the backdrop of economic oppression, against the backdrop of educational apartheid economic injustice institutional racism which is prejudice plus power and then the video of ahmad arbery and then the brianna teller situation and i think it was a recipe for people to get galvanized on every side of the color line and gender line to simply say you know we're looking at why is it that a dylan roof a ted bundy a timothy mcveigh

the white shooters in all of these places are taken alive, but yet Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tasha McKenna, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, the list is just exhaustive, Greg, leading up to George Floyd lose their life. And let's say it was a counterfeit $20 bill. Maybe he didn't know. He loses his life for a counterfeit $20 bill, or even if it wasn't a counterfeit $20 bill, And then Bernie Madoff, he swindles millions of dollars and he goes to jail. So I think that young white folk are pushing back against the narrative of some of their parents and some of their grandparents who have bought into the stereotypical fashion of who black people are. And then there are white young folk who parents and grandparents are not rooted in the birth of a nation racism stereotypes of who black people are, and they're racially conscious, say that it's enough. Folk in Seattle, it's enough. And then over in Rome and over in Norway and over in Denmark and just all over the globe, this was the moment, and we cannot leave out, Greg, the fact that there's an occupant of the Oval Office who is trying to and has issued, ushered in, excuse me, a white supremacist, white nationalist playbook. And I think the democracy, aspects of democracy, albeit white nationalists, domestic terrorists, the Ku Klux Klan, those white supremacist interlopers and Asian provocateurs, aside from them, people have had enough and they were frustrated.

And that's why it becomes a zeitgeist moment. Remove the Christopher Columbus statue in Philadelphia. Remove the Rizzo statue with the Washington Redskins. You know, change the derogatory last name and the 1,800 or so monuments that exist with the Confederate across the democracy. I think that's the moment. Those are all more of a cosmetic change. Are you really optimistic, though, at this time that we'll have a real systemic reform going on, Chad? But I think that's what it has to be. It has to move more along the lines of systemic change. And so when we're talking about systemic and structural racism, it's beyond just having a statue taken down, right? You can take the statue down and still have the anthology of police brutality. So I think that's where we have to push the narrative. We have to push the narrative in the direction of looking at systemic racism, looking at structural inequality. We have to improve our schools from a structural standpoint and systemic standpoint. When we're looking at the police department, it's not diversity training, it's anti-racism training. From a policy standpoint, it's the outlawing and the banning of chokeholds. It's making sure we create a national registry where if you are an indifferent cop and you get fired from New York, you can't go to Portland, Oregon and get a job. If you're in Detroit and you get fired, you can't come to Maryland and get a job. And so I think it's more structural. We need to look at those policies around housing.

When we're looking at the Fair Housing Act, we still have African-Americans, black and brown, and poor whites who are discriminated against. So we need to look at the Fair Housing Act. We need to look at how people in this era of COVID-19 will experience racial trauma, but also economic distress because landlords may in fact discriminate against them. So we're looking at more systemic and structural things from a policy standpoint. So I was very optimistic when George Floyd's brother, the day after burying his brother, was on Capitol Hill talking about police reform. So we need to both end. We need the agitators out in the streets because they

are pushing the agenda, and they also have a platform. So when they talk about defund the police, a lot of that is linguistics. What folk are really saying is, let's not continue to throw millions and billion dollars into a military, paramilitary police presence, and let's try to create some things as it pertains to more social workers, more things in the inner city that's going to bring about structure and things of that nature. So I'm definitely optimistic from that standpoint. And when we talk about structural, we have to look at redlining. We have to look at predatory lending. We have to look at the impact that gentrification has. We have to look at legacy admissions in schools. So yes, it's an amazing first start down at Princeton University,

removing Woodrow Wilson's name off the building. But the public needs to know that that wasn't the only thing they did. They also looked at the impact of not having enough senior professors of African and African-American descent. They also looked at how they can fund with the great wealth that Princeton has, or even the great wealth that University of Penn and others have, how they can do things in the African-American community. I want to touch on the issue of policing reform for a bit, because it really has divided the social work community. There are social workers who want an abolishment of all of the police forces. There are like others who want more social workers working on our police forces. So it's really a mixed bag there.

What do you see as a solution? I don't know about a solution. I do know about best practices. I do know that fundamentally we cannot have officers occupying communities of color, and specifically African American communities, in a paramilitary manner. They cannot work in these communities without being trained into anti-racism training. The issues of trust versus mistrust is really rooted in white supremacist ideology, and it's rooted in institutional racism. we're always talking about what communities need to do. We need to really have a paradigm shift in which where the narrative is what police officers need to do. In my own community, when I was growing up, my mom and dad would say, if the police stop you while you're driving, this is what you need to do. And I didn't have the language at the time, Greg, but as I got much

older, I always wondered, why is it that we don't put together a 10-point platform for what police officers need to do when they stop us. The first thing they need to do is recognize we're human beings. Second thing they need to do is recognize the humanity in us. And the third thing they need to do, and there's so many other things, but the third thing they need to do is reduce the stereotype that they come to the context with. So I think that those social workers who advocate for, no, no, no, we need to keep the police, need to also explore why do they feel that way, right? So when we talk about, once again, defund the police, what people are really saying is that, or let me tell you what I mean. Police will be funded, okay? Police will not be overfunded. We need to redistribute our city budget so that everyone has a fair share. we need police to focus on crimes and criminals we need we don't need police focusing on mental

