1. SW 504 Diversity and Social Justice
Mike Spencer
School of Social Work
Fall 2017

2. Comfort Zone
Comfort zone: Topics or activities we are familiar with or have lots of information are solidly inside our comfort zone. Inside our zones, we are not challenged. Outside our zones, we are challenged. Too far outside, we may withdraw or resist new information.

3. Learning Edge Being on the edge of of our comfort zone
When we are on the learning edge, we are most open to expanding our knowledge and understanding.
Our goal is to learn to recognize when we are on the edge of our comfort zone and challenge each other and ourselves to expand our zone of comfort.
We hope to go to the learning edge and challenge each other to stay through the discomfort.

4. Safety
Safety: Create an environment in which people feel safe to take risks and be open. Safety does not equal comfort.
We must try to create safety in a group where people may have very different definitions of safety and what they need in order to take risks.
What would you need in order to feel safe within the class/within your groups? What would you need in order to push your comfort zones?

5. Triggers
Words and phrases that stimulate an emotional response because they tap into anger or pain about oppression issues.
Trigger may convey, consciously and unconsciously, a stereotypical perception or an acceptance of the status quo.
Triggers are learning opportunities for everyone-- examples??

6. Ground Rules Listen respectfully to different perspectives
Respect each other’s views.
Be critical to ideas, not individuals.
Commit to learning, not debating.
Avoid blame, speculation, and inflammatory language.
Set boundaries for sharing
Speak from experience and avoid generalizing about groups of people
Respect confidentiality
Share air time

7. Defining Culture
Culture includes all of the expectations, understandings, beliefs, or agreements which influence the behavior of members of some human group. These shared ideas need not be conscious, but they are always transmitted by social learning, and they constitute one set of solutions to the adaptive problems facing every human society

8. The Meaning of Culture
Culture does not consist only of our external environment, but also through our cognitive processes.
Culture includes our internal psychological schemas of meaning and action, frame of references, world view in interaction with the social and physical environment--both conscious and unconscious
We give meaning to culture when we construct and give meaning to symbols and material artifacts which are then shaped and given a place in our lifestyles.
However, culture is not only constructed from the external environment, but also from our internal cognitive processes.
Cognitively, we give meaning to culture through our interaction with our social environment. From early in infancy, we develop a sense of our culture through the building of experiences and interactions that successively becomes a part of our working models and representations of how the world works, our frame of reference.
From these representations we begin to develop a world view--people’s picture of the way things in sheer actuality are, their concept of nature, of self, of society.
Ethos--tone, character, and quality of their lives, its moral and aesthetic style and mood. It is the underlying attitude toward themselves and their world.
Traditions--articulated cultural beliefs and practices that are so taken for granted that they seem inevitable parts of life
Customs--come into being and persist as solutions to problems of living in terms of needs and solutions--professed but not necessarily followed.
Common sense--what people come to believe everyone in a community or society should know and understand as a matter of just ordinary, taken for granted, social competence.

9. Changing Culture Culture is historical
Culture is dynamic and always changing
Change happens within a political context
Understand the social, political, and historical implications of change
Change for the better?
History is made by people within the constraints of the system they are living in, and includes a focus on the internal and external developmental dynamics of events over time.
Culture is constructed through a history of connections and interrelatedness between peoples, communities, and social transformations constructed by humans in interaction within the constraints of the natural world.
Culture is dynamic and always changing.
Culture is not static, it reflects the processes of human behavior, change and adaptation. It includes the fluidity and stubbornness of ethnic traditions and customs in the context of the social, economic, and political circumstances in which a particular group of people may live at a particular moment in history.
Often times change occurs within a political context. Culture is political in that aspects of all human relations or agency (race, gender) are negotiated and defined around authority, power, legitimacy, and hegemony--the kind of cultural dominance that influences our expectations, how we sense experience, and where we assign our energy.
Historically, in western society, change is viewed in a largely positive light, a movement towards modernization and progress, as evidence for the continuing development of civilization. Even the negative aspects of culture is viewed as positive at the cost of advancing culture. The truth is that change does not occur without a cost to someone.

