CRT provides social workers with a helpful analytical lens for applying anti-racist practice by examining structures of discrimination based on race and the implications, in relation to both the ideological and material circumstances, for racialized populations (Maiter, 2009, p. 270; Ying Yee, 2004, p. 68). Sarah Maiter (2009) explains that CRT positions race as a concept that “lacks any biological validity” (p. 267) but whose social construction is shaped by and embedded within hegemonic structures resulting in material effects. From this understanding, CRT provides two central areas of focus for understanding power dynamics and oppression: firstly, “the myriad of ways that racism may be embodied or embedded within relations, institutions, systems, and structures” (Ladhani & Sitter, 2020, p. 56) and secondly, challenging and unveiling the (at times obscure) power and privilege of whiteness (Ying Yee, 2004, p. 89).

White Supremacy and Dominant Social Discourse

CRT presents whiteness (or white supremacy) as a key concept in its analysis of power relations at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. From the macro-level, it “examines the historical processes of enslavement, colonization and misrepresentation of non-European peoples,” and how these processes have come to embed white privilege and power within institutions and society (Maiter, 2009, p. 270). Furthermore, it recognizes the “powerful social meanings of race in White-dominated societies,” as well as how these meanings “are evident in the lived experiences of minority groups,” and particularly in the oppressions they face (Maiter, 2009, p. 270). CRT also examines how these dominant social meanings (or discourses), particularly presentations of racialized populations, are informed by the “dominant and/or majority group” and how their “ability to shape, define, and determine the knowledge base about minority cultures documents not only their power to speak on behalf of those who are marginalized in society, but also how society itself normalizes the inferior position of minority cultures” (Ying Yee, 2004, p. 98). By virtue of “dominant and/or majority group’s” normalizing the inferiority of racialized people, white supremacy and racial discrimination can “take place without people being consciously aware” of their complicity within these structures, resulting in the neutralization and deracialization of “whiteness” (Ying Yee, 2004, p. 98).

Anti-Racist Practice and Looking Beyond Cultural Differences

Additionally, CRT’s focus on structures producing racial oppression provides a helpful alternative for social workers when critically reflecting on the lived experience of a service user: social workers can frame a service user’s identity within the wide spectrum of oppression instead of through a focus on cultural differences or “cultural competency”. Ying Yee (2004) argues that social work’s attention to cultural competency and multiculturalism leads to a “stereotyping of cultures” which results in a “pre-defined, frozen, cultural identity” formed by the “norm of whiteness” (p. 99).

Anti-racist practice provides a strong case for looking beyond an essentialized cultural identity as the focus on culture fails to “capture the consequence of race and the related effects of racism for people” (Maiter, 2009, p. 269). This includes, for example, a lack of acknowledgement of the “privileges that accrue to white people because of their skin color” and “the numerous material hardships for people of color” that arise due to a lack of structural privilege, such as “employment barriers, scrutiny by the police, struggles to find adequate housing, amongst others” (Maiter, 2009, p. 269).

Intersectionality and Power Relations.

Intersectionality stems from demands within feminist theory to examine “inequality and oppression within groups of women” and provides an analytical lens “to explore gender, sexuality, class, and race as complex, intertwined, and mutual reinforcing categories of oppression and social structures” (Mattson, 2014, pp. 9-10). The concept was first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe a framework for illuminating the ways that racism and sexism overlap and create “unique and distinct kinds of burdens” for Black women (Southbank, 2016). Emerging from critical race theory (Crenshaw, 1989), intersectional feminist theory’s “aim is to disclose and challenge social structures and oppression” while also acknowledging the complex and dynamic nature of power relations which results in differences of experience within and between groups (Dhamoon, 2015, p. 29; Mattson, 2014, p. 10).

Moreover, the work of Crenshaw draws attention to intersectionality’s purpose of identifying  “intersectional failures" (Southbank 2016), where non-intersectional framing of social issues privileges the perspective of dominant groups over others by reinforcing structures of oppression which are not accounted for in this narrowly framed narrative. She uses the example of feminist movements fighting for women’s equality and how they have historically over (if not only) accounted for issues pertaining to white women, leading to a “representational scheme that allow[s] white women to represent everybody regardless of whether their particular way of experiencing discrimination was the same” (Southbank, 2016). By not applying an anti-racist lens to the issues of women, feminist movements disregard the issues stemming from race, for example, that are faced by women of colour, and therefore reinforce structures of oppression like racism.

Anti-Racist Practice and Intersectionality.

Connecting white supremacy and colonialism.

One area in which critical race and intersectional feminist theories could be more comprehensive and inclusive is by acknowledging the link between white supremacy and colonialism. By recognizing the arguments of theories and frameworks that unsettle the normalization of colonialism social workers may be able to better recognize “the interconnectedness of struggles” against structures of oppression, a particularly important focus being how “settler domination” is at the root of oppressive structures that impact everyone within a settler colonial state, especially marginalized populations (Dhamoon, 2015, p. 34), though certainly not in equal modalities or magnitudes.

Journal prompts for social workers