health right we don't need i don't need a police officer to be a mental health counselor because they can't be they don't understand personal environment i actually read um a study uh indicated that 80 percent of the work that our police forces do deal with like folks who are living with a mental illness or who are homeless. So a lot of their day-to-day work isn't really about a crime. It's more about a social issue or a mental health issue. So are social workers really ideally suited with all of their training and experience to kind of take a bigger role in that area? Oh man, Greg, Greg, you just gave, you know, you contextualized it. You're absolutely right. So if we argue intellectually and practically that police officers are not mental

health counselors, police officers are not social workers, police officers are not medical professionals, and police officers are not educational specialists, then what we need to do is we need to maybe look at this as a public health situation where we can have police officers work in tandem with social workers and with therapists. So then what we're doing is we're investing in our community. We're investing in our people. We're funding our schools. We're funding our hospitals. We're funding our services, and we're funding our infrastructure. And so when you come to a scene and someone is suffering from mental health, if they don't have a weapon on them, social workers can help mediate that potential conflict. So certainly, I think social workers

can play a bigger role, specifically in our schools. I don't think we need to have resource officers in our schools. I think we need to have social workers. We can have counselors, but we need to have trained social workers, school social workers who understand children from a personal environment perspective and all the theories that we go to school for. Absolutely. So the social work profession has a long civil rights history. You know, some of the biggest icons of the civil rights era, Dorothy Hyde, Whitney Young, were in fact social workers. So we are looking at a new social work movement now. What is the role of the profession now? I think the role of the profession now is many fold. I think that the

names that you mentioned, certainly we have to honor them because we come on their shoulders and we come on the shoulders of so many more other folks. We come on the shoulders of those professors at historical black colleges and universities. We come on the shoulders of those social workers who maybe have never been put into print, but do the work and have done the work and have retired and they're training the next generation of social workers and social change agents. The role of social work to me is a continuum. For me, this moment doesn't bring me to a context where I'm like, oh yeah, our role is definitely more important than ever before. I think the role of social work has always been important in a democracy. We need social workers

to be deans of schools of social work. We need social workers to actually run for political office. We need for social workers to, you know, actually be heads of nonprofits and corporate structures. We need social workers to sit on boards on a federal level, on a national level, you know, on the local level. We need social workers in the Department of Justice and every entity of government. And then we need social workers in our hospitals. Medical social work at this point in time is very advantageous because we need social workers to help families overcome the impact of coronavirus. I also may have to deal with families who have to deal with death and dying issues because of COVID-19, to deal with racial trauma because of the anthology

of police brutality in a therapeutic setting like hospitals, whether they be children's hospitals or elderly centers. And so the role of social work is always pivotal for me to the fabric of the development of the United States of America, because social workers, and specifically those who are trained as social change agents fighting for justice, it transcends the color line. And that's the beauty of the moment we find ourselves in, to always be mindful not to get seduced by the racial gaze, because you have a lot of whites all over the world who are holding signs, no justice, no peace, who are holding signs, Black Lives Matter, who are holding signs that if white silence, you're complicit if you don't speak out, if you don't use your privilege. And so

I'm encouraged about the next generation of social workers who will take it to the streets, but also will recognize that it's both and. Take it to the streets, take it to the ballot with the vote but also craft policies that address the forms of oppression if you look at our social work workforce it's about 70% white and and female so I was wondering if you could like offer on advice to a largely white workforce on like how to in um a day-to-day practical way address racism wow i think first you have to start with yourself you have to recognize that we all come to the context with a form of unconscious bias whether that be implicit or explicit i think you also have to put the mirror up to yourself

that beyond coming to any context um as a social worker with a form of unconscious bias some people come to the context though they are social workers as white supremacists or white supremacist ideology i think that we all have to do the work of looking at our isms whether that be white privilege whether that be xenophobia homophobia transphobia whatever the form of discriminatory thinking is, prejudice, bigotry. I think the primary thing that social workers, given the demographic that you just made up, can do is to be honest with themselves, to do the work of exploring the impact that racism has had on systems and on people who lived the experience. I think that the profession in and of itself should continue to address all forms of unlawful

discrimination, but I think that every social work entity at this point in time should have quarterly trainings around unconscious bias, anti-racism training. It's needed. I think that one of the things that the social work profession can do, and you're aware of this, Greg, and we're just one that launched it, but at the University of Penn, we launched the Black Men at Penn School of Social Work Incorporated. Not from a patriarchy standpoint, but having black male social workers who can identify with young African American males and females. And so I think that the profession can look at recruitment efforts similar to how a basketball coach on the first day of middle school or high school is recruiting, you know, a basketball player or someone for sports. We could do the same thing as a profession. We can get into the inner cities. We can go into the African-American community, the Latino community, and we can start talking to young males and females about the profession of social work.

We can go into the black church, which has always, for the most part, been a beacon of social justice. And we can hold in services where we can talk about the profession of social work. And that's what we've done since 2003 with the Black Women at Penn School of Social Work Incorporated to expand the conversation. And so I think the profession has to make a concerted effort to recruit more males into the profession of social work, as well as more diverse voices. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Chad, thank you for this engaging conversation. We are really glad that there are social workers like you out there working on it. Thank you for having me. You have been listening to NASW Social Work Talks, a production of the National Association

of Social Workers. We encourage you to visit NASW's website for more information about our efforts to enhance the professional growth and development of our members, to create and maintain professional standards, and to advance sound social policies. You can learn more at www.socialworkers.org. Don't forget to subscribe to NASW Social Work Talks wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next episode.