Social Justice Activism

FAMILIES IN SOCIETY • Volume 83, Number 4
developing a justice-centered social work practice. Bertha
Reynolds (1963), a leader among the Rank and Filers,
summarized these principles in her autobiography:
• The purpose of social work is to serve people in need. If social
workers serve other classes who have other purposes,
they become too dishonest to be capable of either theoretical
or practical development.
• Social work exists to help people help themselves and, therefore,
social workers should not be alarmed when people do
so by organized means.
• Social work practice operates by communication, listening,
and sharing experiences.
• Social workers have to find their place among other movements
for human betterment by forming and joining coalitions
with clients, community groups, and like-minded colleagues
from all disciplines.
• Social workers cannot consider themselves superior to their
clients, as if they do not have the same problems (Quoted in
Withorn, 1986, pp. 1–2).
Beginning in the 1930s, proponents of social justice
regarded the establishment and expansion of the welfare
state as a primary means of ameliorating the impact of
longstanding structural inequalities in society and the market.
For nearly half a century after their modest successes
during the New Deal, they focused debates over social
policy largely on the extent to which they established social
rights and provided forms of institutionalized compensation
or redress (Towle, 1945; Titmuss, 1968; Gal,
2001). Since the early 1980s, however, attacks on the concept
of entitlement—both legal and social—have undermined
the idea of using social welfare as an instrument for
achieving social justice, culminating in the United States
in the passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and
Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA).
Contemporary Views of Social Justice
Today’s complex environment obscures both the
meaning of social justice and the goals of social justice.
New and persistent questions frame both philosophical
and political debates. These include: Are the goals of social
justice and multiculturalism compatible? Through
what means is justice to be achieved? How can we reconcile
traditional ideas of social justice with the emerging interest
in human rights? Are such rights individual or social?
Can they all be legislated? Should they be?
During the past two decades of welfare cutbacks and
retrenchment, social work authors have stated these questions
both implicitly and explicitly. Looking for a cause
around which to focus the profession’s abstract commitment
to social justice principles, social workers have linked
the pursuit of social justice with a variety of diverse issues.
These include the promotion of peace and nuclear disarmament;
opposition to U.S. intervention in the political
affairs of other nations; support for the rights of women,
gays, and lesbians; defense of affirmative action; and the
promotion of multiculturalism (Brawley & Martinez-
Brawley, 1999; Van Soest, 1994; Gibelman, 2000; Witkin,
1999; Verschelden, 1993). Although the relationships between
social workers and other movements for social justice
are not as strong as in the past, many observers believe
that “far more social workers today think that problems
such as poverty are rooted in structural sources than
thought so in the 1960s” (Cloward, 1990, p. xvi). This
demonstrates that even in conservative times the social justice
legacy of the profession remains strong (Reisch & Andrews,
2001).
Influenced by postmodern ideas, social work literature
now often links the attainment of social justice with the
goals of social diversity or multiculturalism, and with challenges
to the normative power structure and the oppression
it produces (Hyde, 1998). Some authors, however, have defined
social justice in terms of empowerment practice without
specifying the meaning of either term (Cox, 2001). This
ambiguity of meaning is also found in articles about social
policy, which recognize that social justice has to be promoted
at all levels of government, from local to national but do
not explicitly define the concept (Hagen, 2000).
Building on the ideas of Reynolds and Freire (1971),
other social work scholars have focused on human transformation
as part of their critiques of the positivist-empiricist
and rationality-centered emphases of social work research
and epistemology (Weick, 1999; Saleebey, 1990;
Gottschalk & Witkin, 1991; Rose, 2000). Clinical social
workers have struggled with ways of integrating contemporary
emphases on the role of narratives within a social
justice framework (Dean & Rhodes, 1998; Morell, 1996).
Some have connected the struggles for social justice and
gender or racial equality in a way that “requires an integration
of personal, professional, and spiritual-political values
and beliefs into a framework that respects the dialectical
tensions while striving for wholeness” (Sternbach,
2000, p. 413; Wakefield, 1988a, 1988b).
Swenson (1998) provides a clinical perspective on why
social justice is considered the organizing value of social
work. She identifies several strategies for basing clinical
work on a social justice foundation that is derived from the
writings of Rawls and Van Soest (1994). These include
348