A Violent History of Benevolence: Interlocking Oppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working 9781442625082

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A VIOLENT HISTORY OF BENEVOLENCE Interlocking Oppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working

A Violent History of Benevolence traces how normative histories of liberalism, progress, and social work both enact and obscure systemic violences. Chris Chapman and A.J. Withers demonstrate that the standard account of social work history is structured in such a way that contemporary social workers can know many details about social work’s violences without ever imagining that they may also be complicit in them. Framings of social work history actively create present-day political and ethical irresponsibility, even among those who imagine themselves to be anti-oppressive, liberal, or radical. The authors document many histories often left out of social work discourse, including the racialized experiences of Black social workers and the role of early social workers in advancing eugenics and mass confinement. Moving beyond the professionalized realm of social work to encompass the broader framework of “social working” – the vastly diverse interventions into the social world, including community work and activism – A Violent History of Benevolence ultimately invites social workers and others to reflect on the complex nature of contemporary social work, specifically on the present-day structural violences that social work enacts in the name of benevolence. chris chapman is an associate professor in the School of Social Work at York University. a.j. withers is a PhD candidate in the School of Social Work at York University and an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.

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A Violent History of Benevolence Interlocking Oppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working

CHRIS CHAPMAN A.J. WITHERS

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

 University of Toronto Press 2019 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-3731-3 (cloth)  

ISBN 978-1-4426-2886-1 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Chapman, Chris (Christopher S.), author A violent history of benevolence : interlocking oppression in the moral economies of social working / Chris Chapman, A.J. Withers. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-3731-3 (cloth).  ISBN 978-1-4426-2886-1 (paper) 1. Social service – Moral and ethical aspects.  2. Social service – History. 3. Benevolence – History.  4. Violence – History.  5. Liberalism – History. I. Withers, A. J., 1979–, author  II. Title. HV40.35.C53 2019  361.3  C2018-905687-8 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction 3 Social Working, Interlocking Oppression, and Moral Economies  3 A Brief Discussion of Some Indigenous Social Workings on This Land  12 Organization and Structure of A Violent History of Benevolence  17 Part One: Deconstructing Social Work and Social Work History 1 Troubling the Standard Account of Social Work  25 The Standard Account  25 The Pull of the Other Side of the River  27 Charity Organization Societies: Beyond Friendly Visiting to the Poor  30 Settlement Houses and Jane Addams  39 The New “Social Work”  41 What the Established Riverbanks Obscure  45 Contemporary Charity Organization and the Continued Polarity of the Riverbanks  53 “Mingling” as Continued Solution to Structural Violence  59 Conclusion  75 2 White Supremacy and the Erasure of Racialized Social Workers  76 Social Work History as White Social Work History  76 Black Churches: Bestowing Charity and Organizing for Change  80 “Separate Spheres” and Women’s Clubs  82 The Great Migration: Migrant Assistance and the Shift towards Black Incarceration  85 Black Settlement Houses  89

vi Contents

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union  90 Anti-Lynching  94 Ida B. Wells-Barnett  96 White Social Work and Anti-Lynching  99 Maggie L. Walker and the Independent Order of St Luke  102 The Social Work Profession, Social Science, and Education  103 Black Social Work in Canada  104 Settlements in Canada  105 Anti-Slavery Societies and Black Immigrant Assistance  109 Social Services  110 Class Stratification and How It Interlocked with Racism and Social Work  114 Early Women Social Workers and Gender Roles  118 Subjugated Community-Based Social Workings Beyond Black and White  119 Conclusion  122 3 Social Work as Displacement, Denigration, Cisheteropatriarchalization  125 Professional Social Work as the Delegitimization of Local Practices and People  125 Centring Imperialist Displacement; Decentring Ruling Class White Exceptionality  127 Cisheteropatriarchalization as an Advancing White Ruling Class Moral Economy  130 Early Professional Social Work and Cisheteropatriarchy  141 The Ethic of the Healing Power of Domination and Imagined Moral Superiority  151 An Initial Shift in the Ethic of Relating Across Difference: The Knights Hospitaller  158 Claims of Relative Innocence, Part One: Progressive and Secular Dividing Practices  168 Claims of Relative Innocence, Part Two: Knowing It Was Wrong  172 Conclusion  179 Part Two: Interlocking Genealogies of the Ethic of the Healing Power of Domination and Imagined Moral Superiority 4 Knowing Better: Liberalism, Instrumental Violence, and Making New Humans  185 What We Like to Say; What We Actually Do  185 Claims of Relative Innocence, Part Three: Interpreting Others’ Motivations  186

Contents vii

Further Standardizing Instrumental Violence: The Theresian Criminal Constitution  194 Kant’s Enlightened Morality: Rational Self-Assurance and the Birth of the “New Man”  198 Gentle Instrumental Violences, Part One: Rationalizing Colonial Education  203 Gentle Instrumental Violences, Part Two: Continual Observation and Coerced Penitence  207 Gentle Instrumental Violences, Part Three: Psychiatry, Unchaining, and Moral Treatment  212 Surveillance, Sorting, and Scientific Stratification  220 The Validation and Invalidation of the Invalid: Emergent Social Welfare Policy  225 The Validation and Invalidation of the “Indian”: 1800s White Settler Colonial Policy  232 Legislated Exclusions: Racialized and Disablist Immigration Policies  236 Conclusion  238 5 Rehabilitation/Eugenics  239 The Moral Economy of Rehabilitation  239 The Origins of Rehabilitation before the First World War  241 Soldiers, Sailors, and Sameness  244 Medical, Economic, and Civil Rehabilitation  246 Overcoming Disability  254 Nationalizing Rehabilitation  258 Professional Social Work and Rehabilitation  264 Rehabilitation and the Enforcement of Cisheteronormativity  266 Rehabilitation/Eugenics and Whiteness/Nationality/Citizenship  268 Conclusion  270 6 Assimilation/Genocide  275 The Moral Economy of Assimilation  275 Destroying Lives  283 The Unquestionable Good of Imposing Whiteness onto Others  293 Destroying Lifeworlds  301 White Supremacy and Care  305 Conclusion  312 7 What If It Isn’t Getting Better? What Do We Do Then?  323 The Significance of Implicating Ourselves in Interlocking Legacies of Violence  323 Is It Getting Better?  323 Still “Forcibly Transferring Children of the Group to Another Group”  330

viii Contents

Towards Addressing the Chronic Gap between What We Say and What We Do  340 Navigating Inherently Oppressive Systems: The Everyday Life of Many a Social Worker  345 Moving Forward: Learning from Social Movements and Displaced Practices  356 Disability Justice and the Democratic Redistribution of Dependence and Care  359 Conclusion  361 Conclusion: The Varied Paths That Brought Us Here  365 Timeline: Selected Events from the Age of Enlightenment through the Progressive Era  377 Notes  385 References  441 Index  499

Illustrations

1 2–3 4a 4b 5a 5b 6

Cover image of United States Indian School, Carlisle, PA (c. 1895)  59 Selections from Le Livre Sans Titre (1830)  138–9 Annie Wolff (1892)  154 Thomas Moore Keesick (1891)  154 Tom Torlino (1882 and 1885)  155 Woxie Haury (n.d.)  155 “The Penitentiary Panopticon” (1791)  208

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Acknowledgments

We would both like to thank the many people who supported us throughout the lengthy process of researching and writing this book – both personally and professionally. We especially want to thank: Blu Waters, for sharing Cree teachings on Two-Spirit and for her consent to include them in this book. Ruth Koleszar-Green and the Thunderbird Circle – Indigenous Social Work Educators’ Network, for an important consultation on some of the images and content in the book. The many students who helped us with various research, formatting, and editing tasks over the last few years: Megan McGrath, Zainab Imam, Poe Liberado, Kodi Graham, Svitlana Sokolova, Mandy Nyarko, and Tamara Oomen (with sincere apologies if we inadvertently left anybody off this list) – and with a special thanks to Stephanie Archambault and Julia Walter, who worked with us for an extended time, rifled through the Archives of Ontario for lots of gems (especially on the WCTU), and performed many other valuable tasks along the way. Our editors at the University of Toronto Press (UTP): Eric Carlson, Stephen Shapiro, and Meg Patterson. Eric: thank you for initially reaching out, meeting with us for much longer than any of us had planned, and for your enthusiasm from the very beginning. Stephen and Meg: thank you both for your continued faith in this project and for helping to move it along into the finished and polished product it has finally become. All the behind-the-scenes folks at UTP, who are responsible for manuscript approval, production, marketing, and design. Our anonymous reviewers, whose rigorous critiques and helpful suggestions made this book considerably stronger and much more coherent than when they first received it.

xii Acknowledgments

The editors of Canadian Review of Social Policy and the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback for “(Re)constructing and (Re)habilitating the Disabled Body: World War One Era Disability Policy and Its Enduring Ramifications” (no. 75, May 2016, pp. 30–58), some of which was incorporated into chapter five. Matt Leitold and Loree Erickson, who read sections of the initial manuscript and provided useful feedback and important insights. Chris Chapman would like to thank: A.J. Withers, for the wonderfully collaborative relationship during the last seven years. I’ve so appreciated how we’ve supported each other and spotted one another off, based on what other things we were each juggling; improved each other’s initial goes at this or that concept, or period, or chapter, or complete restructuring of the book; weathered bumps, hoops, and hurdles along the way; and – throughout it all – cultivated and cherished a shared vision for what this book could be, which I’d like to think it has finally become in its present form. The many other folks with whom I’ve worked through this or that concept over the years, helping me to build my analysis and understanding – hopefully reciprocally. I’ll surely leave out key folks here, but the following list comes to mind: Liat Ben-Moshe, Allison Carey, Griffin Epstein, Harjeet Badwall, Kali Marsh, Shaista Patel, and Ruth Koleszar-Green. The loving and brilliant chosen and biological family who surround me, support me, and keep me (somewhat) emotionally grounded (at least sometimes), but who also keep me astonished and angry and despairing about all the injustices and inequities that demand big feelings, thoughtful consideration, and collective action. In this regard, I’m especially grateful to Kali Marsh, Griffin Epstein, Gin Marshall, Tionda Cain, and Vic Hill. And Kalye and Maayo for the cuddles and love; for the curiosity and openness; for the hope. The folks at Dalhousie’s School of Social Work, for first asking me to put together a course on the history of social work (way back when!); Kari Dehli, Tanya Titchkosky, Rinaldo Walcott, Sheryl Nestle, and Rod Michalko, for exposing me to very different “histories of social work” than I had previously encountered; and my colleagues and students at York’s School of Social Work who keep pushing me in various ways and allow me the space to keep wondering. And finally, the various social service users who shared with me their big feelings and thoughtful considerations about what I and other service providers were doing to their lives – even though I wasn’t always able to take it in at the time. You have profoundly shaped me and this work. A.J. Withers would like to thank: Chris, for asking me to be a part of this project and for pushing my scholarship and politics in new directions. I don’t think either of us imagined how

Acknowledgments xiii

long or big this project would end up being, but I appreciate how much I have learned through this process both from and with you. Thank you for all the support you have given me with this project, and in so many other things. And, ultimately, for writing this book with me that I think fills an important gap. I am proud to put my name on it. My family, both of origin and of choice. I am forever grateful to my lovely partner, Laura MacDonald, who is an amazing companion and supported me through hard times. Laura also helped unstick me when I got stuck writing, would make me take breaks, and listened to the fascinating stories of the people I was writing about over and over. My mom, who continues to be an example of generosity and compassion in my life. Loree Erickson, for all the work dates and TV breaks, for being a sounding board and advisor, and for being an integral part of my life for so many years. Matt Leitold, for the steadfast friendship, kindness, patience, and generosity. I am honoured to be a part of your life. And Scout “Sorry” Huston, for all the convos, crafts, dinners, and being a great friend. The many people with whom I have organized over the years, especially in and with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). I have learned so much about struggle, social working, and political analysis from the people in OCAP, both from being a part of people’s lives and from fighting back together. I have also hashed out my politics through discussion and debate with so many of you, which has helped me understand the world and develop the foundation on which this book is built. I also want to thank some specific OCAP members, without detracting from the importance of the many more members whom I don’t have the space to name. Yogi Acharya, for making such a great team with me, for diving in, doing the work, and being so caring and compassionate for me and for everyone around you. Marque Brill, for showing me the value of just doing the work – whatever the work is – while continuing to have a critical analysis. John Clarke, who has shown me the importance of using theory to frame our practice and who has a wealth of knowledge after so many years. Gaetan Heroux, who is a tremendous example in my life of social working, has shown me the importance of building relationships on the ground, and has a wealth of knowledge about social work history that I drew upon from time to time for this project. Danielle Koyama, who is profoundly committed to making social work a more humble, less oppressive profession – although she would never see it or say it that way. You have taught me about more things in the neighbourhood and in the struggle here than I can name. Also to Cathy Crowe and Beric German, whose decades of work on homelessness continues to be essential. It is work that I value, learn from, and (try to) build on. Thank you to all of you.

xiv Acknowledgments

Rachel Gorman, for your ongoing friendship, political discussions, and scholarly guidance and advice; and to you, Aaron Cain and Carlos, for giving Laura and I such a beautiful sanctuary to live in, your company, the dinners, and the miracle of stuffy births. All the people who were part of my care collective – both formal and informal – who help(ed) me get through. Because they were hard times, I can’t necessarily remember everyone’s names who helped me but I appreciate you very much. My PhD supervisor, Wendy McKeen, and committee member Gary Kinsman. I appreciate the understanding and patience that my committee had as I worked on this project. Also, thank you to you both for your scholarly guidance and direction, some of which was very useful for this book. I also want to acknowledge that I received financial support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for my doctoral studies during part of the process of writing this book.

A VIOLENT HISTORY OF BENEVOLENCE

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Introduction

Social Working, Interlocking Oppression, and Moral Economies History produces the present. Beyond the obviousness of this statement, the meaning-making that’s generated and circulated about the past significantly shapes possibilities for living and knowing today. Thomas King describes history as simply “the stories we tell about the past.”1 Such meaning-making, he says, shapes our world and lives: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.”2 If stories about the past constitute present-day reality, then careful reflection upon these stories is crucial. As Gary Kinsman observes, “History is a site of struggle in the present.”3 In this book, we aim to trouble the institutionalized and common-sense boundary between organized professional social work and what Uzo Anucha refers to as “social working”:4 the vastly diverse interventions into the social world that are found in all times and all places, which include caring, sharing, community work, and activism. We examine how tellings of social work history maintain and reproduce oppression in the present. In reflecting upon such histories of social work, we invite readers to consider how each of us is uniquely implicated in social and political relations that are harmful, marginalizing, oppressive, and violent. This book approaches history-telling as a political strategy for inviting careful reflection; it aims to invite political and ethical reflection upon our present by deconstructing the most normative framing of social work and social work history, and by tracing out alternative, politicized, and interconnected genealogies of how we got to where we are today. We invite reflection upon stories that are circulated about social work, the work these stories do, and the material consequences of this meaning-making labour. Dale Turner observes, “Because stories are retold many times, and by different people, a kind of communal moral landscape develops, and by participating in this landscape a community develops a shared conception of

4  A Violent History of Benevolence

morality.”5 This book aims to interrupt the “shared conception of morality” governing social work today. We therefore interrogate who gets centred and who gets left out of the most frequently told social work histories; what gets narrated as interconnected or disconnected; which aspects of much longer developments get framed as starting points; and how and why the relationship between past and present gets framed as clear-cut progress or total discontinuity. The standard account6 of social work history is extremely partial. It perpetuates colonial, racist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal, and otherwise oppressive social work practices. Historical studies that trace out oppressive legacies informing our contemporary social order situate historical violences as sites from which contemporary taken-for-granteds emerge, rather than as distant horrors from which we’ve definitively moved on. Michel Foucault called this approach to engaging with history “genealogy.” In genealogies like those in this book, historical struggles and violences are shown to shape today’s possibilities for perceiving, knowing, relating, and organizing social relations.7 Normative knowledges rooted in oppressive legacies shape contemporary humans so that we enact continued structural violences: “power passes through individuals”8 because we are “totally imprinted by history.”9 In genealogies, then, historical “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting” the imprinting by which we are constituted to perpetuate violent legacies.10 Genealogy “allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics.”11 For example, Foucault said that one “contemporary tactic” of his genealogy of the modern prison was to create a situation in which prison social workers “‘no longer know what to do’, so that the acts, gestures, discourses which up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous.”12 Without presuming that we could know exactly what uniquely situated readers should be doing instead of the most normative and oppressive professional social work practices, we attempt to create a reading experience that Gayatri Spivak describes as “an uncoercive rearrangement of desires.”13 A great deal of work goes into policing the boundaries of who is and isn’t this strange beast called a “social worker.” This labour includes, for example, movement towards professional registration, the current push towards “competencies,”14 and the still ongoing reactions to Abraham Flexner’s 1915 speech declaring that social work isn’t a profession.* While there may be occasional benefits to social service

* This speech is referred to so often that we’ll simply invite any doubtful readers to do an online search for “Flexner 1915 social work profession” to see how frequently contemporary authors mention it.

Introduction 5

users as a result of this boundary policing (which could surely be accomplished in other ways), it seems to primarily benefit those who can legitimately claim the title. Therefore, when we talk about social working broadly in this book, we refer to any interventions into our social world done by anyone. That said, organized professional “social work” – that is, paid work done by those who have accredited social work degrees – is a central topic of the book. The distinction between the two is a curious one; one group claims authority over the ubiquitous human labour of intervening into the social world. No matter how much work a person does in social services today, it’s frequently illegal to call oneself a social worker without the right degree and registration. In Ontario, for instance, “no person except a registered social worker shall represent or hold out expressly or by implication that he or she is a social worker.”15 Regardless of experience or function, only those with a specific degree who pay to be registered can call themselves “social workers” (meaning that this designation is easier to attain for ruling class people). The boundaries of social work have always been contested, and the term has always benefited those who are already relatively well off. Even the earliest arenas of professionalization, such as medicine, actively excluded people otherwise politically marginalized, which is one way that professionalization is a vehicle of oppression. Bonnie Burstow discusses how male medical doctors gradually delegitimized female healers in Europe, starting in the Middle Ages and carrying through to beyond the birth of professional social work.16 Mohamed Ibrahim discusses a resonant trend across colonial Africa.17 As a concrete and ongoing legacy of these displacements, Marie-Jolie Rwigema, Onyinyechukwu Udegbe, and David Lewis-Peart, Wanda Thomas Bernard, Lydia Lucas-White, and Dorothy Moore, as well as Harjeet Badwall, Lois Fairfax, and Jennifer Clarke all document that people of colour are normatively subjected to racism and made to feel like outsiders in social work today.18 This violence and marginalization is an ongoing feature of contemporary white supremacy rather than a thing of the past. Here, rather than being a characteristic only of reactionary extremists, “white supremacy” refers to normative and even liberal discourses, practices, and structures that give disproportionate value to white bodies, minds, institutions, countries, values, and mores. One manifestation of this uneven valuation is that racialized persons and communities have been an active part of what came to be called social work since before its official “birth,” but have continuously been marginalized within it and the stories told about it. Resonantly (and sometimes interlocking with racism), competent, licensed, and well-respected helping professionals can lose their right to practice if the wrong person discovers their psychiatric diagnosis and reports it to their regulatory college.19 Who gets included or excluded in a profession, and what work gets legitimized as professional, are tactics of institutional violence.

6  A Violent History of Benevolence

The experience of several stratifications interlocking in conflicting and complex ways is not the least bit exceptional. But accounting for such experiences in all their complexity is less frequently found in the stories that get told. “Exploring the complexities of power and the ways in which it operates in multiple directions through various discourses is not commonplace yet in social work,” writes Harjeet Badwall.20 She makes this statement while discussing her research with racialized social workers who were subjected to racism from colleagues or clients. She demonstrates that social service agencies and white colleagues normatively respond by stressing only the professional hierarchy (which places the worker in a powerful position) and not the racial hierarchy. Racialized social workers occupy a role bestowed with moral authority, at the very same time that white supremacy denigrates their bodies and capacities, and calls their ability to help others into question. Wanda Thomas Bernard writes that a representative of the Nova Scotia provincial (white) social work association questioned the appropriateness of the newly founded Nova Scotia Association of Black Social Workers using the term “social work.”21 Thomas Bernard, Lucas-White, and Moore reflect upon how “many clients experience some discomfort in accepting help from a Black professional social worker.” They comment, “We have been questioned about our qualifications, and many clients seem shocked (and sometimes a little skeptical!) to learn that we have graduate training from an accredited School of Social Work.”22 Lois Fairfax also describes her clients as “surprised that I was Black.”23 When trying to raise this issue with her supervisor, Fairfax recalls that her supervisor “became defensive and asked what proof I had. I was then asked whether I was getting any help for ‘my problem.’”24 In response to the racism Fairfax’s clients subjected her to, her supervisor subjected her to further racism by refusing to acknowledge it was happening at all, and then by pathologizing her experience of racism. In addition to pathologizing social workers who are subjected to racism on the job, white social work professionals and others within the system also subject racialized social workers to the kinds of surveillance and control that characterize social work relationships with clients. For example, Black social workers interviewed by Jennifer Clarke report that the anti-Black racism clients experience through their involvement with child protective services parallels their own experiences working within the system.* “They shared how they too * We capitalize “Indigenous” and “Black” throughout, unless in a direct quote, when used to discuss people (for example, we use “Indigenous people’s knowledge,” but when “indigenous” is an adjective, we use the small case such as “indigenous knowledges”). This practice follows many, but not all, Indigenous and Black scholars. We recognize that this is an imperfect attempt to navigate various competing ideas and identifications, and we are certainly not attempting to influence how or why others identify with identities we do not share.

Introduction 7

experienced differential treatment by White foster parents, service users, and the police during the course of their work … [One] worker explained how it is important for ‘Black workers to be very meticulous in their paperwork because everything is questioned by the supervisor, police, and some judges, especially if the family under investigation is Black too.’”25 Distinctly, but resonantly with these stories of anti-Black racism, Ruby Peterson describes how for Indigenous social workers “the violence of being told we are not professional when we incorporate sacred ceremony into our work with community is profound.”26 Badwall suspects that “parallels can be made” between the experiences of racialized social workers and members of other oppressed groups in which “discrimination and violence may occur in clinical encounters.”27 Although morally exalted and exercising political power as helping professionals, social workers from subordinated communities bring their own experiences of oppression into the helping encounter. The power relationship between service provider and service user is always present, but is never present as isolated and straightforward. Real power relations between helping professionals and service users come into being only as they interlock with both the specific stratifications and the violences opened up for that particular service user in receiving that particular service and the service provider’s experiences of racism, colonialism, disablism,* cisism,† capitalism, heteropatriarchy, sexism, and ageism. Interlocking oppression analyses were developed by Black feminists such as the Combahee River Collective,28 Kimberlé Crenshaw,29 Patricia Hill Collins,30 Angela Davis,31 Audre Lorde,32 and bell hooks.33 According to this framework,

* Some readers may be (more) familiar with the term “ableism.” “Ableism” and “disablism” are generally understood to be regional variations. From our observations, they are treated essentially as synonyms, with various authors and activists weighing in on preference for this or that term, but also with the former being fairly consistent in the United States while the latter is fairly consistent in the United Kingdom, for example. Some of these variances are rooted in political disagreements about which word more accurately captures the form of oppression disabled people face, which Mike Oliver, Dan Goodley, and A.J. Withers (in Disability Politics and Theory) discuss. Fiona Kumari Campbell, among others, has argued that these are two separate phenomena. However, because they are largely held as synonymous, as in they refer to the same oppression, we have chosen to use “disablism.” This is the term that we are more politically aligned with and is more commonly used globally. † Cisism, sometimes called cissexism or cisgenderism, is the exalting of cis people (people who are not trans). Cis or cisgender people experience their gender as neatly and consistently aligned with others’ perception of their gender, the gender they were assigned at birth by a doctor or other designated expert, and the gender normatively associated with their genitals, for those whose genitals match normative expectations of either “male” or “female.”

8  A Violent History of Benevolence

as Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack write, “systems of oppression come into existence in and through one another.”34 Oppressions are interconnected and can neither be achieved nor understood discretely: “Class exploitation could not be accomplished without gender and racial hierarchies; imperialism could not function without class exploitation, sexism, heterosexism, and so on.”35 If sexism were eliminated, for example, the vast majority of women in the world would still be oppressed due to racism, classism, disablism, heterosexism, colonialism, ageism, cisism, and so on.* Interlocking oppression analyses attend to the fact that membership between groups is not discrete (that is, many people are queer and poor and racialized, for example) and also recognize that particular oppressions impact different groups in different ways.36 A compelling example of the latter can be found in various seemingly distinct developments that all took place during the 1840s: the 1840s saw the initial use of the concept of the “norm” to stratify people,37 the then Province of Canada’s articulation of a governmental commitment to Indian residential schools,38 the first school for intellectually disabled pupils in the United States,39 and a flourishing of US asylums. The 1840s thus witnessed a new intersection of (forced) public education, colonialism, normalization, charitable benevolence, and disablement. The resultant explosion of varied and specialized sites of confinement in the wake of this intersection can be understood through the workings of what was then coalescing into an interlocking of oppression. The concurrent expansion of these multiple sites of confinement shared some degree of resonant rationality, architecture, treatment of inmates, and other features, so that certain previously innovative ideas and practices have now become sedimented, standardized, and taken for granted. However, it would be incorrect, oversimplifying, and offensive to therefore suggest that eugenic institutions for people deemed feebleminded were “the same” or even really “like” Indian residential schools in an overarching way. Various kinds of confinement made sense within the same cultural and historical context, and sometimes borrowed strategies of control or violence from one another. People running or directing one site were influenced by those in another; some key figures were involved in multiple such sites; and so on. At the same time, the impact of each institutional system is very different from every other one, and so they should not be conflated as one cohesive force. The impact on disabled people and the impact on Indigenous people are two totally separate legacies

* This work was (and remains) an important critique offered by women of colour about white feminism. See, for example, Moraga and Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back and the statement of the Combahee River Collective.

Introduction 9

stemming from this violent past.* Of course, it is also true that some of the children in Indian residential schools were disabled,40 as is true of any population, and so disablism and colonialism (as but one example) cannot be held as necessarily discrete. We therefore try to attend to the interlockings of oppression in these histories, but we also trace out the specific legacy of colonialism as distinguishable from the specific legacy of disablism, and vice versa. A normatively taken-for-granted foundation to these interlocking legacies can be found in the tenet that some kinds of people are superior to others. In her study of the “making of race and nation in Canada,” Sunera Thobani traces the workings of what she calls a “moral economy”† that differentiates and distributes human worth or value. She uses this framework to describe the ongoing denigration of Indigenous peoples and racialized immigrants in social policy. Moral economies always operate in two directions at once: in Thobani’s critique, they devalue Indigenous and racialized folks while simultaneously exalting or valorizing white citizens.41 According to moral economy analyses, the ascribed value of differentiated humans rises and falls in relation to one another and as a result of concrete human action and interpretation. For example, when extravagant ceremonies commemorate the deaths of police or military, the value placed on the lives of those killed by police or by our military inextricably degrades. The understanding that moral differentiation significantly underlies material violence also animates the Black Lives Matter movement.42 The very name of the movement challenges how Black people are normatively devalued in social workings such as the criminal justice system. Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, writes: “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”43 This movement resists material police violence; it also resists the moral economy in which Black lives are normatively devalued.

* Chrisjohn and Young mobilize Goffman’s analysis of “total institutions” in their discussion of Indian residential schools. In their analysis, individuals subjected to diverse “total institutions” may suffer many of the same consequences, but the cumulative result on a community or population varies widely – so they write that strategies of “normalization” are genocide in the context of colonial violence. † This usage is entirely distinct from another use of “moral economy,” in which the term denotes a positive ethical appraisal of a local economic system. This other use of the term would apply, for example, to Jane Addams’s description of freer sharing without judgment among poor Chicagoans in Democracy and Social Ethics, but that is not how we use the term.

10  A Violent History of Benevolence

Both of us, A.J. and Chris, are implicated in various systems of oppression. We are exalted because of our race, and we benefit from white supremacy. Even while we deplore white supremacy and actively work against it, we’re complicit in it and benefit from its ongoing operations. This reality is often framed as “we have white privilege.” While this formulation can be useful, the framing of inequality and domination as a consequence of privilege has several disadvantages. The notion of privilege can be confusing to some people because it suggests that it’s something a person has: white or male or class or nondisabled or cis or straight privilege. It suggests something tangible that isn’t always as evident to people in these groups as it is to those in groups that are disadvantaged, relative to them. Many people do not feel that they experience any material benefit from “having privilege,” especially if they are materially marginalized in other aspects of their life. Furthermore, by stressing only the material aspects of inequality, oppression, and marginalization through translating complex operations of power into “privilege,” much of the impact of these forces is lost. Thobani uses the concept of “exaltation” rather than privilege, and we believe this framing can help us shift the way we think about structural violence. Thobani shows that exaltation extends beyond those tangible rights and material benefits that tend to be centred in discussions of privilege. It is fundamentally a moral reverence, which makes unequal distributions of rights, property, and status appear just and fair.44 We think the term “exaltation” touches upon something more fundamental than “privilege” and can highlight how varied and interlocking moral differentiations shape and normalize material discrepancies and violences. Each of us is positioned uniquely within interlocking forms of oppression and their histories, and our exact positioning changes to some extent depending on the particular relationship and local context in which we find ourselves. For instance, although Harsha Walia experiences racism and sexism as a racialized woman, she writes: “A straight white cisgendered man who is homeless faces a harsher material reality on a daily basis … than me, someone who might be able to count off more forms of oppression, but who does not have to worry about surviving through a cold night on the streets.”45 In an encounter with such a man, multiple legacies of oppression would be present. Continuing, Walia points out that “oppression is relational and contextual; we are all embedded in relations of domination.”46 Because identities are complex and someone can simultaneously be exalted and denigrated, other aspects of our identities interlock with our whiteness. We are both exalted because of our class, although we are differently situated: A.J. grew up working class, spent many years on social assistance, and is now making a living as a PhD student. A.J. identifies as queer, genderqueer, and trans,

Introduction 11

and is sometimes exalted for being read as male. A.J. routinely navigates the realities of passing/not passing; sometimes A.J. is exalted (not sexually harassed on the street, for example) and other times is denigrated through systems of patriarchy, heterosexism, and cisism. A.J. also passes as nondisabled most of the time, but systemic disablism has contributed to their material deprivation and many experiences of denigration and discrimination. Chris has the exalted class positioning of a professor (and previously a social worker). They live in an extended multigenerational bio/chosen family home of ten people, and they are mad,* disabled, and trans-feminine/genderqueer;† but they’re typically read as a nondisabled (feminine) male and have never been psychiatrized or coercively medicalized. Our varied experiences of exaltation and denigration inform how we understand the world and how we wrote this book – in ways we’re aware of and, surely, in ways we aren’t. Oppressions are historically co-constructed and interlocked. This fact does not mean they are permanent and invariable – or that we can do nothing about them. Himani Bannerji observes that oppression is created by and relies upon social relations – the relations among people.47 Real people, “through [their] own practices, coordinate and produce the social world,” as Frampton, Kinsman, Thompson, and Tilleczek note.48 By fundamentally changing social relations and the systems that real people have put in place to maintain oppression and domination, we can build a better, socially just world.

* “Madness” is a term reclaimed by people who have experiences that are pathologizable within the discourses and practices of psychiatry and people who have been subjected to the regimes of psychiatric intervention. See, for example, Gorman and LeFrançois’s chapter “Mad Studies”; LeFrançois, Menzies, and Reaume’s edited collection Mad Matters; and Erick Fabris’s Tranquil Prisons. In mad studies and activism, the various things that are categorized as abnormal in psychiatry are held to be within the expected range of human experience, and many of the struggles associated with these experiences or ways of being are understood to be largely a result of psychiatric practice and discourse. This view is not to suggest that there is not pain associated with any of these experiences, but that suffering is often exacerbated by discourses and practices that render normal human experiences as “sickness” and “abnormality.” † Chris has often erred on the side of not naming these experiences publicly for fear of implying greater marginality than they experience in their exalted day-to-day life. For resonant explorations of such politicized hesitance, please see Voronka’s “Politics of ‘People with Lived Experience’” and LeFrançois’s “Psychiatrization of Our Children.” Both of these texts can be contextualized within the important critiques of queer, trans, mad, and disabled people of colour’s explorations of how class and race power mitigate experiences of marginalization and oppression due to disability and queer/transness. Readers may also be interested in Sedgwick’s deconstruction of being “in” versus “out” in Epistemology of the Closet, in light of her later public self-identification as a “gay man,” which she names in the same sentence as she also identifies as a “fat woman” in her chapter “White Glasses.”

12  A Violent History of Benevolence

We hope that this book will help readers to reflect upon their responsibility within ongoing legacies of control and violence, sharing and caring. Each of us, over and over again, will find ourselves in positions where we can either take action against oppressive systems of social work or reinforce these systems. Often these moments are incredibly complicated and involve trying to decide which is the lesser of two evils, how to align oneself relative to competing ethical and political commitments, or some other situation in which there’s no clear right answer. Yet, recognizing such complexity is not to give up on political responsibility. Judith Butler calls it, rather, “a new departure for feminist political theorizing.”49 We have to be more careful when we think we’re working towards more equal resource distribution, greater social justice, or more freedom for multiple bodies and minds to live dignified lives, but it doesn’t mean giving up these pursuits. As Paulo Freire writes, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”50 A Brief Discussion of Some Indigenous Social Workings on This Land We have been born, lived our lives, and written this book on colonized land. Like all places humans have ever lived, Turtle Island,* normatively called the United States and Canada,† has known a vast diversity of social working51 before and alongside the dominance of professional social work. However, these diverse social workings have been displaced and denigrated by colonialism, capitalism, and professional social work. These displacements have shifted normative moralities and social relations towards what we trace out in this book as

* The name Turtle Island has been adopted by many Indigenous people in North America and originates with the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabek. † The US/Canadian border is plainly a colonial imposition. For this reason, throughout this book we fluidly explore histories from both what is now called Canada and what is now called the United States. Decolonization will not have been achieved until the land that has been unjustly taken is returned to Indigenous peoples and a fundamental restructuring of the social, economic, and political order has taken place. What role could social workers play in supporting such struggles? Furthermore, we fluidly explore Canada and the United States because of the largely shared cultural landscape between English-speaking Canada and the United States. Historically, for example, developments in professional social work often started in large American cities, with large Canadian cities following suit quicker than most of the rest of the United States, and so this birth or emergence transgressed the border. Finally, the generalizations that hold Canada and the United States as “culturally” distinct are unfair to the vast diversities of people who make up either one.

Introduction 13

the guiding ethic of professional social work. This ethic attributes a healing power to relationships of domination that are directed by people who imagine themselves morally superior to those they “help”; it works to make oppressed groups more like dominant groups, “but not quite”52 or “without making [them] equal.”53 Local context and world view shape the social workings that make sense in any given community. What’s now called the United States and Canada is home to tremendously diverse Indigenous communities and nations, just like other large continents such as Africa and Europe. We therefore try to refer to specific nations or communities by name where possible. However, when not referring to a specific group, quoting someone, or discussing colonial policies or institutions (for example, the Indian Act, Indian boarding schools), we use the term “Indigenous” for all those who lived here prior to European invasion and settlement. This term is strategically mobilized in decolonial political projects, but it carries the risk of erasing diversity among Indigenous peoples.54 These communities’ world views and social workings vary widely, and yet are consistently very different from those that were normative in Europe at the time of invasion.55 Furthermore, some (but not all) aspects of being subjected to colonialism are roughly shared across Indigenous communities. Such resonances make a term such as “Indigenous” politically useful, but we do not wish to perpetuate the myth of a pan-Indigenous identity or culture.56 In 1708, it was observed of Mi’kmaw society that “there is no inherited position due to birth or lineage.”57 This practice seems to have been complemented by other means of valuing members of a community more equally than was the case in Europe in the 1700s (or in Europe, Canada, or the United States today, for that matter). Turner writes, “In many indigenous communities it was considered disrespectful to speak for another, and it was certainly forbidden to choose for another how to speak.”58 Daniel Paul explains how these things affected everyday community decision making: “Reaching consensus was necessary because … Mi’kmaq leaders had to lead in accordance with the will of the People. Thus, if a Mi’kmaq leader wanted to undertake a new initiative, he was dependent upon his powers of persuasion to convince fellow citizens of the merit of his proposal.”59 Such an egalitarian ethic is also put into practice in some Indigenous traditions of talking circles, which grant each participant as much time as they need to speak so that the circle proceeds with no predetermined endpoint. This process is very different from how most non-Indigenous social work groups are run, and is informed by an entirely distinct ethic. It’s not that there’s no differentiated valuing of members in Indigenous societies. However, the tendency is that community esteem and political standing is earned, not through stratified birthright, professional affiliation,

14  A Violent History of Benevolence

or formal education, but through number of years alive, as well as through enduring difficulties and embodying experiences understood as extraordinarily aligned with the spiritual realm – which includes seeing or hearing things that others don’t and embodying multiple genders.60 We can note the fundamentally distinct moral economies here: old age, surviving abuse and other hardship, hearing voices or seeing visions, and transgressing the gender binary all tend to be venerated in Indigenous societies, but these same qualities denigrate people as less capable and less “expert” in white settler colonial discourse and practice. Indigenous communities had very different understandings of gender from what is normative today. Dian Million says they were “richly differentiated.”61 Two-Spirit Cree Elder Blu Waters notes that many Indigenous societies feature three or more genders, rather than two. Historically, she says Two-Spirit people were accorded some responsibilities otherwise delegated to either men or women within their societies, but they also held responsibilities specific to Two-Spirit people. The latter were based upon Two-Spirit people being honoured for experiences of both maleness and femaleness. Two-Spirit people hunted and kept fires when men were away, for example, but also did tasks that were more obviously social working, like mediation and marriage counselling.62 Jill Alaers also notes that Two-Spirit folks were often exalted as healers. She writes: “Reserved roles varied between groups, and also between male and female two-spirits.” Some groups had strict gender roles “that forced two-spirits to strictly adhere to roles typically associated with the opposite gender,” while some didn’t. Using winkte, the Lakota term for Two-Spirit, she writes: “Some groups such as the Lakota allowed winkte members to contribute towards both ‘men’s work’ such as hunting, and ‘women’s work’ such as gathering food or supplies, and making art and textiles.”63 Two-Spirit people were so integral to some Indigenous societies that travellers wouldn’t overnight in communities with no Two-Spirit members, Waters adds, because this fundamental lack was evidence of an unhealthy community.64 To simply say that homophobia or transphobia didn’t exist in these Indigenous cultures before colonization is inadequate: gay, queer, trans, and other related terms do not neatly map onto Two-Spirit; furthermore, the absence of discrimination and oppression does not account for the specificity with which Two-Spirit community members were an esteemed and crucial part of what made a community whole.65 This latter point might usefully illustrate the distinction between liberal multicultural “tolerance” (which leaves whiteness, cisheteronormativity, nondisability, ruling class mores, and so on at its centre) and the notion of a “difference that makes a difference”66 by comprising a community’s fundamental understandings and practices.

Introduction 15

Prior to colonization, more democratic Indigenous societies also involved more egalitarian relations between women and men than those in European and white settler colonies. Andrea Smith says, “Indian societies for the most part were not male dominated. Women served as spiritual, political, and military leaders, and many societies were matrilineal. Although there existed a division of labor between women and men, women’s labor and men’s labor were accorded similar status.”67 She says this gendered egalitarianism resulted in Indigenous societies being less authoritarian in many respects. Just as political power appears to have been more evenly distributed in many Indigenous societies, so too were material resources. Chrestien Le Clercq recorded in 1691 that all Mi’kmaq “must without fail aid the sick; and those who have meat or fish in abundance must give some of it to those who are in need.”68 Paul notes that material items were shared throughout communities so that “the old, sick, infirm and otherwise disadvantaged were protected from destitution.” He says “poverty was virtually unknown,” and stress levels were low.69 Paul also describes how differently Mi’kmaw society viewed human experiences now normatively understood through psychiatry, saying they “bore no social stigma.” He contrasts this outlook with Europe and white settler colonies, where “hellholes called lunatic asylums housed their mentally ill in deplorable and pitiful squalor.”70 As with Two-Spirit experiences, this way of thinking was not simply a matter of tolerance or the absence of sanism.71 Rather, seeing and hearing things that others don’t was revered as a central aspect of what human experience is, can be, and should be. For example, in Decolonizing Trauma Work, Renee Linklater articulates an Indigenous world view in which what’s pathologized today as “psychosis” is framed instead as “parallel realities”: “Parallel realities are two realities occurring simultaneously, such as the physical and spiritual world.”72 This framing goes beyond a lack of sanism; these specific discourses, moralities, and social structures shape what people can know and do in relationship with one another, resulting in drastically different interventions into the social world. Linklater interviews an Indigenous psychiatric nurse named Yvon, who describes working with a person who experiences what psychiatry labels psychosis. Yvon says, “It’s my job to facilitate his reality in a manner that’s not disturbing to himself and others [and] … that’s actually helping to fulfill his prophesy”73 It would make a huge difference to professional social work if psychiatric framings and Yvon’s spiritual understanding of a person fulfilling their prophesy were seen as two comparable, valid, and situated understandings – rather than one representing truth and the other superstition and ignorance. The Indigenous interventions into the social world most well known outside of Indigenous communities may be those that have come to be called restorative and transformative justice. Daniel Ashini, for example, describes how

16  A Violent History of Benevolence

he understands that a fellow Innu named Shinepestis came to harm others, and therefore how this harm should be addressed. Ashini says that the harm Shinepestis caused came out of “his own hurt.” He says his community “judge[s] Shinepestis as no different from the rest of us. He is our equal and we judge him to be a worthwhile human being” deserving of “caring and support,” rather than exile. Ashini continues: “Shinepestis will be accepted back with us not in spite of what he did but because we need him to be a part of our healing.”74 Paul writes, however, that Europeans criticized such compassionate practices* because they believed that “force was the only effective method to assure compliance.”75 Let’s pause to consider what kinds of social working would tend to flow from the two moral systems – the one Indigenous and the other European. Of course, it’s important to remember that Indigenous communities are diverse, as are European ones; and we can’t know how consistently any community lived by its stated and predominant ethical standards. However, what Europeans and early white settlers professed as moral and political ideals differ drastically from those of Indigenous communities in what’s now called Canada and the United States, and in many other parts of the world. Smith cautions against cultivating “the impression that Native communities were utopian prior to colonization.” There was some gender-based violence, she says, but “records often note its relative rarity as well as the severity of the punishment for the perpetrator of violence.”76 Just as European and white settler societies would have featured some people who responded to madness or queerness in ways very different from the oppression, violence, and degradation that was socially sanctioned and normative at the time, so too would Indigenous societies have had people whose actions and beliefs deviated from the Indigenous world views and practices discussed earlier. Nevertheless, we can note the significant gap in stated morality between one and the other cluster of diverse societies (European and Indigenous). Based on these distinguishable predominant moralities, prevalent social workings surrounding a person who, for example, survived violence, sees things others don’t see, or embodies a gender identity between or beyond the binary gender imaginary would likely have been very different in many Indigenous societies than in Europe or white settler colonies. Such moralities shape a society’s everyday social organization and social workings. As we discuss later, in white childrearing from at least the mid-1700s until about fifty years ago, experts advocated strict obedience and the use of what’s

* See the discussion concerning objectification and the imagined necessity for violence/force on pages 221–2 in chapter four of this book and the quotation from Said, Orientalism, xxi.

Introduction 17

now considered physical and emotional abuse.77 In contrast, Paul writes that in Mi’kmaw communities “force was never used to compel children’s participation in the education process, nor would it have been tolerated,”78 which Carole Blackburn documents was also true of Huron-Wendat society.79 Furthermore, in contrast to orphanages, other sites of institutionalizing children, and white child welfare practices, Paul describes how Mi’kmaw children whose biological parents weren’t able to care for them were adopted and treated no differently than had they been born to their new parents.80 Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey likewise note that when Indigenous parents were unable to raise their children, “the surrounding society always stepped in to share communal responsibility for raising the children.”81 Cyndy Baskin names a number of what she calls “general values within Aboriginal worldviews,” including permissiveness, non-interference, and humility.82 European and white settler societies have normatively devalued these qualities for several centuries now (which feminists have challenged as normative masculinist denigrations of traditionally feminine qualities83). These “general values” animate Indigenous childrearing practices. Of Haudenosaunee pedagogy, for example, Turner says that children are told stories and encouraged to consult with elders and others, but they are ultimately expected to come to their own understanding of the stories.84 This non-directive ethic also characterized some Indigenous relations between political bodies, as evidenced in the Two-Row Wampum agreements between the Haudenosaunee and early European traders and settlers.85 These arrangements were mutual agreements of non-interference based in longexisting political practices of the Haudenosaunee. As long as a community or nation agreed to the Great Law of Peace, they were left to govern themselves as they internally agreed upon. Paul describes a resonant Mi’kmaw ethic of noninterference within interpersonal relations: “The philosophy was simple: accept the sincere beliefs of the other individual and then proceed to win the person over to the truth by tactful and diplomatic means.” This ethic entailed agreeing with something that was false out of respect, and dropping an issue “unless the matter was of life-and-death or national importance,” because “in the overall scheme of things the right or wrong of an opinion would not make that much difference.”86 Consider how different this practice is from the ethic that tends to guide professional social workers’ actions when they disagree with their clients.87 Organization and Structure of A Violent History of Benevolence The chapters in this book enact interrelated analyses that aim to unsettle and politicize what’s commonly taken for granted in histories about the emergence of professional social work. They endeavour to interrupt how this history

18  A Violent History of Benevolence

normatively gets taken up in the ethical constitution of contemporary social workers’ understandings of self and other, and in practising relationships, reflexivity, and responsibility. The numbered chapters of this book are divided into two parts: “Deconstructing Social Work and Social Work History” and “Interlocking Genealogies of the Ethic of the Healing Power of Domination and Imagined Moral Superiority.” Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the decades immediately surrounding 1900 and directly interrogate the stories normatively told about the founding of professional “social work” at this time. These chapters enact a deconstruction of established social work history – following operationalizations of this approach in Butler, Spivak, and Bhabha.88 Chapter 1, “Troubling the Standard Account of Social Work,” challenges the story in which social work emerged out of an ongoing polarity between the radical settlement house movement and the conservative Charity Organization Society (COS). The COS is often portrayed as politically problematic and paternalistic, but not as explicitly oppressive. In contrast, settlements are often held up as perfect examples of what radical social work has lost touch with and should strive to become once again. This chapter “troubles”89 the polarity of the standard account of social work: we show how particular claims or traits are exaggerated, while others are minimized; one example is treated as an exception, while another is treated as a guiding norm. We show that the COS and Mary Richmond were both more liberal and more oppressive than the standard account depicts. We also show that the settlement movement and Jane Addams were far from unproblematic and that no figure, including Addams, should be framed as innocent of complicity in oppression. We resonantly unsettle the clear dividing lines between individualistic interventions (which are sometimes framed as inherently conservative) and community interventions (which are sometimes imagined aligned with more radical social change). Using the examples of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’s direct action casework and the community relocations of Regent Park and Africville, we show that these alignments are not always what they’re imagined to be. We also show the extent to which the “charity organization” work of the early COS lives on today in the United Way as well as in smaller-scale social workings. We suggest that social workers today would have different possibilities if they situate themselves within these complex and messy legacies, rather than within the stories most commonly told. Chapter 2, “White Supremacy and the Erasure of Racialized Social Workers,” challenges the whiteness of the standard account of social work history. There are many legacies of social work in communities of colour in what’s now

Introduction 19

called Canada and the United States; we largely focus on Black communities in the United States due to the extensive social services they offered, their celebrated work alongside well-known white social workers, and the often ignored but available and rich scholarly work on Black social work histories.90 We discuss the interlocking of race, gender, and class in the lives and work of Black social workers, and we challenge the tendency in white social work history for radical white social workers’ efforts – including their anti-racist efforts – to get all the credit for radical social work. Chapter 2 thus brings new information or perspectives into the discussion about the origin of professional social work that can’t be easily incorporated into the standard white framing. This approach functions to disturb and unsettle the sanctity of the standard account.91 Complementing the “troubling” of the standard account in the previous chapter, we hope readers will begin to recognize how much work goes into maintaining the standard account as if it were the only valid history of social work. Chapter 3, “Social Work as Displacement, Denigration, Cisheteropatriarchalization,” continues to deconstruct normative understandings of social work. It also introduces the ethic that we trace out genealogically in much of the remainder of the book. Throughout the globe, most peoples’ caring and sharing labour has been animated by some variation of ethicality characterized by a recognition of shared humanity. However, these resonant but also diverse local moralities have been displaced over and over again by an ethic of care that’s shaped by some people’s understanding of themselves as superior to those they claim to help. This displacement has been accomplished through capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. For over a century now, the spread and institutionalization of professional social work has been a significant means of extending this violence. We posit that the guiding ethic animating normative professional social work ascribes a benevolent healing power to domination and imagined moral superiority. We illustrate this violent benevolence through discussions of colonial displacements of indigenous social workings in Nigeria, the shift in a medieval Christian order’s practices from nonjudgmental caring to crusading and assimilative imperialism, and white ruling class impositions of a particular version of cisheteropatriarchy onto poor and colonized peoples for several centuries now. We discuss the highly inconsistent interventions into the realm of cisheteropatriarchy that early social workers accomplished around 1900 – often creating new possibilities for feminist and queer lives in their personal lives but enacting cisheteropatriarchalization through their professional endeavours – and we show that the story in which professionalization enabled women to enter the paid workforce for the first time may not be what it appears to be.

20  A Violent History of Benevolence

Chapter 3 also names and unsettles various commonly encountered “claims of relative innocence” – practices through which people critique structural violences without imagining that they themselves might be implicated in these violences. We illustrate and interrogate various examples of this irresponsible tendency, which brings us through a discussion of Jane Addams’s distancing of herself from her day’s charity workers, representations of historical authors who advocated what we now call child abuse, and a critique of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 apology for Indian residential schools on behalf of the Canadian government. Part 2 of the book is entitled “Interlocking Genealogies of the Ethic of the Healing Power of Domination and Imagined Moral Superiority.” Chapter 4, “Knowing Better: Liberalism, Instrumental Violence, and Making New Humans,” focuses on several projects of social and political reform from the late Enlightenment that relate to innovative individualist and rationalist ethics; liberal optimism about humans’ capacity for transformation; assimilationistcolonial education and understandings of racial difference; crime and punishment; what would soon be called psychiatry; and the surveillance, stratification, and categorization of humans in closed institutional spaces. We suggest that liberal Enlightenment sensibilities enabled taken-for-granted understandings among the white ruling classes that they were superior to all others, although this view was now articulated very differently than had previously been the case. The new instrumental violences born at this time institutionalized the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority across contexts. These innovative practices, in turn, enabled a shift in understanding of what it is to be human, so that morally denigrated and politically oppressed individuals and populations were now believed to be thoroughly and objectively knowable and distinguishable from other humans. We examine this new way of understanding humanity as it was imposed upon a number of long-denigrated and oppressed groups, primarily by discussing the scientific and bureaucratic inventions of the delinquent, the invert, the invalid, and the Indian. Chapters 5 and 6 continue our genealogical tracing of the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. In “Rehabilitation/ Eugenics” (chapter 5) and “Assimilation/Genocide” (chapter 6), we show how social workings targeting disabled and Indigenous peoples extended longexisting moral economies of human value at the time that professional social work emerged. We focus on the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, exploring the denigration of disabled peoples in chapter 5 and Indigenous peoples in chapter 6. Whether the tactic was extermination or making targeted people more like nondisabled ruling class white folks, normative social working aimed to eradicate certain ways of being human. These parallel and

Introduction 21

resonant practices didn’t have identical effects on the two groups. Nevertheless, the adoption of large-scale assimilation and rehabilitation policies in the United States and Canada marked an important shift within continuous moral economies in which certain kinds of people are viewed as inferior but redeemable; these programs coincided with programs of outright elimination. Often told as distinct histories, these seemingly discrete but concurrent and structurally similar developments reflected a further entrenchment and institutionalization of the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. Long-oppressed groups were imagined capable of aligning with ruling class white norms and, for the first time in the early twentieth century, state attempts to bring about this alignment were now legislated, nationalized, and sometimes made compulsory. In “Rehabilitation/Eugenics,” we challenge the commonly held sense that rehabilitation and eugenics (which is the belief that “fit” people should be encouraged to reproduce while “unfit” people should be prevented from reproducing) are oppositional, centring disability in our discussion. Rehabilitation marked a significant shift in the use of individualizing corrective practices as a tool in furthering moral economies of unequal human worth. By exclusively focusing initially on people whose exaltation as exceptionally “fit” soldiers intersected with their denigration as (now) disabled (due to war), rehabilitation soon spread individualizing corrective techniques and discourses throughout the social body. We show that the rehabilitative project complemented eugenics within a shared moral economy in which only some kinds of humans are valuable and worthwhile. This chapter also discusses rehabilitation as a tactic against queer people, and we use interlocking oppression and moral economy analyses to critically reflect upon subsequent reforms in the pathologization of sexual and gender nonconformity. In “Assimilation/Genocide,” we focus on the white settler colonial project and how the United States and Canada attempted to eradicate Indigenous peoples as peoples in the decades surrounding and following the emergence of professional social work. We focus on the shift in state policy that made Indian residential schooling and citizenship (for those deemed adequately assimilated) compulsory. The imposition of white norms was viewed as an unquestionable good within the white supremacist moral economy, which functioned to justify devastating violence against Indigenous people, communities, and nations. Colonial discourse at this time liberally featured stated motivations of care and benevolence. Rather than situating such stated motivations as a ruse, we posit again that benevolent professional social work is normatively operationalized as instrumental violence, and it routinely depends upon and consolidates oppressive moral economies such as that of white supremacy. We

22  A Violent History of Benevolence

discuss how professional social work continues to enact colonial violence, and we more generally challenge ongoing normative discourses and practices of paternalistic care. Chapter 7, “What If It Isn’t Getting Better? What do We Do Then?,” extends our genealogies of social work into the present. We further unsettle the prejudice of progress and show that things certainly haven’t gotten better for many groups – at least not cleanly or straightforwardly. The framing of straightforward progress allows us to minimize the normative violences and inequalities that continue to characterize our time. The moral economies dividing valued lives from worthless ones carry on today, unabated. Their effects over the last few decades on the most oppressed and denigrated groups, if anything, are actually getting worse through neoliberal policies, the expansion of the prison system, and continued child apprehension. We discuss several first-person accounts of experiences within unjust institutions and what front-line workers do to mitigate some of that injustice. We invite readers to think through their complicity in systems of violence while working to make those systems more humane. We also examine some of the lessons that can be drawn from social justice organizing and demonstrate the need for far more than superficial reform to today’s violent institutions. In the conclusion, we summarize the central themes of the book and restate the reasons that we brought what seem to be so many disparate events into conversation with one another. We invite readers to consider: What kinds of legacy are we leaving behind today? And how do we wish to participate in what will become tomorrow’s history?

PART ONE Deconstructing Social Work and Social Work History

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1 Troubling the Standard Account of Social Work

The Standard Account Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young describe what they call the “standard account” of Indian residential schools, suggesting that this most frequently encountered version of history and its legacy frames what these institutions were and, therefore, what should be thought, felt, and done about them today.1 They show how the standard account misrepresents and depoliticizes the history of Indian residential schools in Canada and the United States. Although distinct, we can also say there’s a “standard account” of social work’s emergence – a specific history that is normatively taught in social work classrooms and reiterated in social work texts. The standard account of social work history places the origins of social work in England with organizations that “organized” charities and early social justice establishments called settlement houses.* Brought to North America, these two models were taken up by well-meaning upper and middle class white people who spread their social work knowledge and practice across the continent. These histories commonly name Mary Richmond and Jane Addams as the two key founders of the profession in North America. They were associated, respectively, with the Charity Organization Society (COS) and the settlement house movement.2 The COS is either depicted uncritically as developing “scientific” casework or depicted critically as politically conservative and moralizing, with the example that they sent ruling class “friendly visitors” into poor people’s * See note 2 for a discussion of a significant number of texts’ relationship to the standard account. Importantly, there is existing work that challenges the standard account by, for example, examining the important role of Black people in establishing social work or critiquing social work’s role in settler colonialism and white supremacy.

26  Deconstructing Social Work and Social Work History

homes to tell them how to live properly. The settlement house movement, in contrast, is framed by the standard account as progressive, often as politically radical, and as working towards improving conditions of poor communities through community and political organizing. This standard account has variations, situated more or less coherently on different positions along the political spectrum. In its liberal version, settlement houses with their radical community organizing and social transformation work are nicely complemented by the more individually oriented casework, creating a harmonious and diverse foundation for all subsequent social work.3 In its radical iteration, the settlement houses and Addams are held in sharp contrast to the COS and framed as what social work should strive to be.4 What the liberal and radical versions share is a common understanding that these two distinct spheres of interventions into the social world mark out the parameters of what social work was and can ever be. While it’s undoubtedly true that there’s much to learn from Addams and the settlement movement, we discuss why it’s a mistake to hold these interventions only as positive examples and/or as entirely positive examples. Parallel to the simplification of Addams and the settlement movement, Richmond and the COS are also treated in the standard account with less complexity than their histories demand. First, they are sometimes represented as the right-wing extreme of problematic, classist, and control-oriented social work, which is far from how they viewed themselves. This self-perception is important if we consider contemporary social work and how practitioners view themselves today: while some front-line workers imagine themselves radical, we’ve personally never met social work professionals who claim to be any further to the right of the political spectrum than liberal. The majority of social workers appear to feel that they’re aligned with left of centre political critique. Yet, surely this self-perception does something to hamper critiques of social work – whether from scholars, clients, or community groups. Our concern is that claims of relative innocence enable social workers to acknowledge structural violences in social work but to imagine that they result from the cumulative actions of other social workers who are conservative and intend social control. If no actual social workers imagine themselves as part of this complicit conservative community, nobody will change their practices in light of the already widely circulating critiques. But if both liberal and radical social workers have been implicated in interlocking oppressions ever since the emergence of professional social work, the implications for contemporary ethics and politics are very different. Implicit in and alongside the polarized framing of the settlement movement versus the COS is a framing in which all casework and immediate meeting of needs are imagined to be conservative and all community-level interventions

Troubling the Standard Account of Social Work  27

are imagined to be more aligned with radical politics. This chapter discusses examples that deconstruct this framing: the “direct action casework” practised by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, on the one hand, and the externally imposed community relocations of Regent Park and Africville, on the other. Only a thin selection of the work of either Addams and Richmond and their respective movements (settlement houses and COSs) gets gleaned from a much more complex history, and this partial representation is then held as the founding, and ongoing, struggle (or harmonious diversity) of social work – which also functions to mark out the parameters within which social work inevitably operates. This chapter problematizes this oversimplification, with the hope that such a critical examination might impact the way in which today’s social workers think of themselves, their relationship to history, and their part in creating what will be known as history tomorrow. The Pull of the Other Side of the River Radical iterations of the standard account of social work history follow a pattern often found in radical analysis. In this pattern, there are very clear dividing lines between those responsible for oppression and those opposed to, and/or subjected to, oppression. The pattern is poetically illustrated in The Motorcycle Diaries,5 a film adaptation of the memoir of the same title by Argentinian Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Recapping this scene, Miguel Alfonso Cañero writes: At the San Pablo leper colony, [friends Ernesto and Alberto] spend three weeks helping treat patients, [and] they learn that the doctors and nurses all stay on one side of the riverbank and the leper patients on the other. Right away Ernesto and Alberto break the rules and get in trouble – they shake hands with the patients without wearing gloves … [T]he two friends quickly bond with the patients.6

Shortly thereafter, Ernesto swims across the river to celebrate his birthday with the patients rather than with the doctors, nurses, and ruling class volunteers. Crossing the river represents his radicalization: he leaves behind the life of a ruling class medical student and aligns himself with the poor and disadvantaged – no longer tethered to them through stratified helping in which he is exalted as morally superior, but symbolically becoming one with them, sharing their space. His journey across the river is heavy with symbolism. At first only the doctors, nurses, and other volunteers know what he’s doing. They beg him to come back for fear that he’ll be swept away or get eaten by animals. Their only response is panic and fear. Slowly the folks in the leper colony become aware that something

28  Deconstructing Social Work and Social Work History

is moving in the water. They gather at the edge of the riverbank and cheer when they realize it’s Ernesto coming to join them. He chooses them over the ruling classes he’d previously been aligned with, and everybody on both sides of the river clearly understands the significance of this choice. However moving, poetic, and perhaps accurate in depicting something he really did, the structure of this representation of radicalization is not unique to Che Guevara. Jane Addams’s symbolic moment is said to have been while watching a bullfight in Spain. Moved by the animal’s suffering and the crowd’s inhumanity, she consolidated previous concerns about injustice and indignity, vowing to forever side with the downtrodden and not the oppressors.7 Presumably both of these radicalization stories are factual, and both were surely significant. Probably many of us have our own analogous turning point moments. But to situate your life and efforts forevermore on a straightforward and unambiguous “other side of the river” of justice and solidarity – participating in that imaginary of good versus bad, or of innocent versus guilty – isn’t the only possibility for committing oneself to radical social transformation. Material and symbolic lines divide rich from poor, disabled from nondisabled,8 colonizer from colonized,9 and so on. Work that identifies and challenges these lines is crucial. But whether our personal-is-political ethical alignments10 are most helpfully mapped onto such dividing lines is another question altogether. Even with a figure such as Che, it may be politically dangerous to imagine anyone as always and only aligned with justice and the oppressed, as often comes to light when one employs interlocking analyses of oppression. For example, some male Black civil rights and liberation leaders like Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X* had problematic views on gender issues;11 a number of socialist and anarchist social justice activists, including Emma Goldman,12 were eugenicists; and troubling questions have been raised about Gandhi’s relationship with the “untouchable” caste.13 Just as is true of Addams, so too should Guevara, Goldman, Gandhi, King, and Malcolm X be celebrated for their important work. They did much that needs to be honoured, and we can learn from each of them. But

* White supremacy frames Black men as hyperpatriarchal, which is racist and false. Many Black male organizers and intellectuals – such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, and Huey Newton – have supported feminism. Please see bell hooks’s chapter “Plantation Patriarchy” and Rudolph Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s edited collection Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. It’s important to acknowledge how interlocked oppressions are discursively divided and how they get played against one another. In tension with this point, it’s also important to remember that perfection or innocence is always unattainable for all of us.

