Centering Anti-Racism in Social Work Education: Integration of Critical Race Theory Across an MSW Curriculum

Abstract

Ranging from a multicultural approach to models of cultural sensitivity and cultural competency,
social work education has historically avoided challenging the power of racism in shaping
inequity in the United States. We argue that integrating critical race theory (CRT) in social work
education decenters whiteness, counters color-evasive racism in education, and centers anti-racist
ideas and practices. CRT provides social work educators with a framework that explicitly
addresses race and racism while challenging social work students to self-reflect critically on their
own experiences with privilege and oppression. Further, it enables social work students and
practitioners to analyze race and other systems of oppression structurally. This manuscript offers
an overview of how CRT is integrated across an MSW curriculum to better prepare social work
students to engage in anti-racist social work practice. We describe specific examples of how
CRT is infused into the curriculum in theory and practice courses. We conclude with an
acknowledgment that CRT is not without limitations and call for more empirical research that
assesses the effectiveness of CRT’s application to social work praxis.