Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

All Michigan social workers are invited to a virtual CE event on Wednesday, November 19 from 12-1:00pm.

FREE | 1 Implicit Bias CE

Overview:

Join us as we discuss Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba.

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.

The book is an assemblage of co-authored reflections, interviews and questions that are intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.

Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care is available through your favorite booksellers.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe impacts of white supremacy on social work education, practice, and scholarship
• Describe and contextualize decolonization within the context of the social work profession
• Identify strategies for disrupting white supremacist norms within social practice
  

Presented by Chris Fike, Region 5 Representative on the NASW-MI Board of Directors.

About the Author(s) --

Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba.

Kelly Hayes is a teacher and writer with experience working with all ages in school and church environments. He lives in Florence, SC with his wife and serves as the lead Bible teacher in the high school at The King’s Academy. Hayes is passionate about worldview, discipleship, worship ministries, and artistic theology.

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, librarian, and curator who’s active in numerous social movements for prison abolition, racial justice, gender justice, and transformative justice.

More about the Decolonizing Social Work Book Club:

Decolonization in social work is the undoing of hegemony, the latter being the process whereby white supremacist values impregnated foundational social work theories, research, and practices. In recognizing that white supremacy is a mechanism of social control, that our current social structure is grounded in liberal-patriarchal capitalism, and that social work confirms to prevailing social norms, we, as social workers, must acknowledge our complicity in perpetuating a white supremacist ideology (Crudup, Fike, & McLoone, 2021; Pewewardy & Almeida, 2014). One strategy for disrupting white supremacy in social work is to develop a counter-narrative (Crudup, et al., 2021; Pewewardy & Almeida, 2014), a history that details the experiences of perspectives of those who have been oppressed, excluded, and silenced. The Decolonizing Social Work Book Club will meet on the 3rd Wednesday of each month starting in September 2024 and concluding in December 2025.

The voices highlighted in this book club offer counter-narrative perspectives across a range of issues and topics immediately relevant to social work.