#social work school

livelaughawesomewrites:

As a social work student and person with a certificate in social work, I completely agree with your comments about the ineffectiveness of social workers right out of university into a new community. You’ve got to know your community to be a good social worker, and a lot of people just don’t realize that.

Even more so, they attach themselves to some idea that everything they need to know they learned at school. I think what horrifies me the most about social workers is that you don’t have to have training in anti-oppression or privilege or any of that. You can get by with one or two classes specifically addressing that. And more so, I find that in social work programs, queer folks are kind of held to this huge “YOU KNOW EVERYHTING ABOUT ALL QUEERS” idea, so few white, female-assigned, non-binary, middle class queers actually address the fact that they don’t know what the issues affecting all queer people are. /end rant

I really appreciate your story (as a white “FAAB” genderqueer) because it helps me reconsider how I can be an ally with trans women and not reconstruct transmisogynistic power imbalances when having them as clients. Thank you!

This is an important point. Back when PartyBottom was a teenager and nascent social work student, her second required class was called something like, “Working With Diverse Populations” or whatnot, like, an introduction to cultural competency, which, while taught in some seriously questionable ways, at least introduced a class of mostly-white state school doofy 19-year olds to concepts like, “sooo, reverse racism does not exist,” which, I have to say, was a BRAIN ESPLODE moment for about half the class.

(However, I still use skills and knowledge I attained in that class, especially the unit on gerontology, which has been both helpful in my volunteer work at SAGE – an org called Services and Advocacy for Gay Elders, here in New York – as well as being a good friend/family member to people who are dealing with the difficulties that come with having an aging family member who is having trouble: hoarding, sundowning, dementia, anxiety about routine and attachment to sense of place, etc.)

I currently have a friend who is in an NYU MSW program and she on the regular hears the shittiest things come out of people’s mouths, but that is perhaps not not tied to the fact that NYU is an incredibly expensive private school and most of the students there are hoping to hop on to a pipeline that will eventually lead to very lucrative private practice dealing with yuppie neurosis.

Also I would like to agree with and echo your comments about tokenization and its more sinister ill effects: when you are called on to be the spokesperson for “the community,” it is important to realize that you are a select representative of many communities, many of which share only the loosest of ties. Say, even if we’re talking about “the trans community in New York,” this is a misnomer, as there are dozens of trans communities in New York, broken down by age, income, education, specific gender affinity, location/borough – and, perhaps most importantly, language and race. It bugs PartyBottom when people try to individually speak for all these constituencies, and it is something I hope to be wary of as I continue this blog.

Thanks for writing! xoxo PB