Social Work Month 2016: Forging Solutions Out of Challenges

March is Social Work Month 2016. The official theme is 'Forging Solutions Out of Challenges'. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) picked this theme to honor macro social worker Frances Perkins. She used the skills she gained from her experience at Chicago's Hull House to formulate policies that addressed unsafe working conditions and economic crises. She would become the first female secretary of labor and cabinet member in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. She used that position to improve conditions for working Americans. As an advocate of safer workplaces and workers' rights, her contributions helped create the American middle class.

From NASW:

Our nation’s more than 600,000 social workers have amazing tenacity and talent. They confront some of the most challenging issues facing individuals, families, communities and society and forge solutions that help people reach their full potential and make our nation a better place to live. We celebrate the contributions of social workers during National Social Work Month in March.

World Social Work Day 2016 is on March 15th. The theme ‘Promoting the Dignity and Worth of Peoples'.

The Christian Science Monitor: The surprising relationship between intelligence and racism

The Christian Science Monitor revealed that people with high intelligence (or simply a postsecondary degree) may not support policies that help racial minorities, such as affirmative action and school desegregation:

Are smart people less racist than their less-intelligent peers?

That was the question asked in a new study that examined the relationship between verbal intelligence and attitudes on race and racial policies.

The findings may surprise some: While people who score higher on intelligence tests are less likely to hold racist stereotypes (such as imagining that people of another race are lazy or unintelligent), they're no more likely to support government policies that aim to reduce racial inequality. For example, while 95 percent of study participants who scored higher on the intelligence test said that black and white children should attend the same schools, only 22 percent support school-busing programs.

In a similar racial attitudes study of college students, Baylor University researchers found that white students on average think black and Latino students need to 'work harder' in school than their Asian peers. In my humble opinion, I am not surprised by these research findings. Both reports remind me of the color-blind concept of laissez-faire racism by Lawrence Bobo that explains how intelligent people who believe in the values of equality and inclusiveness can still hold negative attitudes towards racial and ethnic minority groups. Laissez-faire racism is an ideology that blames minorities for their poorer economic situations, viewing it as the result of cultural inferiority. In other words, an educated and intelligent person can say he or she is not racist but may still hold prejudiced views of other groups as culturally inferior. Under this system, racial inequality is manifested in subtle ways that shifts the blame from systemic racism (e.g., redlining and employment discrimination, both of which can have long-term consequences on earnings and wealth) to personal responsibility.

Student Debt Makes College More Expensive for Women

As a woman of color, I understand how difficult it is to repay student loans. Social workers, on average, earn an average salary of $42,000 (source: Payscale). Yet students are increasingly graduating with $29,000 in student loans (source: The Institute for College Access and Success). This data does NOT include student loan debt accumulated from graduate school. This Bloomberg report reveals women (especially Black and Hispanic women) take longer than men to repay their student loans:

Student debt haunts women for years longer than it stays with men, research suggests. A report from the American Association of University Women shows that women take longer to pay off their education loans, which imposes a heavier burden on their finances years after they graduate. Black and Hispanic women in particular earn much less than other groups over time, and end up struggling the most to get rid of the debt that financed their college educations.