CADD Corner: Keeping Hope Alive — How Social Workers Can Persist and Resist

By Susanna Jones, PhD, MSW, Professor & Director, School of Social Work, San Francisco State University

It’s a given that the work we do as social work professionals is hard. Our profession and Code of Ethics rests on the commitment to work with disenfranchised, marginalized, oppressed groups of people and equally importantly, we do so within a social justice framework.

Our profession often draws people who have a commitment to equity, justice, equality, and folks who in their everyday lives think critically, and engage in change efforts in innumerable ways. Facing barriers to justice and working against the grain is part and parcel of social worker’s terrain. Yet, since the presidential election, many of us feel like we hit an unexpected and unprecedented wall. Many of us were blindsided and are in shock and deep despair at the election of the 45^th president. Many of our communities, schools, departments, coworkers, family members and friends feel under attack. How can we understand these developments and the impacts on our communities? How can we rise as social workers ever more committed to our core values and be more effective at achieving social justice? These are the questions that students and colleagues are actively seeking to address.

Rather than discussing the myriad reasons why Trump is unqualified and unfit to be the president, I would like to focus on the intense and remarkable collective mobilization that is taking place internationally, nationally, and locally that offer hope.

If the only safe community is the organized community, then we are doing pretty well: think post elections protests, inauguration day protests, the women’s marches, the airport protests, the Resist mobilizations going on to protect and defend people who are undocumented. Remember, the left has been here before. Many of our students have not, which helps explain the shock and awe they are experiencing. The left has had to grapple with hard times many times before.

The Red Summer of 1919 with massive race riots, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Depression, and struggling labor movements meant big battles for progressives. In the 1980s, we witnessed the rise of Reagan’s neoliberal policies. Attacks on civil rights, apathy to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and attacks on welfare were all under siege. Despite all of these major setbacks, progressives and liberals fought back. The ACLU formed in 1920, Brown v Board in 1954, gay rights activists refused to be silent and established ACT UP. Jesse Jackson began the Rainbow Coalition.

More recently we see DREAMers stand up, the fight for $15 gain steam, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock and much more. All of these courageous acts of resistance can be used as lessons when we organize and build coalitions; we all gain from our bold actions. This is precisely the time when we must come together to build a movement that is more than anti-Trump, but a movement that articulates and creates an America that we want, one that values and cares for all members of our global society.

I would like to pose a challenge to our social work educators community: amidst the tough times, we must find ways to elevate hope, for our clients, our students, our communities, our institutions, ourselves. I recently read the following:

“…hope entails acting, not waiting passively. From the left we might add that hope is not a faith in grand narratives about the world becoming better on its own or a misty-eyed feeling of optimism. It is not merely an attitude, or a mood, or a feeling – all of which emphasizes its subjective side. It is rather a tough-minded  and inspired disposition to act. To hope is uniquely to combine the subjective and objective, collectively seeking to make change happen. Hope creates action, but it is equally true that action creates hope (Aronson, 2017, emphasis mine).”

Now, let’s get hoping!

REFERENCES

Aronson, R. (2017, Feb 9). The relevance of hope under Trump. The Nation. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/the-relevance-of-hope-under-trump