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The social work profession adheres to the values of social justice and equity, yet extensive literature suggests that anti-racism education in social work has room for growth. Research demonstrates that social work practitioners and educators often fail to recognize (1) how structural oppression creates racial inequities and (2) how social workers maintain and reproduce hegemonic power structures. Critical whiteness theory (CWT) seeks to reveal the invisible role of whiteness in constructing racial inequities. As a subject area, critical whiteness studies emerged in the late 1990s as an expansion of critical race theory. A variety of disciplines have incorporated critical whiteness studies as a framework for anti-racism education; however, CWT remains relatively absent from the social work literature. This paper proposes the incorporation of CWT in social work education as a tool to facilitate critical self-reflexivity and combat structural racism within the profession. Engaging with the concepts of white normativity, white ignorance, and white complicity allows social work educators and students to acknowledge and interrogate the formative ways in which social work pedagogy maintains and reproduces white supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collections of policies in the United States have produced and perpetuated ubiquitous social disadvantage. To overcome this reality, policymaking must be more democratic and participatory with active allyship in support of social justice. By deepening contextual understanding of systemic barriers and promoting macro perspective taking, social empathy may foster allyship from socially advantaged group members. However, research on the promise of social empathy and understanding of how to advance it remain nascent. Drawing on the intergroup contact theory (ICT) and using a sample of white U.S. college students (N = 329), this study explores the relationship between cross-group friendships, social empathy, and political engagement. Having close friends of color was indirectly related to more political engagement through a serial pathway of greater sociopolitical discussions and social empathy. The theoretical significance of these findings to the ICT and social empathy framework are discussed, as well as implications for intergroup contact interventions, social policy, and social work education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]