Troubling the Standard Account of Social Work  29

celebrating their work isn’t best facilitated by positioning them as always and only on the side of justice and righteousness, as represented by Che crossing the river. Thomas King cites a different representation of rivers,14 implying a distinct personal-is-political ethics, which is also a different way of imagining that our lives are shaped within the parameters of legacies of oppression. King says that Pueblo people understand “evil and good … not so much [as] distinct and opposing entities [but] as … tributaries of the same river.” This world view, he says, enables “the tantalizing question of what else one might do if confronted with the appearance of evil.”15 Maybe care and disinterest, responsibility and irresponsibility, and work towards justice and participation in injustice are all tributaries on the same river, rather than opposing one another like riverbanks. Could this imaginary open up other possibilities when we encounter “evil” – whether in ourselves or others? Maybe distancing ourselves from violence perpetration, oppression, and complicity isn’t our only option. Distancing ourselves and casting ourselves as innocent makes it less likely we will reflect upon harm we cause, and upon oppression in which we participate or from which we benefit. What would it mean for our ethical and political journeys – for our lives – if we truly believed there was no “other side” at which to arrive? Gayatri Spivak also uses a water metaphor to illustrate a critical intervention into norms relating to responsibility and complicity: “The mainstream has never run clean, perhaps never can. Part of mainstream education involves learning to ignore this absolutely, with a sanctioned ignorance.”16 For Spivak, one responsibility of the critic, the activist, or the helper17 is to “provide a persistent dredging operation” of the mainstream. However, she cautions that this activity “is counterproductive when it becomes a constant and self-righteous shaming of fully intending subjects.”18 She’s suggesting that people don’t always act with the straightforward intention to do what they do, to achieve a desired harmful end, and with full awareness of how they affect others. Spivak takes complicity very seriously in reflections on her own participation in oppression.19 She proposes that such caution needs to inform our critique: “There often seems no choice between excuses and accusations, the muddy stream and mudslinging.”20 How, then, can we critically engage a fruitful “complicity between our own position and theirs?”21 Spivak challenges her readers to move beyond “excuses and accusations” so that they “may then discover a constructive … complicity.”22 Swimming across the river, or cultivating clear political commitments, is very important. But we also have to interrogate where this particular river has come from and where it leads today. We have to interrogate how the river shapes us even when we insist we’ve emerged on the other side. This is the image of responsibility-taking represented by Spivak’s river: we need to clearly take political and ethical stances, but we need to do so in a way that recognizes

30  Deconstructing Social Work and Social Work History

that we and our stances have been shaped by the very legacies that we’re struggling against; we’re never outside of the river and its effects. Sara Ahmed resonantly invites us to concretely trace “how racism operates to shape the surfaces of bodies and worlds … [so that] we become ‘us’ as an effect” of racism.23 Perhaps we have to cross to the other side of the river without ever forgetting that the river itself is part of the problem and that any crossing is always going to be somewhat partial and imaginary. Working with the standard account of social work, we show in this chapter that the radical side of the river is much less consistently radical or social justice–oriented than it’s usually represented. We also discuss how the conservative side of the river is much more liberal or politically centrist than is usually allowed, fancying itself rather a “safe middle ground.”24 What’s more, although both sides of the river in the standard account of social work history imagined themselves to be working for a better society, for social transformation, they were both also deeply implicated in serious violence and oppression, and much more centrally involved in interlocking structural violences than is usually acknowledged. We’re not suggesting that there was no difference between the two sides or that there is no truth to the standard account’s positioning of them, but it certainly isn’t consistently true. This well-known version of social work history limits and shapes what we can know about our past. It therefore also limits and shapes what we can imagine and interrogate about our present and our efforts towards the future. Following Saba Mahmood, we conceptualize the standard account of social work as an “authoritative discursive tradition.” Participation in this tradition enables certain kinds of ethical self-governance, reflexive self-interrogation, and collective analysis, and it prevents others.25 It shapes who and what we can become and, cumulatively, what social work and even our world can become. If we believe we can align ourselves with social justice and against social control and oppression by aligning ourselves with Addams, then we may be setting ourselves up as immune to the possibility that (like Addams, in fact) we are actively complicit and engaged in forms of oppression – which is an immunity none of us can ever achieve. Charity Organization Societies: Beyond Friendly Visiting to the Poor The Charity Organization Society (COS) was founded in England in 1869,26 and was originally called the Society for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendacity (“mendacity” means dishonesty or fraud).27 The founding coincided with the passing of the “Goschen Minute,” a policy that attempted to

Troubling the Standard Account of Social Work  31

strengthen the 1834 New Poor Law’s deterrence of charity and further restricted giving outdoor relief to poor people. “Outdoor relief ” is relief given outside of sites of confinement such as workhouses, poorhouses, asylums, and jails.28 The relationship between this era’s charity and its practices of dehumanizing confinement were intimate from the beginning. The first US COS chapter was founded in 1877 in Buffalo, New York.29 Sometimes called COSs, sometimes called Associated Charities, chapters sprung up across North America, with the first in Canada established in 1881.30 Within eleven years, the number of friendly visitors in the United States tripled.31 In 1911, the (US) National Association of Societies for Organizing Charity (NASOC) was founded, and within three years it had 143 member organizations.32 By 1912, Canada had at least four COSs: Toronto, Montréal, Winnipeg, and London.33 In social work history, COSs are most famous for “friendly visiting,” in which ruling class volunteers would visit, typically, between two and four poor families on a regular basis. According to Mary Richmond, when people see those in need, they generally mistakenly “interfere by sending help,” which “often does more harm than good, and becomes a temptation rather than a help.” As an alternative, she advocated for what she called a scientific approach, involving friendly visitors (and later professional caseworkers) “who would seek out and, with patience and sympathy, strive to remove the causes of need.” In doing so, friendly visitors might offer advice on alcohol consumption or spending, but they worked towards no changes to the capitalist system that allows a certain percentage of the population to live without enough food, sufficient shelter, and other necessities. Yet, Richmond described friendly visiting as a means by which “social conditions could be wonderfully improved.”34 This claim is an astounding example of what Leslie Margolin critiques as “the healing power of class.”35 It’s troubling that Richmond would claim that this approach would improve “social conditions,” and this legacy of imagining political change through individual interventions based upon the ruling classes’ imagined moral superiority lives on today. That the political solution to poverty could be cumulative visits from ruling class people who offer advice, and who ensure that poor people receive only the most necessary and minimal material relief, if any at all, clearly depoliticizes poverty and inequality. Although she grew up a poor orphan, much of Richmond’s work denigrates poor people as morally reprehensible. Richmond recognized the significance of social context, but what’s perhaps most relevant to contemporary framings of political issues is how she did so a century ago. She writes: “The personal and social causes of poverty act and react upon each other, changing places as cause and effect, until they form a tangle that no hasty, impatient jerking can unravel.”36 This statement seems pretty balanced, in theory. Yet, her framing

32  Deconstructing Social Work and Social Work History

goes totally askew when put into practice. She says, for example, of pauper fathers, whom she calls “married vagabonds”: There is a sense in which he is not responsible for his faults; but there is a sense in which we are none of us responsible for ours, and when we are once permanently committed to this view of ourselves, there is no health in us. To treat the married vagabond as not responsible, is only to increase his irresponsibility.37

Richmond says there’s a sense in which the married vagabond’s difficulties are determined by “political, industrial, and charitable conditions.”38 She makes this political critique, but then depoliticizes the specificity of how capitalism and classism operate in the lives of poor men, saying that we’re all partly shaped by these social and political conditions. Her concluding point effectively negates the political critique she just seemed to advance. In her final analysis, the married vagabond is solely responsible for ending his own poverty. Poverty is not a collective or social responsibility, even if she acknowledges a political dimension to poverty. In this and other instances, Richmond, when discussing real poor people, stresses individual responsibility. That stance makes her politically a liberal and much more consistent with most social work done today than is widely acknowledged. The role of the friendly visitor was to evaluate the worthiness of the household to receive material aid and to be a mentor to the poor. For example, the London, Ontario, COS maintained: “We must strive to promote habits of thrift and industry.”39 Friendly visitors were expected to present themselves as concerned neighbours rather than as representatives of a particular organization. Yet, their visits were not neighbourly or even “friendly.” The New York COS’s guidelines encouraged visitors to arrive unexpectedly, rather than at a consistent time or day40 – likely so that the poor people they observed, scrutinized, and categorized could not make their house tidier than it usually was, hide alcohol, or otherwise put on the appearance that they were doing what the ruling classes expected of the so-called deserving poor. The spread of friendly visiting therefore expanded ruling class surveillance of the poor. As Margolin notes: “Prior to social work, political surveillance was more or less restricted to public domains – streets, businesses, schools. With social work, however, it became possible to keep track of marginal and common people in their homes as they pursued the most personal activities.”41 Visitors were discouraged, or forbidden in some chapters, from giving material aid (food, clothes, money, and so on.) to those they visited.42 COSs “organized” charity, as opposed to distributing it. They “organized” charity by restricting and controlling its distribution. They were deeply concerned with

Troubling the Standard Account of Social Work  33

what they called “indiscriminate relief,” which they viewed as contributing to social problems, and they worked “to check the evils of over-lapping of relief”43 – by which a poor person or family might receive material assistance, such as food or money, from more than one source. “Repressing mendacity,” as their original name put it, or catching what is today referred to as “welfare fraud,” was central to their work. COSs documented who received which forms of aid from whom in order to ensure that poor people weren’t collecting more than they were imagined to be entitled to. They considered charities to be “United, an Army – Divided, a Mob” that encouraged laziness and bred pauperism rather than eliminating it.44 According to the New York COS, “Many cases are getting aid who can earn their own support, but prefer the easier way … Aid must be cut off from all who have means, or can earn their own living, or are making a bad use of help.”45 Consequently, the COS campaigned to abolish relief for those they considered “undeserving.” COS activism successfully led to the end of nearly all outdoor relief programs in large cities in the United States by 1900.46 As outdoor relief dwindled due to COS efforts, the specialization and subspecialization of confinement was spreading – continuing a trajectory of expanding the sheer number of people confined and the diversity of sites of confinement, which had really begun about fifty years previously.47 These innovative institutions, including asylums, poorhouses, prisons, and various kinds of medical and/or educational institutions for disabled people, never had any difficulty filling their beds, in spite of high rates of illness and untimely death, alongside highly questionable positive outcomes from the very beginning. In line with the day’s ethos, an 1891 report on the Ontario prison and reformatory system advocated the straightforward mass confinement of those deemed untrainable at the Ontario Hospital in Orillia, alongside establishing what would now be called special education. These classes were to be established only for those deemed “capable of being trained,” who would be taught life skills by social workers. The same report also called for the imposition of institutions designed to reform youth considered in need of a “reformation of character.” These youth were to be “detained until the reformation is attained irrespective of the time required”48 – that is to say, until they met gender appropriate, heteronormative, white ruling class behavioural standards. The report stated that these institutions were not intended as punitive; however, in practice they were almost universally punitive and barely distinguishable from penal imprisonment – not surprising, given how intimately such sites and their practices developed alongside and interlocked with penal imprisonment. Furthermore, the stated rehabilitative orientation justified confining people for their entire lives or for their remaining childbearing years (which

34  Deconstructing Social Work and Social Work History

was also applied to some folks arrested for crimes at this time, if they were also considered disabled).* Surely the expansion of such sites during this period can be largely attributed to the diminished possibility of any relief outside of sites of confinement,49 which again resulted from the work of the COS. When the COS campaigned against outdoor relief, they were in effect campaigning for imprisonment and institutionalization as responses to poverty. What’s more, by around 1900 – when people were first called social workers – many of the relatively new sites of confinement had largely abandoned their short-lived optimism about education, community reintegration, and other such stated objectives. They were now growing due to their openly stated efficiency in removing those considered to be social burdens and restricting them from procreating, as a result of the dovetailing spread of eugenics, which held that only those deemed “fit” should reproduce.50 COS campaigns against outdoor relief thus confined people to institutional sites that nobody pretended were helpful to those they housed. Poverty was often described as a literal disease or infestation needing eradication.51 Reverend William Baldwin, representing Toronto’s Associated Charities (again, another name of the COS), clearly articulated the movement’s drive to eradicate poor people: “To keep them in comfortable quarters and allow them to live in idleness is not the way to get rid of them. Hard work and strict discipline … [are] the best means of getting rid of the professional vagrant.”52 A report summarizing Baldwin’s statement called poor people an “army of tramps that infest this Province.”53 The advocated cure was often to restrict all relief. And, for those who remained unable to more closely align with ruling class social mores even when all assistance was taken away as an enactment of instrumental violence,† the COS promoted the implementation of newly emergent eugenic principles that sought to eradicate poor and otherwise “unfit” people.54 Sir Francis Galton first articulated eugenic doctrine in 1865 and later coined the actual word in 1883.55 Eugenics became an incredibly popular ideology in which those considered “fit” were encouraged to reproduce while those considered “unfit” were discouraged from reproducing. This aim was first accomplished through institutional segregated incarceration for one’s entire life, or

* The central role of two US social workers – Katherine Bement Davis and Josephine Shaw Lowell – in advancing these policies and practices is discussed in greater detail later in the chapter, following Nicole Rafter’s Creating Born Criminals. † Chapter 3 describes the earlier institutionalization of the use of instrumental violence, which is violence tactically used to achieve a particular end. Here, enforced impoverishment is meant to improve work ethic.

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throughout the childbearing years; sterilization was only later added to the eugenic arsenal.56 Eugenic framings of “fitness” were those characteristics already long exalted within moral economies of human value; those considered unfit were diverse members of oppressed groups.57 As part of its eugenic campaign, the COS published Oscar McCulloch’s early and highly influential The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation, which he originally presented at the 1888 National Conference of Charities and Corrections58 (later renamed the National Conference of Social Work). McCulloch was the founder and leader of the Indianapolis chapter of the COS, and a leader of the National Conference Standing Committee on Organization of Charities in Cities.59 In The Tribe of Ishmael, this COS leader compared a poor family to “a crustacean which has left the free, independent life common to its family, and is living as a parasite, or pauper.”60 He described the family as a “pauper ganglion of several hundreds,”61 argued that they were hereditarily unfit, and said that indiscriminate aid had facilitated both their immorality and their reproduction. This COS-published text was one of the earliest to instill fear in the general public about both indiscriminate relief and the eugenic threat that poor, disabled, and racialized people posed. While most of the family would be viewed as white today (although white paupers were considered a distinct race in the usage of the word at the time), some of the family’s “defects” are attributed to Indigenous blood, which is personified as “wandering blood” and called “poison.”62 At the time, it was common to connect Indigenous heritage with eugenic unfitness, including among white people who were considered politically progressive.63 In response to the question “What can we do?”, McCulloch answers: “First, we must close up official out-door relief. Second, we must check private and indiscriminate benevolence … Third, we must get hold of the children.”64 The same decade that McCulloch presented his study to fellow charity workers in 1888, Galton coined the term “eugenics,” and Nova Scotia began implementing child welfare policy.65 The emergence of societies for the prevention of cruelty and later children’s aid societies is told in social work histories as motivated by care, and surely that was part of the picture.66 But in these new organizations, care was defined and policed by those who apprehended children; it was not measured by the children themselves, their families, or their communities.* In this same historical moment, the COS published McCulloch’s study that explicitly advocated child apprehension for eugenic reasons.67 It was

* For example, Nancy Christie describes how J.J. Kelso, an architect of Canada’s Children’s Aid Society system, aimed to convert as many Catholic children to Protestantism as possible. This practice was articulated as motivated by concern for the child.

36  Deconstructing Social Work and Social Work History

believed that by apprehending children and preventing more from being born, initially through the eugenically motivated expansion of gender-segregated sites called “indoor relief ”68 and later through sterilization,69 the problem of pauperism would be ended without redistributing wealth. If paupers were prevented from reproducing, then the remaining “fit” would be free to participate in competitive capitalist society without having to support an underclass. According to this ideology, heredity and social deficiency caused poverty, not the economic system. That said, eugenics was a hybrid of cultural determinism and biological determinism. Inferior culture caused inferior physiology and vice versa. This doctrine enabled culturally oriented eugenic practices such as forced labour and child apprehension, as well as biologically oriented eugenic practices such as sexual sterilization. For eugenicists, these varied strategies were part of a common political and moral struggle. US COS chapters also campaigned to pass “ugly laws” – ordinances forbidding disabled people from panhandling. As Susan Schweik observes: “Where Charity Organization Society went, ugly law did not necessarily follow, but from the 1880s on, when ugly laws occurred, Charity Organization Society leaders all evidently had a hand in the development of the social category of the unsightly beggar.”70 Those considered to be the undeserving poor had long been criminalized. These new laws demonized people who had previously been categorized as the deserving poor – they criminalized disabled people and framed them as a menace to society.71 The COS restricted people’s access to outdoor relief, which again is material assistance that people receive while continuing to live in their own homes, thus forcing people to choose between starvation and institutionalization. In some places, COS-sponsored ugly laws against panhandling also removed a source of income that people could acquire for themselves while living in their own home or community, and removed those people to workhouses, jails, or other institutions if they broke the laws. It’s important to note that there was nothing “conservative” about this intervention: it didn’t seek to keep things as they’d traditionally been. The COS also dedicated significant resources to uncovering those they believed were falsely claiming to be disabled in order to more successfully garner money. Even those who were considered legitimately disabled were constructed as fraudulent.72 Like other marginalized groups, disabled people were portrayed in these laws and in surrounding charity discourse as fundamentally immoral. This depiction relied upon and carried forward a moral economy dividing valuable humans from worthless ones.73 Some COS chapters even played a direct role in the penal incarceration of paupers: COS members acted “as lay-police to go among the crowds detecting and arresting beggars.”74 In 1897, New York City’s police chief instructed his

Troubling the Standard Account of Social Work  37

officers to work with the COS because of their “special knowledge of this class and their schemes.” COS agents also testified against poor and disabled people who violated ugly laws, vagrancy laws, and anti-panhandling laws, and thus played a primary role in their confinement to workhouses, jails, asylums, and other institutions.75 Initially, many of those convicted of violating an ugly law were sent to poorhouses.76 These institutions were miserable places.77 New Orleans’s Shakespeare Alms House, for example, only allowed people to leave once a week, and many died there.78 This history coincided with sites of confinement becoming increasingly specialized;79 through this development, poorhouse sentences became less common for violating an ugly law, and jail sentences became the norm.80 However they rationalized or understood their efforts, North American COSs led coordinated campaigns to criminalize and incarcerate poor and disabled people, to force them into more desperate poverty, and to frame their oppression as caused by their faulty biology. Across North America, COS chapters worked to eliminate the visibility of poverty, while keeping existing economic and social systems intact. Without a doubt, the COS assisted some poor people in certain ways, but it only ever did so in ways that would also benefit the wealthy and support the political status quo. Among other things, COS workers were told to be careful not to incite revolutionary fervour or “uppityness.” The London, Ontario, COS warned: “Be careful not to make the poor discontented; incite their ambition for what they may obtain, but do not make them strive for what they cannot hope to accomplish. Their lot is hard enough, and your aim is to cheer and strengthen.”81 The history we present of the COS here is brief, and there were important differences between COS chapters in different places – for example, we are unaware of ugly laws passed in Canada. Nevertheless, we offer a fuller account of the impact of the COS in Canada and the United States than is frequently told in the standard account of the history of social work. The COS went well beyond standard account histories of lecturing poor families on how to better spend their money or on the evils of alcohol, as the standard account of their problematic interventions often highlight. The “friendly visitors” are certainly outrageous and perhaps embarrassing to a lot of contemporary social workers, but they’re the kind of outrageous and embarrassing that can be laughed about with a now-knowing-better eye roll. The standard account of social work basically says: yes, friendly visitors wasted people’s valuable time, but they didn’t really do all that much harm. This framing is simply untrue; it sanitizes the work of the COS, which took concrete food and money away from poor and disabled people, contributed to their construction as biologically defective, and rationalized both their incarceration and the apprehension of their children

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out of plainly and explicitly eugenic motivations. A narrow focus on friendly visiting, scientific charity, and casework helps construct one of the two founding movements of social work as problematic but not really central to systemic violences against long-targeted populations and their moral denigration in popular, professional, and scholarly discourse. Discussions of the ugly laws and The Tribe of Ishmael feature prominently in discourse about eugenics, especially in disability scholarship, but the leadership role that the emergent social work profession played in these and other eugenic practices is largely left out of many histories of social work. Furthermore, as we explore in more detail further on, we will see it was not only the COS wing of early social work that led the eugenics movement. In this regard, the COS worked in tandem with the progressive and radical activists associated with settlement houses, all in apparent agreement that poor and disabled people who don’t live according to ruling class social mores are best incarcerated in gender-segregated sites in order to prevent further generations of those whom they all agreed were “defective.” The history of eugenics forces a re-evaluation of the commonly accepted political spectrum ranging from right-wing reactionaries to left-wing radicals. Liberals and radicals alike, whether Marxist, feminist, anarchist, or other, tended to work for eugenic aims a century ago.82 Organized opposition to eugenics came almost entirely from the Catholic Church, and was animated by upholding conservative values in a way that many Catholics would say are entirely consistent with conservative Catholic values and contemporary Catholic activism against euthanasia and abortion.83 In a truly conservative world view, each person has their proper place,* and it is not appropriate to interfere in this natural, divine, or traditional order. Poor and disabled people should therefore not be eradicated; their lives should be defended like any other. But the social and political landscape should not be shifted in their favour; it should be conserved as is. Nineteenth and early twentieth century liberals and radicals, in contrast, believed in social progress. They believed in making the world a better place and actively working towards that end. In broad strokes, liberals like Richmond believed political change should happen through cumulative individual hard work with as little outside interference in personal choice and liberty as possible (including the “interference” of charity), while radicals tended to believe in collective efforts towards more fundamental changes directly targeting the

* We use “they,” “their,” “them,” and “themself ” as singular pronouns to be gender neutral and regularize gender neutrality. While less common than “he or she,” these pronouns have a long history referring to singular people in the English language and have been adopted as personal pronouns by many trans and genderqueer people.

Troubling the Standard Account of Social Work  39

social order. However, like liberalism, radical political action and organizing was viewed as perfectly harmonious with eugenics. This radical complicity in eugenic activism offers an important lesson that those of us who consider ourselves radical today should reflect very carefully upon. Settlement Houses and Jane Addams The settlement movement is typically depicted in the standard account as oppositional to the COS. The settlement movement often highlighted political and social causes of poverty, rather than blaming individual poor people for the conditions in which they lived. Jane Addams was critical of those who “believed that poverty was synonymous with vice and laziness … [and who thus] blamed the individual.”84 Settlement workers engaged in political campaigns and organized community services.85 The standard account of social work places the origin of settlement houses, like the origin of the COS, in the United Kingdom (although, as we discuss in the next chapter, this selective history erases the influence of Black community organizing on Addams and the settlement movement). There were only six settlement houses in the United States in 1891, but over 400 by 1910.86 Evangelia Settlement, founded in Toronto in 1902, was the first settlement house in Canada that espoused the values of the settlement movement. Canada, with a smaller population and slower urbanization and industrialization processes, never saw the proliferation of settlement houses that took place in the United States.87 By 1920, there were thirteen settlement houses in Canada.88 The most famous settlement house in North America was Hull-House in Chicago, which was co-founded by Jane Addams and had 2,000 visitors a week by its second year of operations.89 In the standard account of social work history, Addams was the central figure in the settlement house movement, a key founder of social work and, in particular, of radical social work. Much of this portrayal is justified. A small sample of the many services available through Hull-House included a coffee house and a community kitchen; the Hull-House Cooperative Coal Association and the Jane Club for working women were developed to help people reduce energy costs and cover rent costs, respectively. The settlement house also offered a kindergarten, a free health clinic, a sewing house, educational programs for children and adults, and a shelter for homeless women.90 In addition, Hull-House had a gymnasium, which Addams reported “gradually performed a mission of its own and became something of a social center to the neighborhood.”91 Addams deserves to be celebrated for her efforts and accomplishments. Her writing and activism remain relevant within social work and beyond, and much of it is still applicable today. In addition to fighting against war and imperialism

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and struggling for women’s, children’s, and workers’ rights, Addams also advocated for the rights of Black people: she was an early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),92 and she spoke out publicly against both lynching and glorified depictions of lynching and other racism in the Hollywood blockbuster Birth of a Nation.93 Addams was also deeply critical of the COS and friendly visiting. She critiqued the moralistic underpinning of the COS and suggested that poor communities are characterized by a higher ethical standard by which neighbours assist one another. She wrote, “A most striking incongruity, at once apparent, is the difference between the emotional kindness with which relief is given by one poor neighbor to another poor neighbor and the guarded care with which relief is given by a charity visitor to a charity recipient,” which she describes as “an absolute clashing of two ethical standards.”94 For Addams, COS interventions into the social and ethical realm of a poor community were damaging. Addams advocated that practices and moralities in poor communities should not be displaced. Within poor communities, she said, “the fact that the economic condition of all alike is on a most precarious level makes the ready outflow of sympathy and material assistance the most natural thing in the world.” This communal precarity results in what she exalted as “self-sacrifice quite unknown in the circles where greater economic advantages make that kind of intimate knowledge of one’s neighbors impossible.”95 The neighbourly assistance Addams celebrated and admired was given without means tests, background checks to ensure that nobody else was helping the person or family, lectures about how to live a more moral or thrifty life, or otherwise blaming and shaming people for their poverty. If someone expressed a need to another person who could meet it, the other person would respond with the needed assistance, she said. For Addams, then, the world would do much better with more people acculturated to poor communities’ ethical standards rather than to ruling class ones. This conviction is one of the main lessons of her book Democracy and Social Ethics: American “democracy” would only live up to its stated ideals if everyone could be more aligned with the ethical standards and social mores already abundantly found in poor communities and under attack by the COS. Addams also criticized friendly visitors specifically for lecturing and moralizing about “industrial virtues and housewifely training,” which they themselves usually had no first-hand experience of doing.96 Addams’s own generation of ruling class, university-educated, white women did little, if any, cleaning and other housework. Yet, while volunteering for the COS, many instructed poor women on how to do these things. According to Addams, encounters with real, living, poor people confront the ruling class visitor with the stark contrast between people’s real lives and what

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she’s been led to believe. As a result, Addams said, she “discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards have been, and it takes but a little time to reach the conclusion that she cannot insist so strenuously upon the conventions of her own class.”97 Interestingly, Addams articulated these various critiques of the COS and its work within her conceptualization of a radical view of democracy. For Addams, democracy goes well beyond “a sentiment which desires the wellbeing of all” or a “belie[f] in the essential dignity and equality of all.”98 Democracy, she said, also demands “a rule of living” from each of us, by which “all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another’s burdens.”99 What she called democratic or “social ethics” relies upon being exposed to the real-life experiences of one another. She claimed that the “democratic spirit … implies that diversified human experience and resultant sympathy … are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy.”100 Addams promoted a democracy that recognizes inequality, difference, and diversity. This democracy demands exalted people to recognize that we don’t all carry the same burden or struggle, and that we therefore have uneven responsibilities to address inequalities. In this and many other respects, Addams was indeed a radical. Her operationalization of “democracy” is entirely distinct from Richmond, for example, who called it undemocratic to “run howling to Washington, asking special legislation for our troubles.”101 That Richmond construed special legislation in response to political problems as “undemocratic” shows yet again her consistent emphasis on individual effort as the only acceptable means to transform society. That said, like the rest of us, Addams wasn’t consistent in her political efforts. Hull-House implemented a screening system for people applying for relief from private charities: the Hull-House Bureau of Labour and Charitable Registration.102 Not very different from the COS in this regard, Addams had “been working since 1892 to encourage charities to systematize their relief efforts.”103 Further, Margolin asserts that Addams was “far from egalitarian,” in that she advocated that ruling class folks have a duty to help poor people because of their “financial resources … sensibilities and education.”104 This attitude is what Barbara Heron problematizes as the bourgeois “helping imperative,”105 which relies on the exaltation of ruling class sensibilities and mores (however much Addams also significantly worked against this exaltation in other ways). The New “Social Work” Richmond and Addams were two key figures in a period known as the “Progressive Era,” which is widely hailed as a heyday of social transformation and optimism about forging a better world. If we consider that many social service users – now and then – experience social workers as unjustly intruding upon

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their lives, it is curious that professional “social work” emerged at this “progressive” time. Addams, on the front lines of many political struggles of the day, believed that what came to be known as the new “social work” represented the most drastic transition of her day: “Probably there is no relation in life which our democracy is changing more rapidly than the charitable relation – that relation which obtains between benefactor and beneficiary; at the same time there is no point of contact in our modern experience which reveals so clearly the lack of that equality which democracy implies.”106 What Addams called “social ethics” and deemed necessary for true democracy requires an equality that simply doesn’t exist. She therefore called on ruling class people to embrace an “identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy [that] becomes the source and expression of social ethics.”107 She asserted that if ruling class people were empathetic with poor or otherwise oppressed people (the common lot), if ruling class people could better identify with them, then real democracy could be achieved. Addams’s articulation of social ethics as an orientation to guide the relations of rich and poor certainly differentiates her from Richmond’s suggestion “that social conditions could be wonderfully improved if, to every family in distress, could be sent a volunteer visitor.”108 Entirely distinct moral economies are at play here. In one, the normatively exalted ruling class subject challenges her own exaltation through identification with the common lot. If any individual transformation is being stressed in Addams’s schema, the target is the individual who is on top of social stratifications, and their transformation is only a step towards fundamental political transformation and the ending of inequality. This change, according to Addams, is facilitated through contact with the common lot and learning from their morally superior social ethics of reciprocal and nonjudgmental give and take. In Richmond, we are invited into an entirely different moral economy in which the ruling classes are unquestionably morally and intellectually superior. Poor people are the targets of individual transformation, and, through such cumulative individual transformation, “social conditions could be wonderfully improved.”109 Addams’s and Richmond’s working definitions of democracy point to a significant gap between them, as do their suggestions for how ruling class people should orient their engagement with oppressed groups. What is somewhat curious, then, is that Addams and Richmond were (and are) so widely considered to be working together towards one common pursuit – the pursuit that was, for the first time, called “social work.” Nobody had ever used the words “social work” or “social worker” before the twentieth century. What the new term was intended to mean remains up for interpretation. Mapping onto the two main variations of the standard account, the credit for coining

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the term “social work” or the title “social worker” is disputed, and the two sides of the dispute favour either radical social transformation or well-trained morally superior workers efficiently instructing morally inferior individuals how to better inhabit ruling class social mores. Describing one of these origin stories, Bradford Sheafor and Charles Horejsi credit Jeffery Brackett of the Baltimore COS and Children’s Aid Society with coining the term “social work” in the early 1900s. They explain: “He added the word work to differentiate professional practice from what he considered the often misguided and self-serving philanthropic activity of wealthy volunteers.”110 According to this origin story, Brackett came up with the term to imply that the new profession was “orderly, responsible, and disciplined” – exactly what liberals normatively say of the innovations of early social work. Rather than determining who really used the term and title “social work/er” first, we’re more interested in tracing out what these origin stories do. Brackett’s account stresses that “work” distinguished professional social workers from untrained volunteers. In this version of the meaning of the new term and title, “social” is thoroughly depoliticized, referring to “family members, friends, or a myriad of other factors.”111 It is like a “systems theory” version of sociopolitical analysis – accounting primarily for local social arrangements and relations without naming or addressing interlocking forces of oppression and structural violences. This story marks a founding moment – the coining of the title – as consistent with the COS’s purposes and its liberal legacy. It therefore grants legitimacy to work done within this legacy. Authors who tell this story are likely not aware that they’re legitimizing individual and depoliticized systems-level casework and delegitimizing more radical social workings. However, reiterating this origin story does exactly that. And, at least in this particular iteration, there’s no mention whatsoever of Addams, settlement houses, or fundamental political change. The other version of events credits Simon Patten for coining the term. Patten was more aligned with Addams and the quest for radical political transformation. Richard Ramsay provides an example of this radical version of the origins of “social worker” and nicely sums up what we’ve been calling the radical version of the history of social work’s standard account to provide context. In this version of events, Patten coined the title “social worker” in 1900 as an umbrella term for both the COS and settlement house movement. Ramsay says Patten’s creation of this term “prompted a major dispute with Mary Richmond over the issue of whether social workers should be social reform advocates or primarily engaged in delivering individualized social services.”112 In one version of the origin of the term “social work/er,” then, someone affiliated with the COS intends his new term to differentiate trained experts working

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within local social conditions from untrained volunteers, and no mention is made of the settlement house movement, oppression, or fundamental social transformation. In the other version, the term describes both COS and settlement workers, and is coined by someone who prefers the more politicized work of the settlement movement. Addams and Richmond often come to stand for what are imagined to be their straightforward and oppositional political orientations. Richmond, as Ramsay says, “was deeply disturbed by Patten’s preference for group over individual action,” and she “attacked his proposal that social workers advocate for the elimination of the causes of poverty.”113 Ramsay highlights a number of differences and points of dispute between the two women: Addams was a pacifist and a leader in the peace movement; Richmond supported American involvement in the first Great War and developed services to aid military families … Addams promoted social democracy and the amelioration of poverty; Richmond promoted the art of differential treatment … Between 1910 and 1921, these two traded leadership positions in the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (NCCC).114

In this account, the differences between these two women, their respective organizations, and the forms of social work they have come to represent are shown to be fundamentally oppositional. The depiction of the COS and the settlement movement, or of Richmond and Addams, as straightforwardly oppositional is partial and somewhat misleading. While there definitely were two conflicting political positions, an overemphasis on this one divide (or on the complementary nature of the two positions in liberal iterations) marginalizes multiple other stories that can just as legitimately be told about the earliest “social workers” – such as stories of the COS and settlement movements working in tandem for eugenics or stories of the social workings left out of accounts of this polemic between two white factions. Origin stories matter to contemporary possibilities. If social work never had anything to do with political activism and was largely concerned with becoming more efficient at helping individuals, this heritage will impact how social workers today imagine and reflect upon what they do. If the COS and settlement movements complemented one another, political liberals occupying social work roles can feel comfortable knowing that political forces have always been central to social work, even if their own practice only focuses on the individual, family, and relevant local systems. However, if there was a political struggle about the nature of social work from the very beginning, in which Richmond and the COS actively attempted to depoliticize the terrain of social work, then

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there is an implicit invitation for each of us to “take sides.” The way this iteration is told, we might be more likely to imagine ourselves as ethically and politically aligned with Patten and Addams, however inaccurately that might characterize our day-to-day tasks as social workers. But if we allow ourselves to wallow in the river itself, dredging it as Spivak suggests – looking back at how we’ve arrived to this point and looking forward to where we’re going – then maybe different possibilities are available to us in reflecting upon our lives and roles today.115 A persistent dredging operation into these tensions and the possible ways one can position oneself within them requires us to complicate the two received sides of the river. Earlier, we complicated Richmond and the COS’s frequent positioning as politically conservative, showing that they understood themselves to be centrist or liberal as do the majority of social workers today. We also showed that the COS was centrally involved in much more oppressive social workings than are implied in many accounts of friendly visiting and early casework. We now turn to the “other side of the river” in order to complicate the tendencies in which Addams and the settlement movement cleanly represent radical politics. What the Established Riverbanks Obscure Addams was an accomplished theorist and a dedicated, effective activist. We have much to learn from her example. However, to depict Addams as cleanly radical, like depicting Richmond as conservative and classist but not explicitly oppressive, is a partial view of history that invites unnuanced imaginings of our own political positions today. Addams’s social workings were much more inconsistent than the standard account allows. For example, Addams is often celebrated in the standard account of social work as an active anti-racist.116 This is true. However, at the same time as she was involved in important anti-racist work, she also actively upheld racist hierarchies and injustices, however inadvertently. We (A.J. and Chris) wish to be clear that we aren’t positioning ourselves as more consistently anti-racist than Addams. Our point isn’t that we should find another flawless historical figure to emulate in our present-day anti-racism. Rather, we’re challenging the belief that Addams is beyond reproach and that any of us ever can be, in terms of the actual consequences of how we live our lives. An important aspect of aligning ourselves with oppressed groups, especially those that we aren’t a part of, is recognizing that we’re implicated in the very oppressions we oppose, which will sometimes shape the contours of our concrete relationships and political activities. Anti-racist white people need to accept that they not only benefit from the underlying white supremacist moral exaltation that makes white privilege, entitlement, and violence possible,117 but they also perpetrate white supremacy, however unwittingly. Those of us who

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actively attempt to live anti-racist commitments may sometimes do less harm than some other white folks, but we’re not immune to enacting racism. We’re therefore not seeking to displace Addams as the founder of radical social work (at least not yet – in the next chapter we raise concerns about what it means for her to occupy this position as a solitary figure). We’re rather suggesting that any of our role models and positive examples need to be held in their complexity so that this more nuanced view might make it easier for contemporary students and practitioners to understand that we, too, are not immune to forces of oppression simply by virtue of being against them. We can be as against them as we like, but our opposition never accomplishes immunity from our active and ongoing participation and complicity in those things we resist.118 As previously mentioned, Addams suggested that identifying with the common lot is key to building democracy. Her proposal is a beautiful idea, and social workers would do very well to identify further with service users, rather than working so hard to differentiate “us” from “them.”119 No doubt a move towards more neighbourly, respectful, and egalitarian relations across social stratifications would be a radical shift from our individualistic and capitalist mores today. However, according to Sherene Razack, when we work to identify with others whose experiences and political positions differ from our own, “either to reach each other across differences or to resist patriarchal and racist constructs, we must overcome at least one difficulty: the difference in position between the teller and the listener, between telling the tale and hearing it.”120 This insight problematizes Addams’s advocacy that we attune ourselves to the experiences of the common lot so that the work of social ethics or democracy can be clearly laid out for us. Razack notes that such attuning involves those with greater social and political power interpreting the lives of those with less social and political power, and that different groups and individuals bring different experiences into their interpretations. The same concern has been raised in relation to Addams’s writing about poor people. Margolin suggests that Addams wrote about poor people with an intended ruling class audience, which, he says, created a differentiation “between viewers and viewed, subjects and objects.” At times, he notes, Addams morally denigrated poor folks, depicting them without an “understanding of their own activities or relationships.”121 Relatedly, Addams suggested that we centre or privilege the knowledge and stories of oppressed people, which is brilliant, radical, and necessary. However, Razack notes that this strategy unfortunately but inevitably “falls apart … [u]nless we want to fall into the trap of demanding that the oppressed speak in a unified voice before we will believe them, [and so] we are still left with the difficult task of negotiating our way through our various ways of knowing

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and towards political action.”122 The “common lot” isn’t a singularity. There is a great deal of disagreement within any community and, of course, also among the demands and experiences that tend to be prioritized by different oppressed groups. Addams homogenized another diverse group while seconding the 1912 presidential nomination of former US president Theodore Roosevelt.* She said, “It is inevitable that such a party should appeal to women, should seek to draw upon the great reservoir of their moral energy so long undesired and unutilized in practical politics.”123 Roosevelt, however, was a capitalist and a eugenicist. His nomination was likely not supported by many women, particularly poor, disabled, and racialized women who had already been segregated, imprisoned, deported, exploited, and/or sterilized under his former leadership. Addams’s articulation of “women” here, like “the common lot,” functions to marginalize and even erase such diversity within a category, even though she elsewhere critiqued this tendency. For example, Addams critiqued ruling class women for their treatment of poor clients (including female clients) and also for their treatment of female domestic workers who cleaned their houses and cared for their children.124 Although these critiques were grounded in her understanding that not all women experience the same singular oppression, she elsewhere homogenized poor people and women. The Addams/Richmond polarization parallels the Malcolm X/Martin Luther King Jr polarization of 1960s Black struggle or the W.E.B. Du Bois/Booker T. Washington polarization of Black struggle in the Progressive Era. If these varied polarizations map onto a consistent political spectrum, they portray Addams as a radical and Booker T. Washington as a liberal. But this juxtaposition, in fact, exposes that such polarizations are simplifications. Philip Kowalski suggests that Addams’s exalted whiteness and class power enabled her to advocate individualistic and moralizing liberal solutions to oppression without compromising her reputation as a radical. He points out that Washington and Addams shared an “insistence upon hygiene and order,” but Washington was criticized for this position because he was lower class and Black. Kowalski writes that Addams and other settlement workers were protected from this critique: their “association with an immigrant underclass could never taint their white skins.”125 Norma Montesino notes too that Simon Patten, discussed earlier as aligned with Addams, “related consumption to social changes.” Patten assumed that “increased consumption would facilitate integration, but this potential would be lost unless the authorities regulated the consumption patterns of the poor … Thus, the poor had to be trained to develop new and appropriate patterns of * Vice President Roosevelt became president in 1901 after McKinley was assassinated. He left office in 1909 and made an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1912, representing the Progressive Party, which he’d founded.

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consumption.” Patten advocated for consumption educational initiatives for poor people. He also endorsed Jane Addams’s call for organized leisure time because, according to Montesino, “organised leisure time would facilitate access for the poor to the ‘right’ activities including daily consumption.”126 Such assimilative measures, aimed at integrating poor people into ruling class values and mores, were critiqued by radical Black activists (and political allies of Addams) W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells when Booker T. Washington advocated them,127 but Addams could advocate such measures without attracting critique. Addams’s own copy of Washington’s The Story of the Negro is on exhibit with other selections from her personal library at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. An insert inside the book reads: “Although W.E.B. Du Bois and Washington are remembered as leaders with different methods for advancing civil rights, their ideas intersected at Hull-House. Du Bois spoke at Hull-House and worked with Addams with the NAACP. Booker T. Washington influenced Addams as well.”128 Addams also entertained Washington and his wife at Hull-House.129 Furthermore, settlement houses featured strong class boundaries, with poor people often instructed by ruling class workers.130 In fact, many of the same values and social mores that the COS imposed through friendly visiting were also imposed on poor people in settlements. The persistence of classism, ethnocentrism, and racism in structures set up to work against class and ethnic oppression relates to the concerns raised earlier about Addams’s philosophy. Discussing Addams, Shannon Sullivan writes: “Countering asymmetries of topdown power with horizontal processes of negotiation and deliberation does not necessarily eliminate all forms of insidious hierarchy.”131 Inserting reciprocity into existing stratification does not necessarily lead to a just democracy.* People who accessed services and programs at Hull-House were likely generally treated with more respect than many of those visited by friendly visitors and early caseworkers, but class divisions and capitalism remained in place, and the ruling class workers benefited from the moral exaltation that has long come along with acts of stratified “helping.”132 Sullivan also notes that Addams maintained an “implicitly racist view of new immigrants” alongside her “genuine attempt to combat white Chicagoans’ racist dismissal of them.”133 That Addams actively worked against racism† and also * This critique is related to our discussion of the relationships between Mohamedou Ould Slahi and his guards in chapter 7, pages 349–52. † The white settlement house movement (as opposed to that run by and for Black people, discussed in the next chapter) largely worked with immigrants who today would be considered white but weren’t at the time. Many of the discourses about Eastern and Southern Europeans at that time are now circulated about immigrants of colour.

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professed certain racist values and ideas tends to be omitted from the standard account of Addams’s interventions into the social world. Addams wrote, for example, of “immigrant revelation of social customs and inherited energy.”134 The inherent liveliness of immigrants was reiterated many times in her writing. Sullivan therefore argues that for “the new immigrants described by Addams, each side has something of value to give to the other, but they do not have equal ontological weight as human beings. The civilized culture of the one group makes them full persons, and the primitive culture of the other makes them subpersons.”135 In line with ruling class white thinking at the time, Addams “implicitly posited [immigrants] as being part of the untamed, energetic wilderness,”136 much like Indigenous people were popularly imagined. Holding these groups in romantic nostalgia as offering something that “civilized” groups have lost “both reflect[s] and support[s] a hierarchy in which white people are seen as fully human and non-white people as less than so.”137 It was presumably this romantic and ultimately racist nostalgia, along with the desire to coordinate poor people’s leisure time (in alignment with Patten’s ideas about reprogramming consumption patterns), that led to the use of “Indian club” drills alongside German callisthenics and other activities in the gymnasium during the early years of Hull-House.138 The same nostalgia was likely also the rationale for an Indian handicrafts club at Hull-House in the 1930s.139 These “Indian” activities were set up for recent immigrants and other poor white Chicagoans, but there is no record of Addams or Hull-House engaging at all with Indigenous communities in confronting colonialism during its first half century in operation.* Edward Lee and Ilyan Ferrer note that social work, including the settlement movement and the COS, “were transported from Britain, in order to further the Canadian and US colonial nation-building projects.” They describe the “discursive absence” of Indigenous people within social work as “a clear example of how social work professionals implicitly contributed to the mythology of how white settler societies were constructed in Canada and the US, while masking its origins in the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples.”140 Hull-House was established on land from which Potawatomi people had been forcibly displaced by the US government;141 it engaged in the racist romanticization of Indigenous culture; and though it was founded on principles of social justice, it did nothing to address injustices against Indigenous people. This absence is a significant gap, however common it remains. Under the heading “Role of Social Work in Colonization,” Cyndy Baskin therefore cites Akua Benjamin’s “praise” of Jane Addams and her activism, but also

* In the 1940s, an Indigenous group began meeting at Hull-House for the first time.

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cites Benjamin’s anti-colonial critique of Addams’s lack of attention to colonial violence: “However, let us not forget that while social movements were mobilizing in North America, whole populations were being decimated and systematically marginalized. Populations such as First Nations peoples faced genocide during Jane Addams’s era.”142 Furthermore, although Addams was actively involved in struggles against antiBlack racism, in A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil she asserted that “the negroes [were] making their first struggle towards a higher standard of domesticity.”143 Here, the “higher standard” clearly refers to white ruling class social mores, which exalts whiteness as superior to all those thus denigrated as primitive. This statement is exactly the kind of articulation that might have brought scorn upon Washington by radicals but went unremarked when Addams wrote it. In the same text, Addams also made a number of eugenic arguments. Leading eugenics efforts was just as central to the settlement movement as it was to the COS. Addams wrote: When this new science [eugenics] makes clear to the public that those diseases which are a direct outcome of the social evil [of sex work] are clearly responsible for race deterioration, effective indignation may at last be aroused, both against the preventable infant mortality for which these diseases are responsible, and against the ghastly fact that the survivors among these afflicted children infect their contemporaries and hand on the evil heritage to another generation.144

Addams also praised eugenicists for “publish[ing] an ever-increasing mass of information as to that which constitutes the inheritance of well-born children.”145 What’s more, the two leaders of eugenic criminology in the United States, who worked to incarcerate women deemed feebleminded, defective, and, later, psychopathic* for the duration of their childbearing years, were Josephine Lowell and Katherine Davis† – both of whom were close friends of Addams and * Rafter shows how the construct of “psychopathy” emerged from earlier eugenic notions of inherent criminality, such as feeblemindedness and defective delinquency. † Banks defends Davis against such a framing, arguing that Davis believed in heredity and social causes of criminality. However, as discussed earlier, eugenicists were inconsistent in framing genetics as the sole cause of things like criminality. Davis may well have tended towards the culturally determinist end of eugenic doctrine, but that doesn’t place her outside of eugenics. What’s more, Banks’s apparent polarization of “progressive” versus “eugenicist” doesn’t hold true to the historical record at all. Rafter documents Davis’s central role in incarcerating women on eugenic grounds while also recognizing social influences in criminality. With respect to Lowell, Rafter argues that eugenics has been downplayed or erased in accounts of her life too, ignoring her important role as a leader in advancing eugenics-based practices.

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worked with her in various social workings, including radical political struggles. Thomas McCarthy points out: “With mutual interest in settlement work as the start, Addams and Davis would develop a professional relationship of mutual respect and social reform support.”146 One journalist even said: “If Jane Addams were President [of the United States], Katharine Davis would be her Vice President.”147 Of this would-be VP to Addams, Nicole Rafter notes: “No Progressive penologist had greater impact on eugenic criminology than Katherine Bement Davis.”148 Davis was the superintendent of the Bedford Hills Reformatory for women, the first penal institution in the world that could hold someone for life, their sentence based on what was believed to be permanent degeneracy rather than on specific crimes they committed. Addams wrote an endorsement for Bedford Hills to be built so that Davis could implement this eugenic plan.149 To prevent “unfit” persons from marrying, Addams called on governments “to insist upon health certificates from the applicant for a marriage license, that the health of future children might in a certain measure, be guaranteed,”150 and she was involved in plans to institutionalize women who had been labelled as feebleminded in order to keep them from having children.151 Like the COS, which published The Tribe of Ishmael, the Hull-House– associated Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy also created eugenic propaganda. Its 1911 “teaching aid” depicted a number of people who had physical disabilities as well as “Dental Cripples,” “‘Drunken Mothers,’ ‘Early Marriage,’ ‘Feeble-Mindedness,’ ‘Epileptics,’ and ‘Crippled Children.’”152 Meanwhile, the Hull-House–associated Girls’ Protective League went through Chicago’s streets at night observing girls whose morals seemed questionable and taking down their names and addresses for further investigation, after which they could be involuntarily institutionalized.153 Support of eugenics was not limited to Addams, Davis, and Lowell, but was present throughout the settlement movement, just as it was throughout the COS. For example, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was a data gathering and surveillance body that worked to catalogue the “unfit” and promote eugenics. Two of its first field workers had been settlement workers, and twenty-two ERO fieldworkers later became social workers.154 In many ways, Addams and the settlement movement were radical and on the side of social justice, but in other ways they weren’t. We don’t intend here to dismiss Addams’s significance, but rather to adjust what should be taken from it. We can learn from her remarkable determination and struggle, and we can also learn from her racism, classism, and disablism – like our own – without excusing it.

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A similarly simplistic picture of Mary Richmond allows her to represent conservative (but perhaps not explicitly oppressive) social work. As suggested previously, this depiction wasn’t how she understood herself and isn’t how many others have understood her life and legacy. Like Addams, we are seeking neither to demonize nor to romanticize Richmond. It’s clear that Richmond is classist; she calls poor people “less sophisticated,”155 which resonates with Addams’s depiction of what immigrants have to offer ruling class white society. However, Richmond also intervenes into classist discourse, critiquing the “conventional attitude toward the poor … without being at any great pains to know them as they really are.”156 Similar to Addams’s suggestions that we need to have a greater understanding of the lived realities of poor people, but perhaps more in tune with Razack’s critique of discourses of the common lot, Richmond writes that “any effort to go among [poor people] for the purpose of helping them that does not frankly recognize [their] wide diversity, must end in failure.”157 Further, while later critical of Addams, Richmond wrote that she had “been helped by” Addams, that Addams has “given us, at Hull House in Chicago, so admirable an object lesson in the power of neighborliness.”158 Michelle Hébert Boyd describes Richmond as believing it was important that social work shift away from charity and into social justice, which would “make it easier to work for social change while working to alleviate poverty.”159 This description fails to represent the whole picture, but perhaps no more so than framings of Richmond as simply opposed to social justice work. Furthermore, the people involved in more radical social work and the COS were often the same people. Josephine Shaw Lowell, one Addams’s close allies (through the radical Anti-Imperialist League and the National Consumers League160) who led eugenic criminology, was also a COS leader. Her biographer writes: “Much has been made of the early competition and antagonism between members of the COS and the settlement houses, but when the dust settled down, it quickly became apparent that the two had more in common than not.”161 Lowell was known for her “advocacy of settlement houses,”162 and was also the “founder of the New York City Charity Organization Society.”163 In fact, Donna Franklin describes Lowell’s significant influence on Richmond’s early development: the two women met in 1890 at the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. “A social Darwinist organizer of the COS movement, Lowell believed that poverty had its roots in the character of the poor. Pauperism would be eliminated by educating and rehabilitating the poor” rather than through relief.164 Given all these details, which are often left out of (at least) more radical versions of the standard account, it seems unfair to place Richmond on the conservative or “social control” extreme of social work, just

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as it is simplistic to position Addams consistently on the social justice extreme – especially when we intersect histories of eugenics into the standard account, as previously discussed. Eugenics was embraced by liberal and radical social work alike, even though it’s antithetical to social justice. Eugenic social work histories are not included in the standard account of social work, as if they are not a part of “social work history.” Contemporary Charity Organization and the Continued Polarity of the Riverbanks The standard account of social work is significant, not only to how we perceive what social work was but also to what social work is and can be. Many of the injustices from social work’s history continue into the present, however different they may appear. As discussed previously, our contemporary distancing from the oppressions of the past helps facilitate this carry-over. Our presentday reflexivity and self-interrogation is curbed if we cannot critically understand that the past and our stories about the past create present-day taken-forgranteds. The Addams/Richmond, radical/conservative, or community work/ casework divides that are commonly evoked in social work histories – whether framed as complementary or conflicting – are politically and ethically inadequate. They allow today’s professional social workers to imagine themselves aligned with Addams and radical social work, so that there’s no perceived need to be reflexive of the ways in which their work causes harm and perpetuates injustice. In short, the standard account of social work enables social workers to ignore how social work participates in injustice and oppression. Furthermore, to align radicalness with community work and conservativeness with casework creates a simplistic view of social change, people, and needs. Richmond said that the individual and environment are interlocked and that “the charity worker and the settlement worker have need of each other: neither one can afford to ignore the experience of the other.”165 Of course, in spite of saying this, Richmond focused on individual forms of assistance in ways that were ultimately depoliticizing and victim blaming. Nevertheless, she recognized a need for both political and individual interventions, at least to some extent and sometimes. As for the other side of the river, much of the work done at Hull-House, discussed earlier, involved meeting concrete material needs; Addams wasn’t only an activist and community organizer – she wasn’t opposed to meeting individual needs for food, rent, and other essentials. Having complicated Richmond’s positioning somewhat, it nevertheless remains that she was adamant friendly visitors “should not permit themselves to be swept away by enthusiastic advocates of social reform from that safe middle

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ground which recognizes that character is at the very centre of this complicated problem.”166 Most contemporary social workers, and also many politicians and policy makers, position themselves within this very particular liberal “safe middle ground.” The idea here is that a person can see both sides of a problem but believe they need to find a middle ground between radical social change and conserving the existing social order. The safe middle ground of liberal individualism maintains that things should change – slowly – based on individual efforts and traits, such as “character.” However, Bob Mullaly offers a helpful analogy to illustrate how problems like unemployment are not best understood as individual phenomena. We live in a society that has a certain unemployment rate and a certain rate of poverty. As long as these two elements of society exist, there will always be poor people and unemployed people. Mullaly compares unemployment to the number of spaces available in a parking lot. As long as a parking lot doesn’t have enough spaces to go around for all the cars, there will always be cars without a space. It would be ridiculous to attribute this problem to their character, laziness, or ignorance, when there are structurally not enough parking spaces. Until we end the existence of poverty on a structural level, there will always be poor people, regardless of how hard they work and other individual factors.167 Furthermore, individualistic approaches to social reform don’t address social inequality – by which a disproportionate number of people born poor, die poor; and a disproportionate number of people born well off, die well off – or how these disproportionalities are raced, gendered, and so on.168 Extending Mullaly’s parking lot analogy, we could say that some people are born into our society with a reserved parking spot, and some are not. Yet, from the security of an imagined “safe middle ground,” it makes perfect sense for ruling class white women to tell poor women how to raise their families, leaving the poor women to navigate intact oppressive systems in which they remain disadvantaged. Such unjust liberal individualism is still the logic animating normative professional social work today. The sentiment that escaping poverty is an individual’s responsibility remains a recurring theme in contemporary social services. Many social workers give lip service to political analysis – “claim[ing] Jane Addams as their source of inspiration,” as Margolin puts it.169 However, when it comes down to it, services are aimed at individuals. Sometimes social services even offer a narrative in which individual intervention might somehow lead to “ending” homelessness, men’s violence against women, and other political problems – like social conditions improving through friendly visiting. From a liberal “safe middle ground,” those who enact and benefit most from structural violence (white people, the ruling classes) are never held accountable. Exalted groups’ responsibility, according to this line of thinking, is to never give “indiscriminately,” as the COS said, but instead to

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give intelligently and strategically to reputable charitable societies such as the United Way. In fact, if the United Way seems to resonate so neatly with the historical Charity Organization Society, it’s because the United Way is the Charity Organization Society. The United Way traces its origins to the 1887 founding of the Denver COS,170 drawing a direct line from the social work of the past to the present. The United Way works to raise funds and distribute them to local charities. It determines which projects are worthy of funding. According to Bruce Levens, the organization represents itself as ensuring that funding “allocation decisions are community driven and are made by ‘citizen review panels’ drawn ‘from all walks of life.’” However, decisions are actually made by experts and staff, “legitimized by largely uninformed lay committees, and strategically chosen to attract donations.”171 Here again is the long-standing tradition of givers deciding what receivers need, fed by and contributing to the moral economy in which those in a position to give are morally and otherwise assumed superior, so that any responsible distribution of resources must be determined by them rather by than those most in need. Addams’s suggestion that poor communities tend to operate within different and superior moral parameters invites a curiosity about how things might be different if local communities controlled their own redistributions. An example of the paternalism of the ruling classes towards poor and oppressed people, which further exalts and benefits the former and denigrates the latter, is the campaign “Change for the Better,” spearheaded by Downtown BIZ – the Downtown Winnipeg Business Improvement Zone. Change for the Better is an “anti-panhandling campaign encouraging Winnipeggers to refrain from giving spare change to panhandlers, but instead to give to programs that provide skills, training and employment.”172 The money raised by Change for the Better goes to employment programs for homeless people.173 Again, the focus is on individuals’ efforts to raise themselves out of poverty, without dealing with systemic issues. One of the projects funded by the organization hires people to “beautify” the downtown, which includes picking up garbage.174 So, a downtown Winnipeg business organization created a campaign to reduce panhandling by raising money for what homeless people really need – and it gets its district “beautified” for free as a result. Who’s receiving something for nothing here? The understanding in which being paid to pick up other people’s garbage is preferable to panhandling is a value judgment based entirely on capitalist and ruling class mores of behavioural regulation. There’s nothing intrinsically noble or self-actualizing involved in picking up other people’s trash, and likely the business owners behind this plan would object to being made to pick up others’ garbage if they were to fall on hard times. We’re not saying there’s anything intrinsically

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wrong with picking up trash either. But it’s normatively devalued in the moral economy, and yet it is here imposed upon people as preferable to panhandling. This intervention into the social world is made possible by the assumptions that the ruling classes have a better idea of what poor people need than poor people do and that givers are able to give because of innate or at least persistent superiority, rather than as a consequence of an unjust society. Poor people are poor by their own fault, and following directions from ruling class people is the way out of poverty. Firmly grounded in this moral economy, Change for the Better tells people to donate to their program, because donors can trust where the money goes “instead of giving it to panhandlers who may use the money to buy alcohol, drugs or cigarettes.”175 Of course, if donors or organizers of Change for the Better choose to drink, smoke, or take drugs, nobody questions their right to do so (at least within the confines of the law).* Some people cultivate their culturedness and exaltation by drinking alcohol in the right way, which may include drinking a lot of it. Others prove themselves inferior by drinking. This ranked differentiation is the work of a moral economy that actively functions to exalt some and denigrate others, and which underlies a common-sense acceptance of vast inequality and normalized day-to-day oppression. Why should business improvement associations and social workers decide what people need and how they should live their lives, while poor people are only given a say when their narratives align with those of the rich?† The “where does the money go” concern expressed by Change for the Better was central to the COS and continues unabated today, but the same scrutiny is never applied to charities.176 If you give a dollar to a panhandler, that person has a dollar. If you give a dollar to the United Way, the United Way takes around 15 per cent in administrative costs.‡ If that money were then given directly to

* In practice, though, the law enacts unequal moral regulation and material violence here too. Homeless people, who don’t have living rooms, are criminalized for drinking in public, whereas housed people have the privilege of drinking in private. Similarly, homeless people are much more likely to be targeted by police for drug use because they don’t have private spaces to use and are already subjected to intense police scrutiny. † Recipients’ stories are often used to support funding drives, but of course these stories are carefully selected and sometimes even edited by service providers and others involved in agencies’ public relations and image management. A recent and well-articulated critique of this practice within psychiatry can be found in “‘Recovering Our Stories’: A Small Act of Resistance” by Costa et al. ‡ According to their websites, the United Way Centraide Canada takes an average of 15 per cent, while the United Way Worldwide takes an average of 14 per cent.

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a poor person, the recipient would have about 85 cents. Yet, this transaction rarely happens directly. If the money is passed on to a member agency, as with most programming funding, that agency has administrative and fundraising costs as well as social worker salaries, often concealed within programming expenses. In other words, if you give a dollar to the United Way or Change for the Better, administrators take a cut, social workers take a cut, fundraising coordinators might take a cut, advertisers and printers might take a cut, and the list continues. What is left over goes towards what is considered acceptable needs for people who are deemed “deserving.” For example, from within the “safe middle ground” – that always obscures structural barriers and emphasizes individual effort – what’s left might fund a résumé-writing workshop, which may be entirely irrelevant to many people struggling to eat three times a day and secure a safe place to sleep. We aren’t saying that social service agencies are bad or shouldn’t be doing the work they do – although that is surely the case for some. We are rather challenging the particular discourses that have been employed about poor people since the beginnings of professional social work. These discourses are deeply classed, raced, gendered, and so on; they are persistently critical of those who access social services, but rarely of those who provide them; and, overall, they work to uphold the status quo. When money given away is funnelled through an organization that adheres to normative professional social work values,* it’s diverted from other organizations that might do concrete work to end injustice, as well as from those most directly subjected to social injustices who might decide for themselves what is most pressing in any given moment. Like any other people, a poor person’s most pressing need might sometimes be a cigarette, a drink, or a hit. We should be very careful about any sense of certainty that we know better and might not make that same choice if we found ourselves in the same situation. We might even make that same choice after a difficult meeting where we’re tasked with deciding how to effectively use the charitable donations our agency has been granted. Ever since the early COS, agencies that morally regulate poor people have had a near monopoly on the kinds of social work that gets legitimized and funded. However, rather than making the argument that community work and political organizing is the only work that can lead to social change, we posit that neither individual work nor community work are sufficient in isolation.

* The concern here also applies to social work that is reliant on government funding.

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An example of social working that defies the casework versus community work dichotomy is the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), which A.J. has worked with for over fifteen years. OCAP is a radical social justice organization that works primarily for housing for all and increased social assistance rates in the short and medium term, and for the overthrow of capitalism, colonialism, and oppression in the long term. As one component of its work, OCAP uses individual casework as a form of radical community organizing. Very different from Richmond’s casework, OCAP mobilizes community members to attend case actions for folks who need help, most commonly with social assistance but sometimes with a landlord, boss, or other situation involving immediate needs and a power imbalance between those involved. A typical case action involves a group of people going to the person’s social assistance or city councillor’s office and demanding a meeting with a supervisor. The group is loud and essentially shuts the office down, refusing to leave until a meeting is granted and the person gets what they’re entitled to.* OCAP also hands out business cards to other people in the office so they know who to call if they need help. This type of action is an effective form of individual casework, and it also works to strengthen and empower communities at the same time. John Clarke, one of OCAP’s founders, asserts: “Casework is a point of contact with the community you are organizing. If you can’t show you can make a difference in people’s lives – you can’t expect them to join in to larger struggle.”177 Indeed, individuals are part of communities, and communities are made up of individuals. But the individual/conservative versus community/radical dichotomy works to keep people from effectively engaging with both and exploring how individual casework can be radical (just as group work or community work can be conservative and/or oppressive, as discussed in the following section on externally imposed community renewals and relocations). The ideology of the casework versus community work, or individual (and family) versus community, dichotomy plagues European and white settler colonial social work, but is not viewed in this way in non-Western forms of social work.178 In cultures with distinct senses of personhood and connection, including Indigenous cultures on Turtle Island, the individual/community binary that much of Western social work views as a total impasse doesn’t make any sense.179

* Direct action casework is not specific to OCAP, but OCAP has been influential in its contemporary development and spread.

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1  Cover image of United States Indian School, Carlisle, PA, a booklet written by Richard Henry Pratt about his prototype Indian industrial school, c. 1895. Richard Henry Pratt Papers, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

“Mingling” as Continued Solution to Structural Violence Many readers will have heard the infamous phrase “kill the Indian, save the man” as a description of what Indian boarding schools were explicitly intended to do. This violent articulation is from a paper called “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites” by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. The “advantages” Pratt puts forward are that white influence will assimilate or civilize Indigenous peoples. According to Pratt, children’s Indigenousness would peter out through their placement in white-run Indian boarding schools. This transformation would happen precisely because they mingled with white people, the model for being human to which they were forced to assimilate. This process was a highly structured “mingling.” Indigenous kids weren’t going to school with white kids. They were in racially segregated institutions where exclusively Indigenous children were taught and disciplined by white adult authority figures.

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Pratt’s “kill the Indian, save the man” is cited so frequently that the original is sometimes not directly referenced. It’s therefore easy to read this phrase many times without knowing where it was originally spoken. The first public reading and publication of Pratt’s paper was at the 1892 National Conference on Charities and Corrections,180 which later became the National Conference of Social Work. To give some context, other featured themes included immigration, the insane, the feebleminded, and women in philanthropy. Of these themes, apart from “charity organization,” no other theme had more than three papers devoted to it – although there was a special tribute to influential eugenicist Oscar McCulloch, the COS leader discussed earlier who wrote The Tribe of Ishmael181 and had recently died; four people paid tribute to him. “Indian policy” had six papers devoted to it – twice as many as any other theme apart from McCulloch’s tributes and charity organization.182 Several of these Indian policy papers focused on the education of Indigenous children. To give a different kind of context, the National Conference on Charities and Corrections directly became legitimized professional social work and is consistently acknowledged as having done so in social work histories, however selectively. Their 1892 program gives us a glimpse of what leaders of what was soon called professional social work were up to at the time; yet, 1892 was also the year that Black anti-lynching activist and social worker Ida B. Wells (discussed in chapter 2) published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,183 which is a very different kind of social working than that of McCulloch or Pratt. We can just pause to consider what gets included or excluded in normative social work history. While Pratt was not a social worker, it should be recalled that nobody had ever called themselves or anyone else a social worker in 1892. The term didn’t exist. However, the organization through which “social work” came into being over the next decade considered Pratt one of their own. Pratt opened his paper by saying that he was specifically invited to speak, and his invitation “suggested that the theme be ‘the Advantages of mingling Indians with Whites.’”184 Those organizing the conference understood Pratt’s militaristic boarding school – the first of its kind, but certainly not the last (as discussed in greater detail in chapter 6) – to be among the kinds of interventions into the social world that they advanced as an organized body. Charities and corrections were understood as so intimately connected that they were named as the two major streams of interventions into the social world that came together into professional social work. Furthermore, around a decade before the term “social work” was coined, the people who were to become organized professional social workers invited Pratt to speak about his work creating

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Indian boarding schools as they had become standardized. The invitation was issued because the National Conference on Charities and Correction understood Pratt’s work to be highly relevant to what they were up to themselves. Another of the Indian policy papers, in fact, spelled out these connections: “The Indian Policy in Its Relations to Crime and Pauperism” by Chairman Philip C. Garrett. But it was Pratt, in front of those who would soon become professional social workers, who first publicly advanced the idea that “mingling Indians with whites” in a structured hierarchical institution would transform Indigenous children for the better by “killing” their Indigenousness and making them more like white people. The infamous quote from Pratt leaves out an ellipsis that should in fact be there. But the entire paragraph is perhaps even worse than the often-cited and infamous phrase: A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one … In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.185

This violent articulation of an imagined moral imperative to ensure that “all the Indian … should be dead” resonates, however distinctly, beyond colonial violences and across professional social work interventions. After all, whether through placing poor children in ruling class homes, ruling class friendly visitors going to poor families’ homes, or ruling class settlement workers moving into poor communities, the new professional social work attributed a transformational “advantage” or power to the “mingling” of classes. Furthermore, Jin Haritaworn shows that this imagined classist and racist “advantage” continues to frame gentrifications in which white queer activists displace working class racialized folks from neighbourhoods where they’d previously lived. Haritaworn notes that these activists imagine themselves to be revitalizing communities rather than destroying them.186 Like these activists, professional social work continues to attribute a benefit to stratified and targeted forms of “mingling.” This attitude is true of many individualistic interventions, and it’s equally true of some community-level interventions, such as the externally imposed community destructions/relocations of Africville and Regent Park. Albert Rose, who served as both director of the School of Social Work at the University of Toronto and president of the Canadian Association of Social Workers, is described in the Encyclopedia of Canadian Social Work as “the driving force behind the construction of Canada’s first major low-rent rehousing project, Regent Park.”187

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Regent Park was Canada’s first major social housing development. It was a community-level intervention that aimed to mobilize what Pratt called “the advantages of mingling.” Again, there is nothing intrinsically radical or nonoppressive about community-level social work. Regent Park was designed to replace what had, according to Ryan James, “long been labelled a criminogenic ‘slum’ that, by its very existence, demeaned its predominantly white workingclass Anglophone residents.”188 Poor people were displaced from their prior community and family structures, and only granted housing if they replicated cisheteropatriarchal middle class norms: only nuclear families were granted tenancy.189 Such heavy-handed and moralistic interventions into a community’s organization affect all aspects of life, from caretaking and interdependency through neighbourly and reciprocal material, emotional support, and ways of responding to violence or theft within a community to forms of sex, love, and other affiliations that fall outside of those most normatively and consistently socially sanctioned. There is no aspect of interlocking forms of oppression that is not involved in some way when outsiders destroy and reconstruct a community.* Rose himself declared Regent Park a failure in 1968 (while the Africville relocation was still underway).† He stated: “We have constructed huge villages of the poor, disabled, and handicapped, vast collections of dependent and quasidependent families … who cannot provide or foster the indigenous leadership or, at least, the quantity and continuity of leadership required to build a strong neighborhood.”190 Regent Park remained a poor neighbourhood for decades and became increasingly racialized. Regent Park has been redeveloped again over the last few years. Before the latest redevelopment, seventy languages were spoken in the community, and two out of three residents had been born in another country.191 More than three-quarters of the population of Regent Park were “visible minorities,” and the second largest racial group in the neighbourhood was Black people, making up nearly 20 per cent of the community’s population.192 Regent Park was not a community that anybody would characterize as racially segregated or homogenous. However, “the advantages of mingling” factor into this story through

* This assessment applies, too, to those soon to be displaced from Africville, discussed later in this section, and to those displaced centuries earlier by capitalist industrialization in Europe, discussed in chapter 3. † In response to these concerns, Rose advocated settlement house–inspired social work to make positive interventions in poor urban communities. Again, settlement houses could be mobilized to uphold normative values and reinforce the oppression and assimilation of morally denigrated groups.

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what Margolin calls the healing power of class.193 Regent Park was the poorest neighbourhood in Toronto.194 Significantly, with the most recent redevelopment, none of the long-denigrated groups who’d previously peopled Regent Park were to increase in numbers. Rather, as Martine August and Alan Walks write, “the one group to experience demographic growth [in the redeveloped community] will be Englishspeaking adults aged 25-50 with household incomes over $60,000.”195 Again, the advantages of mingling only go one way. Regent Park residents will be saved from their own denigrations and ignorance through intermingling with ruling class white folks; there are no imagined advantages to those already exalted in the dominant framings of this mingling. However, the new ruling class Regent Park residents’ esteem within the moral economy might increase when they put aside normative ruling class prejudice in their seemingly brave, open-minded, and charitable decision to live among poor people. Ruling class folks tend to both frown upon classist prejudice and also to enact it. This normative gap between what’s said and what’s done is perhaps what most distinguishes today’s racism, classism, and other forms of oppression from those of previous eras, when ruling class straight white folks’ prejudices were more openly, clearly, and unapologetically articulated. Paving the way for the redevelopment, Regent Park residents were increasingly constructed as criminalistic over the last few decades, feeding what James calls “racist moral panics” about the neighbourhood.196 In 2002, the redevelopment of Regent Park was first announced. Crime was a central justification for levelling the community. The National Post asserted that “a 1980s and ’90s crime plague too acute to ignore … forced the public and private sectors to pay attention to Regent Park, so much so that the community is in the process of a $1-billion redevelopment.”197 The dismantling of the neighbourhood was discursively construed as both necessary and inevitable because of its social problems. But rather than attending to the systemic causes of social and political problems, and making obvious positive changes such as raising social assistance and minimum wage rates and fixing the many outstanding repairs the buildings needed, the only option presented was destruction and dislocation.* The response to decades of systemic neglect and oppression doesn’t have to be destroying a community. * Those who continue to live in Regent Park following its reconstruction may live in improved material conditions. For example, some units have huge windows letting in sunlight to a degree unheard of in the previous buildings, which many people experience as making a difference in quality of life. As new buildings, they are also cleaner, better maintained, and easier to look after than the previous units. However, such apparent “success” shouldn’t gloss over the fact

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As for the officially stated justifications for the redevelopment, we might note that the reduction of crime had been one of the reasons Rose gave for levelling the previously existing “slum” and constructing Regent Park fifty years earlier.198 This recurring argument suggests that the classism that conflates being poor with violence and irresponsibility is as prevalent as it was fifty years ago. It also suggests that little has been done over that time to make poor people’s lives better so that crime might not present itself as such an obvious option when all other avenues prove fruitless. Indeed, moral panics about increasing crime often occur when there’s no increase or even a decrease in crime.199 The issue of articulating the relationship between poverty and crime is all very complicated. On the one hand, we need to recognize the violence of poverty in pushing people towards dangerous and sometimes harmful behaviours to survive. On the other hand, we need to be very careful that we’re not buying into the framing of poor, racialized, and Indigenous communities as criminalistic. Across communities, crime rates tend to rise when employment rates drop. Crime rates are a thoroughly political problem. Crime is just one social problem related to poverty. Heather Bergen documents her conversations with Jessica and other young moms in Toronto. Jessica describes how her childhood experiences would have been different if she hadn’t grown up poor, which included that “her Mom wouldn’t have had to steal to support them and subsequently would have spent less time in jail … her Mom would have been less stressed and done drugs less … [and] her Mom wouldn’t have let sketchy men hang around the house and so maybe Jessica wouldn’t have been sexually abused.”200 Crime, sexual abuse, classist stigma, hunger, forced familial separation due to jail time, having to pretend that things were okay when they weren’t, the threat of state apprehension, and being unable to concentrate in school: Jessica says that all these aspects of her childhood would have been better if her mother had had more money. As Dorothy Roberts notes, “The vast majority of poor parents do not abuse their children and there is no inherent psychological or cultural aspect of poverty that makes people prone to abuse and neglect.”201 Yet, the vast majority of

that it was decades of neglect, racism, and classism that made Regent Park what it was in terms of the substandard material living conditions in the previously existing buildings. Rather than considering the redevelopment a success, it should invite reflection upon what it means that poor people’s living conditions were only improved so that ruling class people might consider living there – and that this “mingling” of classes and races was the centrally intended intervention into the lives of poor and racialized community members (rather than improving living conditions as an end in itself).

