Race, Power, and Practice: A Critical Race Framework for Social Work

This textbook establishes Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a central framework for social work education and praxis. Addressing and ultimately moving beyond models of cultural competence and diversity, it offers a comprehensive framework for integrating CRT into pedagogy, research, and practice. It introduces analytical tools to address issues such as systemic racism, the social construction of race, critiques of liberalism, interest convergence, intersectionality, and counternarratives. Chapters contributed by renowned social work researchers highlight how social work has been entangled with white supremacy, neoliberalism, and colonialism, while also presenting a road map for a change in the future. With case examples, narratives, and reflective questions, this book is designed for all levels of social work study, as well as for committed practitioners of anti-racism. Although grounded in the US context, global perspectives are included, making it relevant for international audiences facing systematic racism or colonial legacies.

Susan Lares Nakaoka, Associate Director of the Master of Social Welfare Program at UCLA, is a co-founder of the Critical Race Scholars in Social Work network. For over 20 years, her teaching, research, and writing has focused on Asian American and Pacific Islander community development, critical race pedagogy, and social justice. As a third-generation Japanese American/Chicana, her work and values are shaped by her family's incarceration experience during World War II.

Stacey Chimimba Ault (she, her, dr), Professor Emerita of Social Work at California State University, Sacramento, is Founder/CEO of the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Project. As a first-generation mother-scholar, her lived expertise of exploitation, poverty, school push out and the prison industrial complex, grounds her work. Dr. Ault's scholarship and praxis center Black youth, participatory action research, critical post traumatic growth, and Restful Leadership as a liberatory, healing-centered approach to social change.

Larry Ortiz, a social work educator, has written extensively about CRT in social work and led the development of a fully integrated CRT MSW curriculum. Throughout his forty-year career he has taught BSW, MSW, DSW, and Ph.D., students preparing critical thinkers for anti-racist culturally grounded social work practice.

Nicole Vazquez, MSW, MPP, is a queer Afro-Latinx cisgender woman. She has over twenty-five years' experience in the academic, public and nonprofit sectors, and is co-founder and co-director of Critical Race Scholars in Social Work. As Amor Adelante CEO, Nicole centers love in all of her work towards racial justice.