Kolivoski, Meerai et al., Maynard

• Critical race theory (CRT)


  Provides an important framework that social workers can use to recognize, analyze, and change power dynamics that maintain institutional racism and reinforce racial inequality
• The CRT movement seeks to study and transform the relationship between race, racism, and power, and, in contrast to traditional civil rights movements, questions the foundations of the liberal order
• Civil rights issues are viewed within a broader perspective that incorporates economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, feelings, and the unconscious
• CRT acknowledges the effects of race and racism on society, challenges conventional social processes and normative standards that only reflect the White experience, and offers insight into how the relationship between race, racism, and power maintains and supports racial inequality
• Five central tenets to CRT

  • Racism as ordinary
  • The critique of liberalism
  • Whiteness as ultimate property
  • Interest convergence
  • Unique voice of color
• Racism as ordinary


  Racist hierarchical structures govern political, economic, and social domains; therefore, Whites are privileged while people of color are socially constructed as "others"
• The critique of liberalism


  The liberalism worldview embraces colorblindness, neutrality of the law, and incremental change; however, CRT asserts that these formal conceptions of equality only remedy the most blatant forms of discrimination
• Whiteness as ultimate property


  Whiteness is the ultimate property value, leveraged to perpetuate advantages and privileges among Whites
• Interest convergence


  Civil rights gains within communities of color, particularly gains for African Americans, are only achieved when converging with interests of Whites and should be interpreted with measured enthusiasm
• Unique voice of color

  CRT emphasizes the importance of experiential knowledge gained from people of color's lived experiences and shared through counter storytelling, narratives, family history, biographies, chronicles, and parables
• CRT provides tools social workers can use in practice
• Child welfare workers need to be aware of colorblind approaches and policies that ignore the unique experiences of families of color, as well as aspects of cultural competence that may result in making false assumptions about clients, thus perpetuating racial inequalities
• Social workers need to be conscious of their privileged status which interacts with structural forces, particularly the cross-cultural nature of their relationship with clients
• Social workers must recognize how race and racism contribute to their clients' experiences, as well as the ways Whiteness affords privilege and power to view an issue through a lens that supports society's dominant narrative
• The CRT framework encourages social workers administering public welfare programs to ask themselves critical questions about individual and agency practice, such as if there are racial differences in the types and frequencies of sanctions given to welfare recipients
• Social workers providing mental health services can use CRT in practice to elicit the mental illness and treatment perspectives of consumers of color and to address the relationship between racism, discrimination, and mental health
• Social workers can incorporate information and research on the effect of discrimination on mental health as part of psychoeducation, demonstrating awareness of and acknowledging the impact that racism has on mental health
• Social workers with awareness and understanding of CRT can actively engage with communities of color to learn more about culturally sanctioned coping strategies and informal systems of care often preferred by people of color
• The existence of anti-Blackness remains widely unspeakable in many avenues to this day
• In 2016, the United Nations' Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) confirmed that anti-Black racism in Canada is systemic
• Despite being around 3 percent of the Canadian population, Black persons in some parts of the country make up around one-third of those killed by police
• Black migrants are disproportionately affected by punitive immigration policies like immigration detention and deportation, in part due to the heightened surveillance of Black migrant communities
• Black children and youth are vastly overrepresented in state and foster care, and are far more likely to be expelled or pushed out of high schools across the country
• The purpose of state violence is to maintain the order that is "in part defined in terms of particular systems of stratification that determine the distribution of resources and power"
• State violence acts to defend and maintain inequitable social, racial and economic divisions
• Because the state is granted the moral and legal authority over those who fall under its jurisdiction, it is granted a monopoly over the use of violence in society, so the use of violence is generally seen as legitimate
• State violence can be administered by other institutions outside of the criminal justice system, including institutions regarded by most as administrative, such as immigration and child welfare departments, social services, schools and medical institutions
• Following slavery, emancipation required new, or at least modified, expressions of racial logics; people designated Black have been homogeneously rendered as menacing across much of the world, and surveilled and policed accordingly
• Because many forms of overt racism are not tolerated, state-sanctioned violence relies on the blameworthiness of those whom it harms
• Anti-Blackness, which attaches Blackness to criminality and danger, rationalizes state violence against Black communities because Black people are presumed to be "guilty in advance" - as always and already blameworthy
• The overarching goal of white settler colonialism is to eradicate Indigenous peoples, either through assimilation or genocide - to turn them into "ghosts"
• In the logic of Black enslavement, it is Black personhood that is under attack: "the slave" is a useful commodity, but "the person underneath is imprisonable, punishable, and murderable"
• Sanism is an oppression. It makes normal the practice of discrimination, rejection, silencing, exclusion, low expectations, incarceration, and general violence against people who are ordered through mental illness diagnosis, history, or even suspicion
• Black individuals make up 20 percent of the Canadian federal prison population, although black individuals make up 2.5 percent of the overall population
• The school to prison pipeline relies on the early pathologization of black children and much has been written about how young black men are often diagnosed and misdiagnosed with schizophrenia
• There is a link between anti black racism and all other forms of oppression, including, and specifically, sanism
• Anti-black sanism has its roots in the rational turn of the enlightenment and the subsequent co-organization of colonizing systems such as slavery and psychiatry
• Dr. Samuel Cartwright identified two mental disorders peculiar to slaves. Drapetomania was the "disease causing slaves to run away from their masters"
• Anti-black sanism provides a framework that blames the injustice, the pain, and seeks to address the historic discrimination, continued over representation of black individuals in the mental health system
• The rise and privilege of white rationality paints those who are indigenous and non-white as irrational, untrustworthy, and odd