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children who are apprehended come from poor families.202 Jennifer Clarke discusses how Black social workers, and mothers and youth who are involved with child protective services, all know that poor children tend to get apprehended, often due to lack of affordable housing, childcare, and other basic needs.203 Citing Roberts, Clarke also notes: “Several studies have shown that doctors and other mandated professionals diagnose poor children’s injuries more often as abuse rather than accidents, as they do with children from more affluent families.”204 But the solution offered isn’t usually to give poor people more money; it’s to mingle them with wealthier people, through casework, relocations, or life-skills classes taught by social workers. Mingling doesn’t improve poor people’s lives, and it might even make things worse. According to research on the consequences of “relative poverty,” which is the experience of having less than others in your social environment, many difficulties in individuals’ and communities’ lives are tied to the local size of the gap between rich and poor.205 Once basic needs are met, wealthier societies are no better off than poorer ones in terms of the prevalence of a whole score of social problems. However, societies with a smaller gap between their richest and poorest members are considerably better off in relation to many different social problems. Such findings suggest that further mingling of classes (rather than redistributing wealth) might even increase problems such as gun violence, infant mortality, high school dropout rates, and distrust of one another if mingling results in a more acute sense of unfairness and/or self-blaming shame on the part of those who have less. According to these studies, reducing the gap between rich and poor improves everybody’s quality of life, even that of the wealthiest members. Nevertheless, as was the case both fifty and a hundred years ago, the prejudicial assumption that poor people are ignorant and need better examples set for them by the ruling classes tends to dictate policy today, rather than real poor peoples’ experiences (like Jessica’s) or relevant research like studies on the effects of relative poverty. And so, paralleling Rose’s concerns about concentrating poor people in one area fifty years ago, the need to create mixed-income neighbourhoods was used over the last fifteen years as a core reason to redevelop Regent Park once again.206 According to August and Walker, the seemingly self-evident good of mixedincome neighbourhoods rests on “the assumption that low-income people benefit from having middle class ‘role models’ in their communities.”207 Yet, as with early social work’s operationalizing of this concept in the form of friendly visitors and casework, the assumption is deeply flawed and based only on classism. As Paul Piff and colleagues report, “Despite experiencing life stressors on a more chronic basis, lower class individuals appear to be

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more engaged with the needs of others.”208 Low-income people are more likely to be generous, charitable, trusting, and helpful than middle and upper class people.209 Bergen writes that the poor young mothers she interviewed spoke of “the strength, solidarity and community they experienced with other folks that were poor.” For example, one of her research participants said, “[N]obody understands what I’m going through more than another person that’s sitting in the ghetto with me.” Bergen observes: “Other folks similarly discussed a different set of values in poor communities, values that were grounded in an ethic of care and mutual support. Paige explained this in terms of struggling for money but giving money to people that ask for it on the street because, ‘We need to help each other, it’s not just help yourself, you know?’” Another participant, Louie, also described how poverty led to increased interdependency with friends and family: “I really think people thrive when they’re interconnecting, but in a capitalist society, they’re like everybody is an individual, fend for yourself … but it’s actually not … the way that we’re supposed to be doing things.”210 Just as Addams documented in her 1902 critique of friendly visiting,211 there’s a different moral sensibility among poor communities, which is valuable if we can think outside of ruling class taken-for-granted moral denigrations of poor folks. Louie clearly states that capitalism and individualism are at odds with interconnectedness and the thriving that comes with it. She suggests that capitalist society has it wrong. What poor communities need is more money and better infrastructural support. They don’t need training, role models, or mingling. Again, the problem isn’t how poor and otherwise oppressed groups live their lives; the problem is material inequality and structural violence, as well as the normative moral differentiations that make these things appear acceptable. Redevelopment projects miss the point of what makes it difficult to live without enough money. They also make matters worse by disrupting the cohesion, support, and interdependence previously established within communities as ways of getting by without having enough to get by. They can thus make people’s lives even harder. Furthermore, for all these same reasons, the disruption and reconstruction of local social arrangements also undermines a community’s capacity to organize and resist.212 According to August and Walks, the imagined social good of mixed neighbourhoods “tends to arise only to justify projects of renewal or revitalisation in areas dominated by marginalised people.”213 For example, as members of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty often point out, it was only the residents of Regent Park who were forced to move, not those of Rosedale. Rosedale, just north of Regent Park, is one of the richest neighbourhoods in Canada, but nobody raises concerns about the rich living among

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themselves.* Nobody puts a billion dollars into redevelopment to expose more rich people to poor people, or to expose more white people to people of colour (although, again, Addams advocated such exposure in Democracy and Social Ethics as a means to work against rampant inequalities). Rather, the erroneous idea that poor and racialized communities are morally inferior and ignorant continues to shape policy. Consequently, rather than alleviating the violences of poverty and racism, various schemes are put in place to teach poor and racialized people to live more like the white ruling classes. This strategy is both ineffective and profoundly offensive. Constance Backhouse writes of a “national mythology that Canada is not a racist country, or at least less so than our southern neighbour.”214 As discussed throughout this book, this self-exalting representation is untrue. For example, social workers withheld material relief from residents of Africville after the 1917 Halifax Explosion, even though the Black community was located on the waterfront of the harbour where the explosion took place and was as seriously affected as some white communities that received relief.215 The explosion, caused by the collision of a war munitions ship with another ship in the city’s harbour, killed 2,000 people, wounded 6,000 more, and made thousands homeless. Organized social work across the United States and Canada saw this event as an opportunity to prove the importance of the new profession, and social workers from the biggest cities in both countries came to Halifax to provide and organize relief. Half a century after these earlier social workers had withheld relief from Africville residents following the explosion, social workers centrally participated in the destruction of the community and the relocation of its roughly 400 residents.216 Many Canadians learn about Africville, a small, tightly knit and independent community on the Halifax Harbour that was well established prior to World War I. The community was subjected to more than a century of racism and intentional systemic neglect before the Halifax authorities demolished it and relocated its residents. The standard account that gets told about Africville implies that the demolition was part of a bygone era – from the time before the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s.† This account is absolutely false. The relocation was justified in the name of political and social

* While we could not find a specific instance where this comment is recorded, it is commonly said by OCAP members in public meetings; see also Haritaworn, Queer Lovers, 42. † Nelson writes that several US cities perpetrated similar relocations and demolitions around this time.

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progress: white people articulated it as consistent with anti-racist movements towards racial integration. The civil rights movement is commonly understood to have begun with Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat and the resultant Montgomery bus boycott of 1956 (although individual and organized Black resistance had been taking place long before that, as discussed in the next chapter).217 This event took place thirteen years before Africville was destroyed and before the plan to do so was officially set in motion. In the years following the Montgomery bus boycott, several streams of Black activism fundamentally transformed the consciousness and practices associated with anti-Black racism and white supremacy in the United States and Canada. However problematically, most people know this history as represented through the lives of two individual Black men: Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. Patriarchy, liberal individualism, and binary thinking shape the story of two exceptional individual men representing opposing poles, as if this framing accurately accounts for the entire complexity and diversity of anti-racist struggle at the time.218 But we can nevertheless take their lives and work as points of reference, given that readers will likely have some familiarity with them. For example, when we write that Martin Luther King Jr delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963,219 we anticipate that many readers will know of this speech and its enduring significance. That shared knowledge will help to ground readers’ understanding of what we say from there. The very next year several significant things happened in relation to anti-Black racism and anti-racist struggle: King won the Nobel Peace Prize220 (showing how well established his activism was by this time); Malcolm X completed the Hajj to Mecca, delivered his speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” and began to distance himself from the Nation of Islam (NOI)221 (signifying that he’d already done the majority of the significant interventions into the social world he’s most widely remembered for as a member of the NOI); and the US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination based on race.222 All these things happened in 1964. But the year 1964 was also the year that the Africville relocation began.223 It didn’t begin previous to civil rights struggle. By the time the last Africville resident had been removed from his home, both King and Malcolm X had been assassinated.224 Therefore, every word either one spoke that has ever been represented in a film, a song, a T-shirt, or an email signature had already been spoken by the time Africville was finally emptied of its residents and bulldozed. The demolition was not a relic of the overtly racist pre–civil rights era. The Africville relocation was justified beforehand and considered a success afterward as a movement away from racial segregation and towards integration – by white liberals, not by Africville residents.225 Liberal whites

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narrated Africville’s destruction as an anti-racist intervention into the social world. The only reason we almost always imagine otherwise is due to what Henri-Jacques Stiker calls “our prejudice of progress,”226 which we critically engage throughout this book and elaborate more fully in chapter 3. According to this prejudice, that racist act surely was rationalized within the context of a time we’ve long since left behind. But this supposition is not true. Perhaps the Africville destruction could even be used to mark the beginning of our current era of white supremacy,* which may be most notable for the gap between what’s said and what’s done.227 Racism is almost universally hailed as bad, and yet white supremacy continues to profoundly shape everyday life.† That’s very different from the pre–civil rights era, when white folks publicly and unapologetically articulated explicit racism. In other words, it was within sensibilities that remain normative today – in which racism is rampant but nearly always disavowed – that the Africville destruction took place. Africville had been present on a prime piece of picturesque and potentially lucrative waterfront land for over 150 years.228 It was an entirely Black community, which was self-sufficient and characterized by a long tradition of neighbour-to-neighbour mutual aid.229 However, Africville had no running water or electricity because Halifax refused to service the community.230 The resulting lack of running water and electricity fuelled the “slum” label long applied to the community, which eventually was mobilized to justify its destruction. The racist withholding of services that made life easier and more comfortable, which were almost universally available in white urban Canada by the 1960s, enabled the moral denigration of the community. This denigration was further supported by the proximity of facilities that had a moral stain of dirt, disease, and deviance – such as a prison, a garbage dump, and an infectious disease hospital. Although these served all Halifax residents, the city located them near or within Africville.231 In 1963 (again, the year King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech), social worker Albert Rose visited Africville for two hours and conducted consultations with Halifax residents. After his two-day visit, Rose wrote a report calling

* In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed shows that even those we all know to be the real racists separate themselves from hate and claim to be motivated by love. That is a sign of our times. † In recent years, even the Ku Klux Klan advertises itself as “not racist” on a billboard they sponsored for “white pride radio,” as reported by RT USA. Among other responses, this action should invite serious reflection on what it means to consider oneself not racist or even antiracist in our historical moment.

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for the destruction of Africville within six months. Rose stated that “a modern urban metropolis [cannot] tolerate within its midst a community … which [is] physically removed and socially inadequate, not served with pure water and sewage disposal facilities.”232 But his solution was not for Halifax to supply these neglected services; it was to destroy the community.* Destruction wasn’t inevitable. Rose wrote that “relocation and redevelopment” were necessary to prevent “a condition of chronic dependency for many of the families under study.”233 Through interlocking classist and racist denigrations, Africville residents were framed as a threat to the resources of the city† even though, for at least fifty years, Africville residents had paid taxes but received considerably less in return than the city’s other residents.234 Many people in Africville were against relocation and the destruction of their community. This resistance was contrary to Albert Rose’s account, which claimed they were “ready and to some extent eager to negotiate a settlement concerning the ultimate disposition of their community.”235 It wasn’t true that people welcomed the relocation; many were adamantly opposed to it. The relocations took place from 1964 to 1967, with the final holdout, “Pa” Carvery, vacating his home in 1970. In 1967, during the time of active destruction, Albert Rose was awarded the Canadian Centennial Medal.236 The entry about Rose in the Encyclopedia of Canadian Social Work mentioned earlier doesn’t discuss his important role in the Africville destruction. Much of the publicly stated rationale behind the destruction of Africville was that racial segregation and “slums” could not be tolerated. In Razing Africville, Jennifer Nelson writes: “Destruction can be looked on as a sort of rescue.” She maintains that “investments in the inevitability of this solution [were] so strong” that white people typically asked, “Why wouldn’t they just leave?” This question, she points out, “relies on a learned arrogance that assumed the solution being offered – in this case, to live among white people – is superior, as well as that the notion of free choice based on a common understanding of the experience exists … The logic of the slum is productive in its own death,

* The church has been reconstructed and is the site of the Africville Museum. A.J. visited the museum in 2013, and the staff informed A.J. that they’d finally sorted out problems with the water service to the land. The City of Halifax apologized to the community for its racist dismantling of their homes, and, as part of the settlement, it returned the land for the museum. Ironically, however, Halifax also refused to attach the church to its sewer system. † Thobani shows this same pattern in relation to immigration. Although the racist, morally panicked, and commonplace discourse suggests that immigrants drain Canadian social services, non-citizens pay taxes for services they can’t access. Non-citizens in Canada subsidize Canadian citizens’ social and medical services.

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making commonsense knowledge of the fact of its dependence and inevitable need of an outside solution.”237 Racial integration was framed as the solution to racism, with Africville and with many other racially segregated communities in the United States and Canada. But integration in itself does not solve racism. One Africville resident described local white progressives who “held out integration like some kind of Holy Grail, [and] we told them we weren’t sure exactly what integration could do for us as a community.”238 Africville residents resisted relocation because, although things were not perfect, people were doing all right. They wanted change, but what they wanted was a more equitable redistribution of resources, an end to racism, and access to services the rest of the city received – clean running water, sewage, and other amenities. Africville’s destruction is another event for which the underlying problem can be framed as Black lives not mattering within the white imagination. The lives and loves and homes and connections that a people cultivated over a century and a half didn’t matter to the social workers,* city planners, and politicians who destroyed it all, claiming to do so in the best interests of those whose lives and connections they were destroying. In justifying the demolition, Halifax Mayor John Edward Lloyd echoed a common justification for intrusive and violent social work: “Sometimes, some people need to be shown that certain things are not in their own best interests and not in the best interests of their children.” He also asserted the importance of “well-trained social caseworkers” in helping people adjust,239 suggesting he understood that the relocation would be injurious to Africville residents and yet believing that this injury he was causing was justified. Legally enforced racial segregation characterized by uneven qualities of service and infrastructure is clearly a serious political problem, but the racial homogeneity of a community isn’t necessarily a problem. The problem is oppression; it’s the moral degradations of one group that rationalize and naturalize material inequalities and greater subjection to violence, surveillance, control, and so on. However, due to a liberal focus on desegregation

* In addition to Rose, Nelson documents at least two other social workers who materially assisted in relocation/post-relocation. Yet, in spite of Rose’s involvement, other evidence of social workers’ involvement, and what they acknowledge as an apparent endorsement of the levelling of Africville in the Nova Scotia Association of Social Workers Newsletter, Jennisen and Lundy describe the profession of social work as absent in the debate about Africville and in other political struggles of the period. They frame Rose as an aberration in terms of the role of social workers; we are suggesting, rather, that he was typical of social work across contexts – not inactive at all, but actively implicated and involved.

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rather than oppression,* some desegregation efforts were incompatible with anti-racist demands for fundamental social transformation. In practice, desegregation often interlocks with continued white supremacy. The same assimilationist (liberal) white supremacist logic of “The Advantages of Mingling” that informed Pratt’s prototype Indian industrial school persisted through the 1960s and well beyond, targeting Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities.240 In many desegregation efforts, white people set an example so that racialized folks could more efficiently adopt white norms, values, and mores. In order to facilitate this intended project, when Africville was physically destroyed, some of its existing family structures were purposefully destroyed and re-engineered. During relocation, families were broken up: some were forced to surrender children, while others were forced to marry to qualify for housing. People found themselves living in “household structures that differed from those they had known for generations.”241 This independent Black community was therefore not only relocated; white social workers and others reconstructed it as a differently configured community, better aligned with the white ruling class nuclear family. Such disruptive interventions into the structure and life of a community would have displaced previously established and locally negotiated ways of navigating and living outside the confines of white capitalist and cisheteropatriarchal norms, including the displacement of local navigations of compulsory cisheterosexuality, as well as locally specific arrangements of interdependence, mutual support, resource distribution, and care. Local practices of care would have included diverse but internally sensible means of understanding and responding to childhood, old age, the varied experiences laid claim to by psychiatry, and other qualities and experiences under the umbrella of disability. They would have included practices for responding to a family that couldn’t or wouldn’t care for a child, an elderly relative, or any other person requiring assistance. Local norms, mores, and practices would just as surely have included ways of responding to theft, violence, and other such actions without calling the police – who likely would have either not shown up or seriously hurt somebody if they did. Communities have always had ways of responding to these widely varied things – which isn’t to say that such practices are always perfect, effective, or fair. As Connie Burk points out, community practices and values “may have been flawed or aspirational.”242 Nevertheless, communities develop ways of

* Malcolm X and many other radical Black anti-racists were anti-integration, understanding that in practice integration most often meant Black assimilation to white norms.

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doing and living and thinking and feeling; they negotiate these practices with one another over time; and such community-specific and historically rooted ways of living everyday life, however imperfect, may no longer work as well or come as naturally when people are uprooted and moved to a different location and forced into different social and familial structures. The concrete strategies developed to navigate local norms, discourses, and power relations don’t translate perfectly to new contexts. We can assume that, over the course of Africville’s history, there were instances of the varied things referred to today under the umbrella categories of queerness, disability, and crime within the community, just like there would be some of these experiences in practically any community during any 150-year stretch. Local ways of engaging and negotiating these things are disrupted when outsiders tear apart social and familial structures and cobble them back together in new and unfamiliar formations. In this chapter and the next, we discuss historical details and figures left out of the standard account detailing the emergence of professional social work. Before moving on from our discussion of the Africville relocation, as it relates to Black anti-racist struggles of the mid-twentieth century, we’ll offer a few thoughts on the interlocking oppressions in the moral economies of what could be called the standard account of the civil rights movement. As mentioned earlier, Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat to a white person on a bus is said to have sparked the civil rights movement by igniting the Montgomery bus boycott. However, many details of this event are not what they’re commonly imagined to be. For one thing, Parks was a trained community organizer and a paid employee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She was not the tired old woman who is usually brought to mind in recollections of this incident. Her refusal was a political act of civil disobedience, planned and staged by the NAACP. Furthermore, her celebration for igniting the civil rights movement is accomplished at the expense of someone even more relatively denigrated in interlocking moral economies. A fifteen-year-old Black girl named Claudette Colvin refused to give her seat to a white woman in Montgomery nine months before Rosa Parks did so.243 The NAACP chose Parks to re-stage what they knew Colvin had done, with the explicit aim of inciting a bus boycott to protest segregation. Parks was imagined more likely to evoke white sympathies than Colvin, due to the NAACP’s understanding of the moral economies of the day in which ageism, colourism, and moralization about sex outside of marriage all interlocked with anti-Black racism. Colvin was darker skinned than Parks, and she became pregnant shortly after her arrest, giving birth the month Parks was arrested. Colvin was therefore pregnant through the planning of Parks’s re-staging of Colvin’s refusal. The NAACP didn’t feel that Colvin, as a darker-skinned pregnant teenager,

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was the right person to symbolically galvanize a mass movement against racial segregation.244 Perhaps of particular interest to many contemporary social workers, Colvin was sexually active and unmarried when she refused to give up her seat. After becoming a teenage mom, she went on to become one of four women plaintiffs in Browder v. Galye, which successfully ended legal racial segregation in Alabama.245 Therefore, one of the most significant US political transformations in the past century was significantly sparked by a fifteen-year-old Black girl who was sexually active and became a teenage mom. This fact flies in the face of the most freely circulated ideas about teenage moms and other sexually active teens. We therefore invite folks to keep the history of Claudette Colvin in mind the next time they find themselves in a conversation or relationship with a Black teenage mom or a teen said to be sexually “promiscuous,” “precocious,” or whatever. All the assumptions that come with adult and professional characterizations of sexually active teens would never predict that a sexually active Black teenager would have played such a key role in fundamentally changing the world that we live in today. Racism and white supremacy might very well have continued to look very different, to this day, had it not been for Claudette Colvin. Yet, as important as Colvin is to this history, she also wasn’t the first person to do something like what she did. A decade before Colvin and Parks wouldn’t move from their seats in Alabama, for example, Viola Desmond, “often referred to as Canada’s Rosa Parks, was jailed and eventually fined after sitting in a section reserved for whites in the Roseland,” a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia.246 However, as Angela Davis reminds us in her analysis of the Montgomery bus boycotts, we shouldn’t remember these histories through the lens of individualism.247 Bus boycotts could have been mobilized around Colvin’s arrest; something on that scale could perhaps have been spurred by Desmond’s arrest; and there are many acts of resistance equally brave as that of Parks, Desmond, or Colvin. In the following chapter, which describes the erasure of Black social workers from white social work history, we mention several resonant examples: Ida B. Wells took a similar action in 1884 in response to racial segregation on trains and won her case,248 which first established her as an activist; and Maggie Walker and the Independent Order of St Luke led a streetcar boycott against racial segregation in 1903.249 It took many efforts such as these, and the coordinated mass collective response of many more folks, whom Davis evocatively describes as “ordinary people like you and me,” to amass the movement to end racial segregation.250 Like all social justice movements, the Montgomery bus boycott was built on painstaking organizing efforts and the infrastructure

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developed through these efforts by generations of people struggling for social justice. The bus boycott wasn’t a spontaneous explosion. The circumstances for it to take place, including the gradual building of community education and resources, were carefully planned, which included planning the eventual spark for the movement: Parks re-staging what Colvin had recently done. Conclusion A truly critical and anti-oppressive social work would need to engage with its historical legacies. Simply scratching the surface of social work reveals many of the oppressive values that persist. This legacy is commonly acknowledged in critical and anti-oppressive social work literature, but often in a way that invites the “other side of the river” positioning of oneself as exempt from the critique one makes. The standard account works to construct social work history as emerging out of two distinct branches: one radical and the other conservative. This account – according to which Richmond and the COS worked towards social control, while Addams and the settlement movement worked towards social justice – is partial and doesn’t serve us well today. It casts “radical” social work as innocent, erasing its complicity in colonialism, classism, racism, and eugenics. This history allows present-day social workers to imagine themselves firmly on the side of social justice without having to examine how oppressive and complex historical legacies, alongside contemporary discursive and structural factors, shape their everyday efforts. A fuller account of social work’s history needs to contend with the cohesive work that both branches of the new social work undertook to lead eugenics policies and practices; with the way in which the “mingling” of races and classes was used to attempt to assimilate diverse people to become more like the white ruling classes; and with the fact that community-level social work efforts can be as oppressive as even the worst individualistic casework, whereas casework can be carried out in a way that’s politically aligned with radical political critique. As we explore further in the next chapter, a fuller account also needs to contend with social work histories outside of white social work histories.

2 White Supremacy and the Erasure of Racialized Social Workers

Social Work History as White Social Work History This chapter furthers the question, began in the last chapter, of what and who gets left out of the standard account. Here we focus primarily on “the colorline,” a phrase made famous by Black activist-scholar W.E.B Du Bois at the same time as the term “social work” was coined.1 We focus on the work the colour line continues to do since his time in its framing of the Progressive Era. We reflect upon who gets credited for making history and how this choice maps onto moral economies that separate who is and isn’t a valued human with something to offer our social world. In contrast to the histories most circulated, at the time the term “social work” was coined, community initiatives and innovations in working with disadvantaged groups as well as efforts to transform political structures were taking place all over the world. Many of the people involved in these diverse interventions into the social world were neither Christian nor secular, and many weren’t white. For example, according to Saba Mahmood, Zaynab al-Ghazali “is credited with establishing a women’s organization [in Egypt] called the Society of Muslim Ladies … which was initially dedicated to providing charitable services to poor women and children” and later expanded to work towards structural change in collaboration with the Muslim Brotherhood.2 The Society of Muslim Ladies was established in the 1930s, and it might be imagined that al-Ghazali’s efforts were made possible due to feminist successes in Europe and white settler colonies like Canada and the United States. However, Mahmood shows that alGhazali’s interventions into the social world were “a product of the sociopolitical ethos of her times and the new possibilities that were opening up for women at the turn of the twentieth century [in Egypt itself]. Al-Ghazali reached adulthood when there had already been almost three decades of women’s activism

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in Egypt.”3 There was also a proliferation of women’s publications around 1900 that “was accompanied by an efflorescence of women’s charitable associations, which served as the springboard for women’s entry into public and political life.”4 This Egyptian timeline is concurrent to, and squarely resonant with, first wave feminism in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as well as the rise of women’s central role in providing charity that accompanied feminist movements in the Global North. In Europe and white settler colonies, histories of feminism and social work tend to be mapped onto stories of progress, which are framed as a movement away from religion and towards secularism (whether or not that fits with historical figures’ understandings). Indeed, as Sherene Razack observes, “the secular/religious divide . . . functions as a color line, marking the difference between the modern, enlightened West, and people of color, notably Muslims.”5 This blueprint for historical progress doesn’t map well onto developments in Egypt – and not because secularism was unavailable as an option. “Zaynab alGhazali’s first exposure to women’s activism came at the age of sixteen when she joined the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), an affiliation that she reportedly later terminated because of the EFU’s ‘secular orientation.’”6 In reading about al-Ghazali’s treatment of gender relations, it may be easy for many white readers to imagine that secular feminism is a better path towards justice. For example, “the language of ‘women’s rights’ finds an important … place in al-Ghazali’s speeches and writings and is often invoked to emphasize that Muslim women and men are equally called upon to serve God,”7 a priority that may seem misaligned to a secular reader. However, Mahmood demonstrates the profound changes that al-Ghazali and Islamic women’s movements have had on gender relations in Egypt. In her conclusion, she challenges readers with the spectre of genocide, which she suggests is implicit in secular framings of non-secular ways of being: she invites her readers to consider “that analysis as a mode of conversation [across difference], rather than mastery, can yield a vision of coexistence that does not require making other lifeworlds extinct or provisional.”8 Is it possible for secular white readers in the Global North to imagine that Muslim Egyptian navigations of gender relations are just as legitimate and potentially transformative as those that are valued within secular feminism? Furthermore, what would it mean to take seriously Mahmood’s challenge that we tend to approach difference as something we implicitly aim to make “extinct?” Histories like al-Ghazali’s are left out of the standard account of social work, which traces white US settlement houses and Charity Organization Society initiatives back to white people’s initiatives in the United Kingdom.9 This chapter offers a small corrective to this tendency. We do not, however, claim to offer a

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complete account of the story of racialized peoples’ contributions to what has come to be called social work. There will always be examples left out, and our account is no exception. However, by foregrounding and naming these exclusions, and by making humble correctives to a few such exclusions, we hope to offer a context for thinking further about the kinds of interventions into the social world that are normally left out of social work history. We aim to show that these exclusions are arbitrary, in the sense of being unjustifiable; yet, at the same time, they are logically coherent within the framework of white supremacy and have real effects on people’s lives and possibilities. They are arbitrary because there is no objective reason to privilege white people’s accomplishments and to leave out those of racialized communities; but they are perfectly sensible and coherent within the moral economy of white supremacy. White supremacy shapes both the inclusions and the exclusions of the standard account of social work’s origin. In response to these exclusions, this chapter highlights some innovations, contributions, and legacies that racialized communities have made, focusing on Black communities in the United States and Canada. The standard account of social work is simply a white account of white social work.* It ignores racialized peoples’ contributions to the mishmash of interventions into our social world that has been called social work for over a century, and thus constructs social work as white in both the past and the present. The few historical figures we name, alongside countless Black anti-slavery and anti-lynching advocates, community organizers, settlement workers, and other activists and charity workers, were active in forging the foundation of modern social work. Yet, it’s only recently that early Black social workers like Ida B. Wells, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Mary Church Terrell, Reverdy Ransom, and Maggie Walker are having their histories told or read in contexts where there aren’t exclusively Black students, and where these historical figures are understood to be the originators of social work (as opposed to only the originators of Black social work) that they really were. If we understand social work to include various forms of relief initiatives, as well as diverse actions aiming towards community and large-scale political and social transformation – as with the range of work done at Hull-House or by alGhazali and the Society of Muslim Ladies – then the distinction between what

* This point borrows from Bell’s intervention into disability studies, suggesting it either needs to expand its focus beyond white disabled lives or it needs to rebrand itself “white disability studies.” Resonantly, in “Colonial Encounters,” Badwall explores the racism in social work history and contemporary discourse, and calls social work a “white-dominated profession.”

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does and does not get officially designated as social work becomes increasingly arbitrary and unjustifiable. As Linda Gordon asserts, “Welfare histories [have] been by definition white-centered.”10 She shows that it’s “possible to make the widespread welfare reform activity of minority women visible only by changing the definition of the topic and its periodization.”11 Likewise, such a move shifts the understanding of the entirety of social work history. Because social workers are assumed to be white, social work within communities of colour – including that which inspired later white social workers – gets almost entirely left out. Before recounting the histories themselves, we might reflect: considering the explicit anti-Black racism and violence that was widespread in Canada and the United States at the time of social work’s nominal emergence, what kinds of efforts would have made sense for Black social workers? This chapter highlights a few stories of people who were engaged in certain kinds of social welfare activity that have not been officially acknowledged as such within histories of social welfare. Histories such as these are frequently dismissed as particular to specific populations. When white people worked with other white people, the particularity wasn’t noted – whiteness as particularity went unremarked. But Black social work, when discussed at all, tends to be told as Black history rather than part of a collective history. White history is told as a shared history, whereas Black, Indigenous, and racialized histories are normally deemed relevant only to their respective communities. But, considering the social and political context, it made sense for Black social workers to focus on interventions relating specifically to Black communities.* The reasons for this focus include racism, a sense of connection to those communities, a feeling of solidarity with the struggles their own neighbours were experiencing, and the recognition that their neighbours were struggling distinctly, and often more intensely, than white people living nearby (due to racial segregation and the uneven distribution of resources that has always accompanied it in practice12). Black social work was no more particular or insular than work being done within white communities. Yet Black social work, and its contributions to the world we live in, continues to be largely unacknowledged by white recorders of history, which of course includes white recorders of social work history. When white social work was first emerging, a strong and diverse tradition of Black social work was also emerging. Jane Addams is championed as the founder of radical social work, and her anti-racism is used as a prime example

* That this focus still makes sense for many Black social workers is very clearly articulated in the (US) National Association of Black Social Workers’ Code of Ethics.

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of how she lived her political commitments. At the same time (and earlier), however, there were massive organizing efforts on the part of Black people who were pivotal in founding radical social work. If we relieve Addams of some of the responsibility for carrying the entire tradition of social justice–oriented social work practice, we can look to other historical figures and social work movements to see that alternative approaches to helping have always existed – including among professional social workers. Iris Carlton-LaNey points out that when social work was laying down its roots in white America, Black people were developing a “parallel social welfare system.”13 Because of racist segregation policies, many Black people could not access white social welfare programs, and Black service providers were not welcome in the majority of white organizations. In this context, Black communities’ efforts focused on what at the time was referred to as “racial uplift,” and a number of originators of Black social work believed that Black people should deliver services for Black people. Ida B. Wells, for instance, wrote: “The Afro-American can do for himself what no one else can do for him.”14 Black communities organized benefit programs, schools, adult education initiatives, community centres, healthcare clinics, homeless shelters, settlement houses, seniors’ homes, youth programs, parenting education, daycares, kindergartens, recreation programs, job banks, clothing banks, ice banks, food banks, and bank banks. And yet, white people providing these types of services to white people at this time is what is called the origin of social work. Therefore, we can ask: Who gets to tell history? Who are its imagined and actual audiences? Who gets cast as the protagonists or primary characters in the stories that are told, and how does this choice affect the take-up of these stories among diverse audiences? Who benefits from these histories being told in the ways that they’re told? And what role do these versions of history have in furthering the moral economies that continue to accumulate moral worth for white subjects and denigrate the imagined value of people of colour? Black Churches: Bestowing Charity and Organizing for Change There are limitless forms by which people help one another. However, resonating with Egyptian developments at this time, two of the key sites in which help became organized and formalized in Black communities were churches (especially those associated with the social gospel movement) and women’s clubs (which were either secular or attached to a religious institution). The church therefore played a key role in the development of Black social work. In white social work, “social work tended to fill spaces left by the reduced role of religion in everyday life,”15 but organized religion played a more central role in Black

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social work. This situation arose not only because of the role that organized religion played in the development of charity and aid, which also heavily influenced white social work, but also for reasons particular to Black communities. In many Black communities, churches were the only available community spaces. In many places in the United States, it was illegal for Black people to congregate in groups of more than five people other than at church, which meant that organizing was criminalized outside of the church. According to Carter G. Woodson, a prominent Black intellectual at the time, churches were “the only institution in which [Black people could] freely exercise authority”16 and pursue strategies of self-determination and self-governance.* As a result of these factors, churches were important spaces for community organizing, and they ran numerous social and political programs alongside their more traditional role of providing relief to poor people.17 Some Black people, however, were critical of the role of organized religion. W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, disparaged Black churches for not doing enough to help Black communities. In 1912, he wrote in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) publication The Crisis that the church was “still building churches when people need homes and schools, and persisting in crucifying critics rather than realizing the handwriting on the wall.”18 At the same time, he recognized the importance of churches and their centrality in Black communities.19 In the conclusion to an extensive study he led on the Black church, Du Bois, with Mary Church Tyrell and Kelly Miller, recognized the significance of the church as “a mighty social power,” but also asserted “it needs cleansing; reviving and inspiring.”20 One of the key influences of social work and the helping professions in Canada and the United States was the social gospel movement.21 Social gospel originated as a reaction to the social and economic devastation that industrial capitalism caused and the absence of an appropriate response from conventional Christianity.22 Made up of radical and progressive Protestants, the movement engaged in a variety of social welfare programs. Many social change–oriented churches throughout the United States implemented important social programs.23 The Institutional Church in Chicago, under the leadership of Black Reverend Reverdy C. Ransom, is one example of the social gospel movement in action. Ransom and his congregation built a

* In discussing the important role Black churches played in delivering social services and spawning social work, we don’t want to paint a picture of white social work as secular and Black social work as religious or at least heavily influenced by Christianity. There were secular Black social workers and many white Christian churches that did social work during this period.

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settlement house that opened in 1900 and was designed to cater to the needs of the Black community.24 Ransom was a radical, encouraging people to think about adopting socialism, which he saw as a solution to racism.25 He also worked to help settle conflicts between white strikers and Black strikebreakers in Chicago.26 Resonantly, Woodson describes how a Congregational church in Massachusetts under the leadership of W.N. DeBerry established “a free employment bureau, a women’s welfare league, a night school of domestic training, a girls’ and a boys’ club emphasizing the handicrafts, music, and athletics.”27 Similar programs existed in progressive Black churches across the United States and Canada.28 The social gospel movement worked in both white and Black communities to deal with the material crises that people experienced. In addition to increasing people’s access to education, childcare, settlement houses, homeless shelters, and other social services,29 the social gospel movement also worked towards large-scale political change.* Carter G. Woodson, known as the “Father of Black History,”30 referred to the work of social gospellers as “social work” in The History of the Negro Church in 1921. “Separate Spheres” and Women’s Clubs Following the social disruptions caused in Europe and white settler spaces by capitalist industrialization and urbanization, a new discourse of gendered mores, norms, and values emerged. This new arrangement, referred to as “separate spheres,” was a system which held that respectable men and women should only occupy roles then considered gender appropriate. The resultant separation between men and women was helpful in creating possibilities for love-based companionships among ruling class women at the time, known as “Boston marriages” (which we discuss in the next chapter).31 It was oppressive in many other ways, however, and it furthered the moral economy of differentiated human value – valuing the supposedly men’s sphere over the women’s sphere. According to separate spheres discourse and mores, the public domain (politics, paid work, and so on) was to be peopled exclusively by men, and the private domain (household and family) was to be exclusively women’s domain.32 These supposedly “traditional” ideas have a much more recent history than we tend to think. Previously in Europe, although gender roles were segregated, local community norms and immediate family needs largely governed how, where,

* Lam notes that Tommy Douglas, who would become premier of Saskatchewan and establish public healthcare, was a social gospel preacher.

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and with whom people spent their time. The home had often been the location of economic activity, whether for farming or cottage industries, and men and women, boys and girls would often work alongside one another on many day-to-day tasks. The notion that men should work for pay and women should tend to the home and care for the family was at best inconsistently followed, and there was no sense that it was morally superior to always segregate genders. In response to the moral panic arising due to the increased personal freedom that resulted from capitalist industrialization and urbanization, separate spheres discourse arose to police interactions between men and women. It was essentially a moral discourse. In order to demonstrate oneself as respectable, a person would only ever labour in ways then considered gender appropriate. Alongside shifting the norms and mores within ruling class culture itself, this change enabled yet another way for poor and racialized people, especially women, to be looked down upon as morally inferior: female slaves and poor women of any race could not abstain from the “public” or “men’s sphere” of labouring for others. Poor women worked outside of their homes to survive,33 and, obviously, slaves could not freely choose how to direct their labour. Thus, ruling class women’s respectability and morality increasingly relied upon differentiating themselves from women who cooked, cleaned, and provided care in other people’s homes and were considered inferior for doing so.34 Relatively well-off Black women, before and after emancipation, often demonstrated their respectability and full humanity by adhering to the dominant social mores of separate spheres. Black communities frequently adopted all or part of separate spheres norms and discourse. Of Black Nova Scotians, for example, Suzanne Morton writes: “Gender ideology that placed women in the home offered protection and dignity within their own community, even if it could not secure recognition from the white middle class.”35 Harley explains the adherence to separate spheres norms in the context of the post-emancipation US South: “Gender-defined work and domestic responsibilities were symbolic of their new status.” He argues that, within a white supremacist and patriarchal society, “sex-segregation helped to protect black women, married or single, from charges of immorality such as those made by nineteenth- and twentiethcentury writers and reformers.”36 The performance of separate spheres allowed select Black people to establish membership in the new middle class, which Marie Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack describe as gaining “a toehold on respectability.”37 Although white supremacy and patriarchy continued to shape and define their lives and possibilities, some Black women were able to accumulate the social markers of the bourgeois class (certain kinds of dress and education, avoiding labour considered unbecoming for a lady, and so on) through which they precariously entered the ranks of the middle class.

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As in white communities, separate spheres mores intersected with the rise of the middle class professions, which shaped selective opportunities for women to enter the public sphere – but only in roles related to the direction and surveillance of the private sphere. Women occupied paid positions in nursing, childhood education, and social welfare activities, but only rarely in more squarely male-gendered professions such as law or medicine. In Black communities, the transition to women occupying leadership roles within the female-gendered spheres seems to have been smoother than in white communities. For instance, Shirley Yee writes: “Black women often worked with Black men in building institutions that were critical to daily life. Black women’s involvement in the establishment of churches, schools, and mutual aid societies reflected a long legacy of cooperation between Black men and women.” She shows how “Black Canadian women continually blurred the line between public and private and tailored their own notions of ‘true’ womanhood to the realities they faced in daily life.”38 In both Canada and the United States, according to Yee, “the adoption of patriarchal structures that ironically symbolized freedom also illustrated the pervasiveness of sex role ideology.” However, this ideology was resisted too – or at least it was navigated in ways that seem to have been unique to Black communities: “Through their public activism, Black women maintained the interconnectedness of family and community, the private and the public – between which there was little distinction” in their real lives.39 Their ability to interconnect may have been because Black women had always worked in the “public sphere,” and these social mores were only newly available to them; and it may have also reflected distinct (and surely internally diverse) gender mores and norms that had been brought over from West Africa and were preserved through slavery.40 During this time, women’s clubs were one public forum for women to engage in the social governance of the private realm, discussing and acting on issues that were deemed gender-role appropriate. The 1890s saw a wave of clubs emerge in the United States that were focused not only on the home, but also on social and political reform.41 In this decade alone, clubs emerged in New York, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Jefferson City, Omaha, New Orleans, Knoxville, and Providence – and likely in smaller communities as well.42 In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women was founded by activists including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Francis Harper, and Harriet Tubman, bringing Black women’s clubs from across the country into a coalition.43 Women’s clubs of this era were largely focused on individual and community betterment, which they called racial uplift.44 Clubs also served as a training ground for women to obtain community work and social service skills.45 With some important exceptions, these clubs were run by middle and upper class

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Black women, who could follow separate spheres mores for women46 and often had a college education.47 Women’s clubs typically espoused domestic feminism, which, according to Nancy Cott, is “women’s assertion of private power (particularly reproductive control) within their families.”48 Club women, according to Anne Meis Knupfer, “perceived their roles of mother, wife, and homemaker as cornerstones to ‘race uplift’ and progress.”49 They founded orphanages, settlement houses, youth clubs, kindergartens, women’s education opportunities, employment services, youth/recreational programs, nursing homes, daycares, and at least one YWCA.50 Notably, these programs were all in keeping with the ideologies of domestic feminism and separate spheres. Club women helped establish many important social services and worked towards strengthening the Black community, always in keeping with those arenas of life in which it was normatively deemed appropriate for women to participate. The social and political effects of the work of Black women’s clubs, like the concrete effects of Addams’s and Richmond’s work, were therefore complicated. They provided crucial programs and resources to communities that were usually excluded from white social work services, but they also acted to police morality and gender roles. Women’s clubs worked towards reform and progress, but they also confined social service providers and recipients alike to gender roles deemed appropriate according to classed and racialized social mores.* The Great Migration: Migrant Assistance and the Shift towards Black Incarceration The “Great Migration” began around 1915 and, according to Isabel Wilkerson, was “a statistically measurable demographic phenomenon marked by unabated outflows of black émigrés” to Northern US states.51 In order to support the many people who were arriving in cities in the North, often incredibly poor and in need of assistance, Black people set up a number of welfare programs.52 One of the key areas of assistance was with women from the South, many of whom were targeted by predatory employment agencies that would force them into debt and, at times, horrendous working conditions. Black (and sometimes white) social workers were sent out to assist with directions, funds, a place to stay, and advocacy.53

* This limitation, of course, was also clearly true of white social work – as discussed in chapters 1 and 3.

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The largest organization working with Black migrants from the South in this period was the National Urban League (NUL).54 Black social worker and social work educator George Haynes founded and led the NUL, which Elmer Martin and Joanne Mitchell Martin say had the “leading, most advanced black social workers.”55 The NUL monitored existing relief programs, advocating for Black people who had been treated unjustly.56 They worked to ensure economic access to Black people, which involved combatting racism and difficult social and material conditions, and to reframe Southern Black migrants as skilled workers in the ruling class social imagination. The NUL advocated for Black migrants to become “skilled, unionized industrial workers [who would be fully integrated] into the urban political economy.”57 Yet, this goal was accomplished by working to assimilate the migrants to Northern and middle class mores and sensibilities. This approach, according to Martin and Martin, led to social workers focusing on changing individuals to adapt to existing social structures rather than working to change unjust social systems58 – as with most social services at the time. The demographic and social shift of the Great Migration also marked an important point in previously all-white “services” that were now available to, and imposed upon, Black people. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell discuss the profound differences in the institutionalization of communities based on race. Once slavery was abolished, the US state began the mass incarceration of Black people; by the start of the Great Migration, Black people made up the majority of people incarcerated in prisons and asylums. Due to racist segregation, Black people hadn’t previously been institutionalized in poor houses and asylums during much of the nineteenth century, but this policy shifted postemancipation, and Black people became increasingly pathologized. By 1919, for example, the political phenomena of diagnosing “feeblemindedness was so prevalent among African American children that all the black schools in one southern Georgia county had been closed.”59 Now, articulated through the new eugenics discourse, all Black children were said to be uneducable. Snyder and Mitchell describe how the white supremacist pathologization of the entire population of Black people as feebleminded “served to disqualify the population as viable candidates for eugenically based [individualistic] interventions.” They write that Black people therefore “largely escaped the devastation of eugenics-based practices,” and, as a result, it was only in “the late 1940s [that] African Americans with disabilities begin to be institutionalized along with their white counterparts.”60 While this pattern seems true of medically justified institutionalization, they also observe that the mass imprisonment of Black people had begun earlier. At this time, any gender-segregated confinement was commonly rationalized as a form of eugenics with the explicitly

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intended effect of keeping people from reproducing. These early justifications should be kept in mind when reflecting upon the political function of prisons and other closed institutions today. From the beginning of the Great Migration, Black communities organized to provide “outdoor relief,” which allowed people to access goods and resources while remaining free from confinement; at the same time, white communities were beginning to massively confine many Black people in the asylums and prisons that were a legacy of an earlier move towards the “indoor relief ” of poor white people. As was the case with the earlier shift among denigrated Europeans and white settlers,* the massive use of confinement came about because it became increasingly socially unacceptable for white people to openly and publicly kill and torture Black people,61 due to the efforts of early Black social working and activism. This new use of confinement as a primary means of the racist social control of Black people also coincided closely with the mass confinement of Indigenous children in the Indian residential school system, which the government of the Province of Canada took on as a major policy initiative in the 1840s;62 it was now also becoming increasingly socially unacceptable for white people to openly and publicly kill and torture Indigenous people.63 So, while it is true that Black, Indigenous, and racialized people largely escaped the specific violences of early eugenic policies and practices,64 this “escape” carries a very different meaning if intersected with concurrent histories of anti-Black lynching, western expansion, and the Indian Wars. Once such overt racialized violence became increasingly less acceptable, imprisonment, institutionalization, and Indian residential schools were massively used against racialized and Indigenous populations.65 Continuities can therefore be traced between plantation slavery and today’s seemingly entirely distinct institutions of anti-Black racism. For example, Malcolm X recalled his childhood involvement with state welfare workers as so fundamentally characterized by white people shaming his mother that he considered it a legacy of rampant white shaming, denigration, and control of Black mothers during slavery; he also notes another continuity of slavery in the fact that he became the legal property of the white state once apprehended, with white social workers controlling where he lived and what he did.66 Anti-racist activists have also drawn connections between slavery and what was only then becoming today’s prison system.

* According to Foucault, it was the wearing away of the social acceptability and utility of public and explicit violences against these denigrated white people that gave way to the shift towards incarcerating people deemed mad and, later, people convicted of crimes.

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Although US slavery was abolished in 1865 through the Thirteenth Amendment, the same legislative act named the enslavement of convicts an exception: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”67 This law enabled two already existing systems of violence and control to intersect and maintain the exploitation of Black labour. Laws in the North and South that targeted free Black people already existed, enabling Black people to be arrested and punished for things that no white person was criminalized for doing. Following slavery abolition, this persecution intensified with the Black Codes of 1865 and 1866.68 These codes intersected with another violent system that previously mostly targeted white convicts and hadn’t yet been an instrument of anti-Black racism. The convict lease system allowed convicts to be “leased” to companies and forced to engage in unpaid labour (the state was paid a small sum for their labour but prisoners received nothing). Post-emancipation, in tandem with the Black Codes and the continued legality of enslaving convicts according to the Thirteenth Amendment, the convict lease system enabled the enslavement of many Black people. In 1892, Ida B. Wells documented conditions within this racist system: “In one camp it is stated that the mortality is 10 per cent per month, and in another even more than that. In these camps men and women are found chained together.” She also reported: “Men who failed to perform their task of mining from two to four tons of coal per day were fastened to planks by the feet, then bent over a barrel and fastened by the hands on the other side, stripped and beaten with a strap.”69 Although fewer people were subjected to this system than had been subjected to slavery, the experiences of those subjected to convict leasing weren’t particularly different from slavery. A similar pattern of reform functioning simply to reorganize power followed the civil rights gains and abolition of legal racial segregation a century later. One racist system was abolished, and other long-existing systems of control and violence (previously used mostly against marginalized white people) now became mobilized in anti-Black racism: “child protective systems” didn’t normatively target Black families until the end of racial segregation,70 psychiatry began to target folks active in Black Power movements, so that “schizophrenia became a Black disease;”71 and the US prison system has expanded monumentally since the gains of Black Power movements. There’s a clear relationship between the inheritances of slavery and the ongoing white supremacist structural violence of the prison system. Due to the specific context of the historical emergence of the prison and the shared characteristics of certain power relations in slavery and imprisonment, Angela Davis invites her readers to consider: “Is racism so deeply entrenched in the

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institution of the prison that it is not possible to eliminate one without eliminating the other?”72 In addition to continuities dating back to slavery in today’s anti-Black racism, new racist stories emerged in the wake of slavery abolition that serve to pre-empt and delegitimize critique of the white supremacist prison system. Post-emancipation, Black people were subjected to the tremendously harsh and arbitrary Black Codes and thus were incarcerated as a result of structural anti-Black racism rather than due to committing a disproportionate number of crimes. However, critique was pre-empted within white consciousness when “during the 1870s the growing number of black prisoners in the South further buttressed the belief that African Americans were inherently criminal.”73 This belief dovetailed with concurrent developments in eugenic criminology that claimed to scientifically prove that some people were “born criminals.”74 While eugenic criminology tended to target marginalized white people (due perhaps to the continuous violence of anti-Black lynching and the eugenic belief that every single Black person is unfit75), the notion of an inherent criminality intersected with new discourses of anti-Black racism at the time of slavery abolition. As a result, we’ve inherited and continue to perpetuate the enduring, false, and clearly racist notion that Black people are more prone to crime than white people. Black Settlement Houses Settlement houses were also founded in Black communities during the Progressive Era. The standard account of the development of social work depicts settlement houses as following a model imported from the United Kingdom, but Ralph Luker argues that these institutions were strongly influenced by missions established by Northern Black churches in the South starting in 1869, six years after slavery was abolished in the United States. These missions shared similar ideas and practices, and sometimes staff. Luker calls these Black missions “proto-settlement houses.” Many were developed by Black religious organizations, others by white religious or philanthropic organizations.76 These “proto-settlement houses” were created to address the difficulties many Black people in the South faced post-emancipation, and they preceded the first settlement house in the world (Toynbee Hall, in London, England) by fifteen years. In 1890, the year after Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded HullHouse, Janie Barrett founded the Locust Street Settlement in Virginia, which is officially the first “settlement house” for Black people.77 The timeline, however, may prove a little more complicated. The Locust Street Settlement grew out of a

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service Barrett had been providing in her own home for several years previous to this point.78 But Hull-House didn’t emerge the previous year with the breadth of services it would later come to offer; it started much more humbly, initially only providing childcare for working women.79 What this complication means is that Barrett had initiated some of the work, later called the settlement work of the Locust Street Settlement, several years before Addams had even devised the idea of opening a “settlement house” of her own. Does that timeline mean Barrett should get credit for the first US settlement house? Maybe, maybe not.* But it certainly makes a difference to how this history tends to be framed. As discussed in the previous chapter, origin stories matter. They make a difference to how social work is conceived, how race is conceived, and how the two are imagined to intersect with one another. If Hull-House was only the first American “settlement house” in name, or even only “the first white settlement house,” as opposed to being the first settlement house in terms of what it did, then surely this alternative timeline complicates the account that tends to be told about the birth of social work. If concrete and acknowledged antecedents to settlement work are found in earlier Black social interventions, this finding complicates accounts we tend to tell about a number of things, from social work to the role of Black people in shaping the world more generally. At least eleven Black communities had settlement houses by 1910, and several had more than one (Philadelphia had at least three). Black missions or settlements (the name is significant: “missions” underscores that these predated Hull-House and even Toynbee Hall; “settlements” mobilizes the moral economies of white supremacy and secularism to bestow a certain legitimacy to this Black “social work”) provided a plethora of services and programs, including schools for students and future teachers, healthcare services, agricultural conferences, mothers’ meetings, short-term housing, daycare, and the distribution of coal and food. Some also conducted social science studies of the Black communities they served.80 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Another important part of social work history that often gets left out of the standard account is temperance organizing. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, the temperance movement was large and very influential. The largest temperance

* Again, other Black folks had been doing this work in “missions” for several decades at this point.

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organization was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874. The WCTU had a massive woman-run publishing operation – producing 125,000 pages in 1890. In Canada, the first WCTU chapter was founded in Ontario in 1877; the Dominion WCTU, Canada’s national organization, was founded in 1888. The Canadian WCTUs were modelled after and mentored by the American WCTU and had their strongest support in rural areas. After only three years, the Dominion WCTU had nearly 10,000 members, and in 1914 it had nearly 17,000. The WCTU in the United States was made up of autonomous local organizations, some of which were mixed race while others were racially segregated. In the South, it was commonplace to have segregated unions; generally, Black unions were called “number two.”81 Therefore, both of the following are true: white supremacy ensured that Black women were considered second class in the national unions and broader social structures;82 and Black women were active in WCTUs and made important contributions to the organization and the temperance movement more broadly.83 It is important to acknowledge the exaltation of white women in the leadership of the organization, as well as to recognize that Black women played significant roles in it. The most prominent Black woman in the WCTU was Francis Harper. She became the superintendent of Work Among the Colored People of the North in 1883, a position she held for several years. Alison Parker explains that Harper and other Black women were attracted to the WCTU because of “its commitment to national legislation and federal solutions to moral and social problems in the United States.”84 Harper strove towards interracial cooperation and travelled the country advocating for it within the WCTU and Black temperance activism more generally. Harper supported women’s suffrage and viewed white women as important potential allies. She advocated for and had some (limited) success in having more Black representation in the national governing bodies of the WCTU.85 The WCTU and other temperance organizations did a great deal of the kinds of work that those who are credited as founding social work were also doing. Like Hull-House, the WCTU was headquartered in Chicago and did social work such as operating homes for “fallen women,” establishing kindergartens, providing vocational training, advocating for better care for orphaned children, engaging in prison and policing reform projects (which included calls for police matrons and forced prison labour), providing educational programs for mothers and children, and advocating for legislation reform to protect girls.86 The WCTU also worked to lay the groundwork for women to become more prominent in political reform. Significantly, Francis Willard, the long-time leader of the WCTU, called the work of the WCTU “social

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work.”* Why then would the WCTU be left out of the standard account of social work history? Carol Mattingly posits that the WCTU is largely excluded from feminist history because of “contemporary scholars’ discomfort with temperance women’s religious/evangelical associations.”87 This theory seems likely in relation to social work history, whether feminist or otherwise, due to the normative notion that progress over the last few centuries has mapped onto increasing secularism. From a contemporary standpoint, temperance organizing is a political anomaly: these women often used direct action protest tactics and were religious zealots. They viewed all social issues as caused by a single thing – alcohol (and sometimes other drugs like tobacco) – and they believed that eliminating this vice would solve social problems such as poverty and violence against women. Indeed, Frances Willard quoted Richard Cobden: “Temperance Reform lies at the foundation of all reforms.”88 Perhaps seemingly paradoxical by contemporary standards, Sharon Cook argues that the WCTU’s “conservative ideas of family relationships could, and did, result in progressive demands.”89 As a prime example, the WCTU led what may have been the earliest mass campaign against men’s violence against women and children – still a central social work issue today. The WCTU rallied around the watchword “home protection,” coined by Canadian WCTU leader Letitia Youmans. Willard made this watchword a guiding principle for the organization.90 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, alcohol consumption had been constructed as masculine with, according to Cook, “its most destructive impact on the home and the often defenceless family.”91 Alcohol was blamed for men’s desertion of their wives and children, poverty, domestic violence, and sexual assault. The WCTU saw eliminating alcohol as removing the root cause of all these problems. The WCTU circulated petitions against the assault on women and girls, and the organization’s members attended criminal trials in support of female victims of sexual violence. They led campaigns to raise the age of consent in the United States and Canada, and were almost always successful.92 Cook therefore writes that temperance was “a ‘constellation’ issue,” which included “several associated – and ultimately more important – concerns, through which women expressed their outrage at male violence and irresponsibility, their fears for the

* In her book, Do Everything, Willard wrote: “This includes our work for the defective, dependent and delinquent classes. The departments are so numerous that I will not undertake to name them all … [A]ll may read the list of those blessed endeavors grouped under the head of evangelistic and social work” (166).

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survival of the family unit, and, eventually, their collective demands for legislative solutions to these problems.”93 While blaming alcohol and other intoxicants for men’s violence against women, the WCTU nevertheless also politicized violence against women as a gendered social issue and was seemingly the first large cohesive group that organized to eliminate it. As with many social workers then and now, child protection and well-being were a major WCTU concern. In addition to homes for single mothers and their children, the WCTU worked with children’s aid societies to identify and assist children in need. When a child protection agency was created in Ontario, the WCTU expressed the desire to “greatly assist by recommending the names of suitable persons to help in this work.”94 In the United States, the Department of Securing Homes for Homeless Children attempted to do just that. Willard wrote: “Cooperation with existing Children’s Aid Societies is recommended … and [they] are glad to welcome us as coadjutors. It is not too much to say that the salvation of our beloved country depends upon the salvation of these children.”95 The WCTU and its youth counterpart, the YWCTU, ran a number of homes for women in the United States. In Canada, Ottawa’s Home for Friendless Women provided shelter for “fallen women” with children, teaching them parenting skills and providing them with basic necessities. In order to stay in the home, women had to agree to live there for one year or more. The program was designed to both punish and rehabilitate these women, in part through long hours of laundry work. The shelter also took in old women. Another shelter was the “Frances E. Willard Home for Girls [which] was a temporary shelter for young women in Toronto founded around 1895.”96 Its 1905 annual report stated: “Girls coming to the city with no definite idea as to employment are counselled to go to private houses as domestics, and situations are usually found for them.”97 In 1903, the Ontario WCTU noted: “Owing to the everincreasing demand for domestics the average time of the girls in Home is too short to admit of much training, nevertheless we are persuaded that through the sheltering care of the Home and its matron many a soul has been saved from degradation.”98 The Ontario WCTU’s annual reports from 1890 to 1926 also suggest an ongoing interest in working specifically in Black and Indigenous communities.99 While they seem to have imagined that work in Indigenous communities first required contact with white missionaries,* it appears that the position of superintendent

* Mrs Tennant wrote in 1895, “I cannot report as fully of the work amongst the Indians, as desired, owing to the fact that only one response has been received from the missionaries written to.”

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for “Work among the Colored People” was inconsistently held by Black and white women.* These reports also suggest a different spin on “temperance,” which makes sense given the era, but is often left out of what could perhaps be called the standard account of the WCTU. It would seem that their concern about alcohol was, at least in part, a eugenic one. As mentioned earlier, eugenicists believed that social and behavioural influences could shape biology as much as they believed that degeneracy works in the opposite direction. Drinking could thus both cause bad heredity and be caused by bad heredity. Therefore, drinking was believed to lead to many other forms of moral and physical degeneracy. Mrs E. Adelia Lucas served as superintendent of the Ontario WCTU’s Department of Heredity and Hygiene. In 1890, she wrote: “The sin of bringing into the world diseased and defective children is almost unpardonable, and the sin of marrying and inebriating and having descendants tainted and switched off on to the side-track of ruin is literally a crime that can never be atoned for.”100 The WCTU founded the Department of Heredity and Hygiene to investigate the eugenic causes of alcohol and tobacco consumption, which “was soon broadened, so as to include all hereditary tendencies, healthful and pure, as well as diseased conditions.” Lucas maintained that these tendencies reflect “one of God’s primal laws for all living things.”101 Her eugenic rhetoric, then, is thoroughly Christian – undermining the often-assumed analysis that what was considered science displaced religion at this “progressive” time. The WCTU’s Department of Heredity and Hygiene wove science into its religious world view. Anti-Lynching Lynching, the act of extralegal mob murder, became increasingly commonplace as a racialized form of violence in many parts of the United States following emancipation. Although lynching was not a new practice, for the first time in 1885 there were more lynchings of Black people than white, and this tendency persisted until around the time that Black people began to be institutionalized.102 The year-by-year statistics show a dramatic increase of lynching

* This is our understanding from available records. Emma Fox, superintendent of Work Among Colored People in 1893, appears to position herself as a Black woman when she says “the future of our race”: “I believe that the hope for the future of our race, or, in fact any race, rests entirely with the boys and girls.” However, Lillian M. Phelps, superintendent of Work Among Colored People in 1895, seems to position herself as non-Black when she describes Black people as “that race”: “[I]n many counties … there is not a colored man or woman; but along the frontiers there is and always has been a large colored population, brought here by the protection of the Canadian flag offered to that race from the chains of human bondage.”

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in general, alongside a decrease in white people who were lynched each year. When Black people were no longer considered the property of individual white people who could punish and kill them at will, mobs of white people began to increasingly murder Black people. This violence was often rationalized by claiming that they were protecting themselves or other whites (particularly the virtue of white women) from crimes committed by Black people. According to Davis, after the Civil War, “white supremacy continued to be embraced by vast numbers of people and became deeply inscribed in new institutions. One of these post-slavery institutions was lynching, which was widely accepted for many decades thereafter.”103 Lynching was brutal and torturous; it was also commonplace. A draft of a petition to the federal and state governments in 1918 describes what was going on at the time: The reported causes for such appalling brutality run the gamut from alleged violation of the honor of white women to disputing the word of white men … [However,] only about five per cent of these murders are reputed to have been inflicted upon accused violators of womanhood … [so] the desire to protect womanhood is almost negligibly among the so-called causes of lynchings … May your silence be construed as tacit approval or active tolerance of these things?104

Ida B. Wells-Barnett estimated that 10,000 Black people were lynched in the three decades following the Civil War (1865–1895).105 These murders were horrors on multiple levels: they targeted individuals for torture and death, affected families who were left grieving their loved ones and finding themselves in deeper poverty with the loss of their husband or father’s income, and also affected entire communities, in that many Black people knew people who had been lynched or disappeared. That one could be attacked for standing up for oneself, defending oneself, or simply for being Black would have led to persistent fear in the Black community, as it was designed to do. Trigger warning: Please be advised that the following four paragraphs include graphic descriptions of lynchings. Lynchings were often conducted during the day and in public in order to maximize their impact on terrorizing Black populations and constraining them to rigidly racialized social mores. The 1918 anti-lynching petition mentioned earlier, for example, describes one lynching in which a Black man was burned at the stake and “an entire helpless colored population was marched around the fire, amid fumes of a burning human being and put on notice that as that black man was suffering they too should fear to suffer.”106 Lynching was explicitly about keeping Black people in fear as a tactic to keep them subordinated. It secured

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the force of the colour line post-emancipation, socializing both white and Black people to occupy their respective stratified moral and political positions. At the height of anti-Black lynching, white people took photos of mutilated Black bodies and had them mass printed as postcards,107 which were sold at stores and sent through the US postal service.* The rise of anti-Black lynching maps neatly onto the birth and flourishing of eugenics. If not taken as mere coincidence, this intersection suggests a shift in ruling class white morality in Europe and white settler colonies where racialized, poor, disabled, and otherwise oppressed communities were being targeted for eradication in new ways. As poor and disabled white people were increasingly targeted for incarceration and reproductive, economic, and social death, Black people were initially not incarcerated; instead they were being killed. Of the uneven relationship at the time between anti-Black lynching and disablist eugenics, one illustrative event was the murder of a “seventeen year old boy by the name of Jesse Washington … in 1916,” which is the year after the cornerstone eugenic criminology text, The Criminal Imbecile, was published.108 James Allen says that Jesse Washington was “seriously mentally challenged. The wife of the farmer he worked for was found dead.”109 Jesse was tried and convicted. From Rafter’s history of eugenic criminology, we might expect that Jesse would have been given an indefinite prison sentence, resulting in a eugenically rationalized lifelong incarceration due to his intellectual disability – although in Texas, where he was killed, he may have been more likely confined to an asylum for his life. Regardless, neither of these things took place. Instead he was dragged out of the courtroom, kicked down the steps, tortured, burned alive, castrated, had his fingers cut off one by one, and hanged. “There were 16,000 people crowding the street to watch this boy be tortured … [T]here were cheers, like at a football game, cheering the torturers on.” Perhaps Jesse was partly targeted because he was disabled, but he was publicly tortured and murdered because he was Black.110 Ida B. Wells-Barnett Black communities fought vigorously to abolish lynching. One of the most prominent anti-lynching activists was Ida B. Wells (Wells-Barnett,† following her marriage).111 She was also a founding member of the National Association * During this same period, feminists like Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman were being persecuted for sending “obscene literature” through the post: information about birth control. † She was one of the earliest adopters of a hyphenated married name rather than completely adopting her husband’s last name, according to Williams, Williams, and Mink. We refer to her as Wells or Wells-Barnett based on whether or not she had married prior to the date we are discussing.

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for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Association of Colored Women, and was active in the women’s club movement. In 1884, she first gained wide recognition for refusing to move from an all-white train car and for winning a settlement against the railroad.112 Wells wrote a condemnation of lynching in Memphis’s Free Speech and Headlight after her friend Tom Moss was lynched for defending himself from white men’s physical attacks in 1892. Due to the response to this condemnation, she was forced to flee the South. She recalls: “It was for the assertion of this fact, in the defense of her own race, that the writer hereof became an exile; her property destroyed and her return to her home forbidden under penalty of death.”113 Nevertheless, she continued to agitate against lynching. In 1899, she wrote and circulated a pamphlet, “Lynch Law in Georgia,” to Black communities in Chicago. She wrote: “The real purpose of the savage demonstrations is to teach the Negro that in the south he has no rights that the law will enforce. Samuel House was burned to teach the Negroes that no matter what a white man does to them, they must not resist.”114 In response to dominant framings of anti-Black lynching more generally, and specifically to Jane Addams’s acceptance of this normative white framing in her own condemnation of lynching, Wells demonstrated that most lynchings didn’t involve even a claim* that the murdered man had raped a white woman.115 She showed that many of the lynchings committed on the grounds of sexual assault by Black men against white women were actually white responses to consensual interracial relationships, which were considered unacceptable within interlocking white supremacist patriarchal moral economies.116 White men had only recently lost unmitigated sexual access to the Black women they owned in law, regardless of these women’s desires and consent, with the end of slavery.117 The predominant white account of lynching at the time was that white women were regularly raped by Black men, but Andrea Smith challenges the fictitiousness of this narrative: “In fact, Black women needed protection from white men.”118 Indeed, Wells-Barnett’s grandmother was a slave and her father a slave-owner’s son – so he was likely a child who resulted from rape, as was common during slavery.119 Although fictitious, the prevalent notion that white men had to lynch Black men in order to save white women from Black rape was so pervasive that Hollywood’s first blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation, which had the highest grossing ticket sales until Gone with the Wind twenty-four years later,120 depicts what claims to be a historical account of post-Civil War reconstruction and

* This number varies depending on year. For instance, Wells reports that it was 39 per cent in 1896 and 15 per cent in 1900.

