Genealogy of Black trauma and ethics of care


Dionisio Nyaga, Algoma University

We live in a society that is framed and organized on violent colonial occupation and destruction of life in the name of civilization, improvement, and salvation. Such a premise seems to have guided the production of the social work care profession; wherein I argue that such care is violent and is sanctioned by the code of ethics. The birth of capitalism coincided with that of the social work profession. Capitalism divides the society into rural (hinterland, country) and/versus urban (city, heartland) and the subsequent differential and dualistic valuation between the two spaces. Rural sphere was marked as emotional, undeveloped, and degenerate while the city became the space of development, civilization and guided by codes/laws. This presentation argues that such spatial demarcation that were and continues to be sanctioned by the city bylaws, laws and policies were violent and had material and symbolic consequences to those who migrated from the rural to the city. Social work as a borderline profession was given the mandate to decide who gets to enter the city and who was to be deported. Given that the social work profession found itself at the intersection of law and lawlessness, it had to improvise code of ethics to guide the profession while simultaneously confirming itself as a science and part of the public profession. It is this epistemological progress at the violent intersections of the city and the rural that we witness the birth of codes of ethics and subsequent tragic violent care against immigrant others. The codes confirmed that social work had come of age as a science of care that would help manufacture or process the broken immigrant into an exalted subject with rights and duties to enter civilization. Part of the process of codifying Social work was saving it from its destructive state of nature that had previously been associated with the private space where white women would provide unpaid labor. By rationalizing the social work care, it meant that there were two types of care. The care provided by social workers was to be regarded as rational care and that provided by immigrant women as emotional and broken care. The immigrant was thus regarded as superfluous and in need of the coded and civilized social worker to enter the city of civilization. The code therefore helped the White Social Workers to determine who becomes the citizen and whose rights would be suspended while simultaneously confirming the profession as scientific and rational. Such forms of care logic continue to cause harm to marginalized communities. Subsequently, we seek to argue that for social work to decolonize, an ethical requirement grounded on non-violence needs to be revisited. Non-violence as an ethical requirement demands we remember and reconcile such historical and traumatic colonial tragedies that birthed social work as a profession; to start decoding the ways through which codes conceal violence against marginalized communities while affirming white and white social workers as rational providers and Savior of broken immigrant other. To argue for non-violence as a care methodology I delve into how social work ethical code have engaged in anti-Black hate. Social work as a care profession is implicated in Anti-Black racism. Anti-Black racism is a unique form of racism that Black peoples face because of their skin colour. Anti-Black racism is manifested in institutions, ideologies, and cultures as well as individually. In that regard, this presentation looks at code of professional ethics and how systematic prospers anti Black racism and hate. The birth of social work code of ethics was and is simultaneously the erasure and expulsion through reductionism of Black emotions, values, and histories. Such forms of rationalization of professional ethical code of social work care works in ways that forgets ontologies of Black and Blackness to which I argue is implicated in anti-Black racism. This paper engages with the codes of professional social work ethics and how they inform care; to start imagining how they define and authorize practice in ways that forgets histories, values and actualities of Black bodies while simultaneously affirming white subjects as quintessential protector, redeemer, Savior, and provider of rational care to Black social service users. Such kind of care mythologies are kept intact and suctioned by the code of professional ethics and help conceal whiteness and white supremacy in social work practice. This presentation therefore looks at how social work informed by rationalized code works in ways that are marginalizing and colonizing to Black communities. The paper calls for reimagining social work violent care through ethics of practice that are culturally informed and grounded on Black trauma. Rather than collapsing and quantifying Black trauma and selling them in the market place in the name of cultural sensitivity, social workers should instead give accounts and grieve Black deaths by imagining everyday care chokeholds Black people have to face in the hands of social workers. This presentation is therefore a form of grieving in ways that remember rather than forget Black ontologies. Such an ethical diversion calls for non- violent care as a necessary ethical requirement in social work practice. Non-violence is a methodology and praxis of care grounded on community histories, values and realities.

This paper will be presented at the following session: