Statistics about better living conditions are the wrong starting point – racial capitalism limits imagination to symptoms which persists oppression and subjugation

Alan J. Dettlaff, “The Unrealized Dream of Abolition”, HUMAN SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS: MANAGEMENT, LEADERSHIP & GOVERNANCE, 20 February 2024, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23303131.2024.2317310

As we begin to engage in this work, we must also understand the real problems that prevent thisvision from being realized. As social workers, and as a society, when faced with a problem, we are often challenged by the limits of our imagination that have been shaped by our experiences and socialization within our current society – we tend to think of solutions to our problems that exist within the realm of what we know to be possible. For example, when we consider the problem of poverty –a fundamental problem that facilitates injustice and oppression – we are able to think of what many would consider necessary solutions to address poverty – universal basic income, living wages, guaranteed child allowances, and other solutions. In other words, if the problem we face is that people do not have enough money, we can imagine solutions that provide money. Yet we do not ask ourselves why we live in a society where people are required to have money in order to survive.

This is the limitation from which we must break free. The problem is not that people do not have enough money to survive – the problem is that money exists as a means of deciding who gets to survive and who does not. The problem we are ultimately faced with as a society is not how to provide people with more money, but rather how to end a system of racial capitalism that allows money and poverty –and thereby injustice and oppression – to exist.

At its core, racial capitalism is the social order upon which the United States was founded that is built on the idea of capitalist accumulation – accumulation that requires the maintenance and subjugation of an exploitable labor class that is confined to poverty for the purpose of enabling their exploitation (Robinson, 1983). This labor class exists to maintain a system whereby those withwealth continue to gain wealth, and those who produce wealth through their work remain in poverty.Since the earliest origins of the United States, this condition has been maintained through violence –violence that is inflicted directly and violence that is inflicted through policy as a means of maintaining the oppression of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people – oppression upon which the system depends and oppression that is perpetuated by prisons, the police, and the child welfare system.

If the profession of social work truly wishes to be a part of creating a racially just society, a societyfree of injustice and oppression – in other words, a society that fulfills the promise of the original abolitionists – we must abolish the system of racial capitalism that allows injustice and oppression to exist. A society based on racial capitalism will always require the subjugation of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people, and racial capitalism will always maintain the systems that bring about this subjugation.

As social workers, we must broaden our understanding of the real problems we face. Theseproblems do not lie among the individuals, families, and communities with whom social workersinteract. The real problems we face lie in our systems and our structures – systems and structures that over centuries have been designed to create the oppression and inequality we experience today. The real problems we face lie in a government that for centuries has been designed to support these systems and structures for the purpose of maintaining the oppression and inequality they create. Bringingabout the society we wish to see first requires an understanding of the real problems we face as it isonly when we understand the true sources of our oppression that we can begin to develop thestrategies to take action against them