Social Work, Social Justice, and the Legacy of Imperialism

Introduction: Social Work's Lost Vision

The objective of this paper is to trace and critically evaluate the relationship of social work to social justice through the lens of the profession's historical record of inclusion or exclusion of oppressed and marginalized groups. This analysis is grounded in a contemporary social work practice issue and draws on scholarship spanning political theory, history, and professional ethics.

Understanding social work in the United States requires first understanding the ideological foundations upon which American institutions were built. Ruth G. Dean, in a speech on social work, observed: "Social work, it seems, is now content spending more time doing paperwork than working with people. We talk and write in the professional patois of pathology rather than with words that worry life and insight into dreams and aspirations and hope. We now too often speak the vapid language of objective science rather than in narratives that sing with the heart and soul of life and imagination. We seem to have lost our vision of great causes, of what is possible and worthwhile and worth struggling for, and of what could be if only we believed." (Dean, 2004, p. 4)

Dean further noted that "the dominance of ideas of social control and the prevalence of the business ethic are creating dramatic changes in the practice of clinical social work — a profession that developed within an ethos of social welfare. Third party payers control the terms of service, requiring social workers to offer very brief interventions and limited possibilities to clients." (Dean, 2004) This problem is not a new one in the field of social work, and its roots reach deep into the political and cultural history of the United States.

Imperialistic Thought and the Foundations of the United States

According to Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism: "The U.S. was founded as an empire, a dominion state of sovereignty that would expand in population and territory and increase in power. There were claims for North American territory to be made and fought over with astonishing success. There were native peoples to be dominated, variously exterminated, variously dislodged. Then, as the American republic increased in age and hemispheric power during the nineteenth century, there were distant lands to be designated 'vital to American interests,' to be intervened in and fought over. Curiously, though, so influential has been the discourse insisting on American specialness, altruism and opportunity, that imperialism in the United States as a word or ideology has turned up only rarely and recently in accounts of United States culture, politics and history." (Said, 1993)

In other words, the American way was held to be the way, and thus all institutions — whether for-profit or not-for-profit — were founded on this idealism. Said speaks of the "hierarchies of race" that were established in the early years of the United States, a framework that cast certain ethnic groups as undereducated, ignorant of the American way, and as threats to American society. This view is clearly evidenced in the writings of early Nativist thinkers such as Morse and de Tocqueville.

Said defines imperialism as "the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center that rules a distant territory. Out of the imperial experience, notions about culture were clarified, reinforced, criticized or rejected." (1993) He further argues that "imperialism has not really ended" and that "global thinking tends to reproduce superpower, Cold War, regional, ideological or ethnic contests of old." (1993) He also contends that the decrease in American power "underlines the continuity of the ideological need to consolidate and justify domination in cultural terms that has been the case in the West since the nineteenth century and even earlier." (1993)

Said holds that U.S. intervention in third-world affairs — a pattern established around 1945 — is simply a repetition of the domination exhibited in the "old imperial order, which developed during the era of mass societies commanded at the top by a powerfully centralizing culture and complex incorporative economy." (1993) For Said, the major challenge of our time is "to match the new economic and social dislocations and configurations of our time with the startling realities of human interdependence on a world scale," an achievement that "can be accomplished only by revised attitudes to education." (1993)

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