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glorifies the founding of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and a lynching in response to a Black man raping a white woman.121 When considering the views of Smith and Wells-Barnett on lynching Black men accused of raping white women, it’s important to note that white men who raped any woman of any race were never lynched. In fact, most often there was no consequence at all. Contemporary readers should remember this point if they find Wells-Barnett’s handling of rape and sexual assault accusations troubling due to having been socialized within second wave feminism’s crucial politicization of sexual assault and the importance of believing those who say they’ve been sexually assaulted. That indispensable lesson needs to be taken into account, alongside a concern about white supremacist framings of Black and racialized men as particularly prone to rape and other patriarchal violence. Of course, even consensual relationships can involve sexual assault – a point which could be said to become lost within Wells-Barnett’s claim that the issue pertains to race and not sexual assault as the (interracial) relationship was consensual. (That, said, it was not until the 1970s in the United States122 and in 1983 in Canada123 that men could be held legally responsible for raping their wives.) However, it doesn’t appear Wells-Barnett believed that rape never happened. But she was fighting against the ruse by which rape (real or fictitious) was used to excuse lynching. Like many other Black feminists, Wells-Barnett understood how gender and race interlocked, and she fought against this interlocking oppression rather than against racism or sexism in isolation. CarltonLaNey writes of such anti-lynching work, saying that Black women at the time “recognize[d] the political nature of sexism long before their white counterparts.” Wells-Barnett and other early Black social workers “faced the fact that sexual exploitation and violence were perpetuated by both African American and white men.” Carlton-LaNey therefore argues that “politicizing sexual exploitation and harassment for African American women placed it squarely within the context of race. Combatting sexual exploitation, therefore, was inextricably linked to race uplift.”124 Early anti-racist feminism did not minimize sexism or sexual assault; rather, it politicized sexism, sexual assault, and responses to them in multiple directions. Andrea Smith begins her chapter “Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide” by troubling Susan Brownmiller’s second wave white feminist assertion that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” Smith uses this statement as a springboard to explore how racism and colonialism shape the particulars of what rape is.125 Likewise, Wells-Barnett was centrally concerned with situating rape and rape discourse within what contemporary feminists call interlocking oppression, as evidenced by her repeated discussions of gender and race

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and, to a lesser extent, class.126 Such early anti-racist feminist understandings of interlocking oppression trouble the common history of feminism in which interlocking analyses are a recent development initiated by Black feminists such as the Combahee River Collective,127 Kimberlé Crenshaw,128 Patricia Hill Collins,129 Angela Davis,130 Audre Lorde,131 and bell hooks.132 Without minimizing the importance of Black feminism since the 1970s (which often honours earlier Black feminist history), the Black feminist struggle to work against interlocking oppression goes back to the first wave of feminism, which is largely left out of white histories of feminism. It’s not that we wish to reduce the importance of recent anti-racist feminist authors and activists; it’s that remembering the earlier anti-racist feminists raises troubling questions about how feminism’s history up to the 1970s came to be recorded as yet another white history. After fleeing the South, Wells-Barnett organized anti-lynching organizations in a number of states.133 These and other anti-lynching campaigns were hugely influential in Black communities in the United States. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) emerged from anti-lynching activists. Founded in 1909 by a mixture of some of the Black community organizers we’re discussing in this chapter – Wells-Barnett, Terrell, and Du Bois – and some white activists (including Addams), the NAACP has worked for racial equality for over a century and is still active today.134 White Social Work and Anti-Lynching Addams and Wells-Barnett were contemporaries and allies in numerous political struggles.135 Although Addams was somewhat exceptional (for a white person) for her commitment to anti-racism, including her activism against lynching, she also accepted that aspects of the white supremacist connection between sexual assault and lynching were true. She was a member of the NAACP at the time, yet she felt entitled to do and say things that appear to have been unaccountable to the experiences of Black communities. According to Wilma Peebles-Wilkins and E. Aracelis Francis, Addams “did not seem to understand that lynchings involved innocent victims and were not just an unacceptable response to crime.”136 Addams accepted the view that Black men posed a threat to white women and white communities, but objected to lynchings on the grounds that they were not an effective deterrent to this kind of violence and punishment for crimes should be left to the legal system. She also wrote that lynchings were effective in reducing crimes committed by Black men because “certain elements of the self can be prevented from coming into action,” but pointed out that this inhibition was only a temporary fix because these “elements of the self ” might resurface.137 Addams’s analysis was shaped by her whiteness and her class

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positioning, by moral economies of white supremacy, and by discourses stressing the importance of the rule of law and Black men’s criminality. Like Addams, Willard of the WCTU also didn’t understand that lynching was used to control and terrorize Black people. The WCTU refused to allow Wells to address its annual national assembly in 1893. The following year, Wells secured the sponsorship of an organization to ensure that she could address the meeting. She wanted to confront the WCTU’s failure to publicly condemn the lynching of Black men.138 Wells’s insistence on confronting Willard and the WCTU was provoked by an 1890 interview in which Willard made several racist comments about Black people. Willard’s remarks included reiterating the notion that Black men pose a threat to the safety of women and children. She said of white Southerners: “The problem in their hands is immeasurable. The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog-shop [liquor store] is a center of power. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home is menaced.”139 Willard thus reiterated the frequent justification of lynching due to the supposed threat that Black men posed to white women. It is particularly concerning that one of the earliest organizations combatting violence against women reified the idea that Black men were exceptionally violent towards women and failed to condemn the racist violence of lynching. When Wells identified Willard’s position as untrue and racist, Willard defended her position. However, she added: I wish I had said then, as I do now, that the immoralities of white men in their relations with colored women are the source of intolerable race prejudice and hatred, and that there is not a more withering curse upon the manhood of any nation than that which the eternal laws of nature visited upon those men in those homes in which the helpless bondwoman was made the victim of her master’s base desire.140

While Willard continued to claim that Black men posed a sexual threat to white women and girls, she attempted to soften her claims with the acknowledgment that white men also posed a threat to Black women and girls. But, as Mattingly observes, Willard’s condemnation of white men was “situated primarily in the past and associated with the evils of slavery.”141 In effect, Willard was saying that white men may have once posed a threat to Black women and girls, but now it is only Black men who are still dangerous. In response to building pressure, including the condemnation of the WCTU by other prominent Black social justice organizers, the WCTU passed a resolution against lynching in 1895. The resolution stated defensively that the WCTU “ought never to have been placed in the position of having to defend themselves from the charge that they favored the lynching of any human being, anywhere,

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under any circumstances.”142 It also claimed that people “misrepresented our position,” likely referring to Wells, Ransom, and others who demanded that the WCTU actively and publicly condemn lynching. Coming across this story from about 120 years ago, we recognize the still all-too-familiar pattern within social justice work and beyond. Rather than deeply reflecting on her position, this white person in a leadership position, and the organization under her direction, dug in their heels and refused to acknowledge the harm they’d caused. The white people thus claimed their own innocence143 and, worse still, depicted themselves as wronged for having been accused of racism. The implication is that the Black community organizers who challenged the organization’s position were overreacting, too sensitive, and too angry – all of which reaffirms white supremacist anti-Black stereotypes. For this reason, these stories of Wells, Willard, and Addams are not only important as history but also as examples of how people today who claim to be allies need to be reflexive and of when they should defer to the lead of those most directly affected by an issue. Our aim here, with respect to Addams and Willard, is to paint a more complex picture of them – particularly of Addams. We’re all formed by discourses, practices, and moral economies of interlocking oppression. They shape what we can know, believe, and perceive. It’s not that this shaping is out of the realm of our influence or that either woman is innocent. Recognizing these complexities and holding their positive anti-oppressive practice in tension with the clearly racist, classist, and otherwise oppressive things they did is useful in helping us all understand that we’re complicit in oppression even when working against it. Acknowledging this complicity is a crucial part of critical or anti-oppressive practice.144 Early Black social workers were not perfect either. Like everyone else, they were flawed people with imperfect politics who sometimes did oppressive things and often held problematic views about other people. They were part of the project of social work’s new and politically complicated interventions into the social world, and sometimes this project brought an increase in surveillance, assimilation, classism, cisheterosexism, and social control into Black communities. We don’t want to paint a picture of any of these figures as perfect, because we can only follow in the footsteps of the types of people that we know to have existed. As Davis asks of representations of Martin Luther King, Jr: “How could you possibly measure up to someone like that?”145 She stresses that the Montgomery bus boycott – widely considered the birth of the civil rights movement – was started by ordinary people just like any one of us, and she emphasizes how important it is for us to know this in order to open possibilities for considering what role we might play in fundamental social transformation.

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Maggie L. Walker and the Independent Order of St Luke Maggie L. Walker’s record of significantly intervening into the social world begins with her participation in what is believed to be the first anti-segregation school strike by Black students in the United States in 1883. She went on to become a teacher and part-time worker at an insurance company and later was hired as the secretary for the Independent Order of St Luke in Richmond, Virginia. The order had been founded in 1867 by former slave Mary Prout in Baltimore.146 Lily Hardy Hammond, writing in 1922, describes the Order of St Luke when Walker first came on board as “a little benefit society in Richmond – one of probably a dozen or two,” which had around 1,000 members. These societies were commonplace in Black communities where “sickness [was] a catastrophe such as only the poorest people can fully comprehend.” The society paid its members out of dues if a member became sick or died, “thus saving the family from what is often, among the very poor, a crushing burden of debt.”147 At a time when nation-states were just beginning to offer workers’ compensation themselves, local collective organizations, included this one started by Prout, acted as a social safety net. Working class people, including Black people and recent immigrants, would cumulatively contribute to a fund, and the collective would then support them from that fund if they needed it.148 The gradual development of private disability, workers’ compensation, and life insurance are commonly described as contributing to the development of the modern welfare state and as a key part of social work history.149 Walker worked to expand services; by 1922, there were 100,000 members with the organization across twenty-one states. Walker also started the St Luke’s Herald, which provided community and organizational news, and covered topics that preoccupied social work publications of the day such as “health, thrift, morals, and education.”150 The Herald also provided detailed accounts of lynchings, segregation, and racism. The order adopted political positions, including supporting universal suffrage and anti-lynching efforts. It led the Richmond streetcar boycott against segregation in 1904.151 The Independent Order of St Luke created a bank in 1903 under Walker’s direction. Walker thus became the first woman president of a bank in the United States. The bank provided financing for Black people to buy homes and go to college, among other things.152 These funds would have been otherwise difficult or impossible for Black people in the South to obtain. The predominantly circulated history of the credit union is that it was spread by Desjardins to the United States in 1908.153 Credit unions began in Germany, and had begun to be established in Québec by Alphonse Desjardins in 1900 to help low-income people secure credit. Walker’s bank seems to have been

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aligned with the ethos of early collectivist credit unions. When such work is undertaken by a disadvantaged racialized group to provide services for those who couldn’t otherwise access them due to racial segregation and rampant poverty, it is a significant intervention into the social world, enabling people to better navigate and mitigate capitalism’s violences. In 1909, Walker wrote that she wished to “turn the course of that almighty stream of dollar, and see if we can till our own barren lands, feed our own hungry, and clothe our own naked.”154 Yet, this bank is not considered part of credit union history. Like many other early women social workers of her time, Walker was also involved in club work. She founded a Richmond Council of Colored Women, which did community service and fundraising.155 When given the opportunity, Walker and other community members fundraised to establish a home for young women, with help from a white philanthropist. According to Walker, “The white philanthropist … said that if we colored women would show our interest in social work among our people by raising a thousand dollars for it, he would give us the use of a large house, and if we made good, he would deed it to a board of white and colored women for colored work.”156 In response to this possibility, the community raised the money, and the women established the home. Walker said that white women in Richmond “had done fine community work for white people,” but that, with respect to this project, “the white women don’t work for us, – they work with us.”157 Walker worked with whomever was necessary, doing whatever was necessary, to help the Black community of Richmond and, indeed, the whole country. However, if you check the index of any social work text that is not specifically about Black social work, it is almost guaranteed that you won’t find her name there. The Social Work Profession, Social Science, and Education Through the Progressive Era, many professions were not accessible to Black people in Canada and the United States because of the racist, segregationist educational and economic systems. Francille Wilson writes that the only two professions open to Black people were “teaching and preaching,”158 neither of which required a degree at the time. Social work had the potential to be yet another accessible profession for Black people,159 given that it was outside the systems of governing accredited bodies and academic programs (unlike law and medicine, by this time). Decent paid jobs were frequently obtainable for Black social workers in a number of social sectors, although often in segregated agencies or departments.160 The availability of social work jobs may, in part, explain why an increasing number of Black (and white) men entered the profession,

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which had previously been considered women’s work.161 In fact, differentiating social work from charity often mapped onto differentiating the work that men were doing from that which women had been doing previously.162 An increasing emphasis on the use of social science was present in Black social work at the time. In the late nineteenth century, W.E.B. Du Bois started doing sociological studies of Black communities that served to identify their needs and combat racist notions about them.163 Some social science emphasized the desire to take social work out of the hands of the churches,164 but social science was taken up by social gospellers as well.165 As in white social work, a belief in the importance of systematic and scientific social work was commonly held by Black social workers across the political spectrum during this period.166 Black social workers also developed social work educational programs, with the first undergraduate program beginning in 1911.167 George Haynes, co-founder of the National Urban League (discussed earlier), established the program at Fisk University and advocated that an understanding of Black history was necessary for Black people to conduct effective Black social work.168 Haynes was motivated by the desire to ensure that Black service users were served by Black workers and that Black social workers did not become a professional underclass because they had fewer academic credentials.169 The first social work graduate program at a Black educational institution was established in 1922 at Atlanta’s Morehouse College,170 and several other programs were created around the same time.171 Although social work programs had previously been available in white institutions, they did not teach from a Black perspective or address needs that were considered important in Black communities. Black Social Work in Canada Black social work in Canada has a number of similarities to the US history: churches played a major role in community work, reform efforts, and charity; there was a strong tradition of neighbour-to-neighbour helping and community improvement; and women took on important organizing roles, particularly with respect to schools and anti-slavery organizing.172 However, because Black communities were so much smaller in Canada than in the United States, and because of other factors such as political economy, geography, and climate, there were important differences too. The level of formal organization that occurred in the United States was simply not present in Canadian Black communities during the Progressive Era.173 Nonetheless, Black social work and social workers made important contributions to their communities and to the emerging profession of social work.

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Canada had a significant Black population for a number of reasons, including its own legacy of slavery, which began in 1628 when the first African slave was brought to what is now called Canada.174 The main sources of Black immigrants to Canada were slaves who accompanied British loyalists during the American Revolution, escaped slaves from Jamaica (known as the Maroons), freemen after the War of 1812, escaped American slaves through the Underground Railroad, and free US Black people trying to avoid American racism.175 Black communities in Canada during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were largely found in Ontario (called Upper Canada, Canada West, and the Province of Canada at various times) and Nova Scotia,176 although there were also notable populations on Vancouver Island177 and in Montréal178 and several smaller cities.179 This settlement pattern was largely a product of the proximity of these English-speaking areas to the United States. Some Black settlers also migrated to the western provinces, but the government instituted anti-Black immigration policies before their numbers could rise significantly, as we discuss in chapter 4.180 Many US regions where Black people were legally “free” had Black Laws or Black Codes, which seriously restricted the freedom and ability of many Black people to settle. This legal framework was yet another reason some Black people immigrated to Canada.181 In 1850, the US government passed the Fugitive Slave Act, allowing for the arrest of any escaped slave anywhere in the United States and requiring that person’s return to their former “owner.”182 In the years following the passage of this act, around 50,000 former slaves* immigrated to Upper Canada.183 (To provide some perspective, the population of Toronto, called York at the time, was only 100,000 in 1841.184) Settlements in Canada A number of settlements were intentionally established as communities for escaped slaves and other Black people seeking a better life outside the pervasive and institutional racism of the United States. While this organizing has not been traditionally depicted as social work, those responsible for these initiatives were clearly engaged in making individuals’ lives better, strengthening their communities, and undertaking many efforts that would later be called social work when white people did the same things for recent immigrants from Europe. It

* Landon estimates 15,000 to 20,000 people immigrated between 1850 and 1860. Some estimates are as high as 100,000 fugitive slaves in total; however, Winks challenges this number as far too high.

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should be noted, though, that in spite of Canada’s depiction as a refuge for Black people, many were surprised to find extreme racism in Canada as well.185 This hostility, as well as the difficulty of living off the land, meant that most people in the settlements had very difficult lives. A group of Black people who lived in Cincinnati organized to leave the city and travel to Canada in 1829. Cincinnati was a trading hub with the South, and white power brokers ensured that it was inhospitable to Black people.186 The city enforced the state’s Black Laws, requiring, among other things, that new Black residents pay a $500 bond to ensure that they would be of good behaviour.187 In 1829, massive anti-Black race riots took place in Cincinnati. In an attempt to quell the violence and protect their families and property, about 300 Black men agreed to a government plan to voluntarily go to jail.188 This removal of adult men from the community did not quell the white attacks. However, according to Woodson, when the rioting ended, a number of the men who had surrendered themselves “were discharged on certificates of nativity, others gave bond for their support and good behavior, a few were dismissed as non-residents, a number of them were discharged by a justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and the rest were held indefinitely.”189 Black men who had voluntarily agreed to be incarcerated in the hopes of staving off white violence were forced into forms of bail bonds, driven from the city, or indefinitely imprisoned. Prior to this incident, a group of local organizers had been planning to create a community in Ontario. The organizers likely chose an isolated rural area because they wanted to protect their community from white racism and aspired to achieve economic self-sufficiency.190 The numbers swelled after the riot; somewhere between 460 and 2,000 people fled to Canada. They settled in a community they called Wilberforce, near London, Ontario.191 Over the next decade, a school, stores, and farms were established. Wilberforce is depicted as a failure in the historical literature, but Nikki Taylor notes that the settlement met its original goal of independence.192 One of the reasons it was ultimately unsustainable was that the Canada Land Company, the Crown corporation that sold land to settlers, stopped selling land to Black settlers due to protests from white settlers in the region and the common white supremacist belief that Black people were not reliable enough to uphold their contracts.* In comparison to other settlements, Wilberforce was thus quite short lived. Yet, it provided an escape for many people fleeing racist violence and the Black Codes. * Wilberforce did not purchase as much land as it had promised. Winks seems to therefore regard the company’s refusal to sell land to Black people as justified. However, there were doubtless many white people who did not follow through fully on their contracts without the company refusing to continue selling to white people.

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Another settlement established near Windsor by the Refugee Home Society was founded in 1851,193 the year after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed and a mass exodus from the United States to Canada began in response. The Refugee Home Society offered a land-granting program with a systematic approach for providing assistance. Fugitive slaves were granted land (twenty-five acres, five acres of which were free). Settlers were then given nine years to pay for the remaining land, and the profits from the venture went into operating a school and continuing the organization’s work, such as buying more land.194 One of the men credited with founding the Refugee Home Society is Henry Bibb. According to Fred Landon, Bibb believed that “the future of the people of color in Canada depended upon getting them settled on the land and his mind turned to the possibilities of establishing a distinctly Negro colony.”195 For Bibb and the many Black people who lived in, organized, and supported Black colonies, this venture was a liberatory project. For the people who found refuge in Canada, it was also a liberatory project. Yet, while this designation is straightforwardly true, these Black people were also setting up colonies within a white settler colony. Celebrating Bibb in 1920, Landon titled his article “Henry Bibb, a Colonizer.” Bibb saw his chance for freedom for himself and his community as an active part of the colonial process. What was justice for his community helped sustain an injustice for another. Noticing how this one intensely oppressed group was complicit in the oppression of Indigenous people is, by no means, an attempt to undermine the horrors of slavery, including kidnapping, rape, enslavement, torture, and murder. Escaped slaves and other Black people were not wrong to flee to Canada. It was necessary for self-preservation, born of a context in which Black people had mostly come to the Americas through the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade. Bibb’s colonizing can therefore be clearly distinguished from Europeans’ choice to become part of the colonial project. However, it complicates things that former slaves adopted the role of settler. As Sunera Thobani describes, the colonial context of Canada (and the United States) results in any settlement and citizenship being complicit in the continued dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands and sovereignty.196 Importantly, she notes this complicity alongside a careful study of the racism experienced by racialized immigrants in Canada, and she suggests that unless fundamental change is made at the level of what the nation is and its relationship to Indigenous communities and nations, the colonial complicity of all settlers remains an unresolvable dilemma. Mahmood says that agency lies not only in resisting social norms but also in how one inhabits norms. Whether in relation to Black women following the mores of separate spheres or escaped slaves taking up the work of colonization, clearly only so many options were available to long-denigrated peoples to

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enable them to survive and perform respectability. They may have reinforced oppressive mores and underlying moral economies of human value by doing what they did, but perhaps this contradiction might serve to invite us to reflect upon how each of us today uniquely inhabits oppressive mores, outside the simple framings of resistance versus complicity.197 Like many others, Bibb escaped slavery by becoming a colonizer. To complicate matters even further, the “owner” from whom he escaped was Indigenous.* Bibb wrote of his former slave master: “He was the most reasonable, and humane slaveholder that I have ever belonged to.” He wrote that he would rather be owned by an Indigenous person than a white person.198 Yet, he was nevertheless this other man’s legal property. Encouraging slave ownership was a US government tactic of assimilating Indigenous people in the South;199 it was a way Indigenous people were encouraged to inhabit “civilized” mores. Certainly, some Indigenous people having owned slaves does nothing to cancel out or trump colonial injustices. Furthermore, Indigenous nations’ responses to Black slavery were as diverse as the nations themselves. The Cherokee nation is said to have engaged in the most extensive Black slave ownership of all Indigenous groups: by the 1860s, the 17,000 members of the Cherokee nation owned 4,000 Black slaves.† The Seminole and Tuscarora nations, in contrast, provided safe haven for escaped slaves, resulting in many mixed relationships.200 Indigenous people had also been forced into slavery by Europeans and white settlers, starting with Columbus in 1492.201 Alan Gallay estimates that the British were involved in the slave trade of 30,000 to 50,000 Indigenous people in the United States by 1715.202 The practice of enslaving Indigenous people, however, was largely abandoned in the United States by 1720, in part because of militant resistance on the part of Indigenous nations.203 In telling Bibb’s story, we hope to invite consideration of just how complex these histories are, rather than point fingers here or there. Bibb was a fugitive slave who, like so many slaves, was the son of a slave mother and a white father,204 and was likely conceived through the rape of his mother. He had been owned by a First Nations man on colonized land. Bibb escaped when his Indigenous master died, and went on to become a colonizer, purchasing land from the same British Crown that had stolen the land from Indigenous peoples

* Bibb’s owner had just died, and Bibb used the death to escape. The entire story is told in his 1849 autobiography, The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. † After the Civil War, the Cherokee’s slaves were granted citizenship in the Cherokee nation. As documented by Freeman, the former slaves’ Cherokee citizenship was revoked in 2007 through a special election but reinstated due to pressure from the Obama administration.

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across what’s now called Canada and the United States. He did so to provide safe haven for other escaped slaves. Bibb was a social worker who contributed to founding an organization that helped his community secure basic freedom, education, and security. Bibb’s story illustrates the intensity with which histories of slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, and social work interlock. When this social worker intervened in one political problem that was most pressing for him, he couldn’t help but actively participate in another. Perhaps, in limitless variations, this complexity is the history of social work. Anti-Slavery Societies and Black Immigrant Assistance The earliest Black social work focused largely on assisting people who escaped slavery and fled to Canada, often with no money, no food, and no spare clothing. Rather than imagining this work to be exceptionally “particular” to Black communities and therefore irrelevant to the subsequent development of social work more generally, we should look on it as work that helped to meet the needs of a group of people who were struggling as a result of unjust social conditions (as can be said of many social workings today and in the past). There was no state assistance for fugitive slaves (with the exception of Black people who emigrated after the War of 1812 and had assisted the British forces, who were given land).205 In response to this socially constituted need, a massive voluntary effort was undertaken to assist escaped slaves, which involved Black and white people collaborating in anti-slavery and liberation societies.206 These groups helped people find jobs, provided food and other resources, and more generally did the work that would later be called social work when undertaken in an organized way within poor white migrant communities. They also crossed national boundaries, just as later professional social work would do;207 for example, the American Anti-Slavery Society sent agents across the border to Canada to assist escaped slaves.208 These organizations fostered an ethos of mutual aid. Many of the people providing and organizing support were escaped slaves who had established themselves in Canada.209 Organizations like the Fugitives’ Home and the Windsor Anti-Slavery Society were founded and run by fugitive slaves determined to assist other fugitives.210 Several were run by Black women, including the Ladies Freedman’s Aid Society, the Ladies Colored Fugitive Association, and the Toronto Ladies’ Association for the Relief of Destitute Colored Fugitives.211 Sharing the sensibility of what would soon be called social work, these organizations often believed that indiscriminate relief was bad and that aid should be restricted and controlled. For instance, the 1853 report of the Canada AntiSlavery Society says: “All that able-bodied men and women require is a fair

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chance, friendly advice, and a little encouragement, perhaps a little assistance at first. Those who are really willing to work can procure employment in a short time after their arrival.”212 While the fugitive relief effort was carried out on a massive scale, individual aid was often restricted, due to prevalent discourses of liberalism, capitalism, and scientific charity. It also bears repeating, yet again, that such relief efforts later run by white people for recent immigrants from Europe is called the origin of social work. Social Services A number of social work and social service projects were organized by members of Black communities in order to assist others in their communities. While some white people were also involved in helping escaped slaves, charitable and social services were segregated in Canada. Edward Lee and Ilyan Ferrer describe “systemic exclusion from white social work institutions” for the Black community.213 They also argue that “the exclusionary logic of the colour line was reflective of how communities of colour were racially segregated within the Canadian urban geography and provides further explanation as to why they were unable to access the white dominant charity or social settlement movements.” The community building, aid, organizing, and advocacy that Black people did (and continue to do) are very clearly within the realm of what is considered social work, even though it has not been recognized as such in social work history: Elizabeth Jackson Shadd Shreve travelled through Southern Ontario forests to visit sick people and deliver food and clothing to those without;214 and Black people created youth groups, housing cooperatives, and political organizations like the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and the National Black Coalition in Nova Scotia.215 Benevolence clubs were also an important site of social service delivery and community building. One of the most prominent was called the True Band Society, which organized to create Black community self-sufficiency.216 The first True Band was founded in Amherstburg, Ontario (near Windsor), in 1854.217 Like the Provincial Union Association founded the same year, it worked to create and support Black community self-sufficiency.218 The True Bands provided resources to poor Black families, provided care for sick people, supported schools, and worked to resolve conflicts among community members.219 By 1856, there were fourteen True Band organizations with 600 members.220 Both the Provincial Union and the True Bands formed out of critiques about the work of groups like the Refugee Home Society and people like Henry Bibb. They considered the raising of funds and supplies from white people to be shameful, and they wanted Black communities to be self-sufficient. They also

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opposed the construction of Black settlements, calling for people to integrate into Canadian society. One of the strongest voices against collecting resources (“begging,” as they called it) was Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who was active in Black community social services and media.221 Black communities also built formal institutions modelled after those imported from Europe through colonialism.222 For example, Nova Scotian orphanages and children’s homes wouldn’t admit Black children – resulting in them sometimes being put in asylums or on work farms.223 Therefore, under the leadership of James R. Johnston and the African United Baptists Association, the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children (NSHCC) opened in 1921.224 Due to systemic racial segregation in social services,225 this institution was incredibly important to the Black community. Its opening marked the largest gathering of Black people in Nova Scotia since 1783.226 The NSHCC is an example of the social work initiatives that Black communities undertook in Canada. Candice Roker discusses the “positive survival” resistance to racist exclusion of Black people in Nova Scotia. She argues that the creation of the NSHCC “is one of the most public examples of the African Nova Scotian community taking care of its own.”227 The NSHCC retained its historical name but became racially integrated in the 1970s;228 it continued to operate as an orphanage until the late 1980s.229 Like so many institutions that house vulnerable children, including Indian residential schools and many institutions for disabled children,230 significant abuses took place at the NSHCC. In 1948, a social worker documented concerns about inadequate food for the children living in the NSHCC. Sexual abuse was documented in the 1980s, including the rape of a child, but no charges were ever laid.231 In 2001, a number of former residents of the home filed lawsuits for abuse,232 some of which dates back to as early as the 1940s.233 In 2014, the premier of Nova Scotia apologized for the abuse as part of a settlement with survivors, and a restorative inquiry was announced in 2015.234 Terrible things happened at this institution that should never happen to anyone. It is entirely possible abuse was present there from its early days. Yet, even then, we can hold this injustice in tension with an acknowledgment of the importance of what the Nova Scotian Black community did by building the home. Building a racially segregated institution, which seems to have been characterized by the same abuses of power as were found at other institutional sites, can be conceptualized as yet another instance of navigating the norms that were available at the time. Black Nova Scotians built for their community’s children a resource often considered at that time indispensable for serving children in need. As in so many other institutions, many children were seriously harmed within its walls. There is frequently a tendency to view historical developments

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as either good or bad, but removing the NSHCC from “good” anti-racist history and placing it into “bad” institutional history prevents us from struggling to cultivate a complex relationship with this fundamentally interlocking history and its legacies. Black communities navigated available norms, but didn’t adopt all available norms. As a glaring example with tremendous relevance to contemporary social work, we found no historical record of any Black community in the United States or Canada establishing a child protection agency in which people from outside a family or community scrutinized parents and determined whether a child would be allowed to remain with them. In the extensive social welfare systems created by Black folks in Canada and the United States, we found no evidence of a single Black agency that practised involuntary child apprehension. White child protection agencies didn’t normally* serve Black families until the end of legal racial segregation in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, even in cities with significant Black social welfare infrastructures, including women’s clubs, settlement houses, and orphanages, it seems that no Black community practised child apprehension. (If we’re wrong and one or two communities did so, it would have been extremely marginal considering that we’ve encountered no trace of it.) Black and white social workers learned from one another and often worked together, developing similar (usually racially segregated) services, but Black social workers didn’t practice child apprehension. In the only article we found exploring the fact that professional child welfare didn’t operate in US Black communities until after legal racial segregation was abolished,† Jillian Jimenez writes: “A shadow child welfare system [existed] that performed similar functions to the public child welfare system from which African American children were largely excluded.”235 In apparently every Black community, people were left to do the work of “child protection” and “child welfare” using means that had been available to them before anybody had ever become a paid “social worker.”

* Malcolm X describes being apprehended by state welfare workers in the 1930s. His father had been murdered, and his mother was involved with white welfare workers. When she was institutionalized in a psychiatric facility, he and his siblings were apprehended. Although rare, it seems that Black children sometimes came into state custody in circumstances where state authorities were already involved with the family and then removed the caregivers from the home. The prevalence of such apprehensions likely varied from place to place, but norms and laws of racial segregation prevented its widespread occurrence. † Roberts mentions this briefly at the start of chapter 1 of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare.

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In a recent interview about having won the Woman of Distinction Award, Black Canadian politician Zanana Akande was asked where her ethic of “continuing to push” for justice originated. In her answer, she described the informal “social workers who weren’t social workers” who collectively raised her when she was growing up in downtown Toronto in the 1940s and ’50s: “That [ethic] comes from where I was born and the people around me – the first social workers who weren’t social workers, because we were all raised collectively by our parents and by anyone else who happened to walk down the street and see us – that you must speak out, you must take care of each other, and you must push for what you want.”236 In Black communities prior to the end of racial segregation and the introduction of child protective agencies into Black communities, practices, norms, and mores were in place to protect children from violence, respond to tragedies such as parental death, and so on. “Children routinely lived with grandparents not only in the case of death, but when one or both parents left the local area to look for work … [and] children with no family would be taken in by unrelated adults in the neighbourhood who did not have children.”237 Resonant practices have existed in all communities at all times, varying significantly from place to place. Jimenez traces these specific Black child welfare practices to West African traditions of extended kinship and communal care for children, as well as to strategies later developed in response to the violences of slavery – in which Black children and adults were kidnapped, forcibly separated from one another, and held as white people’s property. In the first half of the twentieth century in Black communities in the United States, the principal strategy for protecting children from abuse and neglect was community surveillance: “the extended family, especially grandmothers … aunts, great aunts, and older sisters … provided a concentric circle of approval and disapproval to support or criticize the child rearing practices of a child’s primary caretakers.”238 There were community-sanctioned interventions for when adults harmed children, which were rooted in community-specific hierarchies of moral and political authority. Older women relatives in Black America occupied the role only then being taken over in white America by paid ruling class strangers. One practice is a violent imposition, and the other assumes communities are capable of healing and protecting themselves; both are specific and situated means of social working to keep children safe from abuse and neglect. A very different child protection system would be in place today if families and communities were imagined capable of protecting and caring for their own children, rather than assuming the state and its professionals must do so. As a consequence of racist laws and mores, Black families were fortunate to rarely have their children apprehended by state authorities during the first half of

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the twentieth century. Instead, they carried on and internally adapted longstanding traditions of child protection and care. The earliest white child protection agencies were born at a time of normalized extreme anti-Black violence. Black childrearing practices at the time therefore explicitly sought to prevent children from exposing themselves to the normative violences of white supremacy;239 we can imagine the devastation that might have resulted had Black families become targeted by white social work. Black families worked to protect Black children from abusive parents and also from white supremacy. Their efforts were central to Black child protection during a time of widespread lynching and other explicit anti-Black violence. Such child protection isn’t normatively validated as “social work.” Of all the diverse and significant Black interventions into the social world for over a century, from slavery liberation societies through to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, there seems to have been a consensus that the approach to “child protection” taken for granted among white ruling classes wasn’t morally or politically acceptable. No matter how one is positioned in relation to these histories, this wholesale rejection is an astounding fact for us all to seriously reflect upon today. Class Stratification and How It Interlocked with Racism and Social Work As with white social workers, Black social workers in the United States and Canada tended to be upper or middle class people assisting poor people. Class divisions among Black people, however, had different effects and significance from those among white people, given that segregation and racism had a levelling effect on Black communities. No matter how much money you had, you often could not live in a ruling class neighbourhood if you were Black, nor was it easy to get a loan, be free from the threat of racist violence, go many places, or do many other things available to white people. Class status did not inoculate against racism. Carlton-LaNey writes, “There was very little physical, social and economic distance” between those doing early Black social work and others in the communities where they worked. They “lived in the same communities and by virtue of race shared many of the same societal problems and issues of concern.” However, those “who engaged in the emerging social work profession were among the … educated elite of the African American community.”240 Educated Black women primarily provided social services,241 which could have perpetuated white ruling class social mores. Yet, Carlton-LaNey asserts that “lower class women were also active in clubs and formed organizations in an effort to serve

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themselves and the needy in their communities.”242 She writes that this class diversity among workers, as well as shared experiences of racism, helped these social workers more reflexively consider their own power: even educated Black social workers with “property ownership, poise, and eloquence … [were often] treated like ‘washerwomen’ [which] … kept them attuned to the deplorable conditions to which their less-fortunate sisters were subjected.”243 Through to the 1920s, “a white woman in Halifax looking for help with her laundry felt free to stop any African-Nova Scotian woman on the street and request ‘where she could get a good girl.’”244 White supremacy served to homogenize Blackness so that, in practice, it was the only relevant identifier in many cases, or at least it was the identity category that trumped all others. The assumption that any Black person would know where to get a cleaner in Halifax was based on the pervasive white supremacist association of Black people with domestic service and dirt. This thinking had important social significance and was intimately tied up with interlocking moral economies of human value. At this time, eugenics was often referred to as “mental hygiene,”245 and Ivory Soap boasted about its ability to “civilize” Indigenous people.246 This period was also the era in which white ruling class women acquired an unprecedented degree of exalted bourgeois subjectivity. Fellows and Razack explain that dirt was important in constituting these select women as separate and distinct from – and to imagine themselves morally superior to – “washerwomen.”247 The renegotiation of white ruling class women’s positioning within largely unchanged moral economies of human value relied on the intensive and ongoing discursive denigration of others. Remaining racially devalued even with upward class mobility, Black social workers’ experiences of continued discrimination, alongside the relative class diversity among Black service providers, seems to have mitigated the classism normally inherent to social work. Most Black women welfare reformers, according to Gordon, “were usually newly middle-class, perhaps a generation away from slavery and without much cushion against economic misfortune.”248 These women were living a very different experience of being middle class than that of their white contemporaries.249 Knupfer, in describing the Phyllis Wheatley Club in Chicago, therefore makes the case that “because club women were well aware of the double burden of racism and sexism which all AfricanAmerican women faced, more often than not they reached ‘across’ rather than ‘down’ to their less fortunate sisters.”250 The club’s social work was “mutual and reciprocal” between poor and middle class members.251 In addition to sharing experiences of anti-Black oppression, Carlton-LaNey notes that shared Black pride also “served as a mechanism for group solidarity and helped to undercut class differences.”252

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It seems that race mitigated the class oppression that early Black social workers exercised, as compared to white social work at the time. However, other scholars cite historical evidence of overt and insidious classism among Black social workers too. Many of the class biases that existed in the work of friendly visitors and other white charity work were also present among Black social work organizations. For example, urban Northern social workers who provided social services to migrants from the South often looked down upon the people they were trying to help. Martin and Martin say that Black social workers, like other urban Northern Americans, perceived the migrants as “uncouth, unkempt, boisterous, and ignorant.”253 Northern urban social workers, Black and white, therefore engaged in what Sheila Weiss calls an “effort of the middle class to mold the behavior of the migrants in its own image [which] was clearly a one-way process. There was never any hint that the black bourgeoisie had anything to learn from its newly arrived neighbors.”254 Like many other well-meaning people working to affect social change, then and now, early Black social workers often seem to have believed they knew what was best for the people they worked with. But their ideas were often informed by classist moral economies. This classed outlook was evident, for example, when Black professor R.L. Smith of Oakwood, Texas, began community organizing to make his community more aesthetically pleasing in 1889.255 As a ruling class man, he understood the physical appearance of the village to be its most pressing need. It was only after a year, when only minor issues had been resolved and people didn’t follow through on more major and expensive undertakings, that he began to wonder why the response had been so lukewarm. He realized it was because the people he was working with were poor. He concluded that “what the Negro farmers of Texas and of the South really needed was not, at this stage, a Village Improvement Society.”256 If Smith had facilitated a conversation about what the community needed and how it should go about achieving those needs at the initial meeting a year earlier, their efforts may have been much more productive. Having largely done nothing for the first year, Smith now set out to reduce poverty, alongside his own aim of getting people to improve their homes and yards. He helped organize a cooperative in which farmers in the area pooled their resources, enabling two important changes: buying in bulk (obtaining discounts for volume purchases) and avoiding the use of credit, which could mean substantial savings in interest payments. After the organization had been somewhat successful in helping farmers gain financial security, an organization called the Negro Cooperative Society was founded. Smith was a supporter of the Booker T. Washington – or liberal, rather than radical – school of Black activism, and he tied the ranks in the

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organization to how much people had saved. Only once someone achieved the twelfth degree, and was thus named “Grand Patriarch,” did they gain a vote at conference.257 The richest members of the cooperative society were granted exclusive voting rights, enabling them to direct the society regardless of support from its majority. Class hierarchy and bias drove this organizational design in a clear illustration of the material effects of moral economy: those already regarded superior tend to accumulate further moral (and thus political) capital. It’s assumed that those who have saved the most money are most deserving and will know best. From there, a structure is built that allows those with the most political and moral capital to gain even more institutional political power – even in this “cooperative.” Indeed, a large cross-section of Black social workers supported Booker T. Washington’s principles, which “measure success by the ownership of land, homes, businesses, union membership, and bank accounts.”258 The class status of most Black social workers, like most social workers in general, informed their values and understandings of the world. According to Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “These women’s ideals were [ruling class] American ideals.”259 They accepted the dominant views of society, working to reform some systems of oppression while leaving others intact – especially capitalism. PeeblesWilkins and Francis suggest that Black upwardly mobile social workers, such as Mary Church Terrell, “espoused fundamental, traditional American values about family, the work ethic, social obligations, democracy, and freedom that she transmitted cross-culturally.” They write: “The goals of black women activists focused on uplift and contained the overtones of social Darwinism,” which was the assumed social good of unimpeded competition within existing social and political structures.260 Many Black social workers, like white ones, upheld capitalism, which, after all, was the economic system permitting their upward mobility. They worked towards cumulative individual racial uplift within the parameters of existing economic and moral systems, rather than working to overhaul the system for the benefit of those suffering the most from it. Many social workers, informed by liberal individualism and prevalent moral economies of race and class differentiation, directed their change efforts at individuals rather than the social structures that caused such differentiation. Cornelius Bynum reports that “African American elites largely accommodated white racist assumptions about black inferiority.”261 Martin and Martin suggest that established residents of the urban North “feared that the newcomers would reinforce stereotypes of black people and stir up antiblack sentiments that would have dire consequences for all black people.”262 While social workers worked to “help” poor people, they also often worked to normalize

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and assimilate members of the Black community so that – like white ruling class women – they too might gain what Fellows and Razack call a toehold on respectability.263 When social workers did explicitly set out to address systemic issues, they became burnt out, claim Martin and Martin. As a result, in the end, “they focused their attention on trying to change the character of the victims of the dominant system, helping them to cope better with their oppression.”264 Social work interventions were frequently about normalizing poor Black people and getting them to conform to middle class behaviours, aesthetics, and values.265 This form of social work involved many of the same interventions that the friendly visitors stressed: cleanliness, good housekeeping, temperance, thrift, and so on. The 1921 report of Cincinnati’s Negro Civic Welfare Committee of the Council of Social Agencies demonstrates that the committee was incredibly condescending and paternalistic towards working class people and enacted capitalist indoctrination. The committee operated a workplace friendly visiting program involving over 800 Black women. “She goes and gives friendly advice on punctuality, regularity, efficiency, thrift, and tries to develop in them the proper attitude toward their work.”266 This committee may well have advocated for workers, and the citation above may have been written to attract donations. Yet, the report depicts this social work organization as working to improve people’s lives by helping them transform into more productive capitalist subjects, something that did nothing to improve the institutionalized social, economic, political, and moral barriers they experienced. We’re not saying that any of the work of early Black social workers shouldn’t have been done. Rather, we can all uniquely interrogate the complexities of the past in order to better understand and interrupt patterns we may continue to replicate, uniquely positioned as each one of us is within these legacies. As bell hooks says, “Interlocking systems [of oppression] indict us all in some way.”267 Early Women Social Workers and Gender Roles Working to ameliorate some of the harshness caused by capitalism while upholding the system itself is similar to how many early women social workers – Black and white – approached gender. Separate spheres discourse was incredibly oppressive for women. Yet, its specific contours and divisions also created possibilities for women to take up leadership roles in what came to be called social work. Women encroached into public spaces by intervening into others’ private spheres. As is true of all communities, Black women responded to gendered expectations in diverse ways. Mary Church Terrell, the honorary lifetime president

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of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), largely supported separate spheres.268 However, Maggie Walker was adamantly and publicly opposed to separate spheres. Writing in 1912, she argued: “There is neither justice or good common sense in the demand that every woman should confine her activities to the domestic duties of home . . . As ability, adaptability decide these things for men, so let them decide for woman.”269 Walker, the first woman bank president in the United States, supported equal rights for women, which included for her the abolition of the mores of gendered separate spheres. Furthermore, regardless of their own navigation of separate spheres, many early Black social workers advocated for suffrage and gender equality,* including Mary Ann Shadd Cary,270 Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett,271 and Maggie Walker.272 Women exposed themselves to the risks of men’s patriarchal moralizing when they became active in the public sphere. For example, Henry Bibb said of Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s disagreement with him about how the community should fund a school that her outspokenness “will add nothing to her credit as a lady.”273 Yee explains: “[W]hile Black women’s participation in community-building may have been considered an acceptable extension of women’s domestic responsibility beyond the private household, those who did so found themselves in a delicate balancing act.”274 If Black women social workers were too outspoken, their femininity and precarious toehold on respectability could be questioned – within a patriarchal understanding in which femininity and outspokenness were antithetical. Subjugated Community-Based Social Workings Beyond Black and White The relatively large number of Black people in what’s now called Canada and the United States up to the periods we’re discussing is a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade. The relatively small number of migrants from Asia and other parts of the world – through to the 1960s – is a direct result of exclusionary racist immigration policies. Due to these two white supremacist practices, there were many more Black people in what’s now called the United States and Canada than any other racialized groups from the Global South. However, some people from Asia and other parts of the world did migrate here. As in Black and

* It is worth noting that these two things weren’t always imagined to go together. Emma Goldman was a feminist who was opposed to suffrage. She said that true freedom and emancipation were lost in the narrow fight for the vote within an existing system of exploitation.

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white communities, these communities also came together in new ways to meet needs that resulted from the massive demographic shifts occurring. Most of these communities’ efforts have not been as extensively documented as those in white and Black communities, making tracing their histories difficult; but this scarce documentation doesn’t mean they weren’t actively involved in the diverse activities of social working. Some research exists on the Chinese community in British Columbia (BC). During the era when professional social work was born, Chinese folks in BC “organiz[ed] a remarkable number of voluntary mutual aid fraternal associations, partly in response to the racial discrimination they suffered,” beginning soon after they first arrived in Canada in the late 1850s.275 These groups organized to fight racism, provide social services within their own community, and facilitate conflict resolution. Mutual aid groups operated in Chinese communities in BC for about a century, and were integral to the community in the face of the tremendous racist hostilities that surrounded them.276 Around the same time, the Sikh community in BC worked collectively with other South Asians to provide food, housing, and jobs for those in need; lobby the government; and fight discrimination. Today, we would call this collection of activities “newcomer settlement social work,” and it’s basically exactly what white and Black social workers were providing and calling social work at the time. In 1907, the Vancouver Khalsa Diwan Society was established as a Sikh religious organizing body, but, according to Norman Buchignani, Doreen Indra, and Ram Srivastava, it “quickly involved itself in matters of general [South Asian] community welfare and became the focal point for subsequent South Asian battles against discrimination.”277 While the initial group was Sikh, it is said to have “spoke[n] for all South Asian Canadians regardless of religion.”278 Because of this inclusivity, “South Asian Muslims and Hindus … contributed money and labour to building the Vancouver Sikh temple, for they saw it as a secular rallying point for everyone from ‘Hindustan.’”279 Together, they organized against British imperial rule in South Asia and Canadian government plans to deport South Asians.280 “Over the next ten years South Asians battled continuously against racial subordination. In the process they developed a set of community institutions that were remarkable given the circumstances.”281 Diverse Indigenous nations and communities were also actively social working throughout this period. Folks drew on long-standing traditions of mutual aid and resisted the ongoing colonial project, which specifically aimed at displacing cultural practices of sharing and helping by imposing capitalist economic systems onto Indigenous nations. In these circumstances, working against colonialism to fight assimilation and preserve traditions of helping were important interventions into the social world.282 Other Indigenous interventions into the

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social world at the time, which fall outside the standard account of social work history, are the many ways that parents, elders, and community members organized to prevent their children from being apprehended by the state and tried to incite change when they heard about the abuse their children were subjected to.283 The centrality of the conflict between Richmond and Addams has become standard in envisioning what social work was, is, and can be. Yet, situating the conflict between the “child protection” efforts of Indigenous families, on the one hand, and the “child protection” work of Indian residential schools and children’s aid societies, on the other hand, as another way of thinking about the parameters and possibilities of social work would open up very different understandings of what “social work” is and can be. Recently, Indigenous practices such as restorative justice are beginning to be incorporated into contemporary professional social work.284 But, as we make such much-needed changes, we should be careful to avoid telling accounts of social work history that minimize the violence with which such practices have been – and continue to be – displaced and supplanted with traditions and practices from Europe and white settler communities. Recognition of that violent suppression is part of the work of decolonization too. We also need to be cautious about exactly how Indigenous practices and traditions get incorporated. As Chris has written of their work in a colonial and disablist institution that “incorporated the medicine wheel and a talking feather into our life-skills curricula,” these inclusions were never permitted to interfere with institutional efficiency and violence. They “were removed from their original contexts and pasted into our institutional one, redeployed in such a way as to extend the status quo operations of institutionalization and enculturation.”285 Indigenous practices can be significant in the shift towards more just and dignified possible ways for humans to come together in what is called social work,286 as can the work of countless other communities that have had their practices displaced, marginalized, and subjugated by professional social work. However, these practices should never be cut and pasted into otherwise unchanged white social work. Rather, we need to fundamentally transform the narrow and hierarchical norms and mores that are now institutionalized. The history we provide in this chapter is nowhere near complete. The diversity of examples of social work that sprang up in response to specific community concerns around the turn of the last century exceeds the number of communities that existed at the time. Social work in distinct communities looked different from one another because those communities, and their beliefs, needs, and resources, were different from one another. Such diversity – then and now – could function as an important resource for social workers today, but only if we know to look for it at all.

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Conclusion We have given a brief overview of early social work in the United States and Canada, focusing on Black social work because of the existing scholarship on the breadth of activities and the obvious erasures of sometimes identical activities as those included within white social work history. Presumably, like the majority of those in the helping professions today, most Black social workers at the time worked largely out of the public eye, and so their contributions will forever remain unknown to history. Community organizing and social movements are made up of many people who all make important contributions, but when these activities are recorded in history, the collectivities get translated through individualism into remarkable heroes who bravely led the way.287 This tendency alone, though, doesn’t account for why so little is known within social work scholarship about Black community and social service work a century ago. Many Black leaders – such as Wells, Du Bois, and Walker – were famous around 1900 for their many interventions into the social world. And, of course, we’ve clearly left countless other well-known Black figures out of this history. It’s simply untrue that social work emerged only out of British and white settler efforts, as the standard account would have it. Yet, that false history continues to have concrete effects today. Because the standard account is told the way it is, radical social work scholar Mimi Abramovitz can critique that, due to “racism and segregation, the settlements and the networks established by African American women never became well known or exercised much influence outside the African American community.”288 While this assessment is not entirely untrue, it erases what influence they did have and the prominence some historical Black folks held, and it doesn’t consider whether white folks like Addams might have been directly influenced by the sometimes earlier Black efforts. Yet, what is perhaps even more troubling is that Abramovitz can acknowledge the influence of racism and still also write, as a summary of “the history of social work,” that the “social change-oriented Settlement House Movement (SHM) vied for control of the emerging profession with the older and more individually oriented Charity Organization Society (COS). This initial conflict … anticipated a century of struggle.”289 We are struck by the incongruity of adding the fact that racism shaped history to that very tradition of history without reshaping the priorities which inform its telling as a result of this fact. Social work struggles with personal versus political change, certainly, but why should that particular conflict be the guiding framework for all social work history? Or why should that struggle be represented by the COS versus white settlements? Another history of social work could present the primary tension as that of the liberal Booker T. Washington camp versus the radical W.E.B. Du

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Bois camp, or the liberal Maggie Walker camp versus the radical Ida B. Wells camp. Like centring the conflict between Richmond and Addams, these framings would describe the tension between advocating for reform within a largely unchanged system versus working to fundamentally transform the system. Even more transformative, as suggested earlier, would be if we honoured the “child protection” work done in Black communities with no institutionalized child protective services, alongside that done in Indigenous communities struggling to save their children from externally imposed professional “protection,” and we took such widely diverse work as a counterpoint to the work that became institutionalized as white child protective services and Indian residential schooling. This ongoing struggle of communities taking care of their own versus external imposition is a fundamental tension that has always existed in “social work practice” – and honouring or centring it might significantly shift the ways we think and feel about what we do. Maybe it would even transform what we tend to do. In their history of what they call “radical social work,” Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews discuss some of the work of Black organizers during the Progressive Era. However, they repeatedly make white people the reference point. For example, they write: “Some early radical social workers were far more willing than their mainstream counterparts to work cooperatively with people of color and to participate in inter-racial organizations or multiracial coalitions.”290 Here, the category “radical social workers” is represented as white. They go on to mention the work of (unnamed) Black women organizers and then emphasize Jane Addams’s role in anti-racist organizing. Such representations continue to inform imaginaries of who (radical) social workers are today. While American histories of Black social work are much more concrete and accessible than Canadian ones,291 plenty of interventions into the social world in 1800s Black Ontario and Nova Scotia are well documented. These stories are not entirely hidden – the work of anti-slavery societies and Black colonizers are often disseminated during Black History Month. The opening of the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children brought out the biggest gathering of Black Nova Scotians in over a century,292 and one of its founders, James Johnston, had the largest funeral in Halifax since the death of Sir John S.D. Thompson, Canada’s fourth prime minister, two decades earlier.293 These events were not marginal. How do they become and remain marginal stories when history gets written? Black social workers were clearly influenced by what was going on in white social work.294 Without a doubt, that’s true. But white social workers were also influenced by Black social workers,295 and this reciprocity isn’t acknowledged in the standard account. Most of the histories of Black social work we’ve drawn

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upon make mention of white social work, especially of Jane Addams and her work.296 Racialized social work authors are required to demonstrate their fluency in white social work history, but white social work historians don’t need to prove their credentials in relation to Black histories or any other histories outside of white settler and European communities. This double standard is due to the moral economy of white supremacy continuing to shape what gets known and done. Discussing Black social work educator and social worker George Haynes’s view that Black social workers needed to learn Black history, Martin and Martin write that Haynes felt Black people are “both creatures and creators of history in that history has placed them where they are right now and has shaped their point of view, their identity, and their aspirations.”297 This description is particularly true of Black people in the context of white supremacist American and Canadian history, but it can also be said to be true in site-specific ways for all of us. We are all “creatures and creators of history”; history shapes what we can think, perceive, feel, do, and be – not only because of which past events occurred, but also because of which past events get told, how they’re framed, from whose perspective they’re told, and who gets represented as significant in their development. The exclusion of Black and racialized social workers from the standard account of social work history is a product of white supremacy, and it replicates social work as a white institution, naturalizing white people in the role of social worker and making social workers of colour seem aberrational even today. Histories centre certain figures and decentre others. Addams, a white woman, is centred while Wells and Walker are decentred. This act of narrative exaltation and marginalization has real consequences. Consider the following: Karen Lundblad writes, “As a social reformer and organizer, Addams is almost unparalleled … [and] remains an inspiration and role model for social workers today.”298 We admire Addams for her work and her mind. She is indeed an inspiration. Yet, what does it mean to frame her as “almost unparalleled” if we consider the Black women who fought for social change, benefited their communities, and contributed to the helping professions as a whole? Further salt is added to the wound when claims of Addams’s uniqueness are evidenced by her relationship with Wells, Du Bois, and other Black activists. What’s forgotten is that she gravitated to them as inspirational, at the very same time as they gravitated to her. She wasn’t the only inspiration in those relationships. And she doesn’t have to be the only one available to us today.

3 Social Work as Displacement, Denigration, Cisheteropatriarchalization

Professional Social Work as the Delegitimization of Local Practices and People Like the informal Black child protection practices that weren’t interrupted by professional social work until the end of racial segregation, all people at all times have intervened in their local social worlds in diverse and situated ways. Yet, around the globe, such locally negotiated and ever-changing social workings have been displaced through imperialism, capitalism, and professional social work. Having begun thus far to deconstruct normative framings of what “social work” is and where it’s come from, we now suggest that perhaps what ultimately distinguishes professional “social work” from the ubiquitous and diverse caring, sharing, and otherwise intervening in the social world that’s found among all people can be summed up as follows: professional social work tends to denigrate, delegitimize, and displace situated and often more flexible social workings, only to replace them with paternalistic, normalizing, and standardized means of intervening in other people’s lives. One particularly intense arena of such violence is the moral denigration and material displacement of the infinitely diverse ways that people around the globe have lived and understood relationships and identities relating to love, family, sex, and gender. For the last several centuries, the European and white settler ruling classes have imposed a series of highly particular and interrelated norms upon colonized, institutionalized, and poor peoples. These norms include the nuclear family; the strict gender binary; compulsory monogamous love-based heterosexuality; racist, classist, and disablist differentiations of gender, sex, morality, and danger; and specific structures and practices of men’s authority over women and adults’ authority over children. We name these interrelated impositions “cisheteropatriarchalization” in order to stress that they are

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a cohesive, interlocking, and dynamically imposed force, rather than an ancient and immobile “tradition” from which white ruling class societies have been progressively and consistently advancing. As an example of how cisheteropatriarchalization and its complexities get simplified into a feminist progress narrative, it is frequently understood that social work’s professionalization marked an important feminist gain, whereas early professional social workers, in fact, both forged possibilities for ruling class women to live feminist and queer lives and, at the same time, enacted the cisheteropatriarchalization of poor people’s lives. Furthermore, that women first entered the paid public sphere at this time may also not be accurate. The actual shift may have been more of a decline in women doing caring work on their own terms, rooted in traditionally “feminine” values. A key way that professional social work has advanced cisheteropatriarchalization is by forcing norms of childhood and parenting on those the white ruling classes have deemed incapable of parenting responsibly. We explore Leslie Margolin’s reading of a “before and after” photo of a girl taken into child protective care in 1892, in which he suggests that social work is characterized by its faith in the “healing power of class.”1 Putting this photo in conversation with several resonant “before and after” photos of Indigenous children who were stolen from their families at this time, we extend Margolin’s analysis of social work’s “healing power.” We suggest that social work is animated by an ethic that attributes a healing power to relations of domination, as directed by those who imagine themselves morally superior; furthermore, we suggest that these imaginaries of superiority and materialities of domination intersect class with other interlocking forms of oppression. Following Gayatri Spivak, we suggest that this ethic, which is based upon a group’s sense of superiority, is highly particular. Although the diverse people of the world have varied immensely, Spivak suggests that most people’s ethical systems have been animated by some version of a “call of the other”2 – or a sense of shared humanity. How did diverse ethics rooted in the “call of the other” come to be so widely and effectively displaced by the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority? We go back nearly a thousand years to explore what may be the initial institutionalization of this paternalistic and violent ethic, suggesting that the Crusades set in motion new ways of leading a devotional Christian life, which were seemingly previously unknown: central to this new devotional ethic was the imperative to force morally denigrated persons to change who they were. As it happened, this new ethic transformed the most famous Christian caregivers of the day, known as the Order of the Hospitallers. We trace their trajectory from first working out of a situated iteration of “the call of the other” through to a shift towards violent Christianization – initially

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by crusading and later in establishing what’s considered the first Indian reserve in what’s now called the United States and Canada. Up to this point in the book, many readers may have found themselves agreeing with our concerns but imagining that they have little to do with our presentday lives. We therefore end the chapter (and part one of the book) by discussing “claims of relative innocence.”3 “Relative innocence” describes ways that people acknowledge and critique oppression without imagining that its perpetration has anything to do with them. Like the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority, claims of relative innocence rely on firm dividing lines between a morally superior “us” and a morally inferior “them.” We suggest that these claims prevent political critique from being more meaningfully and fundamentally taken up in our everyday lives – situated as we are as diverse enactors of structural violences, creators of discourse, and agents of history. Centring Imperialist Displacement; Decentring Ruling Class White Exceptionality Uzo Anucha describes the history of professional social work in Nigeria as a process of displacing and delegitimizing indigenous knowledges and their associated interventions into the social world: “Social working in Nigeria and other African countries predates colonialism, [but] formal social work packaged as a profession … began with colonization.”4 Anucha points out that “when social work as a profession was introduced to Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, it completely replicated the social work systems that existed in Britain and was underpinned by a colonial mentality that believed that anything that came from the West was superior.”5 While the details are specific to the spaces in which she locates them, the fundamentals of her account can be roughly generalized as describing what’s taken place throughout the globe as the history of social work. Contrasting indigenous Nigerian social workings with those of professional social work, Anucha quotes Odiah, who describes how the “kinship system in the traditional Nigerian society provided for family welfare, child welfare, health, mental health, care for the aged, informal education, recreation, social planning and development.”6 Nigerian kinship systems also intervened in “behaviors that the community regarded as deviant by involving the wider kin and it was not uncommon for restorative penalties to be imposed.”7 Beth Barron describes long-standing helping traditions elsewhere on the African continent, documenting Egyptian “traditions of giving alms (zakat) to the poor and establishing endowments (waafs) for their benefit.” Baron discusses the trust system within Islamic law too. This system “helped to provide

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for the social welfare of the poor, orphans, and widows.”8 These and countless other diverse practices of social working existed in Africa long before professional social work existed anywhere in the world. In her article about Nigerian social work education, Anucha describes the historical and geopolitical context in which professional social work came to Nigeria. Positioning present-day Nigerian social work within its specific circumstances and origin story makes sense, given the focus of her article. Yet, she curiously also describes the context in which social work first emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States. For her to show herself knowledgeable about social work – even in the context of an article on Nigerian social work education – Anucha is expected to demonstrate her knowledge of the standard account of polarized white social work history.9 We’re not critiquing Anucha here; we’re critiquing the white supremacy everyone is constantly forced to navigate. Anucha’s navigation of this ubiquitous white supremacy is perhaps an illustration of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double-consciousness.”10 She had to intimately know and effectively navigate both relevant indigenous and evertransforming Nigerian discourses and also relevant colonial/white supremacist discourses in order to write this article. The history of settlement houses and the Charity Organization Society (COS) is not a Nigerian history, and Anucha never advocates for the establishment of settlement houses in Nigeria. Yet, settlement houses are mobilized to do the work of legitimizing disqualified and politicized social workings. In order to be read as a legitimate social work scholar (and thus as capable of legitimizing delegitimized social workings), an author needs to align themself with what seems to be an unwritten rule in which white settlement houses do the work of showing that politicized alternative social workings are possible and valid. Consequently, British and white American histories are positioned as a shared legacy of all humanity. Anucha describes “remedial social work” as shaped by “a legacy of colonization and the influence of Western social work,” which she traces to the COS, and she asserts that this legacy is in “sharp contrast to that of the Settlement House Movement.”11 However true this comment may be, the legacy of the COS contrasts sharply with many things, some of which are indigenous to Nigeria. Anucha’s thesis is that indigenous Nigerian social workings are most relevant to contemporary Nigerian social work. She demonstrates that Nigerians were social working before white professional social work came to Nigeria and that long-standing Nigerian practices of intervening in the social world are social work and can therefore form the basis of social work education. She calls for this education “to rediscover the value of indigenous knowledge.”12 But to make that important political intervention, she first must reiterate the white (radical) standard account critique of the COS.

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Again, origin stories give us a sense of who we are, what the world is, and what might be possible in the future. If, for the next decade, every single scholarly social work article, textbook, and lecture, which would otherwise mention the COS and settlement houses to frame what social work essentially is, were instead to cite Anucha’s account of professional social work as a colonial displacement of indigenous knowledges in Nigeria, this alternative framing would change social work fundamentally. Students, professors, and ultimately practitioners would think and feel differently about who we are, what we do, and how we might go about doing what we do with increased justice, respect, and dignity. The conversations about social work that seem to be naturally occurring or politically neutral would be different from those we tend to find ourselves having today. Alongside challenging colonial displacements and delegitimizations, Anucha highlights the fact that indigenous Nigerian ways of organizing, caring, sharing, and otherwise intervening in the social world have persisted. She therefore advocates that Nigerian social work primarily ground itself in these living indigenous Nigerian knowledges and practices, rather than those of white colonial professional social work. Readers may recall that when white professional social work was first emerging, Jane Addams made a recommendation resonant to Anucha’s, but in reference to the poor white Chicagoans who accessed Hull-House. Addams noted the difference between practices of sharing and support among poor neighbours versus those found in the actions of charity workers. She suggested we should follow, advocate, and cultivate this neighbour-to-neighbour helping rather than that of the new professional social work, and she described this alternate social working as grounded in a totally different and morally superior ethic – rather than simply being a different practice.13 Resonating with both Anucha and Addams, Jillian Jimenez advocates mobilizing informal Black child welfare practices to redress rampant anti-Black racism in contemporary professional child welfare.14 Cyndy Baskin and Michael Hart both advocate the same in relation to social work among Indigenous peoples in what’s now called Canada,15 and Inés Hernández-Avila envisions a future in which “sovereign indigenous peoples continue to plunge our memories to come back to our originality, to live in dignity and carry on our resuscitated and ever-transforming cultures and traditions with liberty.”16 Positioning herself as an outsider to an ever-transforming indigenous culture in West Bengal, Spivak articulates her work there as aiming to “resuscitate the lost cultural imperative to responsibility” that she says capitalism destroyed.17 She says she orients her efforts to try “to learn from below, the lines of conflict resolution undoubtedly available, however dormant, within the disenfranchised

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cultural system.”18 This orientation is very different from teaching pre-established conflict resolution strategies or parenting skills, or from telling someone to take responsibility for their actions.19 What might a social work look like that supported “ever-transforming” situated social workings or, where necessary, supported community-led efforts to “resuscitate” local ethics and practices that colonialism, capitalism, and professional social work have delegitimized and displaced? A primary means of tearing the “cultural fabric of responsibility”20 in communities around the world has long been the imposition of new norms and ethics for governing familial life and love – even though such displacements are usually not complete. Anucha writes, for example, that the “traditional reliance on the extended family has been considerably weakened by industrialization and urbanization, [but] the reciprocal obligations of family members toward one another still operate quite strongly in many Nigerian communities.”21 The denigration of such reciprocal obligations was largely accomplished through the imposition of what Robert McRuer describes as “the supposedly ‘traditional’ family structure that places marriage at the centre.”22 For this reason, Dian Million describes colonialism “in Indigenous terms [as] a painful dismembering of families and societies.”23 Such dismembering inseparably involves both material and moral/discursive impositions. Sara Ahmed traces out what she calls a “moral economy” that steers people away from queerness, leads them to naturalize and accept women’s subordination and lack of freedom, and valorizes tastes and habits associated with the white ruling classes.24 Million writes that missionaries and the white settler state imposed a “moral economy that is created between racialized Indigenous children, their families, and the white settler society.” Furthermore, as she notes, “barring any nonmonogamous, nonheterosexual union” was central to this colonial moral economy.25 We now turn to this interlocking moral economy and its violences. Cisheteropatriarchalization as an Advancing White Ruling Class Moral Economy Although cisheteropatriarchy is often imagined to be increasingly dominant and normative the further you stray from contemporary white ruling class culture (either in geography or history), the specific contours of cisheteropatriarchy that are normative today throughout much of the world were imposed by the white ruling classes upon people who were colonized, institutionalized, and poor over the last few centuries. Like other social working impositions, cisheteropatriarchalization is narrated as benevolent.

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For example, James Mill wrote: “Among rude people, the women are generally degraded; among civilized people they are exalted … The history of uncultivated nations uniformly represents the women as in a state of abject slavery, from which they slowly emerge as civilization advances.”26 Such white supremacist framings of women’s relative denigration sanction intense social workings in racialized and colonized people’s lives. Spivak therefore articulates “white men saving brown women from brown men” as a frequent and continued justification for both historical and continued European and white settler state imperialism, describing this orientation as key to “imperialist subject-production.”27 As Hershel Russell notes, white imperialism in the last few centuries can be differentiated from other and earlier imperialisms by its efforts to shape the intimate lives of those invaded.28 These efforts significantly included violently repressing practices considered contrary to white Christian ruling class mores of gender and sexuality. In the 1500s, for example, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa murdered forty people he understood as “male” who wore what he considered “women’s clothing” in what’s now called Panama.29 Jill Alaers also describes how diverse and situated gender norms were violently disrupted across the Americas through colonialism, land seizures, “discrimination, oppression, violence and brutal murder.” Such violence was normatively “supported and praised” within white societies and justified using Christianity. Many Indigenous peoples resisted these violences. For example, Crow people resisted the denigration and suppression of boté (Crow for Two-Spirit), and in 1879 when “Indian agents attacked the last Hidatsa two-spirit by stripping him, cutting off his braids and forcing him into men’s clothing, he fled to the Crow where it became the Chief ’s duty to protect him.”30 While the histories of diverse Two-Spirit folks and traditions are unique, they are not isolated. South Asian hijra communities have a resonant history: hijra people played exalted spiritual and healing roles within Hindu communities, were celebrated as such from ancient through to more recent pre-colonial texts, and were an integral part of pre-colonial understandings and enactments of gender. During colonial rule, the British increasingly marginalized and oppressed hijras, ultimately passing a law in 1897 making it a crime to be hijra. Colonialism devastated hijra communities and disrupted the esteemed role they once played in everyday South Asian life.31 Hijras have survived and continue to play a spiritual and healing role in India, although this role was violently subjugated by the importation of British cisheteropatriarchy. Across what’s now called the United States and Canada, pre-colonial Indi­ genous marriage structures and practices were incredibly diverse, but were also profoundly different from the heteronormative companionate marriage imposed through European colonization. According to Alaers, “same-sex marriages

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were common among Indigenous groups.”32 And Million writes that the “heterosexual couple was not necessarily the focal point for marriages. Marriages were unions of family systems that placed larger responsibilities on clan and kinship bonds between these groups first, not on the relations between the two people.”33 These varied family systems allowed for a greater range of diversity in terms of the kinds of possible relationships between and beyond the two people who were married. Yet, missionaries and white settlers normatively understood any different approach to marriage as morally inferior. For example, a member of the Ontario Woman’s Christian Temperance Union wrote in 1926, “I am impressed with the pitiful conditions existing among Indians in remote parts of the Province where they are still living in their native state, without (as far as we know) any civilized marriage laws.”34 Indigenous societies practised a wide variety of local traditions in relation to love, sex, and partnership – some of which were more rigid or law-like than others; before colonization, however, none practised the precise European norms that would be forced upon them. Million discusses the imposition of these norms in her analysis of the colonial displacements of traditional gender, sexual, and family relations in what’s now called Canada. She says the 1876 “Indian Act altered gender relations in the communities, because it is the law that constructed a hierarchal patriarchy [and] … legislates and morally polices a heterosexual norm.”35 Through this law, she points out, “Canada came to legally control and socially modify all aspects of Indigenous life” in a manner that she describes as inseparably “racialized and gendered and heterosexual.”36 While vastly divergent versions of extended family and community relations had varied prominence around the world, the nuclear family as the expected and morally exalted way to group people together had never existed anywhere in the world before the rise of industrial capitalism in Western Europe (England being the one possible exception, starting perhaps around the thirteenth century*). It’s not that there were never two parents who lived exclusively with their biological children. Of course this arrangement occurred, just as there were sometimes (then and now, here and elsewhere) single parents of adopted

* Hymowitz, in “The Real Roots of the Nuclear Family,” cites scholars who claim to have debunked the notion that the nuclear family had never been normative before the Industrial Revolution. Their counterclaim, however, is merely that the nuclear family was locally normative in England, starting around the thirteenth century. The fact that the nuclear family is now normative and exalted in so many places of the world was a result of European imperialism, regardless of whether it first became exalted in England in the thirteenth century or in Europe several centuries later.