10. Culture and Intervention
Assume change for the better, rational, efficient, scientific--make them more like us
We use our reality, our world view, as the basis for this assumption
We unconsciously assume that others share this world view--that the costs and benefits of attitudes and behaviors are the same
This is important for interventions which we as social workers and social work researchers design and implement.
The assumption of change is that it is often for the “better”, it is rational, pragmatic, and efficient. However, change for some individuals may involve far more adjustments that may be far more important than efficiency.
People may already have quite established ways of thinking, acting, and believing, that they feel secure and comfortable with. Any proposed change to this pattern of behaviors may represent a threat to their survival. Therefore, we must understand the components of culture and well as the historical, political, and social implications of changes to those components of culture.
In order to do this effectively, we must strive for critical consciousness to understand our own cultures and the factors that make up our own culture.
By understanding our own culture, we are better able to assess the cultural experiences and implications for change in others.
In assessing the impact of change on persons from cultures different from our own, we must also be aware that not all members have the same knowledge of their culture or attach the same significance to them.
We can find out about this by assessing what people think and say they do with what they really do.
Change may involves adjustment--acculturation

11. Defining Privilege
We don’t need to think about it because we are surrounded by others who share this same world view--we assume it is universally available and normal.
Privilege: Unearned access to resources only readily available to some people as a result of their social group membership.
Social Power: Access to resources that enhance one’s chance of getting what one needs or influencing others in order to lead a safe, productive, and fulfilling life. 3

12. Personal and Group Identity
Is it possible to separate our individual identities from our social group memberships.
Oppression cannot be understood in individual terms alone. People are privileged or oppressed on the basis of social group status.
One of the privileges of dominant group status is the luxury of simply seeing oneself as an individual.
Persoanl Identity--Erikson--who are we and where do we belong?
Accrued representation of the self through a combination of internal exploration, conflict, or continuity/sameness and information received by the environment which either support exploration, conflict, or continuity.
Social group identity--shared identity with other on a range of physical, cultural, or social characteristics. Also developed over time through a combination of internal and environmental stimuli. Others define who we are as much as we identify ourselves--symbolic interactionism and constructivist paradigms.
Other--awarenes of being distinct, feeling different, being outside the game, outside the circle, feeling isolation, disconnectedness, sticking out like a sore thumb, or being invisible, being distrusted, discomforting, being frightening, being scared.
A white man, is rarely defined by whiteness or maleness. If he does well on his job, he is acknowledged as a highly qualified individual. Hard working. If he does poorly, the blame is attributed to him alone.
View of Americanization that people from various groups will ultimately merge together to create one unified group that is a blend of all the cultures involved.
Assimilation: Imposition of dominant group’s culture and language, individuals and groups gain equality by becoming as much like the privileged group as possible. 4

13. The Complexity of Identity
Our identities are complex
They are not always easily identified
Many questions are raised as we develop our identity
Identity is dynamic, non-linear, and a product of our social, political, and economic environment.
Race is only as important as the meaning we ascribe to it. As with me, the question of how to measure race will likely come up in agencies.
Throughout most of this country’s history, interracial marriage has been highly sitgmatized and in many states illegal. In fact, it was not until in the case of Loving v. Virginia that the last anti-misegenation (or interracial marriage) laws were overturned.
Story of Phipps in Louisiana, had lived her life believing she was white. When she went to get a passport, it was discovered from her birth certificate that she was 3/32 black. Because Louisiana law decrees persons with 1/32 black, she could not be considered white and an appeals court ruled she must accept a legal designation of black.
Say increasing number of organizations, mostly support groups. More politicized, Association of Multiethnic Americans (1988). Culminated in 1990 when 10 mil. people checked the other box on the 1990 Census.
The multiracial movement began it full swing in the early 1990s, marked by the publication of Maria Root’s first book entitled Racially Mixed People in America. This book became the rallying point for many individuals who felt that it was upsetting to have to choose just one racial category and that the option of the other category was too offensive. 5