Decolonizing SW Book Club - How Transforming Ourselves Can Transform the World (Virtual) - 1 CE
4/15/2026
| Event Details |
Decolonizing Social Work Book Club -- What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Transform the World By Prentis Hemphill
Wednesday, April 15 | 12:00 - 1:00pm ET | 1.0 Implicit Bias CE
Virtual Zoom - Synchronous
Join us as we discuss Prentis Hemphill’s What It Takes to Heal. This book asserts that the principles of embodiment – the recognition of our body’s sensations and habits, and the beliefs that inform them – are critical to lasting healing and change. Hemphill demonstrates a future in which healing is done in community, weaving toether stories from their own experience as a trauma survivor with clinical accounts and lessons learned from their time as a social movement architect. They ask, “What would it do to movements, to our society and culture, to have the principles of healing at the very center? And what does it do to have healing at the center of every structure and everything we create?”
Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to
maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel. If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite
is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives. In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed
to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize” Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution
that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of
standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources. By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country
today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.
What It Takes to Heal is available through your favorite bookseller.
---
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. Location Virtual Zoom Meeting Presenters
Cost
CE Information
1 Implicit Bias Credit Hour NASW-MI Provider Number MICEC-0017. All NASW-Michigan CE courses also qualify for MCBAP credits. |
|