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children and households composed of a child, their father, and their father’s brother. But the nuclear family wasn’t deemed superior to other groupings, and it would rarely have been the most common living arrangement anywhere in the world previous to the rise of industrial capitalism, the displacements from traditional lands and communities that capitalism created, and the individualizing of labour power that it enacted. The nuclear family is frequently imagined to have been the most commonly found family structure since, well, forever. This imagining is simply untrue. The imposition of family structures as a strategy of imperial governance may have first taken place in 1609 Paraguay as a Jesuit intervention into Guarani social worlds. These Jesuit-built and controlled settlements were known as “reductions,” and are sometimes remembered today as a successful socialist experiment that we would do well to emulate – as recently expressed by Pope Francis.37 Michel Foucault discusses such romantic representations of the reductions, but he counters that although the Jesuits opposed military violence and slavery, they didn’t substitute these brutalities with freedom but instead “with a different type of distribution, control and human exploitation by a disciplinary system.”38 Instead of subjecting Guarani people to slavery or massacring them, the Jesuits totally regulated the lives of the people in these communities. The monks dictated “their working hours, mealtimes, time allowed for rest, and the fixed time when they were woken up to make love and produce children.”39 Furthermore, the previous communally organized communities were broken off into individual family dwellings, and each of these dwellings had open windows and a walkway alongside it, allowing the Jesuits to supervise what went on inside at any time of the day or night. People’s behaviour could be monitored continuously, and they were organized into family structures that were foreign to Guarani culture. Although discussing a much later history, Saba Mahmood describes a significant aspect of Westernization in recent Egyptian history as the normalization of “the liberal ideal of companionate marriage.”40 This term refers to marriage based on love and carrying with it the expectation that partners will be one another’s closest companions, as opposed to a marriage based initially on things like extended family needs or political alliances. According to Mahmood, companionate marriage has delegitimized and displaced situated and diverse Egyptian understandings and practices of relationality. We can imagine that such processes of displacement and replacement would also wear away previously existing varied and local ways that people negotiated love and sex outside of heterosexuality and binary gender norms – as people have found ways to do at all times and in all places. These situated negotiations would have been developed and honed alongside previously existing normative

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marriage structures (such as not necessarily expecting love or constant companionship between a married woman and man), and so a newly imported norm for straight marriage structures would have also displaced situated strategies for pursuing love and sex outside of marriage. Likewise, the Jesuit social workings in Paraguay would have made it much more difficult to have sex or meaningful emotional intimacies with anyone other than the opposite-sex person that the missionaries understood to be one’s spouse. John D’Emilio therefore notes that the historically and culturally situated norms of companionate marriage and the nuclear family “reproduce not just children, but heterosexism and homophobia.”41 According to Patricia Hill Collins, framing the nuclear family as “traditional” accords moral value to some and denigrates others. She writes that the nuclear family is organized around “a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born into it.”42 She says this system legitimizes racism, classism, and sexism. Gay liberation activists have also been deeply critical of companionate marriage and the nuclear family structure since the 1970s, rejecting what is now referred to as homonormativity (the replication of heteronormative lifestyles by gays and lesbians). The influential 1971 Gay Liberation Manifesto rejected monogamy, calling it “the blueprint of the straight world which gay people have taken over.” The group called for a reimagining of relationships and ways to live, such as “the replacement of the family unit with its rigid gender-role pattern by new organic units such as the commune.”43 Likely influenced by this manifesto, Foucault suggested that same-sex love and same-sex sex has always expanded possibilities for human freedom, however subjugated its interventions into our social world have been. He therefore advocated cultivating relationships based upon the relatively non-institutionalized project of “friendship” rather than the much more rigidly institutionalized model of “marriage.” As compared with a woman and a man, he said, two men have less of a blueprint for navigating love and sex. Beyond cisgender gay men, the widely varied comings together of queer love, sex, and kinship could inspire less institutionalized lives and relationships for all of us, as an alternative to everyone being expected, or forced, to assimilate to the institutionalized and standardized norms of cisheterosexual marriage and the nuclear family. Philosopher C. Jacob Hale describes an illustration of this potential in an article subtitled “How to Have Sex without Women or Men.” He discusses his relationship with a former lover that began with both identifying as women (the gender they had each been assigned at birth); through their play together, he describes how they created a “culture of two” through which each gradually came to reconfigure their understandings of their bodies and selves, such that they now both live as men.44

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Interestingly, though, the European transition to the normalization of today’s nuclear family and cisheterosexual monogamous love marriage also inseparably created the possibilities for what has come to be contemporary queer identity and community. Male/female companionate marriage and the nuclear family first started to become the exalted norm in select parts of Western Europe in the mid-1700s. The displacements spurred by capitalist industrialization disrupted age-old familial practices and found large numbers of people relocating, selling their individual labour to private companies, and therefore living away from extended family and historical community. The traditional function of marriage was thus interrupted, as were the close-knit and long-standing extended family and community bonds in which marriage partners and their children had previously been enmeshed. This disruption created an increase in certain kinds of individual liberty, such as the freedom to choose who to spend time with, have sex with, cultivate the opportunity to fall in love with, and live near or cohabitate with. This new individual liberty wore away at traditional practices of arranging marriages based on family or community negotiations and needs. “Heterosexual relations, in this context, were released from the imperative to procreate and reimagined as connected to love and intimacy,” writes McRuer.45 These material transformations created the conditions for companionate love marriage between women and men and the nuclear family to become both a norm and a moral imperative. They also created new conditions for the possibility of long-term partnerships among people who are romantically and/ or sexually attracted to others of their own gender or who transgress gender binaries – as well as for other forms of practising sex and love outside of heterosexual marriage. D’Emilio writes: “Gay men and lesbians have not always existed. Instead, they are a product of history, and have come into existence in a specific era. Their emergence is associated with relations of … the historical development of capitalism – [and] more specifically its free labor system.” He’s not saying it was new that men had sex with men or women with women. Neither is he saying that same-sex love or partnership was new. He’s rather describing new material possibilities for centrally organizing one’s social life and identity around same-sex desires and affections. Mass displacement from tight-knit rural communities as a result of industrial capitalist urbanization “created conditions that allow some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex.”46 Discussing D’Emilio’s analysis, Susan Stryker adds that the same capitalist displacements also created possibilities for people to live lives that we would today call trans (although this opportunity only applied to those who desired to and were able to pass as the gender they were not assigned at birth, previous

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to the availability of hormones or surgery to facilitate such passing): “Femalebodied people who could successfully pass as men had greater opportunities to travel and find work. Male-bodied people who identified as women had greater opportunities to live as women in cities far removed from the communities where they had grown up.”47 As was the case with certain new gay and lesbian possibilities, the conditions that secured the norms of the nuclear family and cisheterosexual monogamy also facilitated selected possibilities for certain trans lives. Concurrent to the developments in family and relational structure, the advancing moral economy of cisheteropatriarchalization also materialized in a new literature on how to best raise white ruling class boys. Foucault says this literature marked the emergence of a new and more straightforward hierarchy for organizing people within coordinated professional, ruling class, and state control. In this new hierarchy, ruling class boys are directly accountable to their father, who’s accountable to state-sanctioned experts such as doctors, whose practices and advice are standardized and regulated.48 As a result, “the internal parental control that fathers and mothers are required to exercise is necessarily plugged into an external medical control.”49 This childrearing literature extended the concerted control of the state, the professions, and ruling class men, which manifested very differently across class and gender stratifications. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise on education was named Émile after its fictional male student. Émile is an orphan but had wealthy parents, so it was within the classist sensibilities of the day that he was imagined teachable. However, a second person’s education is also described in the book: Sophie, a girl engaged to marry Émile. Discussing Rousseau’s portrayal of Sophie, Ahmed writes: “Women and men should be educated in different ways that [enable] them to fulfill their specific duties as gendered beings … Education for Émile is about becoming a good man … [whereas] education for [Sophie] is about what she must become in order to be a good wife.”50 Rooted in the normatively sexist assumptions of ruling class men at this time that girls are “naturally uneducable,”51 this childrearing literature assumes a boy child. It also assumes that the reader is a father, rather than a mother. And some authors actively advocate that fathers become more involved in parenting their sons. This advice, however, is not a gesture towards feministoriented equity; rather, it’s animated by misogyny and male supremacy. Landmann wrote: “Mothers, who are ordinarily entrusted with their children’s education, very rarely know how to deal with unruly behavior successfully.”52 Screber casts sexist and classist doubt on the capacity of working class women to raise ruling class boys, concerned that “usually … children of this age are

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entrusted almost exclusively to domestics, who rarely have the requisite understanding.”53 With an intended readership of ruling class men, the ruling class male authors deem certain aspects of childrearing too important to trust to a woman or – God forbid – to a working class woman. This literature thus represents a curious intervention into gendered family responsibilities. There’s a moral upgrading of selected aspects of the traditionally feminized labour of childrearing. Yet, this moral valuation interlocked with misogyny and classism to strengthen ruling class men’s power and exaltation. It was a narrow and particular elevation of the importance of how to raise ruling class boys; it was not an elevation of women or of traditionally feminine ways of relating. Rather, if childrearing is important, then ruling class men must be more centrally involved. The white ruling class childrearing discourse of the 1700s and 1800s also institutionalized new strategies for controlling and morally denigrating poor parents. This mechanism of state power was not mediated through the voluntarily sought-out family doctor’s advice, but rather was imposed upon poor families directly. This development concretely prefigured ruling class professional social workers’ later classist and racist intrusions. In what’s now called Ontario, the 1799 Orphans Act dictated that “families that were poor were viewed as moral and economic threats, and their children were to be ‘bound out’ to proper self-supporting families.”54 Poor parents could no longer be trusted to raise their own children to be moral, or to keep them safe. Instead, the ruling classes now framed poor parents as a threat to their children. As a result, poor families were targeted with surveillance and potential punishment. Furthermore, a new moral panic about children’s sexuality entered the childrearing literature in the 1800s. Vastly different social workings in response to this panic illustrate the moral economy differentiating poor and ruling class parents. In addition to being disturbing, writing about childhood sexuality in this period is very odd from today’s perspective. Foucault describes the children as “all those exhausted little masturbators on the edge of the grave who, as they are dying [because they masturbated], turn to their parents for the last time” to reprimand them for not preventing them from this terrible vice that has predictably killed them, as it had killed so many before them.55 The discourse surrounding childhood sexuality at this time isn’t about sexual abuse in a contemporary sense. Sexual violences and their traumatic consequences have only been politically problematized as such since the last half of the twentieth century.56 In the 1800s, the outrage was more about children being introduced to sexual sensation by adults and, as a result, learning sexual temptation and the associated vice of masturbation. The intertwined problems of childhood masturbation and adult/child sexuality were a concern in relation

2a  He was young and handsome – his mother’s hope…

2b  He became corrupted! Soon his crime makes him old before his time. His back becomes hunched.

2c  See his eyes, once so pure, so brilliant: their gleam is gone! A band of fire surrounds them.

2d  Dreadful dreams disturb his rest; he cannot sleep.

2a–d (above) and 3a–d (opposite). Selections from Le Livre Sans Titre, Paris, 1830. Wellcome Collection.

3a  His chest is buckling. He vomits blood.

3c  He raves; he stiffens in anticipation of coming death.

3b  His entire body is covered with pustules; he is a horrible sight!

3d  At the age of seventeen, he expires in horrible torments.57

N.B. These images illustrate the fate of a young man who was said to have fallen prey to the vice of masturbation.

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to all children, but were treated very differently depending on whether the child in question was poor or ruling class. Ruling class children’s masturbation, it was said, was caused or aggravated by the immoral influence of working class domestics and others outside the nuclear family; the solution was to leave childrearing to the respectable, exalted ruling class parents. Foucault notes that concerns about masturbation focused on “the sexual seduction of children by adults” who were in “the child’s immediate circle.” Women domestic labourers were the most suspect: Deslandes wrote in 1835 that “they often seek in [children] compensation for their forced celibacy.”58 Ann Laura Stoler also discusses the commonly circulated fear that domestic labourers performed “‘intimate functions’ for children under their control,”59 showing how this fear was racialized in childrearing literature directed at white colonizers. Discussing this colonial literature, she writes: “Masturbation was not something that European children were inclined to do on their own. They were encouraged and guided in such exercises in selfpleasure by [racialized] servants.”60 When racial difference was brought into the equation, even other children could contaminate ruling class white children’s morality, according to the colonial childrearing literature. The fear centred on the influence of the “inappropriate sexual knowledge” said to be characteristic of racialized children in the colonies.61 The imagined source of sexual vice was classed and raced. White ruling class parents were never imagined to introduce sex to their children, but Foucault says parents were framed as “ultimately guilty” because “they [did] not want to take direct responsibility for their children.”62 Ruling class white parents were blamed for not preventing their children’s masturbation. But they were never held responsible for introducing sex to children. A tempting interpretation of this panic about childhood sexuality is to suggest that it wasn’t possible to speak aloud about ruling class parents’ sexual abuse, but that this issue was surely the authors’ real concern. However, ruling class parents were situated entirely outside the realm of suspicion to such an extreme extent that they were directed to intervene in their children’s sex lives in ways that could be anticipated to increase children’s vulnerability to sexual abuse: “Parents must watch over their children, spy on them, creep up on them, peer beneath their blankets, and sleep beside them.”63 If the authors believed that these fathers and mothers were sexually abusing their children but just couldn’t say so, they wouldn’t have encouraged them to go poking and prodding into their children’s beds – smelling for discharge and hoping to catch hands on genitals – as the literature of the day explicitly advised. It really seems that the authors couldn’t imagine that morally upstanding ruling class men and women might do anything sexually untoward to a child.

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This apparent inability to imagine parents’ sexual predation was strictly classed. At this same time, the concern was circulated that poor people would introduce sex to their own children if only given the chance – just as they would to ruling class children if the parents didn’t prevent it. What therefore emerged during the 1800s were two distinct, parallel concerns and practices relating to sex and children, differentiated by class: first, it was never imagined that ruling class parents could or would introduce sex to their children; second, it was taken for granted that, of course, poor and working class parents and older siblings would surely introduce sexual vice and temptation to their children or younger siblings if only they were given the opportunity. These imagined distinct threats gave way to two entirely distinct responses. Intervention with ruling class parents was non-intrusive and voluntary: the parents were advised to adopt the now standardized advice of their physician so as to better protect their children from other adults. Intervention with poor families, in contrast, was surveillance and the threat of punishment. Intervention with poor people didn’t target children; it targeted parents who were imagined as the source of immoral sexuality.64 At this time, workers’ cities were designed and built around large urban centres to accommodate the dislocations of capitalist industrialization. Due to ruling class concerns about poor and working class parents’ dangerous immorality and sexuality, the housing in these cities was constructed to discourage contact between family members: people within the family were to be differentially sorted and placed apart from one another according to age and sex. Foucault writes: “There is a campaign against shared bedrooms, against parents and children, and children ‘of a different sex,’ sharing the same bed. Ultimately, the ideal is one bed per person … [with] a room for the parents and a room for boys and a room for girls. So, there is no close physical contact.”65 Poor parents were thus kept away from their children’s beds in the same historical moment that ruling class parents were told to get into them. This classed differentiation was the context in which it was first imagined that poor parents needed to be watched by someone outside of the family in order to protect poor children; of course, as Foucault notes, that someone would become the ruling class professional social worker at “the beginning of the twentieth century.”66 Early Professional Social Work and Cisheteropatriarchy Histories of social work are often told through a feminist progress narrative. Professional social work enabled women to enter the public paid workforce for the first time, it’s said. Yet, the relationship between early professional

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social work and cisheteropatriarchy is not so straightforward. How can we understand the material gains that ruling class, first wave feminists made for possibilities of respectably living outside cisheteropatriarchal confines, alongside their enactments of the moral economies and material violences of cisheteropatriarchalization through eugenics and strictly gendered professional work? Addams and others who promoted eugenics were advocating a movement that “plac[ed] a strong emphasis on the definition of moral sex as heterosexual and confined to marriage in order to produce non-disabled children” and framed “homosexuality as inherited, indicating that castration was a eugenic answer to such ‘sexual deviance.’”67 Yet, there’s been speculation that both Mary Richmond and Jane Addams were lesbians. Neither ever married a man, and they both had long-term and reportedly romantic relationships with women,68 sometimes known as “Boston marriages.” This same relationship structure was found among many Progressive Era white women reformers and social workers.69 However, there’s no explicit historical record* proving that these relationships were sexual.70 Both women openly expressed their love to their female companions; Addams slept in the same bedroom with Mary Rozet Smith, and they shared a double bed in hotels when they travelled. But, as a Jane Addams Hull-House Museum tour guide responded when asked her opinion on the matter, “We don’t know what happened between the sheets.” She noted that Addams held quite moralistic attitudes about sex, suggesting that it’s possible that what seems glaringly obvious from the love poems and shared beds may not be what it appears. Nevertheless, she also suggested that Addams’s relationship with Smith is relevant for contemporary queers either way.71 It’s uncontested that such common relationships between women at the time were partnerships based upon love and unique connection, and the women involved were purposefully pursuing alternatives to heterosexual marriage. Whether they involved sex is the only uncertainty; and if we were to ever discover the definitive answer to this question, it’s likely that the answer would be that some did and some didn’t. It could be added that many marriages and other longterm partnerships are sexless, regardless of genders involved, although we’re not looking to insist that these historical relationships were necessarily something they may not have been. If we knew for certain that these partnerships were sexual, that would be important. But we don’t know, and we likely never will. Still, regardless of whether they were sexual relationships, they are important to

* Addams had her personal correspondence with Mary Rozet Smith destroyed after her death.

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queer and feminist histories – as a widespread movement against institutionalized and compulsory cisheteropatriarchy.72 Stories of Richmond’s and Addams’s long-term love relationships with women are usually left out of the standard account of social work. Some of this erasure may be because there’s no concrete evidence of homosexual sex or self-identification in the historical record. At the time, homosexuality was both criminalized and psychiatrized, making it difficult and dangerous for folks to be open about non-heterosexual identities or practices.73 It’s also been speculated that they may have chosen silence in pursuit of “professional legitimacy,”74 in that social work was new at the time. But some of this erasure is likely due to today’s ongoing heterosexism. Most historians assume that historical figures were straight and cisgender, but these descriptions are contemporary identity categories with self-understandings associated with them, just like trans, lesbian, and other queer identities.75 Most of the display in Addams and Smith’s bedroom in the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum is devoted to their relationship, strongly suggesting they were partners in today’s sense, and the museum also prominently displays a portrait of Cornelia de Bey in another room. The write-up accompanying de Bey’s portrait hints that today she might identify as trans.76 She wore specially tailored clothes that would have been considered men’s clothes at a time when there was much more of a clear normative differentiation.77 De Bey was a doctor associated with Hull-House who worked in poor communities, and was an active educational, labour, and women’s rights activist. Mainstream media attacked de Bey for her masculine attire and her politics.78 Mary Schiltz and Suzanne Sinke note that de Bey “for many years shared her home” with a woman, and suggest that she may have had a sexual liaison with a visiting Russian revolutionary named Catherine Breshkovsky in 1904.79 Like Addams, Richmond, and the many other women at the time who had companionships with women and/or were gender non-conforming, we do not know how de Bey identified at the time or, if she were alive today, how she might identify now. Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen and colleagues argue that it’s important to bring this history into the open, in part “to give sexual minority social workers access to their history.”80 The appeal of locating oneself in history is powerful. Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors identifies trans people throughout history. Feinberg discusses “how important it was for me to know I had a place in history, that I was a part of the human race.”81 Feinberg writes: “I couldn’t find myself in history … [N]o one like me seemed to have ever existed.”82 These histories thus have present-day implications with respect to who a social worker is and can be. Consequently, identifying early social workers as lesbian, queer,

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asexual,* or trans means that (at least nondisabled and white†) 2SLGBTQIA‡ people might feel more at home in contemporary social work. At the same time, Addams, Richmond, and de Bey were not lesbian, queer, or trans: they wouldn’t be one of these categories even if there were clear evidence that they identified as inverts or homosexuals or had sex with women. Identities are socially and temporally contingent – today’s lesbian or trans can’t be written onto the bodies of early social workers. It’s likely that in another century the categories and understandings considered real or emancipatory today will have been replaced again, which will enable possibilities for experiencing oneself that we can’t now access. That said, none of these historical figures were straight or cisgender either – and that statement holds true regardless of evidence that they only loved men or consistently identified as women. The significance of cisness and straightness, like queerness, are culturally and historically bound. Furthermore, we can be curious about how lesbian identities (and other 2SLGBTQIA identities) get speculated upon only in the most homonormative of circumstances. This practice creates its own erasures. It’s possible that none of the four women Fredriksen-Goldsen and colleagues discuss had sex with their life companions, but that others they worked with had regular sex with other women, perhaps while married to men (whether also sleeping with them or not). It’s possible that de Bey straightforwardly experienced herself as a woman, but that other dress-wearing assigned-female folks associated with Hull-House experienced themselves as men, as neither man nor woman, or as both. We simply don’t know, but if today’s queer communities include such diversity, there’s no reason the past would only feature the most clear-cut and normative same-sex relationships or gender transgressions. As part of the project of troubling the standard account, it’s important to interrogate the erasure of possibly 2SLGBTQIA people from history and what this erasure does to create ideas about social work in the past and the present. But in doing so, we should also be careful about imposing today’s understandings

* While Boston marriages are normatively framed as lesbian relationships, some people, like Rothblum and Brebony in their edited collection Boston Marriages, frame these relationships as asexual. † Importantly and tellingly, Syrus Marcus Ware cites Feinberg’s “No One Like Me Seemed to Have Ever Existed” as the title of his MA thesis, which is then subtitled “A Trans of Colour Critique of Trans Scholarship and Policy Development in Post-Secondary Schools.” Ware contends that, as in social work history, there is a racist “tendency to prioritize the experiences of white trans people” in trans scholarship and curriculum. See also Emi Koyama’s “Whose Feminism Is It Anyway?” ‡ Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, and asexual.

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of self and identity onto the past. Although there’s no perfect response to all this uncertainty, perhaps we might follow Sandy Stone’s framing of historical figures as representing “something very like transsexualism.”83 Or we can even take a step further towards hesitance and follow Spivak’s deconstructive language to describe resonances: there is most certainly “something like a relationship”84 between Boston marriages and several of today’s available understandings of queerness. However unfortunately, based on the information we have, we can’t fully understand the significance of this history. Were Richmond, Addams, de Bey, and the many other early social workers who had long-term love-based samesex relationships, or were gender variant, active in social working because they were more sensitive to injustice partly due to their own marginalization? Did they view their sexual and/or gender identities as entirely unrelated to their social work? Were they working to establish a form of respectability only for women who lived in loving monogamous partnership with one another, gesturing towards what’s now called homonormativity? These are just a few questions we’ll likely never have answers for. The standard account of social work is shaped by heterosexism and cisism; yet, at the same time, reclaiming Richmond, Addams, de Bey, and others as lesbian, queer, or trans isn’t so straightforward. We can fairly confidently say that none of these historical figures was “queer,” given that “queer” in its exact contemporary sense hadn’t yet been articulated. That said, “it was occasionally used” in what’s been called a “near-modern sense”: in a 1903 novel by Gertrude Stein, “one of her characters uses queer as a ‘coded identifier’ so that only those who were ‘in the know’ would realize she was saying that she is attracted to women.”85 Furthermore, “queer” is often used today as a purposefully open-ended and ambiguous term referring to anything outside of clear-cut cisgender heterosexuality86 – including asexuality, which is another contemporary identity category that might have resonance with some Boston marriages. One appeal of the term “queer” is its original signification of wonky or odd, suggesting it can encompass diverse ways of being out of alignment with cisheteropatriarchy.87 Using this sense of queer, perhaps it can be said tentatively and cautiously that these histories are queer, whether or not they involved sex or self-identifications outside of cisgender heterosexuality. Without a doubt, all of these folks were actively working against the constraints of compulsory heterosexual marriage. In Democracy and Social Ethics, Addams devotes an entire chapter to difficulties arising between adult daughters and their parents when daughters choose to abstain from marriage. She writes that from parents’ perspectives, “the individual often sacrifices the energy which should legitimately go into

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the fulfilment of personal and family claims, to what he* considers the higher claim”88 – the higher claim being, of course, the pursuit of social ethics and democracy. For Addams, refusing to marry was related to this pursuit of justice. (Were these refusals only due to the restraints of heteropatriarchal marriage on women; or, were they motivated by the desire for women to choose to love and have sex with whomever they most desired?) If we take “social working” in its broad sense, the collective action of so many women at this time to refuse marriage and to sometimes pursue long-term companionships with other women was a form of social working. It was part of their efforts to make the world a better place. And, as with any other effort, this project was undertaken within the parameters available to people at the time: Boston marriages appear to have been largely a practice of the white ruling classes, and so we can imagine that this resistance tactic was partly enabled by their relative exaltation in other arenas of life. Other aspects of the relationship between the new social work and cisheteropatriarchy are also much more complicated than often recalled. The standard account frames early social work as a vehicle for women to enter the paid workforce in unprecedented numbers, but even this issue isn’t so straightforward. Working class women and racialized women had rarely had the opportunity to stay home long term to care for their own children and household, so any shift here only really applied to white ruling class women.89 But even then, as Margolin points out, it seems to have been an enormous demographic shift: “By the 1920s, approximately nine out of ten social workers were women.”90 Discussing a recent surge of women’s leadership in Egyptian mosques, Mahmood notes a tendency to dismiss movements of moral reform as apolitical. She writes: “This characterization is a gross political and analytical mistake, however, because the transformative power of movements such as these is immense and, in many cases, exceeds that of conventional political groups.”91 Among other things, such movements create new ways that people form relationships with one another, which is highly political and can even be imagined as one desired outcome of radical politics.† bell hooks articulates it exactly as such: “Through the cultivation of awareness, through the decolonization of our minds, we have the tools to break with the dominator model of human social engagement and the will to imagine new and different ways that people might come together.”92

* “He” in this sentence is used as a gender-neutral pronoun to refer to the daughter, which is kind of fun. † While some versions of this break with established norms may be ultimately depoliticizing, it is considered central in prefigurative political movements, as discussed in chapter 7.

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This articulation highlights again the significance of the shared domestic spaces that women were creating with one another – whether they involved sex or not. Ahmed writes: “Feminism gives time and space to women’s desires that are not assembled around the reproduction of the family form.”93 It’s not that opposite-sex love or desire and the biological family form are bad; rather, feminism allows for women’s possibilities both within and without the family form – all of which is complicated by interlocking power relations that make some family forms more easily available than others and create a wide variety of actual experiences of what it is to be in “family.” For example, for some people, it might be emancipatory to keep a family together against the white supremacist violences of the state and its legacies of slavery, genocide, Indian residential schooling, child apprehension, institutionalization, and imprisonment;94 for others, the freedom to distance from one’s family of origin is more politically and personally pressing. An increase in possibilities for coming together outside of the normative dominator models that are most available to us is a move towards social justice – sometimes the move is towards alternative family forms, sometimes towards denigrated traditional family forms such as extended family structures, and sometimes away from the normative compulsion to be in family. However, we might wonder: did a movement away from dominator models of coming together truly take place when ruling class women entered the new helping professions? Although such a successful shift is evident in the private lives of many ruling class white women at the time, what about their public lives and the professionalized relationships they forged with immigrant, working class, and poor women? Was it a move towards what hooks characterizes as the partnership model, and a move away from the dominator model?95 Or did women massively take on professional roles in which they became (and perhaps were forced to become, through the continued forces of cisheteropatriarchy) what hooks describes as “patriarchal women”96 or Barbara Heron terms “honorary men?”97 What difference might it make if we consider that they were navigating continued heteropatriarchy even as they were resisting it in other ways? For example, Steven Hick notes: “Although they brought women into public life and social work, these early activists … supported more traditional conceptions of the family in which women were expected to stay in the home.”98 This comment poses an interesting paradox. (Some) women are said to have become liberated from the confines of compulsory heterosexuality and marriage, only to become the agents of these same cisheteropatriarchal forces in more marginalized women’s lives. Part of this dichotomy can be attributed to straightforward classism (as always, intersecting with other factors such as racism and disablism): ruling class women could pursue higher purposes in

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life, but working class and poor women needed to take care of families. But is something else going on here too? Why were ruling class women allowed into the paid workforce in such numbers at this time? What was it about this mass movement that was less than fully disruptive of the established status quo? It seems that women were enabled to enter the new professions both because the professions were associated with “care” and were thus traditionally feminized activities, and, inseparably, because all “humanness [wa]s squeezed out [of care work through] … professionalism.”99 This contradiction is articulated well by Margolin, who cites social work educator R.E. Thompson on why women were said to be particularly good social workers due to qualities traditionally aligned with femininity.* These qualities could be used to serve a purpose more traditionally aligned with cisheteropatriarchy, surveillance, and control: Because women are, in most cases, less clumsy and obtrusive than men, less likely to speak in loud tones and assume center stage, they should always be given preference when it comes to selecting investigators of the poor: A woman “can go, without offense, where men would not be welcome. She will see a great many things which ought to be considered, but which escape men.”100

We could say that the qualities of decentring oneself, being unobtrusive, and speaking in gentle tones might make someone an excellent helper outside of the stratified power relations that hooks calls the dominator model. They might even be reminiscent of earlier discussions of Indigenous societies in which it was never acceptable to speak for someone else, contradict someone unless it was really important, or tell a child the meaning of a story. But if, in early social work practice, these qualities amounted to nothing more than a ruse that enabled women to observe more insidiously and take more rigorously damning notes, then women’s labour was key to spreading the operations of power throughout poor people’s homes and communities.†

* We don’t believe that femininity is inherent to those with vaginas or that masculinity is inherent to those with penises. Yet, in this discussion, we mobilize the analytic categories “femininity” and “masculinity” that are normatively associated, respectively, with male-identified and female-identified bodies. Trans/feminist/queer authors Hale, Serano, and Whittle also fruitfully engage these traditional categories. † To utilize the word “ruse” shouldn’t be taken to imply that these women or anyone else knew precisely what role they were playing in this larger scheme or necessarily intended straightforward control for the sake of control. Throughout this book, we attempt to articulate more nuanced framings of “intentionality,” especially in relation to caring and social justice work that perpetrates systemic forms of oppression.

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Is it possible that ruling class white women were granted entry into the professions only in exchange for aligning themselves with traditionally masculinist qualities and political projects? Was this feminist gain complicated by its intersection with an enduring moral economy that values masculine-gendered traits, qualities, and actions over feminine-gendered ones? Was it like the earlier moral upgrading of childrearing, which was only enabled by a masculinization of childrearing practices? Did a resonant masculinization also occur when “caring” was institutionalized and professionalized in the new social work? Mahmood observes that many traditionally “feminine” qualities are now seen as weaknesses and no longer normatively valued – in women, men, or anyone else. She writes: “It is clear that certain virtues (such as humility, modesty, and shyness) have lost their value in the liberal imagination and are considered emblematic of passivity and inaction, especially if they don’t uphold the autonomy of the individual.”101 We might reflect upon how different social work might be today if virtues such as humility and modesty had become valorized through women’s increased entry into the professions. If traditionally feminine traits had entered the public sphere along with the white women now allowed into it, how might even longstanding masculinist realms such as medicine, law, and government have been transformed? Imagine if humility was held as equally valuable as assertiveness, modesty as confidence, curiously listening as giving advice. In articulating her feminist research methodology, Jacqueline Vincent writes that she aims to “cultivate a strategic vulnerability that encourages others to reflect on their actions.”102 Imagine a world in which vulnerability, modesty, gracefulness, and not assuming centre stage animated how those who have more entered into relationship with those who have less. Imagine a world in which women’s increased entry into the workforce didn’t necessitate adopting values traditionally associated with masculinity but rather displaced normative aggression, self-righteousness, self-certainty, and competition across the professions. Hell – imagine a world in which there aren’t those with more and those with less, because previously subordinated folks with a foot in the door of power structures were enabled to work collaboratively to fundamentally restructure our social world. Resonantly, hooks discusses a story of a Black woman whose assistance of a white woman is shaped by white supremacy: “For fifteen years Annie sent the old milkman her hard-earned money every Christmas pretending that it came from the selfish, rich, white woman. This was Annie’s way of teaching by example.” She hoped to make the rich woman “a better person” but was acutely aware of the confines of her role “to be subordinate and to serve.”103 Without wishing to minimize the violence of Annie’s relationship with the white woman, we can nevertheless wonder what a world might be like in which enactments of care and instruction such as Annie’s might be more valued than the assertive,

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certain, white ruling class heteropatriarchal values that have dominated social work since it first emerged. Why did women’s increased entry into the new social work profession fail to bring about such a shift in morals and values? What’s more, the story of women’s increased entry into the workplace rests upon a normatively evoked prehistory: we all tend to know matter-of-factly that women were excluded from the male-dominated public sphere since time immemorial (among ruling class whites, at least). Yet, it turns out that this assumption isn’t true either. The prejudice of progress104 enables the history of social work’s professionalization to be told as a feminist gain that is perhaps less than fully warranted by the historical record. European women occupied key healing roles in both the community and institutions previous to professional social work, but they had been systematically pushed out by the professionalization of medicine for several centuries. The expulsion of women from traditional professional healing roles is another instance of cisheteropatriarchalization as an advancing force, rather than an ancient and immobile starting point from which white cultures have been steadily progressing for centuries. Bonnie Burstow describes the increasing marginalization of women healers beginning in the 1500s. Finally, she says, in the period from 1854 to 1870 (recalling that the first COS was founded in 1869), “bit by bit women practitioners were pushed out.”105 Women had made up a significant percentage of the healing professionals in hospitals (20 per cent) and almshouses (25 per cent), often holding prominent positions through to the 1800s. However, “the claims of the medical profession that … only doctors were qualified to treat the insane gradually forced women into marginal … or volunteer roles.” Burstow therefore concludes: “Examine all the shifts, and a story about oppression is evident.”106 This particular shift created a newly established absence of women in professional healing, which only then allows us to perceive women’s entry into professional social work as a feminist gain. It’s possible, considering all the details that are often left out of this progress narrative, that the actual shift which occurred at this time was from women healing on their own terms, rooted in traditionally “feminine” values and mores, to women increasingly becoming folded into masculinist institutionalized roles and practices of surveillance and control. Stories enacting the prejudice of progress enable the continued disqualification and delegitimization of all things deemed feminine,107 and yet this history has often been spun to tell a straightforward story of feminist gains. Our hope is that we might all be a little more cautious when we encounter narratives like the following: In Canada, the movement for greater participation of women in public life arose at the end of the nineteenth century. It had a number of major strands, including

Displacement, Denigration, Cisheteropatriarchalization  151 the temperance movement, women’s missionary and charitable activities, and the suffragette movement … These early women’s organizations were forerunners to the profession of social work.108

It’s not that this account – taken from an introductory social work textbook – isn’t true. It’s just not the whole story. Only some women were gaining an increased entry into public life, while others were being subjected to more rigorous cisheteropatriarchal scrutiny and control. Furthermore, previous to the professionalization of medicine that lasted right into their own time, some of these women might very well have taken on similar roles outside of these late nineteenth century movements. Professionalization, which is normatively framed as enabling women’s entry into paid work, also actively delegitimized women’s public and paid labour. The Ethic of the Healing Power of Domination and Imagined Moral Superiority An 1892 book of photography by Jacob Riis* called Children of the Poor shows two photos of seven-year-old Annie Wolff.109 The first photo portrays Annie when those soon to be called social workers first took her from her family: “her dress is pulled down, exposing the scars on her arms.” The second shows her “after six months in the Society’s care”;110 Annie is “posed in a silk dress and pearls.” Margolin describes these images as comforting for ruling class anxieties about social and political problems associated with poverty. The photos suggest that these problems have “cures, reforms, remedies, [and] solutions” in the form of ruling class interventions into poor people’s lives. Margolin thus describes the photos as “visual evidence of the healing power of class.”111 People have always cared and shared and tried to influence their social worlds; this activity was not new with professional social work. So what differentiates the most normative organized professional social work from the vastly diverse efforts to care, share, and intervene in social worlds that are found among all people at all times? Margolin answers by suggesting that professional “social work is a type of power,”112 which he sums up as “the healing power of

* Steven Johnson in “Light” sums up Riis’s photographs’ impact on ruling class concerns about poverty, crediting Riis for “triggering one of the great movements of social reform in American history.” Later in this chapter, on page 169, we discuss Margolin’s critique that Jacob Riis’s photography and Jane Addams’s writing worked in tandem to represent poor people as pitiable and without any analysis of their own lives or context.

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class.” Annie’s photos are certainly striking, as is Margolin’s analysis. Yet, perhaps he doesn’t go quite far enough. Annie’s “before” picture exposes much more female skin than would have been socially acceptable in photographs outside of “scandalous” erotica.113 Perhaps, then, 1892’s norms of sexism and classism interlock to represent her as morally at risk due to her family and community. Furthermore, the shape of her body in the “before” picture suggests some form of physical disability, whereas her respectable, fully-clothed “after” picture leaves no suggestion that she might be disabled. We don’t know whether Annie was or wasn’t physically disabled. Yet, it appears that one or both photos were staged to contort her body to appear either more or less disabled. Margolin’s articulation of social work as fuelled and rationalized by “the healing power of class” is therefore both incredibly powerful and far too narrow. The pictures portray Annie as cured from poverty, abuse, the sexual immorality imagined as rampant in her community, and disability. Class is only one dimension of social work’s ethic of an imagined “healing power.” Furthermore, Annie’s photos were not isolated. We can juxtapose Annie’s pictures with other “before and after” photos of the time: those of Indian residential school students. These pictures portray what we might call the “healing power of whiteness.” The most famous are the photos of Thomas Moore Keesick, who has been described as “the face of Indian residential schools.”114 Thomas was a Muscowpetung Saulteaux child from what is now Saskatchewan who was eight years old when he was enrolled in the school in 1891, the year before Annie’s photo was published. Thomas is wearing regalia with long braided hair in the first photo, and a European suit with short hair in the second. Removing Thomas from his family and community could potentially make him a respectable child who, as Homi Bhabha writes, would be “almost the same but not white.”115 At least that’s a fitting description of how the intended impact of Indian residential schools was portrayed in their propaganda. Like many others, “he died from being at a residential school.”116 Other “before and after” photos gesture towards different aspects of the “healing power” of interlocking forms of domination and imagined moral superiority. In images of Navajo teenager Tom Torlino* from 1882 and 1885,117 Tom is considerably lighter skinned “after.” It’s hard to believe this skin colour change is only a matter of different exposure to the sun and wasn’t doctored in the photos. But if it was only lack of sun, it paints a dismal picture of the

* Tom’s photo is held in the Richard Henry Pratt papers, suggesting he was confined to Pratt’s school. Discussed elsewhere in this book, Pratt was the man who advocated to “kill the Indian … save the man.”

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extent to which he was institutionalized. Furthermore, Tom’s facial expressions expose another aspect of the imagined healing power of institutionalization and white respectability. “Before,” he looks openly and positively terrified. He’d been recently taken from his family, after all. “After,” he appears to have learned to suppress more open expressions of fear. He looks just as scared, but seems to be clenching his teeth and body in an attempt to put on a brave face. And then there are the two photos of a young Cheyenne woman named Woxie Haury.118 Woxie’s wearing a wedding gown in her “after” photo, armin-arm with her tuxedoed groom. As discussed earlier, “civilizing” Indigenous peoples – especially women and Two-Spirit people – centrally involved forcing European marriage and family structures onto them. The healing power of class, whiteness, nondisability, sexual modesty, institutionalization, ruling class white norms of emotional regulation, and cisheteropatriarchalization: is this fundamentally what professional social work is? Annie and Woxie were taken from their families and raised by strangers who subjected them to very different lives than they would have otherwise lived. While Annie’s and Woxie’s families and communities were denigrated as a threat to their children, the white ruling classes were exalted through this same intervention as exceptionally capable and moral. Those people running child protective services and Indian residential schools weren’t really superior, and Woxie’s family wasn’t inferior. Yet, the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority led white ruling classes to erroneously believe that other people’s children would be better off raised by white ruling class strangers than by their own families. This belief is so unrelenting that it enables people to imagine that the pain they’re inflicting – as frequently evidenced by children’s and parents’ tears – actually benefits the children and the family. Margolin describes an aspect of historical and contemporary discourse in which “social workers are social workers, and clients are clients. In this most legible of bifurcations, social workers act, and clients are acted upon; social workers are powerful, clients are helpless.” This tethering of social workers’ capacity to clients’ incapacity shapes the largely taken-for-granted “efficacy and superiority” of both social workers and the white ruling classes.119 “Not only were clients’ problems attributed to them, but credit for solving their problems was given to members of the middle and upper classes – specifically, to social workers … [O]ne group was always active and the other passive.”120 Margolin’s framing here suggests an intimate relationship between moral economy hierarchies of exaltation and denigration and Mel Chen’s exploration of the political significance of “animacy” (which is roughly how animate, alive, mobile, and agentive a person, group, or thing is imagined to be). They write: “Animacy is implicated in political questions of power and the recognition of different

4a  Annie Wolff, 1892. Riis, Jacob. The Children of the Poor. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892.

4b  Thomas Moore Keesick (Muscowpetung Saulteaux), 1891. Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan.

5a  Tom Torlino (Navajo), 1882 and 1885. Richard Henry Pratt Papers, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

5b  Woxie Haury (Cheyenne), no dates. American Indians of the Pacific Northwest Collection, Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.

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subjects, as well as ostensible objects.”121 Thinking with Margolin’s observation of social workers’ imagined “efficacy and superiority,” we see that a group’s self-ascribed moral superiority is intertwined with their self-ascribed efficacy, agency, or capacity. The bestowal of exceptional esteem and agency relationally constitutes social service users as “ostensible objects.” Within interlocking animacy and moral economy hierarchies, those who imagine themselves superior and exceptionally capable can’t seem to imagine that others have the character or capacity to improve their own lives, get through a difficult day, or support others. The intertwining of imagined capacity with imagined moral superiority is what makes the professionalization of caring, sharing, and intervening into our social worlds make any sense at all. Sunera Thobani traces the crucial role of the exaltation of white people and the inseparable denigration of Indigenous people in the historical emergence of professional social work and the welfare state.122 Exaltation is an uncommon word outside of its religious usage, yet previous to Thobani’s sustained book-length moral economy analysis of exaltation, several others seem to have independently described professional social workers using this same unusual term. Margolin points out that “visiting the poor was described as an exalted occupation.”123 Snyder and Mitchell describe the helping professional as “exalted as a virtuous social force at the expense of those who receive his charity.”124 And Nicole Rafter writes that early professional social workers’ eugenics activism and eugenics-informed services served to “exalt” ruling class white women while denigrating and oppressing women they categorized eugenically unfit.125 This moral economy exalted professional social work and the white settler state; it also exalted white families and mores. Harkening back to earlier class-stratified European responses to fears about children’s sexuality, we see a resonant raced and classed pattern emerge with Canadian social services and income supports, which Thobani says “help[ed] preserve the [white] family unit (except for the very poor and low-income single mothers) … [and fed] the culturally supremacist exaltation of Canadian mothers and families” as loving and safe.126 Yet, while the welfare state began to support white citizen families, policies targeting Indigenous people were framed instead as saving Indigenous children from their supposedly dangerous, inferior, and immoral families. As Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey note, “The white social worker, following hard on the heels of the missionary, the priest and the Indian agent, was convinced that the only hope for the salvation of the Indian people lay in the removal of their children.”127 Indian residential schools were expanding in 1917 when professional social workers from across Canada and the United States converged on Halifax to

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coordinate relief efforts in response to the Halifax Explosion. These “social workers were careful to make sure that white Nova Scotian orphans would be raised by white Nova Scotians.” Their concern about white children “alongside the ongoing forced removal of Aboriginal children from their home cultures is a perfect historical example of … the tethering of exaltation and denigration.”128 Social work and the state thus enacted what Flannigan and Mack call “the weaponization of care”129 against Indigenous families, while inseparably securing and extending the moral exaltation of the new professional social work, the new welfare state, and long-exalted white families – all at the same time. Thobani writes that for Indigenous families “warfare and welfare were clearly not oppositional systems. Indeed, welfare became the extension of warfare, and the manner of waging this war further exalted the nationals on its front lines as compassionate and caring.”130 In addition to being a principal force of settler colonial moral denigration and violence, the new professional social work found new ways to morally denigrate diverse groups who had long been deemed inferior by the white ruling classes. Mary Richmond wrote that the social worker’s role is “to uplift the morale of that particular home.”131 Although this usage of “morale” is now rare, she’s advocating that social workers elevate clients’ “morals or morality,” “moral principles or conduct.”132 For Richmond, social work was unambiguously and unapologetically about teaching people “how to live,”133 because she understood poverty to be ultimately caused by a person’s character.134 Margolin notes that the ruling classes shared a “general conviction that the moral atmosphere surrounding the poor was as pestilential as the physical.”135 This attitude concretely shaped what professional social workers did with social service users. Due to “the assumption that the poor were morally inferior,” Ben Carniol says, “assistance became defined as moral advice on how to uplift the poor into becoming better individuals.”136 Dennis Guest writes: “Applying for ‘relief ’… was a demeaning and stigmatizing experience, because it was widely regarded as clear evidence of personal incompetence and failure.”137 For Richmond, it was a moral imperative “to inspire or shame [men] into desiring” paid employment.138 Exploring the concurrent history of French social services for disabled people, Henri-Jacques Stiker observes that participating in the capitalist labour market was framed as a moral concern in that context too. Rehabilitation and assistance were increasingly accomplished “through work, always behind walls” (that is, while confined).139 Stiker notes that this concern wasn’t described as only a matter “of achieving an economic goal … [but as] primarily a matter of achieving a moral goal.”140 The emphasis on clients’ participation in the capitalist labour market in early (and contemporary) professional social work is profound, situating such employment as a preferred way of

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life. Professional social work has been just as thoroughly rooted in other moral economies too. Margolin goes through Richmond’s Social Diagnosis to highlight sample questions she advised be asked of various client groups. Of an immigrant family, she wondered if they were “warlike” or “hottempered?” A deserted wife: “Has she … a difficult or nagging disposition?” An unmarried mother: “When did [the] girl’s or woman’s sexual experience begin? Under what circumstances – was it with a relative, an employer, an older man, a school boy? Has she accepted money from any man or men for unchastity, or has she received only a good time – theatres, dinners, etc. – or board?” A homeless man: “What are his ideas about education, about politics, about capital?”141 Richmond’s “diagnostics” were grounded in situated moral economies about each type of person, which continue to hold sway today: immigrants are violent and argumentative; sole moms, promiscuous; homeless people don’t believe in the importance of education or the sanctity of capitalism; and women are to blame when their male partners leave them. That professional social work emerged as a force of continued interlocking moral economies and their associated material violences can’t just be taken for granted. Surely we can wonder how Richmond and others came to approach helping in such paternalistic and judgmental ways. The next section, and much of the second half of this book, offers an account of how the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority progressively became institutionalized across contexts of caring and sharing. An Initial Shift in the Ethic of Relating Across Difference: The Knights Hospitaller Thomas King describes what he calls a typically “Western Judeo-Christian sense of responsibility … contain[ing] the unexamined implication that the lives of Native people needed improvement.”142 Clearly Indigenous peoples have been uniquely subjected to the operationalization of this “sense of responsibility” and its “implication.” Yet, the ethic that those considered inferior require externally imposed “improvement” is normative across contexts in professional social work. It was already established before the invasion of the Americas, enabling Columbus to advocate that Kalinago and Taino peoples needed to be “made to work, sow and do all that is necessary to adopt our ways.”143 Importantly, though, Columbus’s ethic – like all ethics144 – was culturally and historically situated. The year 1492 may be most famous for Columbus’s first voyage on behalf of Spain, but 1492 was also the year that all Jewish people were expelled from Spain. It was the height of both the Spanish Inquisition and Christian wars

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against Muslims within what’s now called Spain.* These violent social workings reflected a drastic turn from the relative peace and tolerance that had previously characterized these lands. We might well wonder how very different things might have been had Columbus first encountered Kalinago and Taino peoples outside of his cultural backdrop of situated normalization of forced conversion, torture, and war – all understood as legitimate means of religious devotion. Columbus’s orientation to Kalinago and Taino peoples, along with the varied denigrations and displacements discussed earlier, begs the question: How did the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority first come about? Citing Thobani, Jin Haritaworn writes that “different modes of emplacement and displacement,” such as the Africville and Regent Park relocations – or, again, even settlement workers or contemporary white queers gentrifying poor racialized communities – take place “in the architecture of settler colonialism.”145 This point is politically crucial, and, like theirs, our work against racism and interlocking oppressions in this book gives a certain priority to anti-colonialism, framing settler colonialism as the means by which many contemporary taken-for-granted systemic violences established their roots. At the same time, though, we might also wonder how the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority was already available to Columbus’s ethical navigations. Furthermore, we can intersect Haritaworn’s analysis with Mahmood’s call “to analyze not only hierarchical structures of social relations, but also the architecture of the self … that make[s] a particular imaginary of politics possible.”146 In this section, we trace both the material “architecture” of emplacement and displacement and the ethical “architecture of the self ” that would come to characterize professional social work, like so many imperialist and classist social workings before it, to a shift in Christian devotion during the Crusades. The history of Christian orders offers an early history of what was to become professional social work, as a 1901 pamphlet of the National Council of Women of Canada observes: “It was by the establishment of hospitals that the religious Orders of men and women first came to the help of their suffering fellowcreatures.” This history is inseparably also a history of white Christian imperialism. The pamphlet continues: “Africa and India opened up new fields for apostolic labourers, and the vast continent of America offered endless opportunities for service.”147 We now describe the history of the most famous caregiving

* Forey notes that the Knights Hospitaller, discussed in this section, were fighting in these wars by the 1100s.

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Christian order until the 1600s in order to trace out what appears to be the initial shift towards a new Christian ethic of relating across difference. The word “hospital” only took on its medical meaning a little over a century ago. Through the late 1800s in Europe and white settler colonies, there was no difference between hospitals, almshouses, and jails* in terms of who might get confined to one.148 Even when the separation of institutionalized sick and injured people from other institutionalized people was first articulated as an ideal in Christian Europe, such a separation was rarely practised. For example, in 1548, Edward Hall used almshouse and hospital interchangeably, describing an “olde and riche Hospitall … in the whiche Almosehouse the poore and indigente people were harboured.”149 In 1552, Christ’s Hospital, Bridewell Hospital, and St Thomas’s Hospital were all founded in London, England. These institutions were exceptional at the time for differentiating who stayed where. However, while one of these hospitals might be called a hospice today, the other two had nothing to do with medical care. We would call the first an orphanage and the second maybe a poorhouse, shelter, or jail. Yet, they were all “hospitals,” because hospital meant all those things at the time.150 According to Foucault, the “general hospitals” in France and New France from the mid-1600s to a little over a century ago “had nothing to do with any medical concept”; they routinely served as jails as normally as they served functions we associate with almshouses, nursing homes, or anything else.151 In fact, it seems that the word “hospital” specified what we would call an “orphanage” in Scotland into the 1880s.152 Beyond the time when the first charity organization societies were founded, hospitals were therefore as centrally what we would call a “social service” as a “medical” one, making them the pre-eminent precursors to professional social work. They were where people accessed social services. It wasn’t illness or injury that primarily brought folks to these hospitals; it was always poverty. In fact, poverty was the driving force in accessing hospitals even when medical care was sought. Only poor people received medical care in hospitals until about 150 years ago. Before that, doctors treated wealthy people in their homes, because hospitals were largely imagined to facilitate contagion rather than cure.153 In the entry for “hospital” in The Oxford English Dictionary, the first few definitions are arranged chronologically – mapping out now obsolete uses of * However, Al-Ghazal and the US National Library of Medicine both maintain that medieval Muslim institutions called bimaristans closely resembled today’s contemporary hospitals. These institutions emerged several centuries after the first Christian “hospitals” but appear to have served a specifically medical purpose. Like the Hospital of St John described in this section, early bimaristans were open to all, regardless of faith.

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the word that predated its modern usage. The first definition represents the earliest obsolete usage of the term: “A house or hostel for the reception and entertainment of pilgrims, travellers, and strangers; a hospice. Hence, one of the establishments of the Knights Hospitallers.” The second definition is also now obsolete, describing more of a social service institution than a medical one: “A charitable institution for the housing and maintenance of the needy; an asylum for the destitute, infirm, or aged.”154 Christian hospitals had existed since at least the fourth century, and those who ran them had been known as hospitallers for some time too. But, starting in the eleventh century, the most famous Christian caregivers and their most famous Christian social service site was the Order of the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem* and their Hospital of St John of Jerusalem (which is the group referenced in the dictionary definition).155 This site was a hospital, and they were called hospitallers. But again, there was “no clear distinction” between an infirmary and a shelter at the time; “it would have been impossible to manage a lodging house for pilgrims without also having some facility for nursing them when, as would have been all too likely, they fell ill.”156 The Order of the Hospitallers is the most significant group in Christian institutional history from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. They had no rival among Christian orders as renowned for caring for the poor, orphaned, injured, homeless, sick, and otherwise in need until St Vincent de Paul in the 1600s. For over five centuries, the Hospitallers were unrivalled as the most famous organized charitable body in Christendom. The Order of the Hospitallers was thus the closest thing in Christendom to centralized and organized professional social work for over five hundred years. The Hospitallers are still around today. Outside of Malta and Jerusalem, they’re most well known for St John’s Ambulance. In fact, the story of the birth of St John’s Ambulance sounds just like what Jane Addams and Hull-House residents were doing a decade later. British members of the order identified a social problem stemming from industrial capitalism and organized locally to address it: “Britain was one of the first countries to become industrial and in the 19th century there were many dangerous workplaces … Accidents were frequent but workers rarely saw a doctor in time. Death or disability from untreated injuries was common.” Local Hospitallers, in response, “decided to train ordinary

* The Order of the Hospitallers has existed continuously since at least 1080. They have been called the Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta, and various other names combining Malta, Jerusalem, Hospitaller, and St John. In discussing them here, we use “Hospitaller” throughout, both for simplicity and to underscore the continuous importance of their caregiving throughout their history.

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people in first aid so accident victims could be treated quickly and on the spot, and in 1877 they set up St John Ambulance to do this.”157 The order continues to be actively involved in social working throughout the world. For example, each year in Ontario, the Hospitallers serve 400 poor and homeless people at the Good Shepherd Christmas Dinner. They also support McDonald House, the Norwood Nursing Home, the Muskoka and Welland Hospitals, the Massey Home for Unwed Mothers, the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital, and various senior citizen homes.158 Given the order’s origins in providing care through undifferentiated institutional lodging, this catalogue of names is a telling list of services they support today. The list shows how the legacy of early undifferentiated hospitals is alive and well; we haven’t yet arranged society so that poor people, including those requiring long-term nursing care, children needing care, sole moms, psychiatrized folks, and elderly people can live outside of legacies of the early hospital. The range of people who continue to need charity, often while institutionalized, is pretty much the same as two or even eight centuries ago; it’s just that now these groups no longer find themselves all confined in the same site. We subdivide but continue to institutionalize, claiming we’ve reformed several times and even deinstitutionalized.159 However, what has changed considerably since the earliest Christian hospitals is the moral framework shaping institutionalization and other professional helping. Surely the Hospitallers didn’t singlehandedly cause the shift towards violent imposition narrated as benevolence, but their millennial trajectory clearly illustrates this transformation. Jonathan Riley-Smith is both a titled Knight Hospitaller and a historian of his order.160 He notes that the Hospitallers’ original hospital opened by 1080161 and served non-Christians.162 “They cared for anyone, without distinction of race or faith.”163 The earliest Hospitallers didn’t tether caregiving to any moral or spiritual direction. If a person required a bed, dressing for a wound, or a meal, they got it. There was no effort to convert or otherwise change people who accessed services from the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem – no moral admonishment, advice, education, life-skills training, routine, or behaviour modification. Speaking in very broad strokes, we could say that the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem and the diverse Mi’kmaw, Haudenosaunee, Cree, Innu, and other Indigenous social workings discussed in our introduction can all be situated within an internally varied umbrella category of ethics that Spivak describes as animated by “the call of the other.”164 In these diverse ethical systems, we’re called to be compassionate, kind, and helpful out of the simple recognition of one another’s humanity. Although widely heterogeneous in specific details, Spivak suggests that variations on the “call of the other” characterized most cultures around the world before being disrupted, over and over again in countless

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locales, by capitalism and imperialism. She says this disruption has torn each community’s specific “cultural fabric of responsibility”165 – that is, each community’s local and situated understandings and practices of morality – which again are vastly diverse in their details, even if all grounded in a resonant foundational “call of the other.” Spivak distinguishes this ethical “call of the other” from an imperialist sense of responsibility “that comes from the consciousness of superiority.”166 She cites Winston Churchill to illustrate this entirely distinct version of ethics: “The price of greatness is responsibility,”167 he said. And again, King notes that the flip side of this particular “sense of responsibility” is the compulsion to “improve” people who are different.168 “The call of the other” is always operationalized in highly specific and situated ways. In our discussion of Indigenous social workings, we noted that seeing visions, surviving abuse, and transgressing gender binaries were venerated. We also mentioned several values that Baskin says animate many Indigenous ethical systems, such as permissiveness. All of these elements comprise aspects of how “the call of the other” is specifically operationalized in actual situated community moralities. The Order of the Hospitallers also had a distinct, specific, and situated morality informing their early social working. They understood care as a form of religious devotion that was tied up with an understanding of their relationship to poor people. They articulated this relationship in two ways: for “the Hospitallers the indigent man or woman really represented the person of Christ and should be venerated as such”;169 and the person receiving their care was also said to “‘own’ the brothers.”170 In this specific moral economy, they positioned themselves subordinate to those they cared for, and they understood treating poor people as they would a feudal lord or even their God as a means of cultivating their alignment with God’s will and love. The Hospitallers therefore believed that those they cared for “should not just have good treatment, but the best and most luxurious possible.”171 This specific moral framework of social service provision is vastly different from that which Spivak describes as rooted in a group’s belief in their own superiority. In its specifics, it’s also distinct from any of the Indigenous moral frameworks we’ve discussed, but all are in such stark contrast with the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority that they can be said to resonantly respond to the ethical “call of the other.” The earliest Hospitallers’ moral framework would never have allowed the scrutiny, punishment, surveillance, and intrusion that have normatively accompanied social services since before professional social work emerged as such.172 The moral discourse and care practices of the early Hospitallers also differed greatly from what the order soon became, and what it soon came to be widely renowned for – alongside continued caregiving.

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Within a few centuries, the now Knights Hospitaller had become “one of the foremost military powers in the region.”173 These most celebrated caregivers took on a military role following the Christian capture of Jerusalem in the First Crusade. Previously, the Hospitallers had “engaged solely in acts of mercy”; Riley-Smith found “no reference to brothers-at-arms or to warfare”174 in their records before the First Crusade. Following this crusade, however, a military role became as central to their devotional mission as caregiving. They therefore went from nursing Muslims whom they understood as the embodiment of Christ to killing them – all narrated equally clearly as devotion to God. Christian discourse on love and religious devotion was very significantly transformed by the Crusades. In his 1095 speech at Clermont that first called all of Christendom to crusade, and which therefore first established the act of killing non-Christians as an act of Christian religious devotion, Pope Urban II said: “I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds to … carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race [Muslims] from the lands of our friends … Christ commands it.”175 He continued: “All who die by the way … shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested … Behold! on this side will be … the enemies of the Lord, on that, his friends.”176 Surely Urban II didn’t invent Christian Islamophobia. Perhaps there were many Christians who had long understood Christians and Muslims or Christians and all others on two oppositional sides representing good and evil. But this polarity was far from the only model of religious coexistence in Medieval Europe or the Middle East; it rather seems to be the case that Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities sometimes lived quite harmoniously with one another.177 All three faiths trace their origins to the prophesy of Moses and the Israelites, and so they were often held together (however xenophobically against other peoples) as the “people of the book.” Scholars from the three faiths worked together in furthering ancient Greek science and philosophy at this time in what’s now called Spain. And, in contrast to Urban II’s account of their desperate situation, Christians, like the Hospitallers, and Jewish people in Jerusalem were living under what seems to have been relatively peaceful Muslim rule. The Hospitallers’ nonjudgmental care for Jewish and Muslim people seems entirely consistent with the guiding ethics of the Muslim society they lived in. Pope Urban II certainly didn’t invent xenophobia and racism in Medieval Christendom, but perhaps he can be said to have institutionalized Christian Islamophobia in a new way – making religious intolerance and the killing of Muslims official church policy across Christendom. This policy seems to have displaced and marginalized earlier Christian moralities of coexistence and assistance. “Christ commands it,” said Urban II, reminding his listeners he was

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imbued with the power of God in saying so. Although the pope’s direct responsibility is less straightforward here, his call to crusade was also answered with a wave of anti-Semitic pogroms or massacres. These massacres were narrated as attempts to “force Christianity on the Jews,” according to Riley-Smith.178 Considering that this anti-Jewish violence accompanied violence against Muslims, Urban II seems to have institutionalized something beyond the Islamophobic violence he intended and explicitly called for. What he engendered could perhaps be generalized as a new orientation to difference, characterized by intolerance, self-certainty, and the notion that it’s Christian duty to end non-Christian ways of being. This way of thinking might read as horrific but not surprising to contemporary readers, given that the Inquisition began soon after, and could perhaps bring to mind brutalities in the name of Christianization in the Americas.179 But the use of violence to convert – or the use of religious conversion to justify violence – were counter to Christian morality at the time because it was believed that people, and “particularly Jews, should never be forced to the faith but could only be persuaded by reason.”180 Pope Urban II called upon “Christ’s heralds to … carry aid,” and then he defined the “aid” as “destroy[ing] that vile race.” He thus enabled the new Christian practice of “warfare as a devotional way of life.”181 The Hospitallers took this call up as part of their religious mission: “they fought out of love as an extension of their care for the poor.”182 Aid was now defined as destroying a race; fighting, as out of love and an extension of care; war, as religious devotion. This moral economy is strikingly different from being owned by poor people who represented Jesus and were to be venerated accordingly, even if Muslim or Jewish. The Hospitallers’ military aggressions extended beyond the territories surrounding Palestine,183 and benefactors in Europe continued to donate generously in support of their devotional work, which was now famously understood as both caregiving and warfare.184 As for the relevance of this history for contemporary social work, perhaps the most significant and enduring shift here isn’t from caregiving to killing. A subtler form of violence may be more immediately relevant to contemporary social working. Following the First Crusade, the Hospitallers abandoned a nonjudgmental acceptance of difference and began directing their efforts towards Christianization and thus towards making different people more like themselves. Mahmood invites her readers to carefully reflect upon the ethic of self-assuredly working to change other people. She says, “Many feminists, who would oppose the use of military force, would have little difficulty supporting projects of social reform aimed at transforming the attachments, commitments, and sensibilities” of Muslim women. She interrogates her own complicity in this ethic

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and invites us all to interrogate those times we think we know what’s best for others, even when the methods of introducing supposedly superior ways seem distant from “military force.” She says her “history of involvement in feminist politics attests to an unwavering belief in projects of reform aimed at rendering certain life forms provisional if not extinct.”185 Mahmood is inviting readers to reconsider the certainty that lifeworlds associated with the West, the Global North, secularism, liberalism, and even feminism are superior to all other lifeworlds. Resonant with Mahmood’s concerns, Foucault writes: “Politics is the continuation of war by other means.”186 Even where military force was not used or not centrally used, the Knights Hospitaller long waged war against non-Christians throughout the world, beginning with their transition to a military order and then carrying their work off in many directions. In the 1600s, for example, the “Hospitaller colonization of the Americas” was a “14-year period in which the Knights … possessed four Caribbean islands”: Saint Christopher, Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy, and Saint Croix. They built no hospitals,187 and they enslaved Kalinago people.188 Hospitallers were also involved in colonial social workings in what’s now called Canada from at least 1603189 (which is before the first settlement by the French or English in the Americas190). Hospitallers held key roles in New France. A Hospitaller named Montmagny, for example, was governor of New France,191 where he is said to have “laid out the streets of Quebec and converted the Algonquin Indian to Catholicism.”192 There’s an important distinction between Hospitaller efforts to convert Algonquin people and the Hospitaller enslavement of Kalinago people. Yet, Indigenous scholars posit that this distinction is not between nonviolence and violence. War by other means, as Foucault put it. King notes that “missionary work in the New World was war.”193 Referring to the same conversion efforts just discussed, King names yet another Hospitaller who was more directly involved in this missionary work. Around 1637, “the first reserve created for Aboriginal peoples in what is now Canada”194 was founded by a Hospitaller named Sillery and a Jesuit named Le Jeune.* Sillery financed the effort, and so the “reserve” was named after him. Ten years later, “there were around 167 Indians living there. However, European religion and farming were not as enticing as

* Sillery was a church-run and non-mandatory intervention into Indigenous social worlds. Staterun and coerced Indian reservations and reserves first appeared in the 1700s in the United States and the 1800s in Canada.

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the Jesuits had hoped, and, by the winter of 1649, the population of Sillery was reduced to two men, both of them White.”195 Bruce Trigger writes that “houses, food and clothing were provided” at Sillery, but only those “who agreed to become Christians were allowed to enjoy these benefits and they had to submit to close supervision.”196 According to Carole Blackburn, Sillery was intended “to create a bounded site where the missionaries could physically circumscribe their audience so that the message of Christianity could be conveyed and then enforced.”197 Close supervision and enforced regulations: this formula is closer to the provisions within contemporary group homes than to the services of the earliest Hospitallers. Indeed, Dale Miquelon and Zach Parrott write that Sillery intended “to convert Aboriginal people to Catholicism [and] … instill an agricultural lifestyle,”198 but King says it was only used as a refuge and source of material comfort, such as food and shelter, rather than an opportunity for personal transformation.199 There’s a gap, then, between how those who ran Sillery intended it to intervene into Algonquin social worlds and how it was taken up by Algonquin people. Algonquin people made use of Sillery in pretty much the way that the original Hospital of St John in Jerusalem had been intended almost 600 years previously. Algonquin people didn’t go to Sillery to change who they were, what they believed, or how they lived their lives; they accessed Sillery to eat, sleep, take refuge, and accept whatever they were offered that might make them more comfortable. Even in contemporary social services claiming to offer only shelter or dropin services, there’s almost always an element of routine and supervision, as if it’s not enough to feed, clothe, or house somebody. As if it would be irresponsible to do so without trying to change them. The Hospitaller Sillery originally intended to build a school for Indigenous children in New France.200 The first boarding school for Indigenous children in what’s now called the United States or Canada had been built in 1620 by another French religious order called the Recollets,* but they soon abandoned colonial-assimilationist missionary work.201 The Jesuits had already been doing missionary work in the Americas and the Philippines, and they took over where the Recollets left off; the Jesuit Le Jeune thus convinced the Hospitaller Sillery that a village was more urgent than a school.202 In fact, while Sillery is remembered as the first “reserve,” because that is what displacements and emplacements of Indigenous people in what’s now called Canada have been called since

* In our introductory chapter, we cite observations about Mi’kmaw life by Le Clercq, who was a Recollet.

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that time, Le Jeune and Sillery knew it as a “reduction.” This and subsequent reductions – which were the first reserves or reservations anywhere in what’s now called the United States and Canada – were modelled after the earlier reductions in Paraguay that we have already discussed. Jesuit reductions and Recollet boarding schools shared a common political dream of transforming Algonquin people to become more like white people. Fournier and Crey note that Le Jeune considered Algonquin people to be “more intelligent than our ordinary peasants [in France],”* and yet he came to conclude that the adults were unteachable.203 Tragically, however, select aspects of the strategic white supremacist social working at Sillery would take root and have a devastating impact on Algonquin people. Sillery was the first place that French approaches to penalty were used against Indigenous people: both imprisonment and the physical violences that then comprised most European penal practices. Le Jeune said it “would be a great blessing for their bodies, for their souls … if they became docile to our direction.”204 This subjugation was accomplished in at least one arena of life: Algonquin converts to Christianity helped administer violent corporal punishments that had previously been unknown in their communities before the Hospitallers and Jesuits arrived.205 Previous ways of responding to deviance within the community had been successfully delegitimized and displaced, initially only among the minority of Christian converts who briefly lived at Sillery. Claims of Relative Innocence, Part One: Progressive and Secular Dividing Practices “Critical histories are sometimes criticized for reading the past through a contemporary lens, but just as our time features diverse accounts of right and wrong, so too did earlier periods.”206 If much of our critique isn’t new, then perhaps we need to interrogate the ways that critique has failed to concretely bring about more fundamental political transformation. One aspect of this failure seems to be that few people imagine available political critique applies to them. This point is the focus of the remainder of the chapter. Readers will recall that Jane Addams was critical of Mary Richmond and the moral economy shaping social services in her day. She wrote, for example: “She does not realize what a cruel advantage the person who distributes charity has, when she gives advice.”207 Out of her biting and important political and

* European peasants were considered intrinsically inferior to ruling class Europeans at the time, and the language of “race” was often used to mark this stratification.

