This essay joins personal narrative with an unpublished book review expressing my skepticism about current anti-racism rhetoric within social work programs and the performative actions that often accompany it. Here, I revisit a critique of the personal narrative written by anti-racism educator Tim Wise in White Like Me (2011) completed during course work in a doctoral program. I use my reaction to Wise’s reflection on his white privilege as material to explore and examine efforts to confront and dismantle systemic racism in social work programs and essentially throughout the profession. I challenge social work programs to think critically about the next steps towards their positions on anti-racism and their interactions with students, staff, and faculty. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the essay while offering opportunities for scholars to contribute to the conversation about dismantling, deconstructing, and divesting from racist ideology and policies in social work programs.

This critically reflexive, conversation-based paper traces the lived intersectional experiences of systemic racism of two racialized women educators (Black and Brown-South Asian settler) at a Canadian university located on the traditional territories of the Anishnawbe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. We discuss experiences of navigating whiteness in relation to “model minority” status and the discourses of diversity that permeate academe. We reflect on how racism, and specifically anti-Black racism and whiteness, are embedded in research. Some key questions we wrestled with are: How are the conversations about model minority status really about white supremacy and proximity to whiteness? How are Brown bodies played against Indigeneity and Blackness to further disenfranchise the latter and serve capitalist interests? How have academic institutions co-opted Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) policies to benefit the status quo? The spirit of the paper encapsulates the two authors’ building solidarity by resisting racist hierarchies enshrined within academia.

As a Native American social work student and practicum supervisor, we describe a program evaluation at a campus Native American student services site and share insights on integrating Indigenous ways of knowing, cultural practices, and a justice orientation into identities and practices. We describe disseminating findings and student efforts to work within systems to make policy changes; however, changing a system—that constantly tells you that you (and who you are) are not meant to be there—while you are in the system is not easy. We describe key engagement concepts including microaggressions, stereotype threat, tokenism, resiliency, and survivance. We—as decolonizing social work scholars—provide a vision for how to move forward together in creating culturally safe classrooms, campuses, communities, and social work practices grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Schools of social work often postulate that they are rooted in social justice and affirmed in the values and ethics of the social work profession. However, the lived experience of being a Black social work educator is oftentimes inclusive of working within an oppressive and toxic work environment, that is also a school of social work. My reflection describes the discriminatory practices exhibited in a school of social work faced by me as a Black social work educator and researcher within a research one institution. These experiences of discrimination include excessive critique, microaggressions, microinsults, and microinvalidations from senior colleagues, as well as a lack of action taken to address these discriminatory practices by administrators within the school. This piece identifies how emotionally overwhelming and mentally exhausting being a Black academic within a school of social work can be when colleagues and administrators demonstrate the actions of the oppressor.

This collection of letters serves to explore the narratives of a collective of women of color in academia by examining individual, collective, spiritual, and institutional strategies for surviving and transforming our institutional spaces and the ways that White Supremacy has shaped our journeys. Multiple perspectives are viewed, and we have written to our children, our future social work students, our future selves, our BIPOC faculty siblings, and our feared enemies to envision and embody more liberatory futures.

I apply Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) in this paper as the research method to reflect on my academic experiences as a Latino within social work education. The four major components of SPN—pre-search, me-search, re-search, and we-search—facilitate my discussions on the racist encounters I have survived throughout my academic journey. Grounded in Latina/o Critical Theory (LatCrit) and Intersectionality Theory frameworks, I apply LatCrit’s testimonio (narrative) approach to explain the four major themes that emerged: assimilation and acculturation, barriers to education, microaggressions and racial gaslighting, and cultural taxation. I conclude with recommendations for recruiting and retaining men of color in social work education and discuss the potential benefits of cultural resemblance between instructor and student.