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Despite a theoretical shift toward anti-racism, racial projects within social work assert public positions against structural racism, while upholding mechanisms that perpetuate its existence. Analyzing the perceptions and intentions of incoming white liberal social work students is necessary for any effort to deconstruct racial projects in the social work profession. The sample used in the present study is composed of a white (n = 139), mostly liberal-identified (84%) group of incoming first year MSW students. Students were asked to provide open-ended responses to a vignette about a Black mother engaging with Child Protective Services (CPS). The vignette was designed to assess structural analysis and decision-making in response to real-world examples of racism and anti-Blackness. The study employed semantic thematic analysis to describe the ways social work students make meaning of the vignette and how this process informs their proposed actions. Students varied significantly on the level of analysis they provided in response to the vignette. The analysis examines patterns of racial projects across 3 main response categories: 1) Descriptive, 2) Analytical, and 3) Action. This analysis is important for informing pedagogical innovations aimed at training anti-racist and anti-oppressive social workers.

Social work education reinforces hegemonic Whiteness through pedagogies and practices that rely on an entitlement to and harvesting of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’s lived experiences for the purpose of its tacit audience: White students. Despite this exploitative and harmful reliance on objectified lived experiences, White students continue to lack critical understanding of their racial positionality and connections to racism. Uprooting Whiteness requires sitting with what it means for White people to be “a White problem.” Drawing on the work of Yancy, we (group co-facilitators; our dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion; and three MSW student participants) describe the creation, organization, facilitation, and experiences of the first year of the Space for Uprooting Whiteness—a biweekly space where White social work students examine and uproot their relationship to White supremacy and domination. We argue for White social workers to take collective responsibility for racism in and beyond our institutions—requiring interrogation of our everyday practices and their (inter)dependence with and on systems of domination. This paper ends with three experiential narratives from student participants in the space and implications of critical intragroup dialogic pedagogy among White students in social work education and beyond.