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ethical concerns about the normative professional social work practices of the charity organization societies, Addams “did not support the professionalization of social work … disliked being called a social worker … [and] vigorously rejected” the ethic and practice of charity visiting.208 However, as discussed earlier, Addams wasn’t simply the champion of social justice she’s often remembered as. Alongside downplaying her relevance to professional social work history by noting that her radical politics have been marginal to normative professional social work,209 Margolin also complicates Addams’s memory and locates her social working within the same moral economies and animacy hierarchies that animate professional social work. Discussing both Addams and Jacob Riis, whose photo of Annie Wolff discussed earlier exemplifies for Margolin “the healing power of class,” Margolin says that they both objectified poor people for ruling class audiences so that “the poor became something to be experienced, judged: a group to which things must be done.” He writes: “Riis and Addams gave the slum dwellers a voice … but organized that voice into something weak and pitiable.”210 As an example, he quotes Addams: “The mother was bewildered and distressed, but understood nothing.”211 Addams was critical of others for morally judging poor people. She was critical of the ruling classes’ belief that they knew better about poor people’s lives and what they needed than poor people knew themselves. Yet, this same critique can be applied to the way she framed poor people in her writing. Tracing intersecting moral economies of exaltation and denigration in Addams reveals two complementary moralizing “dividing practices”212 of continued relevance to radical, critical, or anti-oppressive social work. Like those she critiqued, Addams evaluated the intelligence and other qualities of poor people; yet, her ability to recognize this practice was compromised by her parallel self-exaltation for speaking truth to power, which situated her on the side of righteousness and thus had her critically interrogating other charity workers’ work and morality, but never her own. Focusing on others’ culpability or harm that’s perceived as worse than one’s own is a “claim of relative innocence.” Such claims are an entirely normative practice of meaning-making by “which people position others as relatively more responsible for oppression and violence than themselves.”213 Critique directed only at others left Addams with “little personal agency or responsibility for things in which [she] actively participated.”214 Addams’s focus on others’ paternalistic and denigrating attitudes and actions inhibited any impulse to consider her own. She objectified professional social workers as not understanding what they did in a parallel manner to her objectification of poor people. This pattern again evokes Chen’s animacy theory:215 Addams’s imagined moral superiority

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as a ruling class person makes her capable of transforming poor people; meanwhile, her imagined moral superiority as a political progressive makes her capable of transforming oppressive people. Poor people and oppressive ruling class people are both objectified in Addams’s narration of them. In both cases, the objects of Addams’s (and other social workers’ or progressives’) narratives are sometimes rendered as causing significant harm, which appears to render them as agents, but their infliction of harm is framed as a static characteristic of that objectified “kind of person,” rather than poor people or oppressive ruling class people being rendered as fully agentive ethical subjects. Claims of relative innocence are important to name and challenge so that political critique might invite self-interrogation and greater accountability to others, rather than only inviting moral outrage directed at others. The remainder of this chapter and the start of the next one, therefore, interrogate several common claims of relative innocence. It’s easy to imagine that histories of the Crusades, early professional social work in Chicago or Halifax, or colonial impositions in the United States, Canada, South Asia, Paraguay, and Nigeria have nothing to do with us. Our invitation is for readers to consider that these legacies live on in our everyday lives, even though we’re all positioned uniquely within them. The moral economies governing the earliest professional social work a century ago live on today. Yet, the standard account of social work history erroneously describes professional social work as a move away from earlier charity informed by Christian moralizing.216 For example, Richmond’s Social Diagnosis has been hailed as having “constructed the foundations for the scientific methodology development of professional social work”217 – but this text is the same one cited earlier in which she advised asking about sole moms’ sexual history and immigrants’ tempers. The assertion that professional social work marked a move away from Christianity and moralizing judgment is repeated so often that it’s taken for granted as truth. But it’s not true at all. Donna Franklin describes the tension between Addams and Richmond, noting that “these two perspectives coalesced into one of rational inquiry.”218 Consequently, Franklin titled her article “Mary Richmond and Jane Addams: From Moral Certainty to Rational Inquiry in Social Work Practice.” Steven Hick describes “the history of social work” as a progression through three phases: from “moral reform” through “social reform” and finally to “applied social science.”219 Yet, in spite of this often-stated progression, moral certainty and moralizing judgment remain central to social work today, and this self-righteous paternalism was constant through all the periods Franklin or Hick discuss. In contrast to the false framing that claims professional social work marked an unprecedented shift towards science, the earlier sciences of the 1800s were

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already informing professional social work, even as it was coalescing into what it would become: in the century leading up the birth of professional social work, charity had already been increasingly narrated as informed by a “growing emphasis on ‘scientific thinking,’ which … was used to explain why people occupied different ranks and status.”220 What gets considered science can be used to justify oppression and inequality, just as easily as religion can be used for that purpose. Thobani describes how self-professed European secularity enabled new justifications for uninterrupted colonial violence and land seizures; Foucault documents how it enabled new ways of medically objectifying people; and Talal Asad shows how claims of objective secularity enabled multiple imperialist projects of violently intervening in people’s lives.221 The use of science to shape charity interventions was not a move away from morally judging and denigrating. It was simply a matter of articulating long-standing moral economies of differentiated human worth through increasingly secular and individualizing frameworks. What’s more, and again in contrast to the claim that professional social work marked a move away from religiosity, early professional social workers didn’t understand their scientific claims or work to be any kind of shift away from Christianity. Richmond wrote: “To be religious … is to serve society for ‘God’s sake.’ Social service is thus of the essence of religion.”222 Addams says essentially the same thing in Twenty Years at Hull-House.223 And early social worker Charles Birtwell said that both Christianity and professional social work concern themselves with “the minuscule world of the everyday, the banal faults, the even imperceptible failings.”224 As a result, Margolin observes that “social work records contain page after page of the most intimate description … [so that] the stability of people’s moral universe is placed up for grabs.”225 God was slowly displaced from being explicitly referenced in many sites of professional social work, but the moral project of the confessional and many of its practices continued,226 with social workers taking over the role of moral adjudicator of inner worlds. Rather than being a move away from Christian moralizing, Margolin describes the new scientific charity as merely “another way of articulating the old moralism: that the conditions under which the poor live are ultimately traceable to failures in the poor themselves.” The innovation of professional social work “is not the rejection of moralistic judgment but, rather, a particular manner of expressing judgment – through an ethic of personal responsibility, private initiative, and individual achievement.”227 To this day, professional social work normatively morally evaluates and denigrates social service users. It’s a fictitious self-exalting claim of relative innocence to imagine that secularism or professionalism prevent us from doing so.

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Claims of Relative Innocence, Part Two: Knowing It Was Wrong Nearly everyone today is critical of historical injustices such as the Crusades, slavery, eugenics, explicitly racist immigration policies, and Indian residential schools. However, historical atrocities are erroneously but commonly framed as something we’ve cleanly overcome: bad things happened before, but today we cause no harm and the world is fair. This framing invites contemporary irresponsibility in relation to continuities of interlocking structural violences. According to Stiker, “Our most current construction of our past … suffers from being simplistic. In fact, our prejudice of progress tends to make us look good. We were preceded, we assume, by a kind of barbarity that excluded the disabled or eliminated them.”228 King offers a similar observation of anti-Black racism: “We tell ourselves that, as we have progressed as a species, we have gotten smarter and more compassionate. We say of slavery, for example, yes, that was a horror. We know better now, and we won’t make that mistake again.”229 He then points out that what followed slavery emancipation was simply a different form of institutionalized anti-Black racism: legal racial segregation.230 We need to attend both to hard-won political transformations and to what persists beyond such transformations. Following Du Bois, Davis notes that slavery abolition “only addressed the negative side of abolition.” Consequently, she says, “We’re still living with the residues and the sediments and the memories and the inheritances of slavery.”231 Most people today agree that the slavery abolition movement was important, but we’re nevertheless still living within the inheritances of slavery. Davis’s explanation concerns the legacy of white supremacy. Although slavery became acknowledged as morally unacceptable by an increasing number of white people in the 1800s, white supremacy persisted, even as the critique of the specific institution of slavery grew and informed concrete material transformation. Davis writes: “Even white abolitionists found it difficult to imagine black people as equals.”232 Because of the uninterrupted moral economy of white supremacy, racism wasn’t abolished with the legal abolition of slavery. Today’s oppressions can often be traced to multiple legacies of structural violence in ways that evade simple cause and effect. Foucault called this concept “causal multiplicity,” which entails “analyzing an event according to the multiple processes which constitute it.”233 For example, it’s well established that classism and racism interlock in imprisonment. Davis notes: “Carceral practices are so deeply embedded in the history of disability that it is effectively impossible to understand incarceration without attending to the confinement of disabled people” as well.234

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Genealogical studies of how present-day oppressions came about are politically urgent, perhaps partly due to a situated yet normative practice of relating to history. When white people (like the authors of this book) name some aspect of our lives in relation to those before us, we tend to distance ourselves from the histories, beliefs, and actions of our parents and our parents’ parents. It’s not critical or radical to do this; it rather seems that we’re meant to be ashamed by them and what they did. In the secular, liberal, and psychological tradition that’s normative and dominant in much of Canada and the United States,235 separation from one’s history and context is considered a normal and healthy part of human development.* Separating from the local norms and spaces of one’s family is called “individuation.”236 A person only becomes a true individual by distancing themself from their family. White critical theory and political struggle tends to enact something along these lines: we must each individuate from our oppressive historical context – as if this process were a way to take responsibility for historical oppression. To explore what such ethical individuation accomplishes, we now offer a reading of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 apology on behalf of the Canadian government for Indian residential schools.237 Harper’s apology as a historical event is tremendously complicated, and we don’t wish to dismiss its importance to many survivors. As white settlers, it’s not our place to offer a verdict on its impact on Indigenous peoples.† Rather, positioned as part of the ongoing colonization of this land, we feel compelled to critique the apology as an example of normative white evasions of responsibility. Living on stolen and colonized land, just like Harper, we read the apology to interrogate how our people frame harm that people like us have caused. The apology enacts a liberal individualistic understanding of today’s relationship to the past. Harper’s apology draws a distinct line between today’s government and yesterday’s. As a result, although the “we” making the speech represents the Canadian government and apologizes for what the Canadian government previously

* To say that secularism is dominant and normative in the United States and Canada is not to dismiss the social and political clout of fundamentalist Christians in certain parts of both countries. However, in much of the United States and most of Canada, fundamentalist versions of Christianity are treated with some suspicion and derision, even if the norm in such spaces is a kind of secular/Christian hybrid. We can follow Saba Mahmood’s use of secularism to not only mean the absence of religious convictions, but to be inclusive of religious folks who believe that devotion should not be a part of public life outside of religious institutions. † That said, readers might consult “An Historic Non-Apology Completely and Utterly Not Accepted” by Chrisjohn, Nicholas, Stote, Craven, Wasacase, Loiselle, and Smith, which describes the apology as a “farce.” See also Simpson’s “Whither Settler Colonialism?”

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did, Harper positions himself external to the group that perpetrated Indian residential schools. (He wasn’t the leader of the government at the time of the Indian residential schools,* but he’s apologizing on behalf of a continuous Canadian government; given that this continuity positioned him institutionally as the appropriate person to offer an apology, the apology could have been written without so clearly distinguishing between past and present governments). That other past government is framed only as guilty, ignorant, and violent; the one Harper represents is exclusively framed as understanding, knowing better, and regretful. Harper begins his apology by characterizing Indian residential schools as “a sad chapter in our history,”238 thus mobilizing from the start a concept of time in which history is linear and broken into distinct and discernable periods, each of which is a kind of new beginning (like collective individuation). He mentions nothing previous to Indian residential schooling, such as social structures and educational traditions previous to European invasion,239 more egalitarian and mutually non-intrusive relationships between Indigenous nations and certain early white explorers and settlers,240 white extermination policies and practices,241 antecedents in mass incarceration dating back several centuries,242 or earlier colonial-assimilationist social workings in what’s now called Canada.243 Yet, the Indian residential schools as a primary solution to what the government of Canada called “the Indian problem” made sense within legacies shaped by all those histories and many more. With such a narrow focus, Harper represents the Indian residential schools as much more exceptional than they are. In contrast, Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young’s study of the Canadian Indian residential school system explores how colonization’s violences and rationalizations first made the system possible, as well as how these forces persist today. They write: “The conceptual world-view that gave rise to the genocide of Aboriginal Peoples† remains in place …[U]nless this world-view is recognized, and the damage it has done and continues to do brought into focus, the long-term agenda of Indian Residential Schooling will succeed, even while we congratulate ourselves on having met it head-on and defeated it.”244 As Davis says of slavery, we continue to live with Indian residential schools’ inheritances and residues. However, Harper’s apology delineates a separation between then and now, characterized by today’s now-knowing-better condemnation of past wrongs.

* His career as a member of parliament began three years before the last Canadian Indian residential school was closed. † Chapter 7 discusses the relationship between Indian residential schools and the 1948 United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

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He says, “Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.”245 By acknowledging these objectives, Harper’s account is distinct (in some ways) from what Chrisjohn and Young call the “standard account,”246 which previously pervaded official discourse. Rather than following the tendencies of the standard account, Harper’s apology may appear, at first blush, to be following an anti-colonial analysis of the purposes of Indian residential schools. He continues: “These objectives were based on the assumption aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal. Indeed, some sought, as it was infamously said, ‘to kill the Indian in the child.’”247 Such clear naming of the explicitly stated racist purposes of the Indian residential schools is not how government officials had previously spoken of the them. That said, a truly accountable and anti-colonial narrative would tie the past to ongoing colonization. Instead, Harper draws a line that holds the two periods entirely distinct, thus taking no responsibility at all. Today’s Canadian government is not the perpetrator on whose behalf he is supposedly apologizing. He represents the continuous government in so far as he speaks on its behalf to apologize, but he paints an innocent picture of his government: “Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country.”248 This statement positions today’s government outside the legacies of that one historical “chapter” – today’s government is not implicated – but instead is judging as an outsider what those other guys did. Furthermore, we can ask: What exactly is acknowledged as wrong in the apology? The apology refers to “this policy of assimilation” – not “polic[ies] of assimilation,” but literally “this [one] policy of assimilation” that was Indian residential schooling.249 Yet, Taiaiake Alfred, Cindy Blackstock, Glen Coulthard, Thomas King, Bonita Lawrence, Audra Simpson, and Dale Turner,250 among many others, discuss shifts in assimilationist policies and practices, demonstrating that the Canadian government has never moved away from assimilation. Even Indigenous self-government exists within the framework of the Canadian nation-state, so that Indigenous sovereignty can only happen to the extent that “Canada” permits it.251 We’re all generally expected to learn in classrooms and to act in accordance with laws and their related sanctions hailing from England and France. Such specific examples of ongoing colonialism are endless. If we distance ourselves from the normative white supremacist self-evidence of our governance, legal, and educational structures, as but a few examples, our entire society is settler-colonial-assimilationist, even if we now commonly articulate it as “multiculturalism.”

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Harper articulates the Canadian government’s relationship to “this [one] policy of assimilation” as clear-cut and straightforward: “We now recognize it was wrong.” What those others did back then was wrong. It doesn’t have much to do with us otherwise. The apology repeats variations on “we now recognize it was wrong” several times. The intent may have been partly to demonstrate that the government has listened and understood. But this insistent repetition can also be read as merely working to create the impression or illusion of a government that now recognizes, understands, and is therefore radically distinct from that government of the past and its one policy of assimilation. Harper’s stated “we” is explicitly connected to remorse, apology, and now knowing better ten times. Yet, he only once straightforwardly locates agency for any historical perpetration by using “we” – and even then it’s for “undermining the ability,” rather than, say, forcibly removing children. In relation to every other historical act, his grammar obscures that colonial violence was perpetrated by a “we” to which he belongs – the continuous Canadian government. The apology thus works grammatically to distinguish the “we” that recognizes and regrets from those distinct people who perpetrated Indian residential schools. Harper’s apology does in fact connect violences of the past to the present, but only through continuities of survivors’ lives and actions, rather than through “colonial continuities.”252 The apology acknowledges that “this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact” that “sowed the seeds for generations to follow,” but there is no acknowledgment whatsoever that Harper’s contemporary “we” still enacts colonialism. In Harper’s representation, Indigenous people keep suffering, but today’s Canadian government is not responsible for this suffering. Continued suffering stems from lingering effects of others’ actions, which today’s government knows was wrong. Other stories can be told of the relationship between contemporary Indigenous suffering and the state, however. Inadequate water and other basic infrastructure,253 as well as vastly elevated rates of poverty,254 imprisonment,255 and child apprehension256 all relate to government policies, bodies, and action or inaction that disproportionately affect Indigenous nations, communities, families, and people. None of this harm is acknowledged or apologized for by Harper. Perhaps some future prime minister may come to know that this continued colonial violence too is wrong, but that won’t help those living today without their children, parents, or other loved ones; without clean drinking water or enough money to reasonably cover groceries. What’s more, the impulse to recognize contemporary violences of colonialism might be pushed even further away when a “we” is articulated that is now compassionate, caring, and aware of its mistakes. In saying that we listen,

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understand, and recognize, we obscure that we’re absolutely not listening, understanding, and recognizing ongoing contestations of continued colonialism. Following Ahmed,257 perhaps the apology blocks other kinds of action; certain ways of recognizing historical wrongs can block recognition of presentday wrongs. Chris used to work with men who had perpetrated abuse against their female partners. A dynamic they sometimes encountered was men who were no longer physically assaultive but continued to be otherwise abusive. In relation to events from the past, some men appeared to feel genuine remorse and would describe responding to these memories in ways that they said met their partners’ needs. However, when they swore or yelled today, they could be utterly dismissive of their partners’ naming this continued behaviour as abuse. Sometimes they’d say their partners experienced these behaviours as abuse only because of their past trauma. While a person’s experiences of having been subjected to violence do shape their present-day perceptions, feelings, and interpretations,* responding in this way to someone else’s experience of you as harmful is not “taking responsibility.” He’s acknowledging that he’s causing harm, but he doesn’t take responsibility for it – even for “triggering” her. And if he caused her trauma from the past, it’s even more irresponsible. Given that Harper is in a position to apologize because he represents the continuous government, this pattern among some of the men Chris worked with is structurally similar to Harper’s apology. Harper names ongoing difficulties stemming from Indian residential schools, but he doesn’t acknowledge or apologize for ongoing state violence against Indigenous peoples. bell hooks critiques contemporary white people who distinguish themselves from slave owners of the past, calling this stance an example of a “politics of blame,” where responsibility for structural violence is blamed on someone else through claims of relative innocence. She contrasts this attitude with a “politics of accountability.”258 For hooks, a “politics of accountability” is intimately related to interlocking oppression analyses: “these interlocking systems indict us all in some way.”259 She thus encourages us all to think about our responsibility and agency in relation to others’ experiences of oppression. To say that we’re all implicated “in some way” is not to say that we’re all equally implicated in * This statement should not be taken to mean that survivors of abuse have a less real or less valid experience of the world, its dangers, and others’ abusiveness. As Burstow’s “Toward a Radical Understanding of Trauma” and Michael White’s case study of Paul in “Folk Psychology and Narrative Practice” both illustrate, abuse survivors may indeed have a more accurate understanding of the subtleties and dangers of both interpersonal and structural violences precisely because of what they have experienced.

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interlocking oppression, of course. Some of us bear much more responsibility and benefit considerably more from the status quo than others. Just as legacies shape people subjected to violences of the past, so too are perpetrators shaped by legacies of violence and irresponsibility. We therefore need to explore how people are socially and politically produced to enact violence and irresponsibility as a result of legacies of imagining themselves morally superior, entitled, and innocent of structures of violence. Eli Clare pokes fun at psychiatry’s pathologization of marginalized groups and asks why white supremacy disorder isn’t classified as a mental disorder. He says this malady causes people to believe they’re better than others and entitled to more than a fair share of resources, time, and space.260 Sherene Razack notes that “dispossession of the Indigenous population … requires settlers who come to understand and perform their own entitlement to the land,” and therefore “white settlers and their entitlement to the land [are produced] … in an ongoing white supremacist colonial project.”261 Citing Viviane Saleh-Hanna, Giselle Dias asks: “What are the intergenerational effects of inflicting colonial violence on generations of white people?”262 How does it affect white people to be socialized within legacies of normalized racist violences of incarceration, child apprehension, and colonialism? What possibilities for being human do these legacies produce? In contrast to Harper’s separation of his government from violences of the past, Ahmed asserts that “the past is living rather than dead; the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present.”263 As Thobani puts it: “Each present encounter encapsulates and ‘reopens’ past such encounters. In the [American or] Canadian context, contemporary encounters between national subjects and Native peoples … reopen their past encounters of colonization, genocide, and dispossession, instantiating the past as living present.”264 This reopening of the past applies to encounters between non-Indigenous social workers and Indigenous social service users. It also applies when other stratified political differences are present in social work encounters. Whoever the worker and service user might be, particular legacies and wounds are evoked in every social work relationship. The particular oppressions reinstituted in a given encounter are always highly specific, however, and it can be violent to impose meaning onto others based on even the most anti-oppressive assumptions and generalizations.265 For example, we can’t assume that any account of surviving the child welfare system is going to fit exactly with any other person’s experience of living through a similar intervention. And yet, with this caution in mind, we can tentatively prepare for some of the kinds of wounds that we as social workers might reopen in people’s lives. In this book, we attempt to provide a modest sampling of the histories that may be present, real, and injurious for social service users in their encounters with helping

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professionals, volunteers, and social justice activists. We need to be accountable to these experiences. These histories shape our encounters – whether we like it or not and in spite of our good intentions, political critiques, warm feelings, or sense of solidarity. These things are important, but what’s in our hearts and minds doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for the impact of what we do. The challenge is to resist the prejudice of progress and other claims of relative innocence and to allow ourselves to be undone by engaging with these histories as the legacies that make us, our work, and our relationships what they are today. Reflecting on colonialism in Australia, Ahmed writes: “I am a part of this history … If I am here, then I am there: the stories … are shaped by the land I had been taught to think of as my own … I cannot learn this history – which means unlearning the forgetting of this history – and remain the same.”266 Engaging with Australia’s history of colonial violence changes who Ahmed is and who she may become. This violence had always given shape to her life; and now, knowing this history transforms her ongoing political and ethical possibilities. None of this transformative engagement with legacy cancels out that Ahmed’s life has also been shaped by racism, homophobia, and sexism. Indeed, operationalizations of accountability among feminists of colour and queers of colour often centre uneven positioning within interlocking forms of oppression, rather than framing people as exclusively oppressed or oppressor. For example, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance invite men to take responsibility for ending gender violence, while also acknowledging that some men may have contradictory experiences of power: “We challenge men to address how their own histories of victimization have hindered their ability to establish gender justice in their communities.”267 Perhaps INCITE!’s recognition of both men’s victimization and their responsibility for establishing gender justice can be generalized and specified for each one of us to carefully reflect upon what we can do to work towards justice in the communities in which we live. Conclusion A century ago, social work was an emerging profession. In fact, it was an emerging number of fairly distinct things that people were doing, which were only starting to be thought of as cohesive and even vaguely resembling the established “professions” of medicine or law. Today, social work is arguably the hegemonic approach to intervening in the social world – from individual and family therapy to policy work and paid community organizing. While there are many overlaps with other professional bodies and non-professional groups, and people might rightly protest that social work is hardly hegemonic in relation to

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psychiatry or medicine, no other profession claims expertise over such a broad range of interventions into social worlds – which is exactly what “social work” originally seems to have meant (at least according to one origin story).268 In the work of telling stories about what social work is and how it came to be, many histories are normatively left out entirely, and others are twisted and turned to suggest a coherence, a gradual improvement, and a consistent benevolence and helpfulness that is at odds with many lived experiences of those who’ve had contact with actual social work and social workers from the very beginning. Histories of social work construct what we can know and imagine about the present and future of social work. Following the two previous chapters that deconstructed the white polarized standard account of social work’s emergence, this chapter has deconstructed what social work is, or what distinguishes professional social work from the always-present diverse means in which all people at all times intervene in their social worlds. We discussed Anucha’s description of professional social work having displaced and delegitimized indigenous knowledges and practices in Nigeria, and we generalized that framing as a useful account of the history of social work everywhere: wherever professional social work has gained prominence, it has been at the expense of local strategies of caring, sharing, and otherwise social working. One realm of diverse local social life in particular, which has been intensely displaced throughout the globe by capitalism, imperialism, and professional social work, are those interlocking intimacies and identities relating to love, sex, gender, and family. We therefore described examples of what we call cisheteropatriarchalization. This term underscores that cisism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy are interlocked, and it emphasizes these forces as ongoing and imposed, rather than a carry-over of an ancient problem that the white ruling classes have long been consistently overcoming. We then explored the complex relationship between early professional social work and cisheteropatriarchy – showing that although it played some part in expanding queer and feminist freedoms for some, it was also an active force of cisheteropatriarchalization in poor people’s lives. We also suggested professionalization may not have been the emancipatory feminist gain that it is frequently portrayed to be. From there, we distinguished between the everyday ubiquity of interventions into the social world, generally animated by some version of a recognition of shared humanity, as contrasted with a very specific ethic for relating and intervening, which we’ve characterized as animated by the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. Wondering how this violent and imperialist ethic first began to take hold, we traced out the curious history of the Knights Hospitaller, whose famous nonjudgmental caregiving gave

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way to warfare as religious devotion, and who then went on to enact seemingly nonviolent strategies that were nevertheless violent in their attempts to change who people fundamentally are – including helping to establish the first Indian reserve in what’s now called Canada. In the second half of the book, beginning in the next chapter with a focus on shifts that took place in the 1790s, we genealogically trace out how this new ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority became institutionalized in approaches to social working across contexts. At this midpoint, however, it is important to remember again that these histories are sites that helped constitute today’s taken-for-granted interlocking systemic violences and moral denigrations, rather than horrors of the past from which we’ve decisively progressed. And so, following our interrelated explorations of the normative ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority, we shifted our focus to claims of relative innocence. Claims of relative innocence are means by which people can agree with political critiques without implicating themselves in them. We discussed claims of relative innocence that come with positioning oneself as progressive, as secular, and as distinct from perpetrators of the past because we now know better. It is our hope that these varied critiques and histories will facilitate reflection upon how each of us uniquely lives within continued legacies of violence and control, sharing and caring. Recognizing such complexity is not to give up on political responsibility; it is a prerequisite in order that we might collectively forge very different systems and ethics of living, relating, and showing up for one another in times of need and distress.

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PART TWO Interlocking Genealogies of the Ethic of the Healing Power of Domination and Imagined Moral Superiority

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4 Knowing Better: Liberalism, Instrumental Violence, and Making New Humans

What We Like to Say; What We Actually Do According to Jeffery Olson, “Social justice is the discursive beacon allowing [social workers’] interrogation, investigation, and surveillance of poor persons, persons of color, and other subjugated populations.”1 Leslie Margolin makes this same critique by mobilizing the assumed political positions of the white, polarized standard account: “Social workers may claim Jane Addams as their source of inspiration, but they do Mary Richmond.”2 Through to today, professional social work normatively fancies itself aligned with social justice, but it tends to enact personal intrusion, social control, moral denigration, and interlocking structural violences. This disjuncture is fundamental to actual manifestations of professional social work and to professional social workers’ understandings of themselves. The previous chapter proposed a possible historical emergence of the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority, suggesting that this ethic is what ultimately animated professional social work to emerge with its normatively violent and paternalistic orientation around 1900. This chapter genealogically traces subsequent developments from 1700 through to the end of the 1800s, which interlocked and mutually reinforced one another, cumulatively institutionalizing the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority across sites of intervention into the social world. We explore developments in both discourse and material social workings, which concretely set the stage for what professional social work could and would become around 1900. Michel Foucault writes: “We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment.”3 The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, was a historical period that ended in the early 1800s. Enlightenment Europeans and white settler

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colonizers imagined themselves to be creating a new world governed by reason. This chapter centres developments from the “late Enlightenment,” especially the remarkably dense decade of the 1790s. It also explores how institutions and ideas from that time continued to centrally inform white ruling class beliefs and social workings through to the late 1800s, into what’s called the Progressive Era. These interlocking material and discursive innovations enabled professional social work to manifest as it does. The Age of Enlightenment was characterized by an increasingly secular understanding that humans create society, an undermining of the belief that the rule of the monarch and aristocracy aligns with God’s will, and an increased exposure to societies outside of Europe that were organized very differently from those within Europe.4 This period gave birth to important European discourses about liberty, equality, and justice. However, Talal Asad observes: “The thought that the world needs to be redeemed is more than just an idea. Since the eighteenth century it has animated a variety of intellectual and social projects within Christendom and beyond, in European global empires.”5 George Tinker therefore says that Enlightenment thought was “always dedicated to the eurosupremacist task of rationalizing and legitimating empire” by “trying to frame Europe’s blood-drenched reality in terms of an ‘unparalleled advancement’ in actualizing the loftiest of ideals.”6 This account resonates with Olson’s and Margolin’s critiques of the disjuncture between what professional social work says and does. The initial sections of this chapter return to the childrearing literature of the 1700s and 1800s, and then discuss an innovative criminal constitution from the same era in order to introduce several key disjunctures between what gets said and what gets done. Such disjunctures were introduced in chapter 1 in reference to Africville’s destruction, and will be centrally explored throughout this chapter. We then discuss several late Enlightenment practices and discourses related to “scientifically” changing and objectifying people, all of which functioned to establish the ethical and practical foundation for what would soon become professional social work. Claims of Relative Innocence, Part Three: Interpreting Others’ Motivations In the previous chapter, we discussed how Sillery, the first joint HospitallerJesuit “reduction” in New France, began to delegitimize and displace local Indigenous social workings relating to deviance and penalty. This village was the first reserve but certainly not the last. In 1648, the year before Algonquin people abandoned Sillery, a Huron-Wendat parent used physical violence to punish her child for what appears to be the first time ever. This event occurred in the Jesuit

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reduction of Ossossané. Carole Blackburn relates that “a Christian woman beat her four-year-old son.” She describes this abuse as “a radical departure from the methods of child rearing favoured by the Huron.” Huron-Wendat people had previously “reacted with horror” to the missionaries’ advice to use corporal punishment. They believed “physical coercion and public humiliation of any individual, whether child or adult, was unacceptable.”7 It’s appalling that missionaries introduced child abuse to a community that had previously been horrified by such practices. Moral outrage and revulsion to this history are politically and ethically crucial to ending today’s normative violences. However, this history also demands a careful reflection upon what animates normative violences; moral revulsion, on the other hand, has a tendency to invite people to distance themselves from perpetrators. In this section, we return to the European literature on childrearing from the 1700s to explore the political and ethical question of interpreting and representing others’ motivations – a third exploration and critique of normative claims of relative innocence. Like Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young,8 we acknowledge the impossibility of deciphering a historical figure’s motivations and understand representing historical motivation as a political issue. We propose that representing others as straightforwardly ill-intentioned functions as a claim of relative innocence, and that representing perpetrators as animated by deep psychological drives also fails to invite contemporary readers to carefully interrogate violences that remain normative today. The earliest childrearing literature didn’t address how to educate or transform populations deemed morally inferior. In the mid-1700s, ruling class European men tended to believe that colonized, poor, criminalized, mad, or female folks were uneducable. One thing, then, that makes this literature compelling for the question of motivation is that it’s relatively uncomplicated in terms of power relations. It’s ruling class white men recommending how other ruling class white men should raise their sons. They valorize the use of what we call emotional and physical abuse today, and their recommendations are not animated by racism, classism, sanism, and so on.* As an example, Johann Sulzer wrote in 1748: One must dedicate oneself beginning with the second and third year [to cultivating] a strict obedience to parents and superiors and a trusting acceptance of all * We are not minimizing ageism here. There is a significant power imbalance between a white ruling class father and his non-institutionalized son, but this power relation doesn’t further interlock with other imbalances, as is the case with abuses in Indian residential schools, youth detention facilities, and other similar institutions.

188  Interlocking Genealogies they do … A child who is used to obeying his parents will also willingly submit to the laws and rules of reason once he is on his own and his own master, since he is already accustomed not to act in accordance with his own will. Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey. It is a generally recognized principle that persons of high estate who are destined to rule whole nations must learn the art of governance by … first learning obedience.9

For Sulzer, learning obedience was particularly important for children “destined to rule whole nations.” Yet Sulzer’s influence – or at least the shift in sensibility that he actively participated in* – would affect many people who would be forced to learn to obey without anybody imagining or hoping that they would or could “rule whole nations.” The prioritization of obedience is neither inevitable nor politically neutral. For example, the importance of thinking for oneself animates the description of Haudenosaunee teachings mentioned earlier, in which “each child had to reach an understanding of [a story’s] meaning on his or her own”10 through consulting with elders and other adults. It’s also certainly the case that some European parents in 1748 would have encouraged their children to reach their own understandings and privileged such processes over obedience. So the valorization of obedience is a culturally and historically situated value, and it’s one that Sulzer and other authors at the time believed should consistently guide childrearing – at least for ruling class boys. This childrearing literature is best known to English readers from Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. We’re indebted to Miller, and we also offer a critical reading of her framings. Miller is unquestionably right to critique the literature’s endorsement of violence, but her framing of it arguably prevents her from inviting her readers to reflect upon how and why people continue to endorse and enact violence today. According to Sulzer, eliminating wickedness and willfulness “are the two most important matters one must attend to in the child’s first year … [so that] if parents are fortunate enough to drive out willfulness from the very beginning by means of scolding and the rod, they will have obedient, docile,

* As Hicks notes, Sulzer was an influential philosopher of education. Yet, as in our earlier discussion of the Hospitallers, we aren’t trying to demonstrate straightforward cause and effect by exploring the role of this or that person, group, or development. We’re rather attending to what was possible to say and do at this time or that, which Foucault calls the “rules of discursive formation” in The Archaeology of Knowledge.

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and good children whom they can later provide with a good education.”11 Our understanding of this passage is that, yes, it advocates beating a baby with a rod. Of course, we should have a moral and emotional response to such advice, as Miller rightly does. But we should also think carefully about how our sense of responsibility gets shaped by how we respond to violence such as this. We can very easily read this passage with only disgust and dismissal: How could anyone possibly advocate such a thing? But what if that question is asked sincerely of a humanity we’re part of, rather than distancing such perpetrators from people “like us?” What made it possible for a real human named Sulzer to endorse beating babies with rods? How could anyone possibly advocate such a thing? A situated and identifiable ethic guides this new literature, which isn’t so distant from today’s normative rationalizations of violence. This continuous ethic isn’t interrogated if we respond only with moral revulsion. The literature clearly endorses violence. But it doesn’t simply endorse violence; it also advises against violence. While the literature consistently valorizes obedience, it’s more discerning when it comes to violence. For some authors, a child’s motivation needs to be considered before deciding how he should be punished and whether he should be punished at all (whereas children’s obedience is always framed as good). For example, Johann Krüger wrote in 1752 that “one should never strike children for offenses they commit out of weakness,” whether for falling, crying, struggling with their lessons, or making mistakes. He said that children should only ever be beaten for these same behaviours if they are done out of “obstinacy” or “wickedness.” A child’s motivation should determine whether or not to use violence against him. If the child is defiant, “you are justified in answering force with force to insure his respect, without which you will be unable to train him.” He advised that when you hit your child, you must hit him hard enough to “convince him that you are his master,” until he cries “Oh no, Papa, oh no!”12 These passages advocate both for terrible and inexcusable violence, and also against violence in situations in which some parents beat their children. If we frame Krüger as straightforwardly advocating violence, then we miss something with respect to what was going on for him and what he thought he was doing. Krüger advocates what we call child abuse, but that’s not all he does. This literature doesn’t endorse violence as an end in itself any more than contemporary child protection workers endorse removing children from their families as an end in itself. Most people agree that it’s usually preferable for children to live with their families. However, when deemed necessary, most people today seem to agree that removing children from their families is a good thing – despite acknowledging that doing so is significantly traumatizing for children. To effectively interrogate situations when people decide they can live

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with the harm they know they’re causing, then and now, we need to attend to people’s justifications for what they do. How are people able to knowingly cause harm and feel that it’s the best option available to them? As Foucault articulates this question, “How are such relations of power rationalized?”13 In Krüger, the guiding ethic for deciding whether to hit your son rests on first knowing your son’s motivations: “It is wrong to strike [children] for crying; but it is right and proper to strike them … if he cries with the intent of defying you.”14 But surely it’s impossible to know with certainty what a little boy “intends” with his tears. He might not know himself. And he might simultaneously intend multiple things in multiple directions, as can be true of any of us.15 Just as we should be suspicious of Krüger’s certainty about why a child cries, we should be sceptical about other interpretations of others’ motivations. A resonant interpretive move as that advocated by Krüger guides Miller’s characterization of the motivations driving Krüger and the other authors she discusses. Through this interpretive move, she situates the authors as morally distinct from people who wouldn’t hit a child. Similar framings of parents today might serve to justify violent actions such as imprisonment and the apprehension of their children. A person can take a strong moral stance against child abuse without assuming that people who abuse children have a straightforward intent to harm, and without assuming that they must be fundamentally different from the kind of person you, yourself, are.* This point is politically important if there are going to be people who are granted the authority to intervene in other families’ lives. As an example of Miller’s interpretive move that characterizes the childrearing guides’ authors as intentionally immoral, she describes one author’s

* There is a common narrative in which certain kinds of physical discipline are framed as cultural practices – sometimes in racist narratives and other times as anti-racist narratives defending Indigenous, Black, and racialized families from the intrusions of child protective services. Without a doubt, the prevalence of any practice varies across time and place and culture. However, we can also be assured that any community features a wide range of parenting practices, divergent opinions on the use of this or that practice, and also available but subjugated genealogies of how and why certain forms of parenting came to be relatively prevalent. For examples relating to and coming from within Black American and Caribbean communities, readers may wish to consult Jillian Jimenez’s “History of Child Protection in the African American Community,” bell hooks’s “Plantation Patriarchy” and her “Violence in Intimate Relationship: A Feminist Perspective” (in Talking Back), and Merle Hodge’s “Everyday Violence Against Children.” A significant political and ethical question might be how we can take a strong moral stance against child abuse alongside a strong moral stance against the forced separation of families and the white supremacist, classist, colonial, and patriarchal continuities that disproportionately support the forced separation of families.

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recommendations as a “devious form of manipulation.”16 What these authors advocate is violent, morally reprehensible, and abusive. But it’s dangerous to take this material and ascribe it a simple motivation to harm or deceive. We invite readers to consider instead that the people who made these suggestions would much more likely have been genuinely interested in raising children who would become good leaders, as they said. Given that we can’t know, it’s always possible that some of these authors loved the rush of power and control, or enjoyed seeing children cry. Even then, it seems extremely unlikely that such malice was the sole motivation behind any of them choosing to write about childrearing. The political and ethical importance of how to frame the authors’ motivation isn’t about damning or exonerating them. It’s important to not exonerate the rest of us. These histories live on much too concretely to frame them as having nothing to do with things we continue to do. In 1796, Christian Salzmann gave an account of a schoolmaster renowned for his ability to “bring it about that the children obeyed him without being whipped.” He generally used what he called “gentle means,” but “upon occasion” he would beat a child. Salzmann described in detail how the schoolmaster would postpone the whipping for a day or two. When the day came, he would announce it in the morning but wait until the end of the day to administer the beating. He delayed the beating, he said, so that “the little delinquent will feel the punishment tenfold more sharply because he has had to devote constant thought to it.” He said he intended for the punishment to affect all of the children, not only the one who would be beaten. This behaviour is all part of what he called “gentle means”; today we call it emotional abuse.17 It’s a tremendously complicated account. It’s terribly abusive. It’s also the story of a schoolmaster who said he made a considerable effort to avoid physical violence and was known for rarely hitting students. He acted in this way when it was absolutely socially acceptable for him to beat his students. It’s surely no coincidence that this account was published the same decade as non-physical means of exerting control were first emerging with convicts and mad people, which were narrated as “gentle” just as the schoolmaster narrated his approach. But even then, why did this one particular schoolmaster try to avoid hitting his students? Maybe he loved the rush of controlling children through what’s called emotional abuse today. That’s possible. But according to what he actually said, it seems more likely that he perpetrated emotional abuse because he didn’t like to hit kids and wanted to avoid doing so. His motivations don’t excuse anything. Physical and emotional abuse are both wrong. But attending to his stated motivations can help us to hold his cruelty as wrong, without so neatly distancing our own actions, lives, and motivations from his. We all sometimes hurt others

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when we think there’s a good justification for it. Such normative justifications or good intentions are the focus of this chapter. In these childrearing guides, ethicality is ascribed to using physical violence, humiliation, and so on against children. These violences are thus narrated as benevolent, as responsible. This framing is an important development in the gradual institutionalization and spread of the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. The earliest guides advocate their methods only for ruling class white boys, and adult men’s dominance of these boys is framed as essential for them to grow up to be morally exalted future leaders. In her framing of the schoolmaster who used “gentle means” rather than whipping, Miller doesn’t invite us to consider our own normative rationalizations and acts of domination. Instead, she frames him as aberrationally and straightforwardly ill-intentioned. She introduces him like this: “Feigning friendship helps even more to conceal this type of cruel treatment.”18 What impact does it have on us as readers if we imagine him as “feigning friendship” to “conceal” his cruelty? Few will read this passage and say, “Hey, I feign friendship to control kids too!” – although some people may do that. But if we want to work against normative and widespread forms of violence, we need to address normative and widespread ways that many of us excuse and make sense of our own everyday use of violence. This chapter suggests that today’s normative ethical narratives were institutionalized in the 1700s. In addition to distancing herself from those who perpetrated abuse by straightforwardly attributing ill intentions to them, Miller makes other interpretive moves that are particular to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis interprets many human actions as driven by hidden causes stemming from childhood. Like attributing straightforward ill-intent, psychoanalysis too steers Miller’s readers away from any real self-interrogation. Miller notes the discrepancy between how adults articulate their intentions and the real effects of their violence on children. Yet, psychoanalysis steers her away from considering this discrepancy a rich site of anti-violence analysis in its own right. Consider the following, in which she discusses an author’s advice from 1787 on trying to catch a child in the act of masturbation: “The conscious use of humiliation (whose function is to satisfy the parents’ needs) destroys the child’s self-confidence, making him or her insecure and inhibited; nevertheless, this approach is considered beneficial.”19 It is a fact that it was considered beneficial, or at least as close to a fact as we’re going to get in terms of historical motivation. That these approaches were beneficial is stated in the historical texts as clearly as the use of humiliation is endorsed or obedience is valorized. These framings exist in the texts. But the understanding that the function of humiliation is to “satisfy the parents’ needs” exists only in a psychoanalytic reading of

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the texts. That’s Miller speaking as a psychoanalyst, who therefore believes that parents harm children to satisfy their own psychological needs. Because she’s a psychoanalyst, and only for that reason, she believes “there must be an explanation that has deep emotional roots in all of us.”20 Isn’t it simpler to consider that children were being terribly harmed and that those advocating and practising humiliation (and other abuse) truly believed that the harm they caused was worth it? That’s what they said. Why can’t we perceive explorations of what people say of their motivations as anything other than excusing or exonerating them?21 Perhaps the guides’ focus on white ruling class boys makes it easier to consider that these white ruling class men may have really thought their recommendations were in the boys’ best interests. Miller doesn’t invite us to wrestle with this apparent benevolence and its implications for today’s normative violences. Instead, she states: “Parents’ motives are the same today as they were then: in beating their children, they are struggling to regain the power they once lost to their own parents.”22 This interpretation is psychoanalysis talking, not the historical authors. Miller does acknowledge stated rationalizations: “There is a basic assumption in our society that this treatment is good for children.”23 She says that these rationalizations prevent us from realizing the harm we’ve done;24 we’re suggesting that they also actively shape people’s actions and ethical narrations in the first place.* Her theoretical grounding prevents this explanation, providing her with an ultimate cause that you won’t find anywhere in the source material she cites: “discharge [of] pent-up affect”25 stemming from our own, individual and yet somehow universal, psychologies. Pent-up affect is psychoanalytic theory. Such theories may be useful, but it’s dangerous to treat them as causes of political phenomena (in that they inherently depoliticize). Miller provides a telling account of struggling to explain a widespread political issue using psychoanalysis: when she realized how normalized and widespread child abuse was, she turned from an individual analysis to what she calls a “universal psychological phenomenon.” She almost arrives at a political analysis, except her theoretical grounding steers her away.26 Furthermore, Miller’s framing of this widespread abuse as a “universal psychological phenomenon” takes a European man’s theory (Freud), applies it to the white male authors of the literature, and claims that it’s true of all people. She therefore imposes this situated white male interpretation of particular white men in a particular

* This framing follows Foucault’s contention, most famously articulated in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, that power not only represses but also actively shapes possibilities and produces people.

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European context to all people in all contexts. Things described as “universal” never centre, for example, the childrearing practices of transgendered parents, Imams, or Black women. Studies of marginalized groups tend to be understood as pertaining only to others within that group. Only studies of some groups get taken up as universal. The oppressive impact of such supposed universality ranges from giving harmful drugs to women and/or people of colour27 to interpreting traditional Indigenous childrearing practices that centre children’s process and collective responsibility for childcare as “neglect.” Miller’s intervention into child abuse is surely not intended to perpetuate ongoing harms caused by such an imagined universality; but she theorizes a universal subject from a situated white male experience. This example illustrates, yet again, that even the best of intentions do not prevent our complicity in violent practices. The authors Miller discusses, and Miller herself, all narrate what they’re doing as beneficial for children; yet all normalize and advance systemic violences. A close reading of Miller shows how one’s imagined innocence and others’ imagined culpability are tethered together through ethical framings of exaltation and denigration: on the one hand, it’s dangerous to imagine that those who harm have only ill-intent; on the other hand, it’s just as dangerous to imagine that our good intentions inoculate us against perpetrating injustice. Although some harm in the world may be caused by a straightforward intent to harm, much of our normative, systemic, and everyday violences perpetrated by individuals and systems are narrated and imagined as “good” for society, or even as helpful to those subjected to such violences. Further Standardizing Instrumental Violence: The Theresian Criminal Constitution Many European countries abolished the public torture of convicts between the late 1700s and the mid-1800s, a significant political cause among progressives of the day.28 Yet, Foucault and Asad invite us to consider that this reform might not have been the clear case of progress that it first appears. For one thing, reformers weren’t sure that lengthy imprisonment was less cruel than a shorter period of physical torture29 (and perhaps we shouldn’t be so certain ourselves). Foucault says the success of the abolition movement was not primarily a result of humanitarian concern, but was due to public torture beginning to ignite poor people to revolt rather than recoil in shock and awe as they’d apparently previously tended to do.30 Foucault suggests that the abolition of public penal torture was largely a ruling class shift in how to maintain control over an increasingly politicized population, rather than a shift away from power and control or towards kindness.

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It’s not that inflicting pain upon convicts ended or even lessened; rather, the tactical use of pain changed. What emerged in the 1700s, then, was “a certain discretion in the art of inflicting pain.”31 An innovative 1769 criminal constitution supports Foucault’s provocation that something other than a straightforward progress towards greater humanity was underway. Like this same time period’s childrearing literature, this constitution is often cited as an example of the excessive violence of a long bygone era; in contrast, and illustrating that people don’t know what to make of the constitution’s social working, it’s sometimes portrayed as a part of the torture abolition movement – which also isn’t true.32 Neither of these polarized framings account for the fact that, like the child rearing guides, the constitution innovatively employs violence instrumentally and discriminately; these framings certainly don’t invite us to consider that this innovation profoundly shapes us today. Rather than representing a bygone era of heartless cruelty, both the early childrearing literature and the Theresian Criminal Constitution illustrate a new operationalization of the utility of violence. Empress Maria Theresa of Vienna abolished penal torture a few years later, but her 1769 Criminal Constitution instead standardized the use of torture. Around this time, Jeremy Bentham resonantly argued that corporal punishment ran the risk of excess and didn’t serve a clear purpose, whereas torture was acceptable when used to secure a confession because it was contained by its very nature and had a clear-cut purpose.33 Although contested by abolitionists, this rationalization made sense within Enlightenment sensibilities. Torture was maintained in the Theresian Criminal Constitution, but only for obtaining a confession, while the infliction of bodily harm as punishment was abolished. The Theresian Criminal Constitution was designed “primarily to codify procedure.”34 To this end, the last thirty-five pages of the constitution are graphic illustrations accompanying descriptions of how to correctly build and use torture instruments.35 The constitution provides details such as how many candles to use when burning a person’s side during an interrogation and the correct positioning of studs within thumbscrews.36 Maria Theresa’s torture was distinguished from the public ceremonies in which convicts of certain crimes were publicly tortured repeatedly for hours on end and their bodies mutilated, even after they died.37 That treatment was now considered distasteful, at least against white convicts. Many European governments abolished public and openly government-sanctioned torture within their criminal justice systems at this time. Yet, anti-Black public torture and mutilation lasted well into the twentieth century in the United States, in slavery, lynching, and convict leasing, as well as during the Indian Wars and in many other

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colonial contexts; furthermore, torture is still widely practised today behind closed doors.38 The effort to align the Theresian Criminal Constitution more closely with Enlightenment ideals such as equality also shaped its accounting for law-breaking among the ruling classes, who generally enjoyed impunity in previous penal regimes. However, while the constitution standardized punishments, it also differentiated them based on class and gender. Maria Theresa’s move to a more precise, instrumental, and scientific penal system differentiated which kinds of punishments were appropriate for which kinds of people. Ruling class men were fined or made to forfeit their military service, while ruling class women could be confined to a convent. Neither men nor women of the ruling classes were ever deported or made to do forced labour.39 That type of sentence would have been just as distasteful as the unregulated use of corporal punishment. The Theresian Criminal Constitution, therefore, illustrates two key Enlightenment innovations that the remainder of this chapter further explores. The first is the standardization and instrumental use of violence. A little later, in the 1790s, standardized and instrumental violence began to be used to transform people who’d previously been considered “uneducable” by the white ruling classes. This new use distinguishes the 1790s innovations discussed in the following sections from the instrumental violence advocated in the childrearing literature previous to that decade and also from the 1769 Theresian Criminal Constitution. The constitution didn’t aim to change people; it instrumentally used violence, but only to obtain a confession. And while the childrearing literature advocated instrumental violence to improve people, its earliest examples were directed exclusively towards the education of ruling class European boys, who were already imagined “educable” within white ruling class discourse. Because it’s imagined to be benevolent, instrumental violence can be narrated as gentle or nonviolent, even when it’s violent and is experienced as oppressive. The second key Enlightenment innovation found in the Theresian Criminal Constitution is its effort to standardize differentiations between categories of human. We attend to such efforts later, centring the bureaucratic and supposedly scientific classifications of the delinquent, invert, invalid, and Indian. First, we discuss the instrumental use of violence to transform individuals, through an exploration of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, colonial education, the penitentiary, and the emergence of what would soon be called psychiatry. Thomas King critiques white settler colonial relations with Indigenous peoples as “a suffocating paternalism that can gently strangle the life out of a people.”40 The previous chapter discussed how colonial warfare lives on in the apparently nonviolent actions of missionaries, educators, and professional

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social workers, and we articulated the driving force behind such social workings as an ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. Discussing professional social work’s role in colonialism in what’s now called Canada, Cindy Blackstock writes that professional social work normatively “assumes the efficacy of external motivations.”41 Following Mel Chen’s animacy theory,42 social service users are imagined incapable of living ordinary lives, and so they need extraordinarily capable outsiders to govern their lives for them. Asad observes that the varied social projects of the late Enlightenment can be characterized by “a readiness to cause pain to those who are to be saved by being humanized.”43 He says that the new interventions into the social world at this time used “violence to connect an optimistic project of universal empowerment with a pessimistic account of human motivation in which inertia and incorrigibility figure prominently.”44 What Asad describes as optimism about human potentiality and pessimism about human motivation is illustrated in Angela Davis’s description of two key prison reformers of the late Enlightenment: John Howard and Jeremy Bentham. Howard conceptualized “imprisonment as an occasion for religious self-reflection and self-reform,”45 illustrating his “optimism” that convicts were capable of personal transformation at all. Sharing Howard’s optimism about this possibility, Bentham “claimed that criminals could only internalize productive labor habits if they were under constant surveillance,”46 illustrating his “pessimism” about human motivation. Critiquing the legacy of this Enlightenment ethos, Blackstock writes: “The notion of improving other people is endemic to social work.” The moral economy governing social workers’ experiences of this ethos is that it may feel like a burden, but it also functions as a source of respectability and exaltation for professional social workers.47 Our belief that we’re better human beings enables us to believe we can transform inferior human beings. This moral differentiation is a violent foundation for caring, sharing, and otherwise social working. The self-exalting beliefs “that we know what good is, are good, and can instill good in others, are so ingrained in the social work fabric that there is little meaningful conversation about our potential to do harm.”48 As Barbara Heron puts it, “Thinking of one’s self as moral enables bourgeois subjects to normalize our part in global domination through a sense of entitlement and obligation inscribed with innocence.”49 During the late Enlightenment, the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority, discussed in the last chapter as possibly first taking root during the Crusades, now became institutionalized as a moral “imperative” or “obligation”50 among the white ruling classes.

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Kant’s Enlightened Morality: Rational Self-Assurance and the Birth of the “New Man” Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who wrote his most widely read works in the 1780s and 1790s. He’s one of Europe’s most influential philosophers, and he’s most well known for his moral philosophy. We’re not suggesting that Kant directly caused any specific material violence. However, his work has been incredibly influential, and, at the very least, it powerfully illustrates several key shifts in European thought and practice that characterized the late Enlightenment. Kant provided innovative and remarkably influential theoretical groundings for several key Enlightenment social workings: first, he furthered the normative ruling class European transition away from the ethical “call of the other” by formulating an entirely new means to ensure one’s ethicality by relying only on one’s individual reasoning (which was also contingent on being Christian); second, he came to believe that all human beings are capable of becoming fully human beings, or fully moral and rational subjects, but he both articulated this possibility and theorized the means of bringing it about in ways that justified instrumental and externally directed violence and domination. Together, these two seemingly abstract or theoretical innovations enable real people to fancy their own use of material violence to be benevolent. Not everyone agrees upon what is and isn’t ethical. Kant’s response to this dilemma was to use reason to secure absolute ethical certainty. He wrote: “Until we have the guide and supreme norm for making correct moral judgments, morality itself will be subject to all kinds of corruption.”51 Yet, he acknowledged a problem with relying on reason to guide ethics: no person can objectively judge the ethicality of this or that action. When faced with ethical decisions, we can never know what will happen as a result of this option versus that one, or how this or that action fit into the big picture. Gayatri Spivak summarizes Kant’s dilemma: “We must think a final purpose and yet we can not know it.”52 Supplementing his rational means of securing ethicality, Kant claimed that this dilemma is resolved if one has faith in “a moral author of the world, that is, a God.”53 He posited that Christian faith54 is a requirement for a person to correctly follow “the call of [their own] moral inner determination”55 (as opposed to “the call of the other”), which is then attended to through individual reason – rather than through accountability to others. For Kant, a person’s moral reasoning can be perfect if they are also properly aligned with God’s eternal wisdom. However, because God’s universal morality is unknowable to us, Kant set himself the task of using reason to devise what he called “the supreme principle of morality”56 so that humans can ensure that they align their actions with God’s will.

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Importantly, “good will” in Kant’s world is taken as “good in itself without regard to anything else”57 such as “its usefulness in achieving some intended end.”58 It’s possible to judge one’s own will as good. Through a self-assessment of purity of motive, Christian faith, and the correct use of reason, absolute certainty about one’s morality is possible: “When the person acts according to [universal reason], this moral goodness is already present in him.”59 There’s no place for accountability to others here. Ethicality is achieved by a person’s assessment of their own pure motive, their faith, and their use of reason to align themself with what Kant considered universal reason and morality.60 Kant’s prescription for how to rationally ascertain the purity and ethicality of one’s “good will” involves two forms of self-interrogation. We return to the second one shortly, but the first goes like this: I should only do what I believe everyone should do, or what I believe should be turned into a universal law for everyone.61 Although intended to critically interrogate what we do, this prescription for self-reflection is entirely dependent on the perspectives and experiences a person is exposed to and the frames of reference through which they interpret those limited perspectives and experiences.62 For example, let’s recall that Rousseau believed women should be educated only to be good wives. If he surrounded himself with men who basically agreed with this idea, then their perspectives would strongly influence his potential for critical self-reflection. Their influence would support him in concluding that it would be a just universal law. If women expressed different views to him, the onus would be only on him to consider whether they were more correct than his male friends. This self-interrogation would be shaped within his already existing framework that holds men smarter and more moral than women, so the women’s perspectives would likely not alter his judgment. This process is therefore more likely to bring about self-assuredness than ethicality or justice. Nothing in Kant offers any reliable checks and balances against perpetrating violence that’s normatively socially sanctioned by those who share one’s gender, faith, class, race, and so on. There are several other reasons for this shortcoming. First, Kant straightforwardly advocated obedience. He wrote that the most just ruler would say: “Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, only obey!”63 This view overwhelmingly supports the status quo: for example, Nazi official Adolf Eichmann claimed to align his life with Kant’s philosophy. However, he said that “from the moment he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles.”64 Hannah Arendt defends Kant against Eichmann’s use of him, but she then concedes: “There is not the slightest doubt that in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant’s precepts: a law was a law,

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there could be no exceptions.”65 Kant unequivocally advocated obedience to the law.* Another reason that Kantian moral reasoning provides no checks and balances against perpetrating structural violence is that, like most Europeans of his day, Kant never questioned the superiority of ruling class European culture and civilization.66 The only real debates among Europeans and white settlers at the time concerned whether European superiority was a naturally occurring (biological) inequality or a consequence of what they considered the superiority of European culture.67 These parameters can be framed as conservative biologically determinist white supremacy versus liberal culturally determinist white supremacy. Kant was a conservative biologically determinist white supremacist in the 1780s, and a liberal culturally determinist white supremacist in the 1790s.68 Kant’s 1780s biologically determinist white supremacy had him supporting slavery and saying things such as, “[Indigenous] Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus, [they] serve only as slaves.”69 He considered people indigenous to the Americas “incapable of being educated,” and said Black people were only “capable of being trained to be slaves” (using the German word for training animals).70 He also believed South Asian people “can be educated only in the arts.”71 In the next section, we discuss the first European argument for mass assimilative education of colonized peoples. The correlation between Kant’s stated beliefs and the fact that mass assimilative education was proposed for India before the Americas or Africa coincides with reigning white supremacist racial hierarchies of his day. Contemporary philosopher Charles Mills argues that Kant’s racist beliefs seem to contradict Kant’s moral philosophy of the same decade. This contradiction, he says, can only be resolved by recognizing that Kant “makes whiteness a prerequisite for full personhood.”72 Although this reading of Kant is contested, the uncomfortable but true historical reality is that many Europeans in the 1700s believed that only white people were fully human.73 Mills’s reading of the contradiction in Kant in the 1780s is most clear in relation to Kant’s second means of securing morality through reason: “Act in such a way as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of anyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means.”74 This self-interrogation is directly oppositional to slavery, which is among the most obvious examples of treating a person as a means to an end not of their choosing. Yet, Kant

* Asad notes in Genealogies of Religion that Bentham also viewed a “good citizen” as an obedient one (203).

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articulated this thought in the 1780s, at which time he also defended slavery. For Mills, this passage shows Kant “simply does not include non-whites in the group of persons.”75 In the 1790s, Kant began to critique the injustices of colonialism and slavery, which Pauline Kleingeld says reflected a change of heart.76 All people were now folded into the category of person and thus as having the potential to become fully rational/moral subjects. However, like other liberal ruling class Europeans at the time, Kant continued to believe in the cultural inferiority of nonEuropeans and European poor people. According to this belief, without a ruling class European education, people aren’t exactly fully human in all respects. According to Spivak, Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgment states that those he calls “man in the raw”* are unable to appreciate and discern what “we, prepared by [ruling class European] culture”77 can appreciate and discern. What “man in the raw” needs, therefore, is the externally directed “development of moral ideals.”78 European ruling class culture is necessary to bridge the “gap between the [fully human rational/moral] subject as such and the not-yet-subject.”79 This liberal culturally determinist white supremacy was not unique to Kant or the late Enlightenment. A century later, the paper that articulated “kill the Indian … save the man” named these two white supremacist positions; its author, like Kant, positions himself among the liberals: “It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage,” said Captain Richard Henry Pratt. “He is born a blank, like the rest of us.”80 Razack suggests that these two white supremacist possibilities continue to shape colonial relations today: “The encounter between colonizer and colonized … remains a moment when powerful narratives turn oppressed peoples into objects, [either] to be held in contempt, or to be saved from their fates by more civilized beings.”81 Racialized and colonized peoples aren’t framed as intrinsically inferior in liberal culturally determinist framings, but they’re nevertheless held as inferior; they need superior ruling class Europeans’ interventions into their lives for any chance that they might reach their full potential. This new Enlightenment liberal discourse of culturally produced inferiority creates a previously unknown ethical dilemma, as it interlocks with Kant’s optimism about flawless moral self-certainty. Heron frames the white ruling class “helping imperative” as grounded in “a sense of entitlement and obligation” to intervene in others’ lives,” which, she says, is “inscribed with innocence.”82

* Spivak notes that Kant uses other language to specify European women, children, and poor people, so she says “man in the raw” can be understood as broad enough to include peoples outside of Europe.

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Kantian philosophy concretely enables this imperative: If someone is inferior only due to their inferior socialization, is it not universally correct to socialize them differently? And if an entire group of people is inferior because of their inferior socialization, is it not universally correct to make every effort to resocialize that entire group? Within the Kantian framework, which continues to profoundly influence white ruling class discourse and practice,83 the moral dilemma of colonization and other forms of stratified social working is how to best make fully rational/moral subjects out of people who are otherwise only potentially fully human. In 1793, now believing in European superiority due only to superior culture and education, Kant articulated the possibility of making a morally inferior person into a fully rational/moral subject. He wrote, however, that this transformation required “a revolution in the disposition of the human being … And so a ‘new man’ can come about only through a kind of rebirth.”84 Only after an initial and drastic transformation does Kant advise to focus on a gradual “improvement of mores”85 similar to that which the white ruling classes should use to constantly strive to better themselves. The very possibility of such a “new man” marks Kant’s progress from conservatism to liberalism, from biological determinism to cultural determinism. The possibility of improving an inferior person reflects Enlightenment “optimism” about human potential; the call for drastic personal “revolution” reflects Enlightenment “pessimism” about human motivation. This ethic of creating “new men” will animate colonial policies and sites of confinement around the world – such as Lord Milner’s articulation of the objective of colonial policy in Egypt as making “new men”86 and William A. Jones’s aim to “exterminate the Indian but develop a man” through US Indian boarding schools.87 Becoming fully human will likely be painful, but, again, pain is justified within Enlightenment sensibilities as long as it achieves something specific and isn’t considered excessive according to those inflicting the suffering. Articulating this ethos, Kant described suffering as an important and ongoing instrument for pushing the “new man” towards progressively “becoming good or better.” Writing about the truly rational/moral subject, he explained that “sufferings are not ascribed to him as ‘punishments;’” rather, “he willingly takes [them] upon himself, as so many opportunities to test and exercise his disposition for the good.”88 For Kant, inflicted pain might tactically bring about an initial drastic individual “revolution,” and from then on it could continue to instrumentally help people become better throughout their lives. Kant’s articulation of the “new man,” enabled by his transition from conservative white supremacy to liberal white supremacy, articulates the importance of instrumental violence in changing people deemed morally inferior. According to his ethics, as long as other rational/moral subjects (that is, white

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ruling class men) agree upon strategies for changing morally inferior people, these strategies can be safely, comfortably, and rationally assumed to align with God’s universal morality. These arguments didn’t exist before Kant. Violence and oppression existed, but these particular arguments for their instrumental use in transforming inferior people into fully rational/moral subjects and the particular means of achieving a sense of unwavering moral certainty and innocence through Kantian moral reasoning were absolutely new. White, educated, ruling class, Christian men no longer needed a pope-like figure to assure them that their well-intentioned instrumental violences aligned with Divine Law; now they could sort that out for themselves, without ever having to consult those they targeted. If contemporary social workers are to refuse the claims of relative innocence that allow us to imagine that professional social work’s systemic injustices have nothing to do with us, then we need to consider how such rationalizations continue to live on in our hearts, minds, relationships, and social services. Gentle Instrumental Violences, Part One: Rationalizing Colonial Education Striving for Kant’s “new man” animates many interventions into the social world, and nowhere is this orientation stated more explicitly than in colonial policy, as in Milner, Pratt, and Jones’s framings of Egyptian and American colonial intentions mentioned earlier. These terrible articulations, which usually invite us to distance ourselves from unimaginable racisms of the past, were grounded in the liberal sensibility that first emerged in the late Enlightenment and remains normative today. In 1792, the same decade that Kant renounced his conservative biologically determinist white supremacy in favour of an enlightened liberal culturally determinist white supremacy, according to which all people could potentially become aligned with white ruling class mores, the first call for large-scale assimilationist education of colonized people was published by Charles Grant. Grant’s own personal history is rather surprising. On 16 April 1746, the antiimperialist Jacobite Rising in Scotland was defeated in the Battle of Culloden.89 Shortly thereafter, traditional Scottish clothing and other aspects of indigenous Gaelic culture were outlawed.90 One of the Scottish rebels killed that day fighting against English imperialism was Alexander Grant. His son Charles was born the day of the battle, and would go on to champion British imperialism in both India and Scotland.91 Yet, within the sensibilities of the late 1700s, Charles Grant was progressive. He was a slavery abolitionist, even though many other Scots displaced through the Highland Clearances went on to become slave

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traders or owners.92 And, like Kant in the 1790s, Grant too believed that colonized peoples were capable of becoming more cultivated, educated, and otherwise improved. With that purpose in mind, Grant was actively involved in Christianization efforts in India and Scotland.93 Grant was unwaveringly white supremacist, in that he wouldn’t have questioned white European superiority compared to all other peoples, and he believed that white superiority was a consequence of culture and education. In 1792, the first mass emigration of Scot settlers to Canada and the Carolinas94 continued the imperial violence of the Highland Clearances and the destruction of indigenous Gaelic culture in Scotland, at the very same time as it perpetrated settler colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in what’s now called the United States and Canada. These histories of English imperialism are more interrelated than we often recall. For example, as Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young note: “Many of the tactics subsequently applied” in what’s now called Canada and the United States “were practiced first upon” indigenous people of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. They point out that British-style education systems imposed in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales worked towards “the suppression of native languages and the denigration of traditional practices.”95 In 1792, the year of the first mass Scot emigration, Grant published Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals, and on the Means of Improving It.96 This text shared the liberal sensibility of Kant’s “new man.” Grant described South Asian people as not yet normally capable of rational and moral self-governance, but as having the potential for rational and moral self-governance if given a British education.97 Grant’s Observations also explicitly articulated a softening of Enlightenment egalitarian values, which would haunt Indian residential schools and other colonial policies worldwide, as well as asylums, prisons, group homes, and other sites of social services: in practice, at least, it’s held that inferior people can be made to approximate white ruling class standards, but they can never achieve actual equality. Colonized and enslaved people’s lives can be vastly improved, but the idea that they would become equal to ruling class Europeans was outside the realm of European thought at the time.* * Within this logic, Grant may have faced ongoing prejudice because he was Scottish (along the lines of Said’s tracing of shifts in British denigrations of Irish people in Culture and Imperialism). However, he was probably also exalted in India as a European colonizer. This shifting positionality, contingent on geopolitical location, resonates with Razack’s suggestion in Dark Threats and White Knights that Cree men in Canadian “peacekeeping” forces in Somalia were contingently positioned as colonizers in Africa, even though they are obviously among those colonized in Canada.

