2.1 Chapter Overview and Learning Objectives
Ethical Standards for Human Services Professionals
Standard 34: Human service professionals maintain awareness of their own cultural and diverse backgrounds, beliefs, values, and biases. They recognize the potential impact of these factors on their relationships with others and commit to delivering culturally competent services to all clients (NOHS, 2024).
Understanding your identity and background is critical to being able to help others, whether their experiences are similar to or quite different from your own. As human services professionals, we must also understand how historical actions, laws, and practices impact us today. In this chapter, we examine the ways in which human services work is related to settler and colonization practices and laws in the United States. Keep your own identity in mind as you read.
What has been taught as social work and human services history has focused on White activists and social service providers as the leaders of this field, when in fact Indigenous and Black people have implemented helping practices within their own communities for far longer than the fields of social work and human services have existed.
This chapter describes practices developed within Indigenous and Black communities as well as the early leaders who formalized human services and social work practices in White-dominated culture. Then we will look at the current practices and focuses of human services. Finally, we will examine how cultural humility and decolonization are intertwined.
The Contributions of Scholars from the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare
The first two sections in this chapter—”Understanding the Historical Context of Human Services in the United States” and “Integrating and Honoring BIPOC Contributions”—draw heavily on the work of three scholars: Kelechi Wright, MEd, LCPC, LPC; Kortney A. Carr, LCSW, LSCSW; and Becci A. Akin, PhD, all associated with the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas. Their seminal work, adapted here for length and clarity, “The Whitewashing of Social Work History: How Dismantling Racism in Social Work Education Begins With an Equitable History of the Profession” [Website] appeared in the openly licensed Advances in Social Work [Website] peer-reviewed journal in 2021.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the historical context of and what it means to “Whitewash” the human services field.
- Explain what it means to decenter the history and current practices of White providers of human services and expand to BIPOC history and diverse providers.
- Describe cultural humility, the social construction of difference, and intersectionality.
- Identify the dimensions of diversity and how each relates to the human services profession.
Key Terms
Key terms are important vocabulary for understanding the content of the chapters. They will be bolded and defined via an in-text glossary the first time that they appear in the chapter.
Key terms for this chapter are:
- Ageism: The stereotypes (how we think), prejudice (how we feel), and discrimination (how we act) toward others or oneself based on age.
- Culture: Shared meanings and shared experiences by members in a group that are passed down over time with each generation.
- Decolonize: An ongoing process that supports the decentering of Eurocentric ways of learning and understanding the world. The most essential part of decolonization is continual reflection. Education systems should be willing to reflect on curriculum, power dynamics, their structuring, and any action undertaken on behalf of their students.
- Ethnicity: Social identity based on one’s culture of origin, ancestry, or affiliation with a cultural group.
- First language: The language an individual learns in early childhood
- Gender: The socially constructed perceptions of what it means to be male, female, nonbinary, or something in between, the way you present to society.
- Intersectionality: Inequalities produced by simultaneous and intertwined social identities and how that influences the life course of an individual or group.
- Origin: The geographical location where a person was born and spent at least their early years.
- Race: Socially created and poorly defined categorization of people into groups on the basis of actual or perceived physical characteristics that have been used to oppress some groups.
- Religion: Shared systems of beliefs and values, symbols, feelings, actions, experiences, and a source of community unity.
- Sex: A biological descriptor involving chromosomes as well as primary and secondary reproductive organs.
- Sexuality: A person’s emotional, romantic, erotic, physical, and spiritual attractions toward another in relation to their own sex or gender. Sexuality exists on a continuum or multiple continuums.
- Spirituality: Connection to something larger than yourself (a higher power), a quest for meaning, and a commitment to live each day in a sacred manner.
- Whitewashing: Focusing on the accomplishments of White people and groups while excluding BIPOC strengths and accomplishments.
- White savior complex: An ideology in which a White person acts upon from a position of superiority to rescue a BIPOC community or person.
- White fragility: a concept that explains how and why White people are sensitive, uncomfortable, or defensive when confronting information about racial inequality, White dominance, and injustice.
- Voluntouring: a short trip that combines volunteer work with tourism.
Licenses and Attributions
“Chapter Overview and Learning Objectives” by Elizabeth B. Pearce is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Revised by Martha Ochoa-Leyva.
a professional field focused on helping people solve their problems.
shared meanings and shared experiences by members in a group, that are passed down over time with each generation
well-being
race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and other aspects of identity are experienced simultaneously and the meanings of each identity overlaps with and influences the others leading to overlapping inequalities
a paid career that involves education, formal training and/or a formal qualification.