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Edward Said writes that the first principle in every colonial relationship is that “a clear-cut and absolute hierarchical distinction should remain constant between ruler and ruled.”98 Therefore, where assimilation is considered possible, its aim isn’t true equality with colonizers. Homi Bhabha also discusses this principle in his analysis of Grant’s Observations: “India required a system of subject formation – a reform of manners, as Grant put it – that would provide the colonial with ‘a sense of personal identity as we know it,’” that is, a particularly European sense of individualism. Yet, this “reform of manners” was only intended to go so far. Bhabha says that Grant was “caught between the desire for religious reform and the fear that the Indians might become turbulent for liberty” (like Grant’s father had been). Bhabha writes: “Grant paradoxically implies that it is the ‘partial’ diffusion of Christianity, and the ‘partial’ influence of moral improvements which will construct a particularly appropriate form of colonial subjectivity.”99 This explicitly articulated aim towards “partial” improvement distinguishes colonial education from the strategic use of obedience and instrumental violence advocated earlier that century to prepare white ruling class boys to rule. South Asian people were to be made more like white people through British-style education, but the objective was never to make them equal to white ruling class boys. Bhabha says they were to be “almost the same, but not quite”;100 “almost the same but not white.”101 As evidenced by Grant, the British destruction of indigenous ways of being (whether in Canada, the United States, India, or elsewhere) and the creation of assimilated colonized subjects who would forever be inferior to colonizers were entirely purposeful and publicly stated objectives. These explicit motivations shaped policy around the world. However, they shaped policy distinctly in white settler colonies as compared to colonies where settlement wasn’t a primary strategy.102 In India, for example, the goal was a new class of Indian people to govern the relatively unchanged masses, at least in the short term. Grant wrote: “The proposed plan of communicating instruction to the Hindoos, through the medium of our language, does not suppose that the vilest out-casts of society are first to be selected for that purpose.”103 In the United States and Canada, in contrast, the goal was the more immediate and total destruction of Indigenous lifeworlds and absorption into the white British/American/Canadian body politic – yet subordinated and on the margins. Again, this strategy represents the progressive and liberal end of European race discourse at the time. Grant’s Observations “was only superseded by James Mill’s History of India as the most influential early nineteenth-century account of Indian manners and morals.”104 Mill was a student of Bentham and a prominent Scottish philosopher. Like Grant, his account of “Indian manners and morals” functioned to support his argument to displace and then replace them with British ones. Mill argued

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for the fundamental morality of imperialism in a way that may be surprising. According to Ahmed, Mill’s “justifications for empire rested primarily on its benefits for the colonized.”105 This framing of empire as benevolent informs what Rudyard Kipling would call “The White Man’s Burden” in 1899.106 The “burden” is shouldered by the white civilized man who is duty-bound to assist others to lead moral and civilized lives.* As Ahmed describes, Mill’s advocacy for empire relied upon the instrumental utility of violence and suffering: “Although … Mill does recognize that colonialism involves suffering for the natives, he argues that the good that colonialism brings for India outweighs any such suffering.”107 Mill held that life outside of European civilization is so miserable that the short-term pain of Indian people having their entire way of life destroyed would benefit them in the long run. Erroneous and disgusting as Mill’s ideas may be, don’t they live on today? Is the idea that people in the Global North have a better understanding of people in the Global South truly a thing of the past? Or that white people should influence the lives of Indigenous, Black, and racialized peoples; ruling class people, the lives of poor people; or non-psychiatrized people, the lives of psychiatrized people? Those who continue to imagine themselves morally superior also continue to intervene in denigrated others’ lives at their own discretion and are normally only held accountable to others positioned similar to themselves in race, class, disability, gender, and other political identity categories. Christianity would long continue to be a major force animating interventions into social worlds, but justifications for social working were increasingly (also) articulated in secular terms during the Enlightenment. Within what Erick Stokes calls this period’s “secular evangelicism,” the guiding premise was that “natives could be converted” to European mores, which would “liberate the individual from the slavery of custom.”108 During the Enlightenment, the European ruling classes largely maintained previously existing hierarchies but now articulated them without positioning God as so central to their arguments, and they thus described themselves as working for justice. This transition towards secularism within Christian traditions and moral judgments was complex, with Christian faith and Enlightenment rationality often complementing one another and producing unexpected new results.

* The framing of empire as benevolent didn’t go uncontested, even among the white ruling classes. Erin Murphy documents how Jane Addams, at an Anti-imperialist League rally, spoke out against these justifications for imperialism, explicitly referencing Kipling’s poem the same year it was published.

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Kant’s use of reason to align with God’s universal morality is one example. Another example is the spread of disciplinary practices beyond the monasteries where they first developed. Gentle Instrumental Violences, Part Two: Continual Observation and Coerced Penitence Over the course of several centuries throughout Medieval Christendom, monks developed practices of self-discipline and self-regulation that aimed to ward off sin and temptation. All humans were said to be born with original sin and were therefore prone to temptation. Because of this belief, disciplinary practices were to be kept up for one’s entire life. Asad sums up these practices and their rationalization as follows: “In his sinful state, man is in mortal danger; yet, God in his infinite mercy has provided for the possibility of man’s salvation.” Monastic life provided an opportunity for the soul to be reformed and thus redeemed.109 For centuries, these practices were only ever undertaken voluntarily. For example, in institutions established by the Hospitallers, the only people subjected to disciplinary practices would have been the Hospitaller monks themselves. However, in the late 1700s, monastic strategies of self-cultivation were added to the arsenal of ways to control denigrated peoples in an effort to align them with white ruling class mores. This new tactical and externally imposed use of discipline coincided with the emergence of long-term imprisonment as the primary response to crime. It wasn’t until “the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries … [that] new legislation … [made] detention the penalty par excellence, [and] introduced procedures of domination characteristic of [disciplinary] power.”110 Imprisonment filled the social working gap that resulted from white settler and European countries abolishing the public torture of white convicts. Foucault notes the central role that framing imprisonment as “gentle” played in discourses surrounding the shift from public corporal punishment to confinement. Yet, this shift marked a change in violence and domination rather than an end to violence and domination. The violence of flogging or hanging targets the body, while the violence of imprisonment targets the soul or the very being of the prisoner.111 Resonating with Kant and Grant, the new imprisonment’s goal was a transformation “of the conscience itself. A profound submission, rather than a superficial training; a change of ‘morality.’”112 Two significant developments in 1790s social workings targeted the prisoner’s soul: in 1790, the world’s first-ever “penitentiary” was created at the Walnut Street Jail in Pennsylvania; and in 1791, Jeremy Bentham published his ideas for the “panopticon.”

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6  “The Penitentiary Panopticon,” 1791. The Bentham Papers, Special Collections, University College of London Library.

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Bentham’s “panopticon” is an architectural plan in which people are led to believe they might be under surveillance at any given moment. Cells, or beds, or desks, or workstations are arranged in such a way that a central observer can keep an eye on them all at the same time. In its ideal form, walls and lights are manipulated so that those under surveillance can never know whether they’re being observed at any given moment. The purpose is for immoral people to internalize moral habits they’d ordinarily only practice while observed by someone with the power to punish them. It is therefore an architectural enactment of the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. The panopticon is most often discussed in relation to imprisonment, but Bentham specifies that it was intended for penitentiaries, factories, workhouses, “mad-houses,” poorhouses, hospitals, and schools.113 Foucault therefore invites us to consider the panopticon as representing “the basic functioning of a society”114 characterized by new operations of power and control. Davis likewise notes the “far-reaching implications” of the panopticon. As she writes, this period was a time in “which the working class needed to be constituted as an army of self-disciplined individuals capable of performing the requisite industrial labor for a developing capitalist system.”115 Although it was hotly contested, imprisonment won out as the penal method deemed the most enlightened of all options: its proponents considered imprisonment nonviolent and egalitarian – because all are said to be free within liberalism, and imprisonment is said to only target a person’s freedom.116 However, in its actual usage, long-term imprisonment affects prisoners well beyond simply restricting freedom and is intended to do so. It intentionally regulates prisoner’s lives “by the termination of any relation that is not supervised by authority or arranged according to hierarchy.”117 That’s entirely distinct from simply preventing a person from leaving this building or that room. Furthermore, like the Theresian Criminal Constitution, imprisonment has always differentiated between categories of inmate. For example, a century later in the United States, “custodial and reformatory prisons were both first established for women. The reformatories meant to rehabilitate female prisoners housed mostly White women, while [the harsher] custodial prisons were similar to men’s prisons and housed mostly racialized women.”118 In 1790, part of the Walnut Street Jail in Pennsylvania was converted “from a detention facility to an institution housing convicts whose prison sentences simultaneously became punishment and occasions for penitence and reform.”119 As Davis notes, those subjected to this new “penitentiary” – designed for moral/ spiritual penitence rather than simply segregated removal from society – lived in total isolation and silence, filling their days with only eating, working, silent contemplation, and reading the Bible (if they were literate).120 “The body was

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placed in conditions of segregation and solitude in order to allow the soul to flourish … emulating the architecture and regimes of monastic life.”121 Except that this new penitence is under coercion. This “except” is the difference between self-actualizing or self-growth work, on the one hand, and the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority, on the other. Silent contemplation or reading the Bible can be healing and emancipatory – but only when done voluntarily.122 Those who established this first penitentiary also constructed the first entirely new institution built according to the Enlightenment ideals of the penitentiary: the Eastern State Penitentiary, also in Philadelphia. This institution’s website describes its history: In 1787, a group of well-known and powerful Philadelphians convened in the home of Benjamin Franklin. The members of The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons expressed growing concern with the conditions in American and European prisons. Dr. Benjamin Rush spoke on the Society’s goal, to see the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania set the international standard in prison design. He proposed a radical idea: to build a true penitentiary, a prison designed to create genuine regret and penitence in the criminal’s heart. The concept grew from Enlightenment thinking.123

This reform of penalty had its critics, however. Bentham wasn’t convinced that lengthy imprisonment was less cruel than more time-limited physical punishments.124 And, as Davis notes,125 Charles Dickens was horrified upon visiting the Eastern State Penitentiary. He wrote that the penitentiary entailed an “immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers.” Upon seeing the conditions of the penitentiary, he called for its abolition: “I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature.” Dickens desired to abolish the penitentiary just as clearly and straightforwardly as he elsewhere advocated abolishing slavery.126 Dickens provides a useful example if our critique – historical or contemporary – might function as an invitation to re-think continued normative practices of violence and their justifications. He positioned himself as implicated in the violence of the penitentiary if he did not work against it. He said he could not sleep at night “with the consciousness that one human creature, for any length of time, no matter what, lay suffering this unknown punishment in his silent cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree.” Furthermore, alongside condemning the penitentiary for

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perpetrating unspeakable brutalities that need to end altogether, he believed that “those who devised … [and] carry it into execution” seem to genuinely intend it as “kind,” “humane,” and working “for reformation” of its prisoners.127 If we suspend our disbelief, and our claims of relative innocence by which we only ever hold others as truly responsible,128 we can imagine that some people who perpetrate unspeakable horrors consider themselves to be acting out of benevolence or kindness. This understanding, in turn, might invite us to be more careful when we’re as sure as these Enlightenment reformers and jailers that we’re on the side of others’ best interests, justice, or simply necessity. As in Dickens’s example, such a “generous” reading of some perpetrators’ motives doesn’t preclude a hard line against their material structural violences. The difference between pre-1790s confinement and the imprisonment we take for granted today is enormous. Alcatraz is perhaps the world’s most famous prison, and its history illustrates the transformation from Indigenous social workings related to “penalty,” through the earliest white settler and European confinements, to contemporary imprisonment. The island seems to have been used by Ohlone people for a number of purposes previous to the US military occupation of it – initially as a military base: “Alcatraz was used as a place of isolation or ostracization for tribal members who had violated a tribal law or taboo, as a camping spot, an area for gathering foods, especially bird eggs and sea-life, and … as a hiding place for many Indians attempting to escape from the California Mission system.”129 White settler colonialism displaced the existing Ohlone system, in which it seems that people were ostracized on this island for a time – which could be said to have something like a relationship with confinement. However, this system of confinement doesn’t seem to have deprived people beyond the experience of isolation or ostracization, in that the island was a place where entirely free people who weren’t being punished would sometimes stay or gather food. The island was also used as a refuge from missionaries, illustrating that Ohlone people experienced the “benevolence” of missionaries, educators, and social workers as a violent imposition on their lives. Once the US military took over the island, but before the famous prison was built, Alcatraz Island was home to a military base. As would have been the case in any white settler military base, confinement was used occasionally for specific and time-limited circumstances where it served a particular end, such as awaiting trial.130 Confinement was never used as long-term punishment, as the punishment for almost every crime, or as a means to change people anywhere in the world before 1790.131 The details of where and how a person was confined before 1790 therefore really didn’t matter. As an illustration of how little care was given to where a person was confined, soldiers who broke the rules at the Alcatraz military base were confined in a hole in the ground

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with a trap door at the top. Up to thirty people were held in the small space at the bottom.132 It was utterly filthy and dark, and nobody could have imagined at the time that this basic strategy of incarceration could ever be mobilized in efforts to transform people beyond simple deterrence – much less to transform them into better people. However, Alcatraz was converted from military base to military prison in 1861, and its confinement became organized roughly according to the logic of Bentham’s panopticon, with cells lined up along the walls, one on top of another, that guards could monitor at any time. Tellingly, nineteen Hopi men were imprisoned at Alcatraz in 1891 for trying to prevent their children from being stolen and confined to an Indian industrial school (which was a form of confinement explicitly and clearly intended to make Indigenous children more like white people). The Hopi men were released after one year because they were said to have undergone a “total reformation of character.”133 Whether that’s true and whatever it actually meant, their incarceration and release illustrates the logic of imprisonment ever since the 1790s. Unlike the hole in the ground in the previously existing military base, Alcatraz’s military prison and its later federal penitentiary intended to change people. This tactical use of imprisonment was an entirely new phenomenon. Thirty-five additional Indigenous people were confined in the Alcatraz military prison during the Indian Wars.134 Just as it was a force of anti-Black racism from the get-go,135 the new imprisonment was a force of colonial violence from the beginning. Beyond the United States and Canada, Davis notes, furthermore, that “European prison systems were [also] instituted in Asia and Africa as an important component of colonial rule.”136 It’s entirely a result of European imperialism that imprisonment is “now normative worldwide.”137 And, likewise, psychiatric confinement has also been imposed upon peoples all around the globe.138 Gentle Instrumental Violences, Part Three: Psychiatry, Unchaining, and Moral Treatment Alongside Kant, Grant, the panopticon, and the penitentiary, the so-called liberation of the mad also took place in the 1790s. As the story goes, Dr Phillipe Pinel removed the chains that shackled mad people to walls at Bicêtre Hospital near Paris in 1793. This story’s been depicted many times, pretty much consistently along the lines of Brooke Cannon’s description of a film portrayal of the event: “Through respect and kindness, Pinel systematically brought patients out of the dark dungeons in which they were chained for decades. His humane treatment, referred to as ‘moral therapy,’ allowed patients to be cured and discharged from the asylum.”139

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Pinel’s story is the touchstone to the standard account of the history of psychiatry. The term “psychiatry” was coined in 1808,140 referring to the work of Pinel and other doctors, known variously in English as “moral treatment,” “moral management,” or “moral therapy.” The term was coined by Johann Christian Reil, the leading German proponent of the medical care and treatment of mad people. Tellingly, he’s called “the German Pinel.” Just as Jane Addams’s name evokes radical activism in social work discourse, Pinel’s name signifies benevolence, humanity, and treatment efficacy. For example, Jules Fournet, head of the clinic at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital,141 wrote an article in 1854 that drew a parallel between colonialism and psychiatry, saying that missionaries “are Pinels.” Fournet praised the “missionaries of civilization … who take from the family its spirit of peace, benevolence, devotion, and even the name of father, and who seek to cure the prejudices, false traditions, and errors of savage nations.” In contrast, Fournet stated that “conquering armies who claim to bring civilization through the brutal force of arms … act on nations in the way that chains and prisons act on the unfortunate insane.”142 Referring to Fournet’s framing, Foucault observes: “There were two ages of psychiatry: one in which chains were employed and the other where, let’s say, humane feelings were employed. Well, in the same way, there are two methods and maybe two ages in colonization: one is the age of the pure and simple conquest by arms, and the other is the period of establishment and colonization in depth.” Fournet’s conflation of “Pinel” with peaceful benevolence prevents an analysis that can hold both ages or methods (whether of colonization or psychiatry) as violent imposition. For Fournet, “in-depth colonization is carried out by the organization of the family model; it is by introducing the family into the traditions and errors of savage peoples that one begins the work of colonization.”143 Therefore, in addition to illustrating that various late Enlightenment developments were framed as peaceful by contrasting them with earlier more explicit violences, Fournet also gestured towards the centrality of cisheteropatriarchalization in Enlightenment practices of transforming people. Remember that this same time saw ruling class parents encouraged to use intrusive surveillance and instrumental violence against their children, and the psychiatrist and missionary were imbued with an analogous patriarchal authority. Colonization in what’s now called Canada and the United States involved European kings framing themselves as the “father” of Indigenous peoples – which Indigenous peoples both resisted and attempted to navigate to their advantage.144 For example, according to Dale Turner, Haudenosaunee people insisted that the relationship was one of equal “brethren,” that in matrilineal Haudenosaunee society “father” didn’t signify ultimate authority, and that Haudenosaunee people allowed Europeans to frame themselves however

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they wished so as to further negotiations and to hold Europeans accountable in certain ways.145 But the white ruling classes understood their relationships with various denigrated others through the framing of cisheteropatriarchal male/ female and adult/child power structures. James Mill’s History of India described “the child and the native [as] alike … [under the gaze of] the impartial witness – the civilized man.”146 And Foucault says of the British home of moral treatment, the York Retreat, established in 1796 by William Tuke, that “madness is childhood.”147 Narrating colonized or confined peoples as childlike allowed white ruling classes to disregard voices of resistance and to legitimize their actions as benevolent and beneficial to society. They were often even imagined to benefit those confined or colonized. And even beyond these interlocking rationalizations, in some cases these histories are more thoroughly interlocked. Benjamin Rush was mentioned earlier as having articulated the will to create the world’s first penitentiaries in Pennsylvania.148 Having signed the Declaration of Independence, Rush is a “founding father” of the white settler colonial United States, and he’s also known as the “father of American psychiatry.” Bonnie Burstow notes that Rush framed his intentions and actions as benevolent, and she cites his account that “a humane revolution dictated by modern improvements in the science of the mind, as well as medicine, has taken place.”149 Yet, in contrast to his framing, she describes Rush’s “use of terror, silence, humiliation, darkness, pain, and solitary confinement”150 as “treatment.” Enacting the prejudice of progress a century ago, Rush could understand his use of terror and humiliation as part of a “humane revolution.” This possibility was enabled, in large part, by the potency of the myth of Pinel’s liberation of the mad. Several inaccuracies, gaps, and unfounded assumptions in the frequently retold history of Pinel’s liberation of the mad can be found. First, “Jean-Baptiste Pussin … actually gave the orders” to unchain the prisoners.151 Perhaps this uncontested and straightforward inaccuracy might invite readers to consider the degree to which history really is only the stories told, rather than what actually happened.152 But furthermore, Pussin was not a medical doctor. He was a former patient of Bicêtre Hospital (for scrofula).153 Although the mapping of this story onto a straightforward progress narrative is dangerous, not chaining people up is better than chaining people up. Pat Deegan, who’s a psychologist, psychiatric survivor, and founder of the recovery movement, therefore considers Pussin an early “peer worker.”154 Deegan cites Pussin’s account in which Pussin says he insisted that attendants no longer beat patients and fired attendants who disobeyed his order. To whatever extent this development was a shift towards more humane treatment, it did not originate from within the field of medicine. Second, the commonly told story entirely removes gender from the picture in two significant ways: Burstow writes that

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those initially unchained were all male. Of those inmates first unchained, no women were freed in the initial “liberation.”155 What’s more, Pussin’s wife, Marguerite, also worked with mad people at Bicêtre alongside her husband. In his own writing, Pinel credited both Marguerite and Jean-Baptiste Pussin for instigating the methods that came to be called moral treatment and led to the unchaining.156 This story represents a concrete example of what we described in the previous chapter as professionalization as a force of cisheteropatriarchalization: Dr Phillipe Pinel gets all the credit for treating mad people in hospitals more humanely. Yet, he learned this ethical “call of the other” (that is, to treat patients humanely, rather than with disregard for their most basic humanity) from Marguerite Pussin and her husband, who was himself an ex-patient of the hospital. Medicine took credit for their work, and may even have intersected it with a new arsenal of approaches that attempted to change mad people (using humiliation, terror, and other means far from gentle or nonviolent), all of which furthered the movement to professionalize, masculinize, and medicalize the supervision and management of mad people in hospitals. Third, this supposed “liberation” took place within the walls of confinement (that is, everyone remained confined), and some people were deemed unfit to ever be liberated. This group was “set apart in the heart of the asylum, forming a new confined population ... [subjected to] imprisonment pure and simple, exclusion in the most rigorous sense of the term.”157 Some mad people at Bicêtre continued to be held in chains for another five years.158 Fourth, and perhaps most outrageously, the unchaining is rarely told in relation to another momentous development at Bicêtre Hospital in the 1790s that profoundly influenced what would soon be called psychiatry around the entire world. In 1790, the upholsterer for Bicêtre, named Guilleret, invented the straitjacket.159 This invention has been hailed by historians of Bicêtre as bringing a great improvement to the lives of mad people.160 A century later, celebrating the historic unchaining, Paul Bru recorded that the only precaution Pinel believed he needed for the unchaining was to ensure he had a straitjacket available for every single person he unchained.161 Still another century later, this practice doesn’t sound so humane or heroic. Straitjackets had already been in use for three years at Bicêtre previous to Pinel’s appointment in 1793. Bru’s book on Bicêtre is subtitled “Hospice – Prison – Asylum,” because Bicêtre served as what would come to be called all three, as did other hospitals at the time, and it documents that convicts on death row were permanently confined to straitjackets previous to the unchaining of mad people.162 But if nobody at Bicêtre had previously unchained a mad person and confined them to a straitjacket in the three years between its invention and the unchaining, we

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can imagine that at least the Pussins and others who’d already been working there might have considered it. People may have already experimented with unchaining previous to 1793, and unchaining was only attempted at all due to this new alternate means of restraint – the straitjacket – which today we look back upon with horror (even though inmates in many kinds of institutions are still routinely restrained). This distancing is our prejudice of progress as surely as Bru’s enabled him to celebrate Pinel’s use of the straitjacket a century ago. Like so many other historical points of progress, this one isn’t so straightforward either. Stories like the liberation of the mad feed our prejudice of progress partly due to normative assumptions about what came before. It might be imagined, for example, that mad people were chained up in some version of asylum since time immemorial. This assumption simply isn’t true. Although the 1790s didn’t mark the beginning of long-term incarceration of mad people as it did with convicts, mass incarceration had only existed at all for about a century and a half. Before then, it had never been used anywhere in the world as a primary means of responding to madness, or to anything else. “It is this [first mass] incarceration that set the stage for Pinel’s alleged ‘freeing of the mad’ – an act later constructed to symbolize the liberatory nature of psychiatry.”163 Unchaining can only appear liberatory in contrast to chaining. Given that chaining first took place within the spaces that set the stage for specialized and treatmentoriented (or at least treatment-rationalized) asylums, it’s certainly suspect to consider all of this “liberation” a story of progress. The reality is that chaining and confining mad people hadn’t been all that common previous to the new localized phenomenon of mass confinement in 1650s France and French colonies (when Indigenous peoples in New France were first confined in both boarding schools and prisons). The first mass confinement in France was very significant locally: “more than one out of every hundred inhabitants of the city of Paris found themselves confined … within several months.”164 However, outside of France and French colonies, the spaces of undifferentiated confinement previous to the “liberation” didn’t contain that many people, as compared to the numbers of people confined around the world in the sites subsequently created by reformers inspired by Pinel’s liberation. The year that the term “psychiatry” was coined in Germany, England passed the 1808 County Asylum Act, aiming to confine more mad people in settings considered humane and treatment-oriented. But the intended mass construction didn’t actually happen until the 1840s, with the passage of the 1845 County Asylum/Lunacy Act165 – about half a century after Pinel’s liberation. All of these historical threads suggest that there’s a sleight of hand performed when French developments are credited for a worldwide liberation of an injustice that

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was mostly confined to France and French colonies.* Pinel’s liberation, in fact, set the stage for many more mad people to be violently confined than had ever happened anywhere. As Burstow notes, the Medieval European “approach to the ‘mad’ was hardly ideal.” Their treatment was sometimes terrible, but she notes that these medieval violences were inflicted on far fewer people than are subjected to psychiatry today. “In fact,” she says, “even as late as the seventeenth century, the famous Bethlehem (Bedlam) Hospital – the sole hospital for ‘lunatics’ in all of England – held fewer than 30 patients.”166 In England, according to Deborah Stone, mad people remained in their homes, cared for by “their families unless the person caused public disturbances, became dangerous to the public, or was uncontrollable by his relatives.”167 During this period, most people who would now be called disabled lived in communities and occupied diverse roles.168 It wasn’t an idyllic time, free from disablism and sanism, but the particular denigrations of disabled and mad folks previous to the 1650s in France and later elsewhere rarely led to confinement or forced treatment. As Naomi Baker asserts, “There was a widespread delight and interest in the irregularities and variety of nature in the 17th century.” She recounts that “people delighted in seeing these forms,” which were often thought of as humorous.169 Southworth says of mad people: “The most startling feature of their existence [prior to first being massively institutionalized] was their visibility at every level of society, including the highest. Whether they were treated with kindness or cruelty (and there were plentiful instances of both), they were accepted as a normal thread in the social fabric.”170 The one exceptional group targeted for transformation† in early European closed sites previous to the 1790s, rather than simple imprisonment, is physically

* This framing is perhaps resonant with Harper’s apology for Indian residential schools contributing to Canada’s moral capital as an exalted peaceful and benevolent country, rather than reminding folks that it’s a white settler colony. † This framing of exceptionality erases the fact that 1600s French schools and reductions targeted Indigenous people in an effort to make them different kinds of people – well before Grant’s Observations or the other liberal developments of the 1790s. There are always scattered social workings that fall outside of a place and time’s norms. The Pussins’ work at Bicêtre before Pinel granted it medical legitimacy is another example of this point, and was probably not the only example of people in hospitals treating mad people with kindness, even though doing so was non-normative and not yet legitimized by medicine. A similar pattern can be said of the French missionaries’ work, in that it was a very long time before these social workings became statebacked and expanded into the Indian reservation/reserve and Indian residential school systems. In Psychiatric Power and “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault discusses the Paraguayan reductions as an example of disciplinary power over a century before the 1790s. He calls power relations

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disabled ex-soldiers – who would continue to be central to the development of disability and social services well into the twentieth century. Henri-Jacques Stiker notes that previous to 1674, disabled ex-soldiers had already been provided care by the French monarchy. They’d been pensioned and housed in monasteries.171 In 1674, however, the king of France created the Hôtel des Invalides, a new institution for disabled ex-soldiers. Stiker reports that it worked to ensure “good hygiene, heating, surgery, a regulated atmosphere.” He also notes that these ex-soldiers were “concentrated, interned, and transformed into productive workers.”172 However, like the earliest childrearing literature guiding white ruling class fathers on how to educate their sons, this new approach wasn’t yet imagined as transforming the patients into different kinds of people. Earlier institutionalization of disabled ex-soldiers previous to the first penitentiaries and the advent of moral treatment helped to pave the way for later asylums and other institutions. However, scattered spaces like the Hôtel des Invalides were not believed to fundamentally transform their patients’ souls or very beings. Their patients were exceptionally exalted former soldiers and were thus already assumed to be morally worthy and hard-working. The exceptionally exalted status that military men were granted rendered these injured soldiers imaginable of being retrained and re-entering the workforce. Although the Invalides’ particular patients were more exalted than other disabled persons, rare early treatment-oriented institutions like the Invalides helped ease people into the notion that disabled people and other denigrated folks are best transformed by first removing them from everyday life. As Stiker notes: “At the same time as these innovators rehabilitated and educated the disabled, they institutionalized them as well.” Thus, the early model for “what would become in [the twentieth] century the almost single formula for persons afflicted with malformations, inherent or acquired” was established: institutionalization.173

differing from those dominant in a culture “heterotopic” or comprising “heterotopias.” In contrast to utopias, these alternative political arrangements already exist and create possible avenues for social transformation (whether good or bad). This idea is similar to “prefiguration,” which we discuss in chapter 7. Both also resonate with what Ahmed calls “moments of suspension” in The Promise of Happiness and “queer moments” in Queer Phenomenology. We can consider that such site-specific social workings of this or that group at this or that time would have to be enabled by a situated ethic. For example, early French missionaries’ efforts to transform Indigenous peoples in the Americas may have reflected a sense in which all people are potentially human – but this sentiment would have been a distinct understanding from that which later became normative in liberalism (which we characterized as culturally determinist white supremacy).

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Burstow notes that the long-existing European designation of mad people as among the “deserving poor” intersected with these material developments to “set the stage for any treatment no matter how intrusive to be seen as something society ‘owes’ its ‘unfortunates.’”174 It’s not that mad people were previously free from violence, but the new sense of white ruling class entitlement, innocence, and moral obligation to “help”175 by coercive direction and control enabled new ways of articulating violence as benevolence and also meant that many more mad people began to have their lives intensively intervened upon than had ever previously been the case. These intrusions significantly included the new methods of “moral treatment,” first used at Bicêtre in the 1790s. Burstow writes: “What distinguishes moral treatment is a … view of madness as correctable moral error.”176 Because madness is seen as correctable, the “treatment” is another instance of the Enlightenment optimism that people can change, alongside a pessimism that people need to be made to change by their moral superiors. Like other shifts in social working of the late Enlightenment, moral treatment is narrated as nonviolent and progressive; yet, it centrally uses instrumental violence in an attempt to change morally inferior persons. Pinel wrote: If met … by a force evidently and convincingly superior, [the mad person] submits without opposition or violence. This is the great and valuable secret in the management of well regulated hospitals … intimidation without severity … oppression without violence. For this purpose, the strait-waistcoat [straitjacket] will generally be found to be amply sufficient.177

Burstow writes that Pinel, in fact, subjected patients “to ongoing humiliation, used threats, as an object lesson even returned them to their chains.” She notes: “What we have with Pinel, in other words, is not the end to brutality as professed but a more subtle form of brutality.”178 Perhaps we might say it’s a more instrumental or tactical brutality. Chains couldn’t have been used as an “object lesson,” with an intended aim of rehabilitation, until indiscriminate chaining had already been recast as unacceptably violent (and only because it straightforwardly intended restraint; in Enlightenment logic, if restraint is done with the intention of cure, then there’s nothing immoral about restraint). Furthermore, and resonating yet again with 1790s developments in imprisonment, Burstow also notes that “Pinel kept his patients under perpetual surveillance.”179 Constant surveillance in closed sites transformed white ruling class perceptions of people considered inferior, which then seeped out from institutions into governance practices of state bureaucracy. The remainder of

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this chapter explores several instances, institutionalizations, and implications of this change. Surveillance, Sorting, and Scientific Stratification In his studies of the late Enlightenment shifts in both imprisonment and the medical gaze, Foucault traces how institutionalization enabled continuous surveillance and the hierarchical comparison of those thus observed. This change led to entirely new ways of understanding what it is to be human. Although many people had been confined in France and French colonies for almost a century and a half, the notion that confinement might enable new kinds of knowledge about confined persons only really takes root in France in the 1790s. Discussing developments in French hospitals during this eventful decade, Foucault describes a new understanding of “the hospital, in which the series of patients examined is itself a school.”180 As a result of organizing and observing people in these spaces, new things were learned about disease; new things were also learned about the humans who were confined. Yet, even to say “new things were learned” implies that previously unknown truths about humanity preexisted these new tactics of science and bureaucracy, whereas Foucault invites us to consider that these discoveries were in fact fabrications that functioned as new forms of power and domination. He’s not exactly saying they’re not true, so much as he’s asking us to suspend our taken-for-granted understanding that true and false are going to be useful framings here. What’s constituted as the truth about humans enables specific tactics of rationalization, domination, moral stratification, objectification, and care. This era’s medical knowledge has become foundational to our understanding of who we are and how we might best be cured of disease. Yet, Foucault troubles the benevolence of the new medical gaze: “To look in order to know, to show in order to teach, is not this a tacit form of violence, all the more abusive for its silence, upon a sick body that demands to be comforted, not displayed?”181 While doing his later research on the prison, he returned to the medical gaze and articulated a mutually enforcing interdependence between power and knowledge: “How one was to distribute patients, separate them from one another, divide up the hospital space and make a systematic classification of diseases: these were all twin operations in which [power and knowledge] … are inextricably bound up.”182 Furthermore, Ellen Samuels notes that the new scientific and bureaucratic objectifications spread well beyond those embodiments that are most explicitly medicalized today. She observes that “while today we are more likely to associate medical identification with disabled bodies, medicine in mid-nineteenth-century America was centrally focused on questions of race.” She writes: “Prominent

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physicians … argued for the inferiority of African Americans and American Indians and explicitly supported slavery and settler colonialism as the natural system resulting from the superiority of the white race.”183 Medicine was just as invested in sexuality, criminality, and the study of differences said to exist between poor people and the ruling classes. Margolin calls record-keeping in the subsequent professional social work “the mechanism that assures the differential distribution of power.”184 These practices of detailed observation and record-keeping first emerged in closed sites, such as hospitals and penitentiaries. They enabled a new white ruling class belief that denigrated peoples could be exhaustively known and categorized. This research functioned as a new political strategy; it was a new tactic for domination and moral stratification. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell note that, even today, “a primary source of disabled people’s oppression” stems from “our historical investment” in the belief “that disability makes a person available for excessive research and bureaucratic oversight.”185 Parallel to this development in closed institutions, the open-air but contained Indian reserve or reservation also became mobilized as a site “for experimenting with new medical and bureaucratic knowledges.”186 Casting a person or an imagined type of person as thoroughly knowable is always violent. It involves subtracting purpose, responsibility, agency, or animacy187 from framings of how that person or “those people” function. There’s a vast difference between understanding a person’s actions as motivated by values in response to shifting contexts versus framing a person as doing what they do as a result of unalterable characteristics typical of that kind of person188 so that “a singular nature” is framed as “the root of all [their] actions.”189 The tendency seems to be that we frame ourselves, our loved ones, and people imagined as “like me” as value-driven and responsive to contingent external factors, whereas we tend to frame those further away from our sphere of intimacy and affinity as morally disengaged, as just doing what “people like that” do. Furthermore, these tendencies have also been shown to frequently privilege adult, male, masculine, free, nondisabled, and “linguistically intact” (that is, speaking) people.190 Such possibly age-old objectifications, however, were now granted a new aura of scientific legitimacy when rigorous observations about already objectified and denigrated groups were first mobilized to further their objectification and moral denigration. For this reason, Edward Said writes: “Any comprehensive vision is fundamentally conservative,”191 leading to understandings of people such as imagining them as so distinct and morally divested that “power is the only language they understand.”192 Some people are now known to require external motivation, coercion, and so on, precisely because they’re considered to be among the types of persons who

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are already known to require these interventions.* Snyder and Mitchell note, for example, that “special education classrooms have so internalized the standard, one-size-fits-all medical definitions of autism that the educational context itself produces ‘acting out’ behaviours.”193 The violence of the institution is enabled by the “comprehensive” knowledge of autism that shapes both the space itself and the beliefs of those who staff it before any actual child with an autism diagnosis ever enters the classroom. The comprehensive knowledge of people who are organized into such types enables justifications for controlling, containing, and enacting instrumental violence. This and countless other manifestations of such dehumanizing violence are narrated as benevolence. This “fundamentally conservative” tactic of power and knowledge emerged from within the liberal Enlightenment. The “optimism” that all people could become more like the white ruling classes always assumed the superiority of white ruling class people and of white ruling class norms and values. It was now a moral imperative to intervene in the lives of as many inferior people as possible,194 and yet it quickly became clear that not everybody responded well to enforced penitence, moral treatment, and other such interventions.195 If these enlightened methods didn’t do what they were created to do, surely the fault must lie with the morally defective people subjected to them. Coming to know precisely what’s wrong with such “incorrigibles” then gets folded into the moral imperative to try to change the world. As Foucault writes: “What defines the individual to be corrected is that he is incorrigible … [and] in so far as he is incorrigible, he calls up around him a number of specific interventions … which will serve as a support for all the specific institutions developed for abnormal individuals in the nineteenth century.”196 Previous to these new tactics of observation and record-keeping, accounts of people’s lives had functioned to exalt those whose entitlement to rule had to be demonstrated through biographies that often bordered on the mythological. However, “disciplinary methods reversed this … [operation of power, so] … the child, the patient, the madman, and the prisoner were to become … the object of individual descriptions and biographical accounts.” No longer a tactic of exaltation, these biographies were now “a means of control and a method of domination.”197 Foucault therefore describes the creation of the criminalistic person at this time: “The offender becomes an individual to know.”198 “Behind the offender, to whom the investigation of the facts may attribute responsibility for an offence,

* In the 1700s, Europeans were critical of Indigenous restorative justice practices because of the belief that criminals would only comply with force. See the quotation from Paul, Not the Savages, 23, on page 16 of the introduction in this book.

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stands the delinquent whose slow formation is shown in a biographical investigation … [which] establishes the ‘criminal’ as existing before the crime.”199 Criminality was now, and for the first time, inherent to particular individuals. Elsewhere, discussing operations of early psychiatry, Foucault says that the human being as individual, as psychological subject, and as psyche was created through disciplinary practices in closed spaces like the asylum: “The individual was constituted insofar as uninterrupted supervision, continual writing [of observations], and potential punishment enframed this subjected body and extracted a psyche from it.”200 The notion of an individual psyche that can be exhaustively known by others with specialized knowledge was thus invented; it displaced previously prevailing European understandings of humans as primarily spiritual beings whose nature was beyond the grasp of human reason.201 This displacement enabled new ways of classifying and stratifying humans, but didn’t change which groups of people were exalted or denigrated. As yet another example of this new strategy of classification, Foucault locates the birth of the scientific understanding of sexuality in Carl Westphal’s article “Contrary Sexual Sensations.”202 Like the transition from a focus on crime to a focus on “the delinquent,” Foucault says Westphal’s article marks the emergence of a change in focus from sexual acts to a particular kind of person; he notes that “the homosexual was now a species,” due to developments in sexology that originated with Westphal.203 Not coincidentally, this new understanding emerged in a hospital. Westphal worked at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, and “Contrary Sexual Sensations” is a case study of two people confined at the Charité. Although this article enabled the subsequent categorization of “the homosexual,” Nikki Sullivan notes that Westphal’s theory is more of “a theory of transgender,”204 and Foucault describes the classification of “invert” that emerged from Westphal’s article as “a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul.”205 In fact, Westphal explicitly states that not everybody who engages in same-sex sex is of the “pathological character” he was inventing in the article.206 Although his first case study is a person assigned female who has sex with women, the second is a person assigned male who exclusively has sex with women. Both of them, though, identify with what Westphal considered the opposite gender: the person assigned female was masculine, the person assigned male, feminine. Yet, this article’s articulation of the invert spurred the developments in sexology that also led to the scientific classification of “the homosexual.” As John D’Emilio says, framing homosexuality as “inherent in a person, part of his or her ‘nature’” was an ideological shift rather than a scientific breakthrough.207 Something new took place in the possibilities for knowledge, political domination, and moral stratification when medical experts like Westphal created “the invert” as a distinct kind of person.

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The focus shifted from the crime committed to the delinquent, from the sex act or gendered attributes to the internal “psyche” of the “invert.” Such internal natures were said to leave traces on the body, justifying the authority of the medical gaze and the sorting of people that had begun in closed institutions. Siobhan Somerville writes that this period in Western Europe and white settler colonies featured “a culture that sanctioned science to discover and tell the truth about bodies.”208 Snyder and Mitchell call these approaches “sciences of the surface.”209 These sciences strengthened the interlocking moral economies in which the white nondisabled ruling classes were deemed morally and intellectually superior to everybody else. Although consequences varied widely across targeted groups and cannot be conflated with one another, sexology interlocked with scientific racism,210 which interlocked with criminology,211 which interlocked with psychiatry and psychology,212 so that each new discipline’s findings buttressed every other new discipline. As an illustration of this interlocking and buttressing, “one of the most consistent medical characterizations of the anatomy of both African American women and lesbians was the myth of an unusually large clitoris”213 – which was interpreted as a sign of moral depravity. These sciences extended beyond the walls of the hospital and prison, but their institutional origins are significant. For example, Aleš Hrdlička measured skulls and bones, and claimed to demonstrate moral and intellectual differences between racial groups. Yet, he first did similar work attempting to find a correlation between physicality and feeblemindedness or insanity while working at a hospital for the insane.214 These studies had serious consequences for those they claimed to better understand – whether Indigenous peoples, paupers, disabled people, criminalized persons, or Black people. Discussing Samuel Morton’s 1839 Crania Americana, Samuels writes that through “the ‘gathering of American Indian skulls and attempts at their description and comparison’… [Morton asserted that] ‘the Indian brain was so deficient … that the race would be impossible to civilize.’”215 This “finding” was presented just slightly before Indian residential schools became government-supported in what’s now called Canada, and it contributed to the sense that although educating Indigenous children was a moral imperative, it was also tragically impossible. Medical categorization affected distinct groups in varied ways, but it was an important tool in the legitimization of multiple groups’ oppression during this period. These new sciences carried forward previously existing assumptions about their subjects’ inferiority, such as those Kant expressed in the 1780s before his shift from conservative to liberal white supremacy. The medical and bureaucratic sciences that emerged originally in the hospital and prison dramatically extended the operationalization of these long-existing moral economies into

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concrete practices of domination – even if they failed to prove anything. “Try as they would, the scientific racists of the past failed to discover any objective criterion upon which to classify people; to their chagrin, every criterion they tried varied more within so-called races than between them.”216 And yet, as Deborah Stone writes of insanity, “the inability of the medical profession to present an objective definition did not stop policymakers from constructing a vast array of policy measures predicated on being able to identify a separate class of people.”217 It is now to such state policies that we turn, first exploring the bureaucratic construction and regulation of what we call “disability” and then the bureaucratic construction and regulation of Indigeneity. The Validation and Invalidation of the Invalid: Emergent Social Welfare Policy Although a consensus on exactly what “disability” means has never existed and doesn’t exist now,218 it does have a rough coherence: when people say “disability,” they have a sense that others will hear something like what they intend. Yet, nothing like today’s roughly coherent umbrella category of disability existed a little over a century ago. For example, Stiker writes of 1800s France: “Unlike those called insane, many of [those now considered among] the disabled could not be assimilated to the sick … [so] impairment and reduced mental ability are clearly separated from disability or deformity.”219 To say that the umbrella category of disability didn’t yet exist isn’t a matter of vocabulary changes; nobody at that time perceived all those who today are classified “disabled” as an internally cohesive group. So how did disability come to mean what it means today? There are conflicting accounts. According to Stone,220 it resulted from the emergence of the welfare state. She says the grouping together of vastly diverse people under one umbrella term initially happened in British policy with the category of “pauper,” although this term was inclusive of folks now considered nondisabled too. But, by the end of the 1800s, she says, German policy first used “invalid” to designate all those now considered disabled and only those now considered disabled. In contrast, Snyder and Mitchell centre US history. At this time, there was no state welfare in the United States or Canada, and eugenics was much more prominent than it had yet become in Europe.221 They argue that disability became an umbrella term as a result of eugenics. They say that “by restricting the social liberties and rights of disabled people, eugenics invented the category of ‘disability’ that grouped people with widely divergent physical and cognitive characteristics under a single heading of ‘defect.’”222 Surely eugenics was important to this history, but its role is complicated. Rachel Gorman critiques Snyder and Mitchell’s efforts “to make eugenics the

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foundational narrative of disability oppression.”223 Although eugenics certainly targeted all those now considered disabled, it just as centrally targeted all racialized peoples and all those deemed immoral or irresponsible due to sex practices or work ethic, as in relation to queerness, sex work, crime, or poverty. If we focus on the language of feeblemindedness, eugenics can appear to have been essentially concerned with what’s now called intellectual disability; Snyder and Mitchell even call feeblemindedness “the late nineteenth century term for disability.”224 Yet, this language wasn’t consistently more prominent than that of racial degeneration or terms stressing moral depravity such as “moral imbecility.” Eugenics was an interlocking of oppression. At times, it centred the construed immorality of sex workers, unwed moms, convicts, and queers; at other times, race; and other times, perceived unintelligence. All of these aspects were considered to apply to all those deemed unfit: for example, a white sex worker who today would not be labelled with an intellectual disability was considered feebleminded, racially unfit, and morally depraved. Her assumed moral depravity meant she was also eugenically, racially, and intellectually defective. All people who today would be considered intellectually disabled were automatically deemed racially defective and morally depraved. Eugenics considered all people of colour morally depraved and feebleminded. Eugenics conflated immorality and unintelligence, and it often articulated these imagined deficits in racial language. It was centrally about disability. It was just as centrally about race. And class. And so on. The welfarist “invalid,” therefore, seems a more exact fit with today’s disability category than the eugenic “defective.” However, Stone totally leaves eugenics out of her history, resulting in too narrow and depoliticized an exploration of the development of the disability category. Earlier, we discussed the shift in focus from crime to “delinquent,” and from gender presentation to “invert.” Stone’s account of the disability category traces a parallel shift from “state-validated inability to work” to “disabled person.” We now discuss this history, intersecting it with the recurring themes of this chapter and eugenics. The 1601 British Poor Law “specified ‘ability to work’ as the criterion by which people would be separated into the primary and secondary distributive systems”225 – wage labour being the primary and social assistance being the secondary.* It “created a validating device in the form of certification by

* Stone situates this shift as emerging earlier in “a series of fourteenth-century laws for the regulation of vagrancy,” and says the Poor Law of 1601 was one of several reformulations of these earlier laws. This timeline coincides neatly with histories situating the birth and infancy of capitalism in the fourteenth century.

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local officials” who “validated” one’s inability to work. Like later welfare workers, these officials were bureaucrats rather than doctors.226 Non-medical state officials policed the legitimacy of welfare claims before, during, and ever since disability became medicalized. In fact, when doctors became involved in validating claims of inability to work in the 1800s, Poor Law officials “complained that the doctors were too lenient and that their humanitarian instincts needed checking.”227 State bureaucrats were validating disability before doctors began to do so, and they were critical of doctors’ leniency when disability was medicalized. Stone says that it’s therefore not really medicine that holds the disability category together. She calls the interlocking of medicine and disability “an artefact of history,” and writes that “if we do not take for granted what is true in our own society, it is not obvious why judgments about inability to work … should be made by physicians rather than by priests, judges, juries, teachers, or public officials.”228 Like other identity categories, disability is therefore a political and moral category, and not a medical one. According to Stone, it was the capitalist disruption of European feudalism that created the conditions for the development of the disability category. Feudalism had based its internal rules and practices for resource distribution on where a person was born into their community’s established hierarchies, but capitalism “introduced a new distributive principle – labor – according to which people would receive wages determined by the value and amount of work they performed.”229 This new principle of distribution disrupted previous means of allocating resources that had long existed in feudal Europe, including established means of distribution to those in need. Since this initial displacement, colonialism’s exportation of capitalism has disrupted and subjugated countless other systems of resource distribution. This disruption, as well as the subsequent medicalization of disability, continues to displace local understandings globally.230 Under the feudal system, begging was looked down upon, but it was also understood that poverty could be entirely unrelated to how hard a person worked. Some people would always be poor. Christian discourse partly attributed poverty to God’s will and dictated that wealthy people share with poor people (or at least poor Christians). Of these sensibilities, Stiker describes the church’s representations of a person who would be considered disabled today as “someone to stimulate charity.”231 With capitalism, however, asking for assistance “came to be seen as undermining the newly emerging system of wage labor.”232 This view intensified the moral denigration of those who needed assistance. Seeking assistance became framed as a result of laziness or moral failure. According to the ethos of the Enlightenment, the ruling classes fancied themselves both morally entitled and obligated to try to transform those who

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needed to beg – through surveillance, detailed record-keeping, and instrumental violence – all shaped by good intentions and interpretations widely shared by those who inhabit one’s class positioning. Charity, then, gradually went from meaning the virtue of universal love for all Christians to signifying a moral crisis that demanded strict monitoring and coercive intervention.233 Snyder and Mitchell attribute Adam Smith’s capitalist theories, published in 1759 and 1776, for what came to be “an inverse relationship of power … where the need for assistance denigrates one human actor by turning him into an object of scorn, while the provider of assistance accumulates cultural (and spiritual) capital.”234 The new distributive economies of labour and charity intensified a previously existing moral economy in which it was morally superior to give than to receive. Yet, now the most moral course of action was to have the determination and foresight not to give, so that a beggar today may be self-sufficient tomorrow – due to having learned the virtues of honest labour through the instrumental violence of going without. It’s now imagined to be ignorance or laziness that causes poverty, rather than injustice, God’s will, or whatever else. In the New Poor Law of 1834, this interlocking of instrumental violence with the moral economy of capitalist charity gets explicitly written into British welfare policy. Because poverty was now so clearly attributed to moral failure, redistribution was now mobilized to correct the cumulative individual causes of poverty rather than only relieve it. The New Poor Law sought “national uniformity in welfare administration, denial of assistance outside the workhouse, and deterrence as the basis for setting benefit levels.”235 It put forward a series of principles to guide welfare policy and reform. These reforms continue today, have intensified again under neoliberal capitalism, and very squarely shaped the work of charity organization societies and other early social workings aiming to “organize” or “coordinate” social services (including Hull-House236). Stone says that the umbrella category of disability emerged through the resulting bureaucratic surveillance and management of welfare recipients. She writes that the “most striking aspect of nineteenth-century [English] Poor Law is that through it, a formerly undifferentiated mass of paupers came to be understood as comprising several distinct elements.”237 (Again, this shift parallels slightly earlier shifts from undifferentiated mass confinement to an ethics in which it was first considered important to observe, track, and categorize those already confined.) And so it came to be known (or perhaps invented) that “five categories were important in defining the internal universe of paupers: children, the sick, the insane, ‘defectives,’ and the ‘aged and infirm.’ Of these, all but the first are part of today’s concept of disability.”238

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English Poor Law therefore operationalized pauper to mean what disability means today, but with poor children added in there too. In keeping with the era’s impulse to categorize people, these five categories of “pauper” were considered to represent a “variety of very separate conditions … so that social reformers were careful to differentiate these effects. It was only the need for a common administrative mechanism and an accurate validation device that pushed these categories together.”239 Basically, everything now considered a disability was grouped together administratively under the category of “pauper,” which also included all poor children; but nobody yet understood this category to be internally cohesive any more than people considered children and elderly people to make up a cohesive subcategory of humanity. In addition to categorizing people in this new way, the New Poor Law also reflected the ethos of the day in that it subjected disabled people to strategies of deterrence. Deterrence is a form of instrumental violence through enforced impoverishment, which was often accompanied by hard labour and confinement. Deterrence strategies were contested due to the contradictory framing of paupers as legitimately in need of relief and simultaneously in need of externally imposed motivations so that they might better themselves. “Some people held that the sick were not ‘the proper objects for such a system.’ Others believed that the deterrence principle embodied in the 1834 Amendment ‘causes the lame to walk, the blind to see, and the dumb to speak.’”240 This tension has remained central to welfare ever since. It was politically important to try to ensure that people who couldn’t work wouldn’t starve as a result. But it’s untrue that local practices hadn’t been in place to address poverty, however insufficient and inconsistent, previous to the birth of the welfare state. Furthermore, the welfare state institutionalized intrusive surveillance and record-keeping, as well as the instrumental violence of the New Poor Law’s “principle of less eligibility,” by which a welfare recipient must make less than the lowest paid labourer. On the one hand, the New Poor Law moved towards the practice of (theoretically) all disabled people having the means to survive outside of the capitalist market. On the other hand, it institutionalized the forced impoverishment of disabled people and began to standardize and coordinate these practices across alms-giving bodies, so that it became increasingly difficult to receive enough money for anything beyond basic survival. This instrumentally enforced poverty continues to be the reality for people living on disability-related and other pensions, and also for those receiving other social assistance. Previous to the welfare state, some poor people were surely worse off; but just as surely others were able to live better by accessing several charities, perhaps panhandling, playing music on the street, under-the-table work, or informally selling things. There was previously no regulatory body that would take money away from a

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poor person who was caught supplementing their income. How is it possible to consider such a regulatory body an indication of progress? Stone says that the 1889 German Invalidity and Pension Law furthered the work begun in the British New Poor Law and, finally, created the disability category. In it, all things now called disability, and only things now called disability, were grouped together and conceptualized as a coherent and self-contained whole. In addition to being the first enactment of this consolidation, this German legislation also influenced a number of other countries’ social welfare policies, so it is “a critical point in the development of the disability category.”241 As in the New Poor Law, the 1889 Invalidity and Pension Law defines “invalid” not in relation to a doctor’s assessment, but in relation to ability to work in the capitalist market. It defines an invalid as a person who “because of his physical or mental condition is neither in a position to perform regularly his previous work . . . nor to earn the minimum invalidity pension through other work corresponding to his strengths and capabilities and existing job opportunities.”242 Participation in the capitalist labour market and perceived ability to participate in this labour market were central to this first-ever grouping together of basically all those who are today considered disabled. Welfarism and eugenics are normatively imagined to be very different political projects. Yet, approximately fifty years after inventing the disability category in the context of welfarism, the German government was exterminating disabled people through the eugenic Nazi Aktion T4 program. However truly positive the welfarist sensibility was in determining all those now deemed disabled eligible for a state pension, its categorization of some people as fundamentally incapacitated shares a sensibility with eugenics. Some people are disproportionately disadvantaged by the always unjust capitalist wage labour system, including many disabled people; it is therefore appropriate, within (certain) capitalist ideologies, to allow exceptions to the harshness of this system that would otherwise leave many more starving, homeless, and erroneously blamed for not being better competitors. However, such a relative disadvantage is not synonymous with holistic unfitness or even total incapacity to work. Both eugenics and welfarism construct disabled people as less valuable than nondisabled people. In welfarism, disabled people are devalued because of their incapacity to earn a wage, though they’re deemed more deserving of assistance because of that. In eugenics, in contrast, disability is understood as a kind of holistic unfitness. Nevertheless, both discourses take it for granted that disability indicates only an individual problem, burden, or tragedy.243 Neither interrogates the political structures and moral economies that cause disability oppression.

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Social work and charity responses to disability, to this day, often straddle the line between framing disabled people as totally unfit and as simply unfit to work. This framing is the legacy of the two forces of eugenic and welfarist discourse coming together to shape what appears to make sense when it comes to disability. In fact, it seems that these discourses came together in constructing the disabled person in Canada and the United States through the provision of organized private charity (given the absence of state programs until considerably later). Snyder and Mitchell write of the United States: “Disability came to be construed as a fully tragic consequence of embodiment gone awry [in eugenics], one that extracted individuals from productive membership in a capitalist economy [in welfarism].”244 Here, both eugenic and welfarist discourses are evident. This new construction, they argue, resulted in the displacement of family/community-based care: “People with physical and cognitive differences found themselves controlled by new terms: those of the emergent modern charity concepts of the industrial United States. Disabled people found that their livelihood and integration were no longer perceived as a matter of familial and community responsibility; instead, they were to be officially classified by scientific techniques adopted for producing objectifying taxonomies of the body.” These populations, then, came under the management of charities and then government. Named as members of a deficient population – the legion of the defective, delinquent, nonproductive, and burdensome – disabled bodies increasingly came to be managed by private organizations [and a little later by] state and federal agencies.245 Reading Stone in tension with Snyder and Mitchell,246 then, we are suggesting that it was in private Canadian and American charities, influenced by both welfarist and eugenic sensibilities, that the category of disability first took hold in Canada and the United States. It was a denigrated category from the very beginning, with a tension as to whether that denigration related to who a disabled person was at their very core or only about whether they could work – along with the familiar tension between whether disabled people were irredeemably inferior or could be improved and aligned more closely with exalted nondisabled people. Stone’s book was published in 1984. Since then, due to neoliberal policies, the numbers of those deemed eligible to receive help has become smaller. Neoliberalism marks a return to earlier liberal ideologies of individual competition and survival of the fittest, so that many hard-won social services are being dismantled with the justification that this measure will produce hard-working and self-sufficient labourers. Although Stone appears to bring us to a fixed legal understanding of disability, the legal definition is always in flux, and the recent trend has been to restrict relief.247

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The Validation and Invalidation of the “Indian”: 1800s White Settler Colonial Policy The European history of creating the categories of pauper and invalid occurred alongside a resonant history. The Canadian and US governments created a new bureaucratic category of person as surely as the English and German systems had: the “Indian.”* Like disability, this new bureaucratic category and the people subjected to it would also prove fundamental to professional social work’s enactments of structural violence. The histories of disability and colonization can, and sometimes should, be told as distinct histories. The oppression of disabled people, as a group, and the oppression of Indigenous people, as a group, are certainly distinct from one another, as are respective histories of resistance and all those life experiences that are neither acts of resistance nor experiences of oppression.248 However, many disabled Indigenous people live in the legacy of, and are directly and negatively impacted by, both histories, which is one argument for articulating the histories together. Another is that some contemporary enactments of structural violence are at once colonial and disablist, often using medicalizing language to efface the coloniality of violence.249 But rather than focusing on any of that here, in the following section we discuss how reigning moral economies and state strategies to control, manage, and categorize Indigenous peoples in nineteenth century United States and Canada resonate with those that were used against European disabled peoples at the time. Indigenous peoples across what is now called Canada and the United States represent a vastly diverse array of peoples, with divergent practices, beliefs, relationships with one another, relationships with (also diverse) settler populations, and other features. These various communities across the Americas were as diverse as those in Asia, Europe, or Africa. Previous to the late 1800s, these communities had never been administratively bundled together as one cohesive whole. Likewise, no external body had ever granted itself the authority to define who could and couldn’t name themselves Indigenous. In Canada, this categorization occurred through the Indian Act of 1876. In the United States, it was the 1887 General Allotment Act, also called the Dawes Act. The two white settler states granted themselves authority to validate who was an “Indian,” making this term signify a unity of experience in policy that was not reflected in everyday real life and disqualifying the Indigeneity of all

* “Indian” is the official state category in both the United States and Canada, and so we use it where appropriate.

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who fell outside of the bureaucratic category “Indian” (even if they were Indigenous). Concurrently, policies governing state–Indigenous relations invalidated Indigenous persons as less than fully functioning humans and therefore as incapable of directing their own lives.250 Discrete Indigenous communities were viewed as nations and treated as such within early treaties negotiated with the British Crown and in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 (which was previous to the American Revolution and after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, so it officially covered all of what was settled at the time by the French or English in what is now called Canada and the United States). This point is not to deny the terrible violence that also occurred, including mass murder and forced displacement. Yet, alongside such violence, Indigenous communities were also understood as sovereign political entities with whom the British Crown negotiated; and this practice was subsequently adopted by the United States and Canada.251 The shift towards the bureaucratic categorization of Indigenous peoples and an increasingly paternalistic relationship with them resonates with other developments discussed in this chapter, by which instrumental violence, categorization, surveillance, and detailed record-keeping were used against denigrated and oppressed groups in institutional and bureaucratic spaces. Dean Neu and Richard Therrien write that by the 1800s “colonial administrators had come to the conclusion that containment and/or assimilation of Indigenous peoples were the only viable policy options, since the close watch of the humanitarians and missionaries had effectively ruled out extermination and slavery.”252 Now colonies like those that would soon confederate into “Canada” understood themselves morally obligated to “civilize” Indigenous peoples – within an understanding in which instrumental violence was considered necessary to make denigrated people work to approximate exalted ruling class white mores for the supposed benefit of all. Neu and Therrien describe a transition in colonial governance in Canada “from a nation-to-nation relationship at the time of the Royal Proclamation to a paternal relationship in which the colonial government has the majority of the say in how annuity payments will be distributed.”253 They note that it’s “interesting to juxtapose this relationship to other debtee/debt-holder relations and to notice the inversion of influence – usually we think of the debt-holder as having significant influence over the structuring of the interest payment.”254 Although settler populations largely forget this fact, Indigenous peoples receive payments from the Canadian and US states in exchange for the states’ use of the lands. That was how settlement was negotiated through treaties and early relations. As Neu and Therrien point out, this relationship is one in which one political entity (the Crown; the state) is legally indebted to another political entity

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(diverse respective Indigenous nations or communities). The Innu Nation and Mushuau Band Council observe, then: “The social assistance that comes to us is payment for the development of our own resources. Maybe the government thinks we don’t know that. But we know. Other people think we get help from the government, but the money comes from our resources. This money from all over Canada comes from Native peoples’ land.”255 This context is forgotten, and the colonial relationship is instead reconceptualized within the capitalist moral economy of charity, so that the white settler state is morally exalted as the supposed “giver,” and Indigenous peoples are denigrated and framed as undeserving recipients. As Frantz Fanon points out, the white supremacist moral economy enables white people to imagine and narrate conquest and invasion as partly caused by deficits that had always existed among Indigenous peoples the world over, rather than considering that host societies might have been guided by values such as hospitality or generosity, which were taken advantage of due to colonizers’ racism and capitalist greed: When we endeavor to understand why the European, the foreigner, was called ... “honorable stranger”; when we endeavor to understand why the shipwrecked Europeans were welcomed with open arms, why the European, the stranger, is never perceived as the enemy, instead of explaining it on the basis of humanity, goodwill, or courtesy ... we are told it’s quite simply because something was written … in the unconscious [of colonized peoples] that made the white man the awaited master.256

This framing of Indigenous peoples as so many deficit biologies, cultures, or psyches, rather than as value-driven and agentive,257 allows settlers to forget, to erase that settler societies depend upon Indigenous land and resources, and also that we were the ones who violently conquered other civilizations. Settlers can then erroneously envision both payments dating back to treaty arrangements and forced assimilative efforts as act of benevolence. According to the ethos of the day, the US settler state and the Canadian settler colonies imagined themselves morally obligated to transform Indigenous peoples to make them more like white people. As colonial administrators came to articulate this clear assimilationist agenda to absorb all Indigenous peoples into the white colonial body politic, annuity payments to Indigenous communities began to shift their focus away from meeting the needs and wants that had been negotiated, and towards strategies of coercive assimilation. Referring to the 1845 Report on the Affairs of the Indians in Canada, Neu and Therrien document how the colonies changed these payments “in the continuing attempt to change the habits and customs of Indigenous people.” They continue: “Instead

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of providing clothing, blankets and hunting supplies, General Darling proposed that agricultural implements be distributed, as ‘active steps to civilize and educate the Indians.’”258 Annuities were also modified to encourage schooling and discourage hunting. The report notes that, starting in 1838, part of the annuity payments were used for “the erection of school houses, the purchase of elementary books, and the payment of resident school-masters, for the benefit of the Indian tribes.”259 Alongside the slightly later Indian Act, and with the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869 bridging them in time and working in tandem with their goals,260 colonial administrators and the new state took it upon themselves to validate Indigenous identity (that is, decide who is a legal “Indian”) and also to invalidate Indigenous lifeworlds by displacing them and replacing them with European practices and values. The history in the United States is similar. State efforts to assimilate Indigenous persons through European-style schools and agriculture went back to at least the Civilization Fund Act of 1819, which granted money to reformist and missionary groups to implant these practices in Indigenous communities in order to displace Indigenous practices.261 The United States then granted itself the authority to define who is and isn’t validly Indigenous through the Dawes Act of 1887. Designating Indian status was a strategy for getting rid of both Indigenous lifeworlds and Indigenous legal title to land. As Samuels writes, the Dawes Act was “part of the federal effort to divide the lands formerly held in common by various sovereign Indian tribes, for the stated purpose of better integrating Indian peoples into an American society based on principles of private property and individual agency.”262 These underlying aims shaped the validation process itself: the state worked both to “recognize fewer Indians for land allotment, since all ‘surplus’ lands would become available for white settlement,” and also to recognize as many mixed-blood people as possible because they “were perceived as more likely to vote in favour of [capitalist] land distribution.”263 In claiming the power to define a person’s Indigeneity, white settler colonies and states could manipulate something that was imagined as self-evidently clear cut – the question of heritage, race, or ancestry – so that numbers might leap at one time and decrease at another, as Samuels documents. The Dawes Act institutionalized the measurement and validation of “blood quantum” in the United States, a designation reminiscent of the “sciences of the surface” discussed earlier. This practice never involved literally measuring the percentage of Indigenous versus white settler blood, which is impossible, but it sure sounds scientific. What’s more, in subsequent political uses of the original measurements from the enrolments at the time of the Dawes Act, the cut-off points for what was deemed sufficient Indigenous ancestry to qualify for this or

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that purpose would fluctuate considerably – based on factors entirely outside of any individual’s physiology or ancestry. Like having the state validate one’s disability in bureaucratic welfare policy, having one’s Indianness validated by the state is indistinguishable from state oppression. From the beginning, blood quantum both bureaucratically validated one’s Indigeneity and bureaucratically invalidated one’s legal status as a fully functioning and capable human. Samuels discusses how “percentage of white blood conferred competence upon the Indian landholder.”264 Yet, this white supremacist and paternalistic violence was narrated as benevolence. These “restrictions were framed as a matter of protecting a class of people who were [constructed as] particularly vulnerable to exploitation because they lacked the ability to make informed, rational decisions about property.”265 Legislated Exclusions: Racialized and Disablist Immigration Policies In 1882, the same decade that the Dawes Act was passed, US immigration policy saw the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act,266 and Canada passed the “Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 [which] imposed a head tax on Chinese immigrants to curtail their entry.”267 The same year as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the United States also passed the Undesirables Act, “which barred ‘convicts, paupers, the insane, and idiots’”268 from immigrating, as well as “any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.”269 Seven years before the German Invalidity and Pension Law described earlier, all paupers and criminals were barred in this same act alongside various categories of person who would now be considered disabled, so it more closely targeted the eugenically “unfit” than it could be said to target those called disabled today. Various forms of unfitness were interlocked in many different ways. For instance, Chinese people were considered eugenically unfit, morally dangerous, and an overall threat to the population and country; consequently, both white settler states restricted their entry. Only two decades previously, Down syndrome was given its initial name and characterization by Dr John Down: “mongolism.” Down claimed racial degeneration caused this syndrome: he believed white folks with this diagnosis had degenerated to the intellectual and moral capacity characteristic of Asian people.270 Canada inherited its infamous (and still operational) “excessive demand” principle from the 1859 British Quarantine Act, which allowed for the denial of entry to “any Lunatic, Idiotic, Deaf and Dumb, Blind or Infirm Person, not belonging to any Emigrant family” if they were believed “likely to become permanently a public charge.”271 Once Canada confederated, it passed its own

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Immigration Act in 1869, keeping the same language about denying entry but reducing who was barred to “any lunatic or idiotic person.”272 The country would continue to refine its disablist exclusion laws over the following years. Canada was a little ahead of the United States in restricting the entry of those considered disabled today, just as it was in defining who is legally an Indian. Canadian immigration officials also mobilized every legal mechanism they could in an attempt to keep Black people out,* many of whom were trying to get away from the Black Codes of 1865 and 1866 (the latter is the year Down named “mongolism”).273 Canadian government representatives dissuaded Black people from immigrating to Canada, particularly to the Prairie provinces. In 1911, the Canadian government wrote a rule expressly barring entry to Black people, although this rule was never implemented.274 Instead, rather than using legislation for the express purpose of excluding Black people, the Canadian state worked within existing exclusionary legislation that specifically targeted disabled people to keep as many Black people as possible out of the country.275 Black people were thus excluded due to “arthritis, asthma, cellulitis, curvature of the spine, diabetes, defective sight, eczema, hookworm, goiter, gout, hare lip, lameness, melancholia, opium habit, poor physique, varicose veins, and pregnancy.”276 As stated earlier, the strategy of targeting disability or things considered medical issues as a means of effacing racism or colonialism lives on today. Although they are very different in the context of a white settler state, the Dawes Act and the Indian Act shared the practice of giving meaning to racial categorizations through the enactment of law with the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Chinese Immigration Act. These acts are characterized by a resonant sense of moral panic, and they respond to this panic by either trying to “keep” Canada and the United States white (through exclusionary immigration policies) or attempts at making Canada and the United States white (through policies aiming to destroy Indigenous lifeworlds). Each of these white supremacist laws was passed in the last few decades of the 1800s, while the various activities that would very soon be called professional social work were exploding in American and Canadian cities. The first US chapter of the Charity Organization Society was founded the year after the Indian Act was passed, and what’s normatively considered the first settlement house was founded two years after the Dawes Act. The resonant ethic animating the varied social workings discussed in this chapter profoundly shaped professional social work.

* As Thobani discusses, the Canadian government also amended the Immigration Act in 1908 with the continuous journey requirement, which was designed to stop South Asian and Japanese immigration.

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Conclusion The ethic that we’ve teased out in this chapter made explicitly white supremacist laws seem totally reasonable to policy makers and the white ruling class public in the late 1800s. This same ethic made professional social work take up the particular strategies that it did. From the invention of the straitjacket through to the Indian Act, a lot of supposedly progressive work had long been done that cumulatively set the stage for the new interventions into our social world that would be called “social work” around 1900. The violent ethic animating this work was particular and situated; it wasn’t inevitable, and it’s up to us today to work hard to ensure that it doesn’t remain permanent. Many social services today are understood as benevolent by those running them, and by the white nondisabled ruling classes more widely, and yet they’re very often experienced by service users and marginalized communities as violent. Those of us involved in such systems might be more open to taking such experiences and critiques seriously if we truly understand that such imagined benevolence in sites that perpetrate violence, oppression, and harm has been so incredibly widespread. We can perhaps even say that understanding one’s actions as justifiable or even good-intentioned is the norm of violence perpetration, rather than the exception. Casting others’ violence as exceptional therefore serves to wear away any sense that the rest of us might have anything at all to do with fundamentally changing things.

5 Rehabilitation/Eugenics

The Moral Economy of Rehabilitation “To rehabilitate” originally meant “to restore (a person) to former privileges, status, possessions” and also “to legitimate (a person of illegitimate birth).”1 Both of these early definitions point towards some of the critique of rehabilitation commonly encountered in disability activism and scholarship. The first early definition suggests there’s a previous state of social, political, and moral value, to which one can be returned – which is particularly problematic when rehabilitation targets a part of a person’s body or soul they were born with. The second original meaning suggests something perhaps even more concerning: to legitimate a person of illegitimate birth. This second definition poetically articulates the troubling promise of rehabilitation: even someone born illegitimate, invalidated, or unvalued can achieve moral, social, and political worth by working to get closer to nondisabled norms and white ruling class cisheterosexual mores. Although disability critique raises serious questions about rehabilitation as a political dream or ideology, it is otherwise normatively taken for granted as utterly unremarkable, unproblematic, and good. According to Henri-Jacques Stiker, rehabilitation “refer[s] today to [only a] collection of medical, therapeutic, social and professional actions.”2 He writes that the underlying moral economy that animates rehabilitation – in which some bodies and minds are preferable to others and everyone should align with normality or nondisability – “has been trivialized.”3 Although a moral economy that unequally ascribes human worth renders rehabilitative practice sensible, this underlying moral economy that has been so fundamental to legacies of interlocking oppression remains largely uninterrogated. As we’ve previously explored, moral economies, in which some bodies and identities are exalted in direct measure to denigrated others, have a

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long history in European and white settler discourse and interventions into the social world.4 Scientific, institutional, and bureaucratic classifications of diverse bodies and identities have reinforced and secularized these uneven distributions of whose life is worthy. However oddly, these rigidifying developments were intimately connected to the emergence of new discourses and associated practices relating to human self-control, malleability, and perfectibility. By breaking from notions that human life is predominantly a reflection of God’s will, it became possible to imagine that individuals and entire societies could take it upon themselves to fundamentally better themselves. While this break from past thinking may have been a largely positive development in the abstract, its materialities and discourses interlocked with moral economies determining which forms of life were worthy and which were not.5 While diverse persons previously considered irremediably without value could now accrue moral value, the paths to doing so involved alignment with normative notions of what constitutes a valuable life. As such, varied long-denigrated characteristics, ranging from Indigeneity to queerness to criminality to disability, remained as fully denigrated as they were previously, but they were now considered correctable. Across contexts, although diversely across them, rehabilitation involved aligning oneself with white ruling class, nondisabled, cisheteropatriarchal mores. In the new political practices of rehabilitation, as well as in the associated practices of assimilation we discuss in the next chapter, “worthless people could achieve worth by eliminating the part of them that was disabled, degenerate, uncivilized or criminalistic.”6 This belief indicated a significant shift towards an understanding that people have the potential to become, and therefore should become, normal. Unvalued, deviant, or abnormal aspects of people could now be eliminated, without explicitly intending to eliminate the people themselves. But the previously existing moral economy of human worth was retained, across interlocking forms of oppression, and this differentiation of human value shaped the particularities of the new apparent “optimism.” People only achieved value if they approximated white, nondisabled, ruling class, cisheterosexual norms. Rehabilitation and eugenics are often conceived of as fundamentally different projects, even as oppositional. Rehabilitation is often thought of as helping individuals to fully participate in society and become economically productive. Within social work and medical discourse, rehabilitation is therefore most commonly viewed as unproblematically good. Yet, the philosophy and practice of rehabilitation involves intervening in peoples’ behaviour, minds, and bodies to bring them closer to exalted norms. Rehabilitation and eugenics are therefore compatible and complementary practices of normalization and violence.

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Historically, rehabilitation has proven compatible with continued efforts to eliminate those deemed worthless, most notably through eugenics. In the convergence of eugenics and rehabilitation, after being initially separated from the “fit,” those deemed “unfit” are further subdivided into irredeemable and salvageable – where salvageable signifies both a person’s need for rehabilitation and also that they are deserving of services.7 The designation of who deserves rehabilitation and who does not aligns with interlocking oppression and the uneven moral distributions of human value, so that those with disabilities deemed “less severe,” or who are otherwise exalted as white, ruling class, and embodying other characteristics of dominance, may be deemed deserving of rehabilitative, integrative services.8 Rehabilitation gained prominence during the First World War and was initially practised on a large scale on the bodies and souls of wounded soldiers and injured workers, two groups exalted through interlocking discourses of nationalism, masculinism, and capitalism. Rehabilitation gradually came to be applied to less straightforwardly exalted “abnormal” people, and therefore began to divide more morally denigrated communities into redeemable and irredeemable. This division furthered the reach of the moral economy that bestows social worth and deservingness only to some. Both rehabilitation and eugenics reinforce the taken-for-grantedness of a morally superior normality and the righteousness of normalizing practices. They both aim to eliminate certain ways of being human, and they uphold oppressive systems that make it difficult to live outside of socially constituted “normalcy.” We demonstrate these assertions in the sections following in a discussion of how and for whom rehabilitation programs were first implemented, as well as an examination of their intimate relationship to the contemporaneous forces of eugenics. The Origins of Rehabilitation before the First World War The emergence of rehabilitation resulted from a convergence of the influence of orthopaedic surgery, workers’ compensation, and charity organization societies.9 While orthopaedics has a longer history, significant developments in surgical procedures (and the coining of the word) occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These new medical technologies helped transform the understanding of injuries and disabilities, and facilitated the development of systematic approaches to intervene upon “crippled” bodies (as they were then called).10 Towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, workers’ compensation practices were initiated in a number of countries including Germany, England, Norway, and parts of the United States and

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Canada.11 Stiker states that many of the core themes of rehabilitation, “the ideas of compensation, collective responsibility, state involvement, normalization based on a perception of the average, and social insurance had their origins in work-related accidents.”12 The first workers’ compensation legislation in Canada was in 1909 in Québec, followed by Ontario in 1914.13 In the United States, Maryland and Montana first introduced workers’ compensation in 1902 and 1909, respectively.14 Workers’ compensation marked a compromise between business owners and workers, including unions.15 Owners collectivized much of the cost of industrial accidents, paying a predetermined fixed amount rather than a variable one, and so potentially paid larger amounts to workers when there were injuries. Workers’ compensation was a significant victory for workers, given that courts had often ruled in favour of management and litigation required significant resources to navigate. These changes, however, also found workers surrendering the right to sue employers – which is what made it a compromise on the part of workers and their unions. Like others of its time, Ontario’s program framed injured workers’ rehabilitation “as a right and not as an act of charity.”16 This positioning was a positive development, and yet it also contained responsibility for workers’ injuries within bureaucratic, individualistic, and capitalist terms. Rehabilitation helped to keep workers working, and it minimized any loss in productivity and profit. “If the aim of workmen’s compensation was to be realized, the injured worker must not only be compensated for loss of earning power, he must be rendered fit to work again and placed in a job.”17 Significantly, eligibility for worker’s compensation was restricted to those injured at work. If a working person became sick or was injured outside of work, they would not qualify for rehabilitation or for any support at all from their employer. Further, people not working in recognized and legitimatized paid labour did not qualify, regardless of how their injury occurred. The third major influence on rehabilitation was the Charity Organization Society (COS).18 Social casework was key to the development of rehabilitation as a concept and a practice.19 According to Michelle Hébert Boyd, following the 1917 Halifax Explosion, the Halifax Relief Committee’s “sub-committee with the broadest scope of work was its Rehabilitation Committee. Its work incorporated many of the aspects of casework that were emerging in larger centers.”20 Hébert Boyd places this passage under the subtitle “‘A Procedure, A Guidance, A Paternal Care’: The Rehabilitation Committee,” which shows the importance of standardization and the paternalism of those who know better guiding those who are assumed inferior – a pattern discussed in previous chapters. In 1912, a COS leader named Francis McLean described a central aim of the COS as

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“family rehabilitation.”21 McLean didn’t define this term, but he did state, tellingly, that “employment [is] often specifically mentioned as one form of rehabilitation” and provided no other examples.22 This statement suggests just how crucial men’s integration into the capitalist economy was to what was called family rehabilitation. COS figurehead Mary Richmond gave a lecture in the early 1900s called “Family Rehabilitation,”23 and she used “Charity Organization Society” and “Family Rehabilitation Agency” interchangeably in her influential text Social Diagnosis.24 The moral economy that both exalts social workers and determines what kinds of lives are valued is clear in Richmond’s earlier description of the subjective experience of rehabilitating a family, showing how the strictly gendered parallel to men’s integration into capitalism played out for women. She wrote that there’s “deeper satisfaction … in turning a sham home into a real one; in teaching the slatternly, irresponsible mother the pleasure of a cleanly, well-ordered home.”25 Men were to remain in the workforce if at all possible, and to find work if they had none; women were to keep a clean and disciplined home. This gendered division of labour was the foundation for family rehabilitation. And, in addition to being gendered, it was fundamentally shaped by ruling class, white, and heteronormative social mores. Although it exalted white, nondisabled, and ruling class mores and denigrated all others, rehabilitation, as a liberal intervention into the social world, claimed to “consider every case individually.”26 This task required standardized mechanisms for casework, such as sorting “cases” and evaluating their progress. Individualizing practices of continual surveillance and exhaustive documentation, first developed in “indoor relief ” sites like asylums and poorhouses,27 were now spread to “outdoor relief ” through social work.28 This development paved the way for workers’ compensation and family rehabilitation programs. Given the developments of moral treatment described in chapter 4, it may not be surprising that rehabilitation had already been marginally practised in psychiatric institutions as early as the early 1800s.29 Prior to the First World War, rehabilitation had also been implemented by a limited number of charities for specific disability groups (for example, the National Tuberculosis Association in the United States, the Canadian Tuberculosis Association, and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind).30 But it was in response to the consequences of the two world wars that the rehabilitation of disabled people became a more established practice and way of thinking about disability. Like injured male workers in the new workers’ compensation programs, disabled soldiers were considered exceptionally deserving of something other than the desperate poverty that frequently accompanied disability. This exaltation of soldiers fed rehabilitation’s flourishing. However, the massive numbers of disabled soldiers didn’t transform the moral economy devaluing disabled bodies

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and lives. Instead, it spurred efforts to eliminate disability among those who were otherwise exceptionally exalted. Soldiers, Sailors, and Sameness Early rehabilitation projects paved the way for rehabilitation to be implemented on a large scale during the First World War. According to Stiker, the beginning of that war “provides a reference point” that marks a “new way, both cultural and social, of addressing disability.”31 During the war, the moral economy of human worth’s operationalization in eugenic confinement and sterilization encountered a problem: the sweeping categories of “fit” and “unfit” were increasingly difficult to maintain and justify as discrete, due to the 172,000 injured soldiers who returned to Canada from the war.32 Physically adept young men who fought for their country, and were therefore exalted as among the most “fit” of all, were disabled. These men were still deemed reproductively fit, that is, of “good genetic stock,” but they were often no longer viewed as economically fit.* This paradox played some part in the reform of eugenic discourse and practice through the emergence of the new subcategory of “unfit but correctable.” Through this new subcategory, rehabilitation became the state response to the massive influx of disabled soldiers into Canada, the United States, and Western Europe, which seamlessly complemented ongoing eugenic strategies against those still simply deemed unfit. The new subcategory helped to intersect eugenic strategies with liberal political beliefs, so that exalted others’ evaluations of a person’s individual efforts increasingly served to justify ongoing inequality and violence. Now, not all disabled people were considered deserving of desperate poverty; it was only when helping professionals determined that a person wasn’t working hard enough that they were understood to deserve a life of desperate poverty. In the half century or so of massive institutionalization leading up to the war, people with physical disabilities often lived secluded, hidden-away lives, so that the nondisabled public gradually became increasingly less accustomed to living alongside disabled people.33 The plentiful and highly visible returning soldiers therefore posed a problem for nondisabled experiences and accounts of disability. These men had been discursively constructed as fit enough to defend * War injuries had historically served as a marker of fitness before this time, as discussed in chapter 2 of seventeenth century France. This view of fitness had also been the case following the American Civil War. However, due to the prevalence of eugenics discourse and practice in North America during the First World War, the explicit struggle or tension between reproductive fitness and physical fitness was new.

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the country; each had been medically examined and declared fit to fight.* Upon their return, a conflict of representations and values arose between eugenic denigrations of disabled bodies and minds and the exaltation of soldiers: the “fit” were also “unfit.” Writing of this tension in Britain, Bourke asserts: “The war created a new constituency of disabled people … [and] fundamentally altered the whole experience of disability.” The injured soldier, however, was not understood as disabled in the way that those disabled from birth were understood. Instead, the soldier was distinctly understood as “mutilated. He was the fit man, the potent man rendered impotent.”34 Existing paradigms of disability no longer made sense. Shortly after the onset of the war, the state and various medical and vocational experts in the United States, Canada, and other Western countries required a new discourse about disability. This newly articulated discourse would resolve the contradiction between the fit and the maimed person. It was called rehabilitation. Rehabilitation efforts at this time were unprecedented, in both scale and scope. Ana Carden-Coyne writes: “Rehabilitating disabled veterans generated new systems of medical, military and social management.”35 In 1918, Thomas Kidner, vocational secretary of the Invalided Soldiers’ Commission of Canada and later staff at the US Federal Board for Vocational Education, observed: “It was the first time that the work had been undertaken on so large a scale and to embrace such a variety of occupations.”36 Injured soldiers were the largest group provided rehabilitation at that time, and the Second World War would see an even more massive mobilization in both the rhetoric and practice of “restoring” disabled soldiers. Again, this concept is best understood as a resolution of the clash within the moral economy that both denigrates disabled people and exalts soldiers. At this time, physical disability was openly described as “monstrous,” “freakish,” and “ugly,” and it was believed to be a physical manifestation of underlying incompetence, laziness, immorality, intellectual inferiority, and worthlessness. But for injured fighters, according to David Serlin, “disability is material proof of one’s service to the military, to the modern state, to industrial capitalism: these help to preserve patriotic values and respectable citizenship.”37 The two world wars, by creating so many disabled people who were otherwise exceptionally morally exalted, enabled the widespread development and implementation of rehabilitation in Canada and the United States.

* The Special Committee’s 1917 report, Returned Soldiers, documents that although all Canadian soldiers had previously been declared fit to fight, when it came time to distribute pensions, some of the men who fought and were injured in the war were retroactively declared unfit.

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Medical, Economic, and Civil Rehabilitation Disability rehabilitation comprised three important components during and after the two world wars: medical rehabilitation, which works to cure or diminish the disability of the body and mind; economic rehabilitation, which works towards the person’s productivity and employment; and civic rehabilitation, which works to produce a moral citizen. These three components interlock in a moral economy separating the valued from the worthless, and are foundational to rehabilitative discourse. Physical rehabilitative services were geared towards productivity and imagined as necessary for economic rehabilitation; civic rehabilitation imagined both economic and physical rehabilitation to be prerequisites for full citizenship. The rehabilitation project focused on reconstructing the economically productive citizenry that had been disabled in the wars. According to Canadian Major John Todd, “No means of reducing a [soldier’s] disability [was] left untried.”38 However, this sentiment was only the rhetoric. In actual practice, efforts only extended towards the goal of a man’s (re)entry into the capitalist workforce. American rehabilitation director Michael Shortley stated: “It is only needed to develop their remaining skills and capacities, through physical restoration and training, to the point of economic usefulness.”39 Resonantly, Canadian Senator McLennan proclaimed in 1917: “The fact that we want as many of these returned soldiers to be producers as possible is one that should not be lost sight of.”40 Indeed, this narrow, specific goal was never lost sight of. The body was the principal site of intervening to make disabled ex-soldiers economically productive, as is clearly demonstrated in the history of the prosthetic limb. Prosthetics were essentially understood as work tools for disabled ex-soldiers, and so both world wars saw the flourishing of the prosthetic industry.41 Prostheses were developed out of the attitude that what “the war has taken away, we must replace.”42 Prior to 1914, simple legs made of wood or crutches were the only mobility aids used by amputees, but the war saw the development of both what Stiker calls “the very idea that you can replace” and more sophisticated and specialized prosthetics.43 Gendered ruling class norms and mores dictated what was and wasn’t considered worthy of replacement. For example, Douglas C. McMurtrie, director of the American Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men in New York, discussed in 1918 how prosthetics were “designed with a practical aim only in view: they vary according to the trade in which the individual is to engage.” A man’s job would determine what kind of prosthetic arm he would receive. “For example, the appliance for a machinist would be quite different from that with which a wood turner would be provided.” For his home life,

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“he is provided with a ‘dress arm’ which is made in imitation of the lost natural member.”44 First World War amputee soldiers were provided with specific tools to replace their lost arms so as to enable paid employment. But no such replacement was deemed important for the home life. This policy reflects the prevailing gender discourse of separate spheres, in which men – especially ruling class men – were never expected to do daily household chores like cooking and cleaning. In line with this discourse, prosthetics simply didn’t need to be useful at home; outside of paid work, they were only designed to be aesthetically normalizing.* The assumption was that women would care for their sons and husbands, not that disabled men would care for themselves or others. Any usefulness for a prosthetic arm beyond paid labour – cooking, changing diapers, cleaning, giving hand jobs, and other labour relating to social reproduction – was imagined unnecessary in the state’s singular emphasis on men’s participation in the formal capitalist economy.† This attitude didn’t just reflect separate spheres ideology; it furthered its reach and dominance. Surely some men at this time would have done tasks like washing dishes previous to losing a limb in the war, even if doing so was outside of the norm. But when it was bureaucratically decided that a man never washes dishes unless he gets paid to do so as a job, this policy would have had the material effect of further aligning more men and women with a strict cisheteropatriarchy. Canada sent 2,054 women to the front lines as nurses, 53 of whom were killed, and so we can anticipate that, logically, many women would have been disabled as a result of war-related work.45 Yet, in the 1917 Parliamentary Special Committee proceedings on the reintegration of war veterans, which is over 1,200 pages long, women are mentioned only in their role as wives, widows, mothers, temporary workers filling what were properly men’s jobs during the war, or nurses to disabled male veterans. The one exception to this gendered exclusion in the First World War was a small rehabilitation program in which some women

* As early as 1980 (relative to the history of disability studies as a discipline), Audre Lorde made a Black lesbian feminist critique of prostheses in her Cancer Journals: she refused to wear a breast prosthesis for the sake of normalizing her post-mastectomy chest. She also implicitly critiques other aspects of rehabilitation, and the professional ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority more generally, when she emphasizes the importance of the (non-professional) love of other women for her healing, as well as how important it was for her to connect with other dykes who had also had mastectomies in order to assist her in making sense of her experience. † Of course, many people with one or no hands do the varied tasks associated with child rearing, homemaking, and sexual stimulation. Yet, state policy held such tasks to be things men don’t do, as unproductive, and therefore as unimportant.

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took a massage course.46 After the Second World War, the only exception was in a report by Canadian civil servant Ian Campbell about the rehabilitation of twenty-five women. These housewives, he reported, “had been rehabilitated to the point where they were capable of caring for themselves and in many cases had therefore released an able-bodied person for economic activity.”47 Here, the disabled woman’s quality of life, comfort, and even capacity to engage in the paid workforce were all apparently irrelevant. The only factor of any relevance to the state and its policies was her lack of dependency on someone else’s unpaid care labour – and only so that other person could participate in the formal capitalist economy. When women were accounted for at all, services were geared towards re-establishing their capacity to cook, clean, and caretake. As late as the 1940s, one major rehabilitation study stated that, because women made up only a quarter of the paid labour force, “no estimates were made concerning the employability of handicapped women or their need for rehabilitation services.”48 But one-quarter of the paid labour force is a significant number. In this particular study by Shortley, the national numbers of disabled women were discussed, but only disabled men were then divided into employability categories. The focus on capitalist production and the construction of women’s labour as nonproductive and irrelevant to state policy – whether unpaid or paid – resulted in women being entirely left out of rehabilitation discourse and most rehabilitation practice. Resonating with those men who had washed dishes at home before losing an arm, many women who made up 25 per cent of the paid workforce and became disabled were forcibly aligned with separate spheres mores because no state efforts were made to reintegrate them into paid work. These policies, seemingly only about disability, fundamentally regulated and policed cisheteronormative gender practices. And we can extrapolate even further. Women who could no longer work as easily would have had a more difficult time opting out of marriage with a male breadwinner, given the discrepancy between men’s incomes and women’s incomes for the same work, and so these state policies may have resulted in fewer of the then-common “Boston marriages” between two women. Also, poor women’s inability to continue to work for pay would have meant more extreme poverty, which could have led to homelessness, imprisonment for theft, or child apprehension for what was depoliticized and construed as neglect. Patriarchal, capitalist, and white supremacist discourses interlocked in policy makers’ assumption that women would never need rehabilitation or compensation to restore their economic productivity.49 Ruling class white women were only imagined as caretakers and consumers, never as producers.50 Racialized and poor women were certainly positioned as workers in the white supremacist,

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capitalist system and its imaginary, but their domestic labour in others’ homes and other informal work was not covered by early worker’s compensation51 or by state unemployment benefits that emerged a little later.52 Their labour was essential to the economy, but due to their denigration in the sexist, racist, and classist moral economy, the state excluded them from rehabilitative services. The focus on only rehabilitating women as homemakers characterized the social work interventions following the Halifax Explosion of 1917 too. In 1918, Joseph J. Murphy, superintendent of the Explosion Blind, boasted that they had successfully re-educated many recently blinded women who “were sitting in absolute idleness in their homes” into women who were “happily busy with their daily household tasks.”53 Sexism also shaped how women’s relief was administered after the explosion, whether or not they were disabled: their relief was usually distributed to male relatives, regardless of the quality of their relationship.54 Professional social workers were sent from big cities across the United States and Canada to help with the explosion response. In these same cities, many women were opting out of marriage with men. Some were in “Boston marriages”; some had no singular companion of any gender. It was at this time, when massive numbers of ruling class women were forging lives independent of men’s scrutiny and control, that professional social workers gave women’s pensions to their nearest male relative. Professional social work didn’t passively reflect existing values. It also enforced them. Hébert Boyd also discusses how the intersection of masculinity with disability gave a particular shape to men’s experiences of disability following the explosion that cannot be summed up as disability plus men’s power and privilege, or by disability plus a neutral gender experience. Discourses surrounding masculinity shaped the particular experience of men’s disability. Because men were assumed to be capable of financial independence, “widows receiving a pension would always have their medical expenses covered by the HRC, but men who accepted the lump-sum payment were out of luck. It was not unusual, well into the mid-twentieth century, to see disabled men begging on the streets of Halifax, wearing signs reading ‘Explosion Victim.’”55 This situation was a gendered experience of disability, a particularly male experience of disability, which disabled women were therefore not subjected to. Highlighting this example is not to say that men were worse off overall; it’s rather to note the specific and varied ways that gender and disability interlocked with one another – as they always do. The focus on individual self-sufficiency for returned soldiers not only reinforced liberal capitalist ideologies; it also reinforced cisheteropatriarchal masculinity. Mark Humphries, for example, in an exploration of how gender ideologies intersected with trauma and psychiatrization during the First World War, shows

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that “doctors constructed trauma as an individual failure to meet masculine ideals in order to parry a larger challenge to idealized masculinities.” He suggests that this construct precluded a more rigorous reconsideration of disability, capitalism, and social welfare, permitting the state to uphold existing “tests of morals and means to determine who was deserving or undeserving of state assistance.”56 Physical disability also complicated understandings of masculinity and self-sufficiency in that only those who demonstrated the desire to be self-supporting were considered deserving. Rehabilitation, then, wasn’t only geared towards realigning disabled men as productive capitalist subjects; it also actively cultivated their enactment of cisheteronormative masculinity. The focus on independence within the pension system, writes Durflinger, “dovetailed nicely with contemporary social views of a man’s role as his family’s selfreliant breadwinner.”57 Racism intersected with these developments too. As mentioned previously, when Africville residents applied for relief after the Halifax Explosion, these Black applicants were usually given nothing at all. Denial of benefits would likely have been the case more generally in terms of racialized disabled people’s experiences of disability relief systems, although white researchers have not always looked into such dynamics in their histories. People of colour and Indigenous people can be anticipated to have been less likely to receive veterans’ disability pensions or workers’ compensation, because they would have been more likely to be dismissed and disbelieved by medical experts due to the extensively documented systemic racism in the medical profession.58 In the rehabilitative project, human worth and economic productivity were inseparable. McMurtrie of the American Red Cross said that rehabilitation was driven by “the economic aim of sparing the community the burden of unproductivity on the part of thousands of its best citizens.”59 This discourse about productivity was a rejection of the need for charity or social assistance. Reflecting its Charity Organization Society (COS) roots, in that the COS largely worked to restrict relief and police those receiving assistance, the rehabilitation movement consistently articulated an anti-charity message. This anti-charity orientation was particularly evident with respect to veterans’ disability pensions. Pensioners were constructed as deserving and entitled because of their war service, rather than as recipients of charity due to their disabilities – in stark contrast to the previously prevailing discourse and practice that situated disabled people as among the few who were “deserving” of relief, from which we inherited the umbrella category of disability. Concerns that reliance on charity would breed dependency and laziness were prevalent at the time. For example, H.W. Hart, secretary of the Ottawa Returned Soldiers Committee, clearly expressed this idea: “The habit of living on charity, repugnant

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at first, may become chronic, transforming worthy and desirable citizens into useless and undesirable beggars.”60 The explicit denigration of charity and social assistance both legitimized the pension program for serving an exceptionally deserving group and also justified the lack of assistance for anyone else, including unemployed nondisabled veterans* and disabled civilians.61 Neither of these groups had sacrificed a tangible part of themselves, such as a limb or one of their senses, while defending the nation. The moral exaltation required for entitlement to assistance was highly specific. Pensions were distributed based on a calculation of the economic loss the soldier would suffer due to disability. A 100 per cent level disability, or “total disability,” meant that one could not work at all.62 Pensions were designed to fill the gap when rehabilitation had been taken as far as it could go. They were intended to mitigate the difference between wages a disabled person could get and those a nondisabled person could get. Disability was therefore defined entirely in relation to paid labour productivity. As Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel James Biggar put it: A man is not pensioned because he has lost his eyes, but because, having lost his eyes, he cannot see. He is not pensioned for a wounded shoulder, but because he had lost his full ability to use his arm. In other words he is pensioned for the loss, partial or complete, of a normal ability; which, in fine, is the exact meaning of the word disability.63

The state was careful to ensure that disabled people were only ever paid for a loss in wages because of lower productivity. One consequence was that pain resulting from war injuries was to be endured, not compensated; the only thing compensated was loss of earning power. It’s interesting to note that the meaning of disability had been so recently established as connected to earning power, as discussed in chapter 4, and yet Biggar could say so matter-of-factly that he was reiterating “the exact meaning of the word disability.” We can be curious about Rod Michalko’s question: “How is it possible, for us, for anyone, to say and do what they say and do about disability?”64 Biggar may not have been aware of it, but he and the state were in fact creating “the exact meaning of the word disability” through their policies and rhetoric. To some extent, we’re all doing this all the time when we speak or write or sign about disability, but the earliest rehabilitation programs – like earlier

* The federal government provided some assistance to municipalities to cover relief costs for unemployed veterans during the first two winters after the war.

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European disability programs – significantly constructed our collective sense of what disability is, and what can be thought, said, or done about it. Constructions of disability not only impact those considered disabled; they also construct nondisability. This construct is evident with respect to pension rates, in which the state was careful to ensure that disabled people were only ever compensated for a loss in productivity and would never benefit beyond that. As disability was considered synonymous with un- or under-productivity, this social policy not only governed disabled soldiers but was also a means of what Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis call “governing the center,” in that it provided an incentive to be productive to those not (yet) disabled.65 Following the logic of the 1834 British New Poor Law and the COS, pensioners received very little in order to prevent nondisabled people from becoming envious of these new state pensions. Furthermore, as Peter Neary observes, although First World War “veterans’ benefits prefigured the welfare state, they also set an example of complex eligibility criteria and of coverage based on status rather than citizenship.”66 Some Western European countries had been developing extensive welfarist infrastructures for several decades by this time. The Canadian state deferred such a commitment to a larger segment of poor people by giving highly restricted pensions to a small group of returned soldiers, alongside targeted rehabilitation programs that stressed changing individuals rather than the social environment. Government officials were committed to ensuring that Canada would not adopt a large and expensive war pensions system like the United States.67 To this end, the Canadian government articulated a discourse in which pensions for disabled soldiers were wholly sufficient.68 According to this discourse, pension rates were set at exactly the amount one needed to replace what was lost. The implication was that any enduring financial hardship was the fault of the worker who just wasn’t working enough. This erroneous argument that government assistance is adequate and that any shortfall is the fault of those receiving assistance continues to be commonplace in relation to social assistance today. Rehabilitation proponents were also opposed to the “charity job,”69 by which employers hired disabled veterans out of pity. McMurtrie proclaimed: “The employer’s duty is to find for the disabled man a constructive job which he can hold on the basis of competency alone … This is the definite patriotic duty.”70 Curtis Lakeman, director general of Civilian Relief for the American Red Cross, warned that “misdirected sympathy [could] degenerate into dependency.”71 This same critique of indiscriminate or unscientific charity was, once again, fundamental to the emergence of social work at this time.72 Independence and self-sufficiency were the watchwords of rehabilitation, which positioned itself in opposition to dependency, charity, and reliance on community and state support.

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According to Lakeman, rehabilitation helped the soldier “continue doing his duty by making good as a civilian.”73 This explanation was to ensure that men, as Kidner put it, “are self-supporting, capable members of the community, fulfilling their duties in peace as they did in war” rather than “dragging out a useless existence as pensioners.”74 Carden-Coyne argues that state and non-governmental organizations collaborated “in reconstructing the disabled soldier as a dutiful and useful citizen.”75 This process entailed, for Todd, reforming soldiers as people “doing the thing right in civilian life” by working, which was considered as central to recovery as medical care.76 According to Senator John S. MacLennan of the Military Hospitals Commission, they strived to rehabilitate a soldier so “he becomes a shining example to the young, of selfdependence, of courage and perseverance in overcoming disabilities.”77 The senator also claimed that “idleness was demoralizing to them,” which made veterans less able to take up “their proper positions as civilians.”78 Through this discourse, citizenship and economic productivity interlocked, undermining citizenship claims of those who did not participate in the formal economy (as was the case for many women, Indigenous people, and disabled people). Before the end of the First World War, the importance of psychiatric rehabilitation beyond the walls of the asylum began to be stressed, again showing a resolution of the tension resulting from “unfitness” among those deemed fittest of the fit.79 Abraham Myerson stressed: “The war will break down many a man” through “shell shock” and other difficulties.80 Naming the trauma of war was a positive development, but it interlocked with the ongoing denigration of madness, the framing of interpersonal and structural violence as exceptional rather than widespread (so that those who are designated “traumatized” are positioned as abnormal and sick), and the normalizing of exalted experiences that secure relative safety from such violence, as Gorman, Clare, Million, and Burstow all discuss.81 Towards the end of the war, a new psychiatric technique allowed many soldiers to be rehabilitated and returned to service relatively quickly.82 In 1943, this same technique was re-implemented for American troops, again with successful results.83 Tellingly, though, policy makers and helping professionals chose not to use official psychiatric labels – including “shell shock” – for what they were encountering, because they implied a permanent state of disorder. Instead, all these soldiers were at least initially diagnosed with “exhaustion,” because it was a non-psychiatric term.84 The logic behind using the term “exhaustion” continues into the present in the term “combat fatigue.” Franklin Jones, a specialist in war psychiatry, explains: “Using a ‘normalizing’ label such as combat fatigue is an important therapeutic manoeuvre intended to impress the soldier with the idea that he is not mentally ill but just tired and can expect to recover with rest.”85

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This linguistic manoeuvre suggests how carefully the psychiatrization of the “fit” was navigated (and continues to be navigated), in stark contrast to what was happening in asylums at the time and how their inmates were conceptualized by the general public and the helping professions alike. However, given that no change had happened to the moral economy dividing valued from worthless humans, those psychiatrized soldiers who were deemed unfit for rehabilitation or who were not successfully rehabilitated were “written off as social ‘misfits.’”86 Failure to be rehabilitated was framed as the consequence of an inherent flaw in the individual, meaning that standard psychiatric labels and all they implied about a person could unambiguously apply to this one person (but still not to most other soldiers). This careful navigation of psychiatric labels, which nuances but retains the eugenic division of fit and unfit, has been a part of rehabilitation from the beginning and is alive and well today. Two examples that carry on into the present can be found in helping professionals’ experiences of “secondary post-trauma” (rather than our own trauma about our own lives in the context of structural and normative violence; and also rather than our distress relating to perpetrating injustices in the course of social service provision) and Global North citizens’ distress about war that, according to some popular media coverage, can be assuaged with positive self-talk and other “outpatient” cures, rather than either allowing oneself to be transformed by distress that one’s country is at war or requiring more intrusive treatment.87 Overcoming Disability Rehabilitation was defined in a variety of ways during this period. Major John Todd, commissioner for Canada’s Board of Pension, asserted that “in the narrowest sense, [rehabilitation] refers to the replacement of broken fighting men in their homes.”88 But “in its widest sense,” Ontario’s Special Committee on Industrial Relations defined rehabilitation as the reclamation of potential powers of production, inactive through subnormal physical or mental capabilities. It is grounded upon the assumption that there exists in the mentally and physically handicapped portion of the population certain latent capabilities susceptible of development by systemic training and encouragement.89

Rehabilitation was viewed as a web of supports and training for soldiers (and sometimes for others). However, in practice, prevailing discourses placed responsibility for its success or failure on the disabled individual and the strength of their determination to “overcome” their disability.

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The notion of “overcoming” situates disability as an individual deficit and a problem, which is morally tethered to an arguably fictional nondisability that is held as an unproblematic good. According to Eli Clare, the moral imperative to overcome relies “upon the perception that disability and achievement contradict each other.”90 Overcoming disability narratives therefore discipline disabled people and allow nondisabled people to be inspired by the accomplishment of normality by the subnormal.91 All social and political factors are erased in this moral imperative, because the responsibility to overcome lies with the individual. Those who fail to overcome their disabilities are deemed incorrigibly unfit, while those who do overcome legitimize normality. During and after the First World War, those committed to rehabilitation repeatedly emphasized the individual nature of disability, and therefore the need to overcome it: “The disabled man himself must have the will to succeed, the will to overcome his handicap;”92 “It is the duty of every returning man by his will and through the aid of his fellows to become a self-supporting unit, a man who pulls his weight in the boat and is not a passenger”;93 “No single factor exerts a more powerful influence upon the patient’s convalescence and subsequent rehabilitation than the mental attitude of the patient himself.”94 Within this discourse, will was measured by gendered capitalist valorizations of paid labour. McMurtrie could therefore assure his readers: “Make a man again capable of earning his own living and the chief burden of his handicap drops away.”95 This coupling of economic productivity with rehabilitation was so prevalent that the official “Creed of the Disabled Soldier” at one American hospital read: “Once more to be useful … to work, produce, provide, and to feel that I have a place in the world … a MAN among MEN in spite of this physical handicap.”96 The capitalization of “man” and “men” yet again suggests that the male gender is politically marked, rather than neutral. In addition to transforming how disability was conceptualized and responded to, such rhetoric was also significant to ongoing cisheteropatriarchalization. The notion here that being “a MAN among MEN” requires one “to work, produce, [and] provide” wasn’t only being drawn upon (which we might presume wouldn’t require the added emphasis); it was being reinforced as an increasingly standardized and institutionalized norm for male-designated people. The effects of this “creed” on patients who had any of the varied experiences falling under the umbrellas of queer or trans may have been violently shaming, as would also have been the case – however distinctly – with straight cis men who were unable to overcome their disabilities. Practices aimed at getting people back to work began while newly disabled soldiers were still in their hospital beds receiving medical care.97 The occupational retraining program focused on ideas of choice for injured soldiers,

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in keeping with liberal “principles of individual freedom and self-determination,”98 according to Curtis E. Lakeman of the American Red Cross. There were, however, substantial restrictions on who could access the program. Only those who could not return to their former employment were admitted, excluding 5,000 people who applied.99 Where possible, existing knowledge and skills were built upon, which reduced training time and, therefore, expense. For example, a bricklayer was trained to become a foreman or contractor.100 Circulated narratives stressed patients’ “individual freedom and self-determination,” but the actual freedom people were granted was limited and paternalistically determined. Returned soldiers’ wishes were “generally concurred in,” but not always.101 The attitudes of officials were, at times, overtly paternalistic towards those going through rehabilitation. For example, Ernest Scammell, secretary of the Hospitals Commission, maintained that a man should not be allowed to choose his occupation: “He must have the wise counsel of someone who knows the whole problem better than he does himself.” This advice, he said, required “a minimum of sentiment and a maximum of hard business sense.”102 While choice continued to be emphasized, it was clearly constrained. Of the American program that was modelled after the Canadian one, Lakeman discussed the use of “expert vocational guidance, and of systematic educational propaganda” that was intended to “form the man’s own will.”103 This method framed the program and “educated” the returned soldier in such a way that he might believe he had made free choices, but his choices were in fact steered by structural-level economic factors and rehabilitation discourse via a vocational expert’s guidance. Yet again, we find an illustration of how social work’s ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority operates as a liberal discourse and practice – often individualized and appearing freely chosen. Overcoming discourse circulated as freely after the Second World War. The head of the Veteran’s Administration, for instance, assured the US public that any disabled soldier who wanted it would receive “such training as will enable him to overcome his handicap.”104 In such repeated emphases on individual will and “overcoming,” disability was being actively constructed as overcomable. This thinking had no effect on the long-standing construction of disability as something that is better not to have,105 and it now cast disabled people who were unable or unwilling to overcome as personal failures. If one did not overcome disability with support and rehabilitation services, this non-success was now taken as evidence of a lack of will, laziness, or personal failing. Those who overcame proved themselves ultimately fit, and so were therefore realigned with exalted nondisabled soldiers; those who did not overcome proved themselves irredeemably unfit,

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thus aligning themselves with other denigrated disabled people. In the end, the dichotomy between exceptionally exalted soldiers and denigrated disabled people was maintained – now hinging on individual effort, will, determination, work ethic, and so on. Even in the face of insurmountable physical obstacles (stairs for a wheelchair user, as the most famous example), the expectation is on the disabled person to overcome, rather than on society to accommodate. Individualization of disability-associated barriers erases social and political factors and puts full responsibility on disabled people to cumulatively assimilate, reform, and rehabilitate; it places no onus whatsoever on society or nondisabled people to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. Because rehabilitation makes corrections to individuals rather than society, Stiker writes that it therefore ultimately functions, at best, to “to make [disabled people] identical [to nondisabled people], without making [them] equal.”106 Disability was therefore increasingly seen as something that could be overcome through rehabilitation. This perhaps seemingly progressive transformation furthered the denigration of disabled people who weren’t able or willing to re-enter the workforce. Fascinatingly, some discourse in circulation during the First World War era even held that one was no longer disabled if one had been rehabilitated. This argument illustrates how thoroughly these policy makers and social workers were cementing disability into a political and moral category, rather than the medical one it’s most often assumed to be. A poster from the period demonstrates the elimination of disability through productivity, claiming: “The Disabled Man Who Is Profitably Employed Is No Longer Handicapped.”107 The rehabilitation publication Carry On was designed to encourage disabled soldiers to do just that, claiming: “Productive workers, who have outgrown their handicaps … are no longer classified as cripples, and dare not be so regarded.”108 Again, outgrowing handicaps here doesn’t mean that the person is no longer disabled in a medical or common-sense sense. The person may still walk with a walker, be blind, or have one arm. But this propaganda suggests that the person is no longer handicapped or crippled if they can be gainfully employed in the capitalist market. The initial development of the disability category in British and German social welfare policy therefore finally reaches its logical conclusion here. The disability category was comprised of incredibly diverse people grouped together for the first time as the “deserving poor” because they tended to be unable to work; here, liberal individualism intersects afresh with the now commonsensically established disability category, so that those who can work shouldn’t be considered part of that category. Disability is a thoroughly political and moral category, not a medical category. A veterans’ advocate at the time even made the claim that one man’s “loss of

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his arm was no handicap” because he was able to work in the same job he had before the war.109 This platitude was possible to say because disability meant moral inferiority: it didn’t mean “person with one arm”; it meant “person unable or unwilling to work.” Disability was therefore not only overcomable, but rehabilitation also eliminated disability from individuals. Yet, what was eliminated was only the imposed significance of being a moral and political failure. The productive capitalist citizen was therefore not “disabled,” whether or not they had a disability. Nationalizing Rehabilitation Stiker asserts that rehabilitation, “especially from the 1920s onward, is remarkable in its own right. It is applied to congenital cases [present at birth] as well as adventitious [acquired subsequently in life].”110 He continues: “Rehabilitation becomes a generalized notion and will be extended to all the disabled, to all forms of disability. In the 1920s a swing will occur and a new logic will come to predominate.”111 Some credit France for having initiated modern statesponsored rehabilitation programs when it responded to labour shortages by rehabilitating disabled people,112 and Stiker’s provocative and compelling history of rehabilitation in France has become foundational to American and Canadian disability studies.113 What is sometimes overlooked in uses of this history beyond France, though, is that eugenics was small and relatively obscure in France at the time; both church and state focused on increasing population numbers, often through clearly anti-eugenic policies.114 In 1920s France, rehabilitation was no longer restricted to otherwise exceptionally exalted subjects who became disabled through injury; it was expanded to include folks labelled disabled at birth or in childhood. This shift resulted in major service transformations. A key component of rehabilitative discourse was “restoring” the disabled person to the point of functionality. “It implies returning to a point, to a prior situation, the situation that existed for the able but one only postulated for others. In any case, reference is to a norm … and reference is back to the assumed prior, normal state.”115 In other words, people who have always been disabled are not “restored” to how they were before being considered disabled; they are to be normalized. The inner, nondisabled self is rescued from the abnormal disabled body or mind by making that body or mind conform to nondisabled normalcy. In France, the 1920s marked a transition in which it was held that anyone could be rehabilitated to the norm. Some readers might be wondering, “What’s the problem here?” “Isn’t rehabilitation a positive development?” The disability movement critique of

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rehabilitation is not that rehabilitation is “bad.”* A prosthesis or reduction in the invasiveness of trauma responses to violence, war, or abuse, for instance, is often very welcome. What is problematic about rehabilitation is the notion that having all one’s limbs, being entirely free from the effects of violence, having a certain IQ, and so on are “normal,” and, therefore, almost all support for diverse disabled people gets geared towards achieving this state of supposed normalcy. Disability services tend to be so concentrated on this one goal that those who don’t achieve “normalcy” are considered individually culpable for their “failure” and are often treated harshly – from living institutionalized to poverty-level social benefits. The enduring moral economy of differentiated human value never stopped denigrating disabled people and exalting nondisabled people when rehabilitation gained prominence. If it had, rehabilitative services might well have been the simple “progress” they are often assumed to be. If disabled people were free to pursue rehabilitative efforts at their own pace, which might include not doing so at all, whether forever or for significant periods of time,† then the greater availability of services that might help to improve people’s access needs and quality of life would be a straightforwardly good thing. Rehabilitation services would need to feature absolutely no external pressure to achieve this or that state of supposed normalcy, but could proceed so far as a person wished to pursue goals based on their own needs, desires, and the context of their life at that particular moment in time. Furthermore, if such a non-moralizing and non-coerced rehabilitation coincided with real efforts towards structural and * Readers may wish to consult Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, a series of meditations on the complexity of living disabled life in relationship to interlocking oppressions and the sometimes-welcome, sometimes-violent discourses, practices, and promises of rehabilitation/cure. † This description of services is how many things held to be transformative or curative are pursued by ruling class folks who don’t have others enforcing their compliance – whether private talk therapy, exercise regimes, meditation, or yoga – all of which are also enforced upon disabled people and other social service users for their supposed own good. It is precisely this discrepancy of freedom that enables Robert DeFelice’s parody of the power relations surrounding physical therapy and what distinguishes it from nondisabled exercise practices. In a performance called “Crippled, Queer, and Legally Blond(e),” he envisions a new exercise video based on the notion that “able-bodied people do not exercise because of their health, and neither should we … That’s the big fallacy of physical therapy. Nobody works out for their health … Do not consult your physician before beginning this or any other exercise program … [Y]ou have consulted with that man many times, and look at you!” This passage and other segments of DeFelice’s performance are shown in Mitchell and Snyder’s documentary Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back. See chapter 4, pages 207–10, where we make this same point in relation to the enforcement of disciplinary measures in the early penitentiary.

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discursive change, directed towards ending political experiences of disablement – that is, the oppression so often tethered to disabled bodies and minds – as it interlocks with all forms of oppression, then this truly would have been liberatory. That, however, is not the history of rehabilitation anywhere. Here we can see, once again, the gap between ubiquitous interventions into the social world and the violent ethic of the healing power of normalcy, imagined moral superiority, and domination. For any human, greater access to voluntarily sought support, care, or assistance can be very welcome, including self-directed efforts to alter aspects of our embodiment or our emotional, cognitive, or sensory experiences. But such services only ever tend to feel welcome when they’re voluntarily sought out, and when users remain in control of them even after initially seeking them out. From the beginning of service and throughout, consent is absolutely crucial for care to be nonviolent. However, when any of us are forced to pursue such attempts at personal transformation, especially when they’re driven by others’ beliefs about what we should do, what we can do, or what makes life valuable, this experience represents social work as the healing power of normalization and political domination. Closer to developments in France than in most other places, Germany’s rehabilitation values and practices were also well established before the end of the First World War.116 According to Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, “Germany developed one of the most advanced and robust rehabilitation regimes, which ultimately surpassed anything in the rest of Europe or the United States.”117 This system, later under Nazi rule, was not contradictory to eugenics but complementary to it. At the time, the dominant ideology was one of economic rehabilitation – the construction of productive citizens – but “those who ‘failed’ their rehabilitation program found themselves permanently excluded from categories of citizenship.” Snyder and Mitchell point out that this practice paved the way for mass eugenic exterminations in the Holocaust.118 In Germany, eugenics and rehabilitation were not discreet projects, but rehabilitation served as a kind of inoculation for eugenics, at least during early Nazism. Rehabilitation and eugenics comprised a seamless effort to rid the world of disability: rehabilitation, if possible; eugenics, if necessary. While both the German and French histories of rehabilitation are crucially important and telling, neither should be straightforwardly superimposed upon North American history. In Canada and the United States, rehabilitation wasn’t widely adopted for disabled people by the 1920s, as in France and Germany. It just wasn’t. This fact is significant for Canadian and American scholars who are taking up Stiker’s history, or that of Germany, and applying it to North America. Birthrates had stagnated in Europe, and the war had led to massive

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casualties, including civilian populations, compelling governments in Germany and France to adopt national programs to maximize productivity among those imagined incapable of working and to increase the birthrate.119 In North America, where wartime population losses were almost exclusively soldiers, rehabilitation, and its relationship to eugenics, was very different. Rehabilitation wasn’t a policy alternative to eugenics, as in France; nor was it an inoculation to a complementary eugenics policy, as in Germany. In Canada and the United States, rehabilitation was only available to those otherwise exceptionally morally exalted and having previously proven themselves economically productive – soldiers and certain injured male workers. As in Germany, although very different in practice, rehabilitation complemented continued efforts to eliminate those deemed worthless through eugenics. Eugenicists in the United States and Canada claimed to focus on “quality” rather than “quantity,” and so they continued to work towards the elimination of the “unfit” disabled, alongside the rehabilitation of the most exceptionally “fit” disabled, for several decades after the 1920s. Even between Canada and the United States, there were significant differences in approaches to rehabilitation. In the United States, rehabilitation was somewhat expanded to the civilian population beyond workers’ compensation programs in 1920, at least on paper. According to Shortley, the war “provided the stimulus” for the Vocational Rehabilitation Act (VRA).120 This law’s purpose was “the promotion of vocational rehabilitation of persons disabled in industry or otherwise and their return to civil employment.”121 The continued emphasis on economic productivity in the act was clear. Social worker Edward Devine stated that the war “made us realize how sadly we had neglected [physically disabled people] in the ordinary routine of civil life; and out of the attempts to meet the needs of the men disabled in the war has developed a new ideal and a new program of action equally applicable to disabled civilians.”122 However, the program was fraught with “incredible inefficiency of administration,” which “has made our actual treatment thus far of those whom the system was intended to benefit a national disgrace.”123 While the federal Board for Vocational Education had set an annual target of 84,000, only 1,687 people received some form of rehabilitation in 1923, and the majority of them were referred through workers’ compensation programs.124 In spite of the law, then, in practice nothing new was really happening. What’s more, legal scholar Jonathan Drimmer observes: “The preamble [of the VRA] seems to include people with congenital disabilities [those already present at birth] only as an afterthought.”125 It was only in 1935 that the American federal rehabilitation program received permanent funding and began to work with children with disabilities.126 By

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then, 68,000 Americans had received some form of rehabilitation, as authorized by the VRA.127 Between 1920 and 1935, an average of 4,500 people were treated through the program each year. This modest figure, and the details as to who was and wasn’t offered rehabilitation, shows that although the passage of the act marked a significant shift, the American government continued to exclude people labelled disabled at birth or in early childhood from its rehabilitation programs. During the Second World War, the federal government amended the VRA,128 expanding it to include rehabilitation programs for civilians labelled with mental disabilities.129 This expansion may have been a welcome development in some ways, but the amendment was motivated, in part, by wartime labour shortages, and so it allowed the state to exploit rehabilitated civilians’ labour power.130 Consequently, it was only during the war, when labour shortages were very serious, that the United States adopted similar policies as France had done during the First World War, when it too had faced serious labour shortages. Again, “benevolence” is sometimes not so clear cut. It was only in 1946, as eugenics first fell into widespread disfavour as a result of horrors expressed over atrocities in Nazi Germany, that 169,796 people were included in the US federal program, although the majority were still not identified as disabled at birth. Fifteen per cent of this cohort was considered to have congenital disabilities, while nearly half had become disabled through illness.131 To put this post-Nazism figure into perspective, more than twice as many people received rehabilitation services in 1946 alone than in the dozen years between 1923 and 1935 combined, although the population increased by only 13 per cent in that same period.132 Once eugenics became associated with Nazism and officially disavowed, US rehabilitation services soared. In reflecting upon this shift, we should never forget that Nazi eugenicists had been inspired by earlier eugenic developments in Canada and the United States133 – many of which were spearheaded and administered by professional social workers. Sunera Thobani observes, more generally, that the welfare state in Europe and white settler states flourished only following the normative disavowal of Nazism after the war. She theorizes that this renunciation served to preserve the moral economy holding white people as superior, in spite of Nazi atrocities. “The welfare state’s characterization of the [imagined white] nation-state as shaped by the ethic of compassion … became an important means by which a claim to western civilizational and moral superiority could be reconstituted.”134 White supremacy also shaped the services that were newly made available. Thobani shows how the welfare state – including its rehabilitative programs – exalted white citizens by creating policies in which they were eligible for the new social safety net supports, while immigrants were rendered ineligible,

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alongside the circulation of discourses falsely describing immigrants as milking the system.135 While rehabilitation is oppressive in many ways, it is often the only support available to people; it can be even worse to be excluded from any support at all. The reality is that this last statement is much more complicated: Is it preferable to have oppressive systems imposed upon you or to be entirely excluded from the only services available? As a comparison, we can recall that throughout these developments in rehabilitation, three distinct systems providing “child protection” existed. One of these systems was Indian residential schooling, which we can fairly simply say was terrible to have imposed upon anyone. In comparison to Indian residential schools, it was better to be excluded from any service (or “education”) at all. The second system was the newly emergent professional child protective services, which at the time was only imposed upon poor white people. The third system was that which has existed in all communities and all times – all the varied and largely informal ways that extended families and community members protect children they know personally. As discussed previously, Black communities continued to practice this form of “child protection” exclusively at this time, as would have been the case for South Asian, Chinese, Japanese, and other racialized communities – all of whom were excluded from most white social services. Ruling class white folks were also free from the interventions of child protective services, but they could purchase private care, tutoring, medical and nursing services, counselling, mobility aids or prostheses, and other services as needed. For those who didn’t have the money to purchase such assistance, contact with social services might have been the only way to access indispensable items or services. Recalling the contrast between the Hospital of St John and Sillery, which we discussed in chapter 3, we can note that people don’t get to choose nonjudgmental services and support such as those offered in the early Hospital of St John. Like the Indigenous people who accessed Sillery only for material comfort but then encountered people who tried to make them more like whites, those who access rehabilitative services today have no other option but to accept moralizing and a denigration of who they are as an inextricable part of the “helping” encounter. So, it’s not that support for disabled people is bad. The problem is the framework in which support is normatively held. That said, previous to rehabilitation’s nationalization, there were no nationalized programs supporting disabled people at all, and so, alongside its many, many problems, state-sponsored rehabilitative programming often improved the lives of some of those who could access it. But access to nationalized rehabilitation programming was distributed along lines of race and citizenship, among other stratifications.

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Taking all that into consideration, and however much this narrative flies in the face of the story Canadians like to tell about Canada, let’s note that Canada lagged behind Germany, France, and even the United States in offering any semblance of a nationalized rehabilitation program. This fact is interesting, considering that Canada had been viewed as a model for the American veterans’ rehabilitation system.136 While segmented rehabilitation systems existed for certain types of disabled people (for example, veterans, injured workers, and those with specific diagnoses who could access diagnosis-specific organizations), it was only in 1951, after the fall of Nazism and its particular eugenic project, that Canada implemented a national rehabilitation program.* Furthermore, once adopted, this program continued to have an economic focus. Ian Campbell, national coordinator of Civilian Rehabilitation, noted the importance of an employment placement service that could “meet the needs of employers.”137 The Canadian system aimed towards “the restoration of a large percentage of the disabled to their place of maximum usefulness in the community.”138 Measuring a person’s “usefulness” in this way is dehumanizing and violent. Although there were differences between the Canadian and American national rehabilitation programs, they shared a number of commonalities. Neither system’s governing bodies had representation from disabled communities.139 Both systems operated under a medical model, emphasized economic productivity, and located the “problems” they addressed firmly within individuals.140 Both systems featured sheltered workshops, which are segregated spaces that employ disabled people, usually to do menial labour for wages well below minimum wage.141 (The US government considered final placement in a sheltered workshop a failure in rehabilitation, contending that only a disabled person’s employment in the open capitalist labour market marked a success,142 whereas sheltered workshops were more squarely encouraged in Canada.143) Rehabilitation programs in both the United States and Canada employed professional social workers. Professional Social Work and Rehabilitation Medical social work was first established in 1905 at the Massachusetts General Hospital, but it was the First World War that really pushed the profession more generally in this direction. (This push took place while Jane Addams and many other so­cial workers and feminists were intervening in our social world by resisting the use

* Canada’s Unemployment Insurance Commission did adopt a program in 1940 that employed speci­ fic disabled people, but this initiative was not rehabilitative beyond “economic rehabilitation.”

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of military violence as a means of persuasion and diplomacy.144) In response to the need for medical and psychiatric social workers, Smith College implemented an emergency psychiatric social work course, which formed the basis for the Smith College School for Social Work. The primary aim of the Smith College social work program, according to social worker Maida Solomon, was to “prepare social workers to assist in the rehabilitation, individual and social, of soldiers suffering from nervous and mental diseases.”145 The Smith College School for Social Work marked the birth of clinical social work. By 1920, a number of hospital psychiatric wards were employing medical social workers.146 That year, Dr Abraham Myerson declared: “For a hospital to be without a social service department is to confess itself behind the times and inefficient.”147 The role of the medical social worker was understood as assisting with diagnosis (often by gathering information in the community, as well as from the person in question) and helping improve or expedite the recovery process.148 According to the 1920 Manual of Psychiatry, medical social workers also conducted home visits for psychiatric outpatients who’d been “paroled” to ensure that “the patient is living in a manner calculated to prevent a recurrence of the disease.” If a social worker determined that a person was “not recovering satisfactorily,” they could force the patient back into hospital.149 The medical social worker served a medical, rehabilitative, and policing role within psychiatric care, thus extending the social control of the medical profession beyond institutional walls. If a person in the community failed to be appropriately rehabilitated, they could be re-confined, based only on a social worker’s judgment. In many ways, the First World War helped social work establish itself as a profession. Social workers in Canada directed all of their energy and resources towards the war.150 Nearing the end of the war, their focus was turned towards soldiers who were coming home from the front, particularly disabled soldiers. The war, including the relief effort that responded to the Halifax Explosion in 1917, allowed social workers to demonstrate their competency and specific knowledge, gaining both respect and a market for their services.151 Indeed, Myerson, author of “The Psychiatric Social Worker,” declared: “Unquestionably, the war will raise all social work in dignity and remuneration.” Due to the traumatic impact of the violences of war, he elaborated, “the psychiatric social worker may confidently look forward to a field of work.”152 Many social workers embraced rehabilitation ideology during this period, but debate remained over who was considered correctable or worthy of rehabilitation. Founder of the New York School of Philanthropy, Edward Devine, for instance, embraced rehabilitation for physically disabled and psychiatrized people, and condemned the government for not doing more to expand rehabilitation programs for civilians. However, he also called for the forced

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institutionalization of many he considered “mentally sick,” and he advocated for “after-care for discharged patients, vocational direction, [and] psychiatric home service” only for those for whom psychiatric incarceration was deemed unnecessary.153 Devine also argued that “no recovery is to be expected” for “feebleminded” people,154 and suggested that many of them be “kept in a colony or other institution, both for their own sake and as a means of preventing them from propagating.”* Confinement, he added, would also prevent them from committing crime.155 Though Devine supported rehabilitation with certain populations, then, he also advocated segregative eugenic confinement for those considered irredeemably unfit. Workers and soldiers undergoing early rehabilitation programs were almost exclusively men, while front-line social workers were most often imagined to be women. With some important exceptions, men dominated leadership and teaching roles in social work, but front-line social workers were predominantly women, and so publications about medical and psychiatric social work tended to assume that women would be providing rehabilitation for disabled men. For example, Aaron Rosanoff and colleagues used exclusively female pronouns to describe psychiatric social workers in the 1920 Manual of Psychiatry,156 and in 1918 Myerson posed the question: “What type of woman is needed” to be a psychiatric social worker?157 His response listed a number of feminine-gendered “objectionable qualities,” including being a “prude” and “hyperaestheticism.”158 The war, then, saw the specification of not only what kinds of people were rehabilitatable but also who would make the ideal front-line social worker (particular kinds of usually white women, aligned with traditionally masculinist qualities), as well as who would control the field (primarily white men). Rehabilitation and the Enforcement of Cisheteronormativity Significant changes in psychiatry during and after the Second World War occurred, enabling further expansion of the rehabilitation model to more and more bodies and souls deemed abnormal. The number of doctors who began to practice psychiatry during the war was more than the total number of American Psychiatric Association (APA) members in the United States before the war.159 While psychiatric rehabilitation had existed from the early 1800s, it went through significant changes during and after the war, permanently changing the discipline and expanding its rehabilitative emphasis. The American military developed a

* This argument is an example of support for the widespread use of institutionalization as a strategy of eugenics. See chapter 1 of this book, page 36.

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comprehensive diagnostic manual to categorize and classify mental disorders during the war,160 which was one of two key texts that the APA later drew from to create the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Several editions later, the DSM remains the primary diagnostic tool for psychiatrists in the United States, Canada, and many parts of the world.161 When the war ended, there was a surplus of psychiatrists with no patient base. Consequently, as Gerald Grob argues: “The traditional preoccupation with the severely mentally ill in public mental hospitals slowly gave way to a concern with the psychological problems of a far larger and more diverse population as well as social problems generally.”162 Previously normal people could now be pathologized (and therefore potentially rehabilitated). As Stiker observes: “The field of mutilation extends indefinitely, thus also that of maladjustment, then reintegration, finally rehabilitation.”163 Those previously denigrated in the general population through religious or eugenic moralizing were now categorized as medically ill through new psychiatric designations such as homosexuality and transvestitism.164 Widespread moral concerns about queerness were not new to Europe and white settler nation-states, but the scientific classification of queerness, using taxonomy to divide, subdivide, and categorize, which had started with the nineteenth century sexologists discussed in chapter 3, reached a climax in the first DSM of 1952. At the same time as Germany and France were creating nationalized rehabilitation programs in the 1920s, a few European doctors, mostly in Germany, began surgically altering trans women’s bodies.165 These surgeries became more common in the following decades, particularly after the famous gender affirming surgery of Christine Jorgensen in 1952.166 In the 1950s, it also became standard practice to surgically assign normative sex organs to intersex infants, which is another instance of rehabilitation and normalization. Sex assignment surgeries, as well as gender affirming surgeries performed on trans people, fall within the rehabilitation paradigm we are discussing, given that they aim to normalize intersex and trans people. We can speculate that the medical community endorses these surgeries because they are essentially normalizing in that they work to reinforce the gender binary. We’re not saying that such surgeries are bad, but only that “passing” post-operative trans or intersex people may prove less “troubling” to gender binaries than to people who live their lives outside of the gender binary. Trans people have many different reasons for having gender affirming surgeries. A.J. has had top surgery, and we are by no means condemning or even questioning the practice of trans people having trans-related surgeries. However, it has been suggested that the reason the medical establishment is invested in trans surgeries is because these surgeries aspire towards rehabilitated, normally

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gendered, productive citizens.167 The flip side of this normalization is that trans people who have not had surgical interventions are often depicted as “a time bomb. A person with such a disorder is at significant risk of losing control under stress.” They are “frail” and “fragile.”168 Trans women who have not had surgery are thus constructed as dangerous to other women. For example, an imprisoned trans woman named Synthia Kavanagh was deemed a threat to cis women, and was framed as embodying the potential to “prey on [non-trans/‘real’] female prisoners.”169 Within the logic of such representations, trans surgeries and/or hormones can serve to rehabilitate frail, dangerous “time bombs” into normal, productive individuals. While many trans people use surgeries and hormones in many different ways, some that include the desire to be “normal” and others that don’t, these medical procedures would not be so accessible to trans people if they didn’t fit within the logic of rehabilitation, normalization, and the gender binary. As with other rehabilitative services that people access for a variety of reasons, there’s nothing wrong with a person choosing surgery or hormones. What remains wrong, across contexts, is the rehabilitative project of aligning people with pre-established notions of normalcy that exclude and marginalize a vast range of human diversity in relation to bodies, minds, and genders. Rehabilitation/Eugenics and Whiteness/Nationality/Citizenship Thobani documents how thoroughly the development of the Canadian welfare state and its benefits has further exalted white nationals and further denigrated Indigenous people and people of colour in the wake of the Second World War, as well as how this process interlocks inextricably with sexism.170 Resonantly, griffin jaye epstein describes a disturbing relationship between race, disability, and gender in their study of psychologist and Jewish Holocaust survivor Bruno Bettelheim in his work as director of the Orthogenic School in Chicago. According to epstein, Bettelheim was born into a context “where Jewishness had for centuries been understood as both racial marking and disability … Jews were seen as ugly, sickly, mad, deceitful, swarthy creatures, primitive relics from a remote biblical time and place, out of step with modernity.”171 The interlocking of race, disability, and religion is also inseparable from gender: “Jews were understood to defy Western European gender and sexual norms. Jewish men were seen as ‘effeminate sissies’ unfit for labour while Jewish women, when they appeared discursively at all, were read as ‘phallic monsters.’”172 According to epstein, Bettelheim’s experiences of anti-Semitism and its particularly gendered contours shaped his rehabilitative endeavours. Having survived a Nazi concentration camp, Bettelheim migrated to the United States and quickly became a major figure in psychology, referencing his

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experiences in the concentration camp. epstein critically attends to Bettelheim’s public blaming of Jewish people for anti-Semitism, and places this belief in conversation with his rehabilitative work at the Orthogenic School. For example, epstein presents an incident recounted by biographer Richard Pollack describing what took place in 1940 when Bettelheim delivered a speech at Hillel House: “‘Anti-Semitism, whose fault is it?’ ... ‘Yours!’ he shouted [to the fellow Jewish people in attendance]. ‘Because you don’t assimilate, it is your fault. If you assimilated, there would be no anti-Semitism.’”173 epstein invites us to consider that Bettelheim’s “treatment” of autism can be read as an “overcoming” of traits long associated with Jewish people and “a deep desire to erase or destroy Jewishness.”174 Furthermore, they trace how this coincided historically with American and Canadian Jewish people being folded into whiteness and thereby distinguished from racialized others. Although the Orthogenic School had previously served children with physical disabilities such as cerebral palsy, and had served largely containment and segregation purposes, Bettelheim transformed it towards rehabilitation and recruited primarily “autistic children and others whom he called ‘young victims of extreme psychosis’”175 He instituted “a ‘white only’ policy for his students and staff. This racist and exclusionary tactic remained in place even after 1954’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education court decision ordering the desegregation of schools. According to Bettelheim, racialized children might ‘confuse’ white children, interfering with their recovery.”176 epstein is critical of rehabilitation, but they also acknowledge that rehabilitative services are often the only supports available to people. Bettelheim’s “students had to be white, middle/upper-middle/upper class, academic achievers … which … denied the possibilities for autism diagnoses – and, subsequently, access to specialized resources – for people of color.”177 Creating a white-only policy that did not discriminate based on religion or culture institutionalized Jewish people’s whiteness in this one institution and also contributed more widely to the shifting discursive dividing line between white and racial other that increasingly placed Jewish people among white people. epstein also describes the dovetailing of disability rehabilitation and Jewish assimilation, noting that “children were expected to be ‘cured’ by total immersion in heteronormative, procreative, binary-gendered, white Protestant family environment.”178 Bettelheim believed that autism was caused by “an emasculated, passive father and a ‘refrigerator mother’ whose secret hatred of her own femininity manifests as a death wish for her child.”179 Bettelheim believed this family dynamic resulted “in a facsimile of the concentration camps created by their parents,”180 and epstein shows that the framing of the refrigerator mother who “causes” her child’s autism “fits quite neatly in the stereotype of the Jewish

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mother … [T]he ‘Jewess’ is both sexually-charged and masculinized.”181 This characterization is entirely consistent with long-standing anti-Semitic depictions of Jewish women. For Bettelheim, Jewish people were responsible for “overcoming” both anti-Semitism and disability through assimilation. During this period, Canada and the United States were actively keeping racialized people out of both countries, but the work at this time to assimilate European Jewish people and other white groups then denigrated as inferior (Irish, Italian, Eastern European) both shifted the terrain of how whiteness was conceptualized and also paved the way for efforts that would be directed towards racialized immigrants when they started to enter the countries in larger numbers. Although highly specific in its particulars, Bettelheim’s conflation of assimilation with rehabilitation was hardly an exception. The notion that people could be (imperfectly) folded into the norm – whether from disability, Indigeneity, pauperism, queerness, transness, or racial otherness – was in many ways what held together the diverse interventions into the social world which are animated by the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. Conclusion Rehabilitation and eugenics have always been complementary rather than contradictory. What they share, in spite of their differences and the internal diversities that characterize each one, is an adherence to what Lennard Davis calls the “tyranny of the norm.”182 According to discourses of normativity, only certain experiences are “normal.” These experiences are held to be utterly unremarkable and therefore politically neutral and, at the same time, to be unquestionably morally superior to anything understood to deviate from them. Although eugenics tended to put this ”tyranny” into practice differently than rehabilitation (aside from the conflation of the two in segregative institutional confinement), rehabilitation too tends to be securely tied to normalization, even at its best. Unlike eugenics, however, which today is often othered as an unimaginable evil of the past that only ever took place elsewhere (which is entirely false), rehabilitation is often taken as a necessary and uncomplicated good. In this chapter, we’ve tried to show how complex rehabilitation really is, in relation to interlocking oppression and the moral economies that unevenly distribute human value. This complexity is no less true today than it was a century ago when rehabilitation was slowly becoming the standard response to disability. Through tracing historical developments since that time, we have put forth four overlapping critiques of rehabilitative discourse and practice. First, not

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all disabled people can be “re”-folded back into a predetermined and morally valued “norm.” In other words, efforts towards rehabilitation, as they are presently constituted, further the moral denigration of disability. Indeed, Alison Howell and Jijian Voronka, in their mad critique of the rehabilitative recovery model within psychiatry today, argue that ideas of recovery and resilience “are powerful tools in the governance of those deemed mentally ill, and also by extension, all citizens.”183 These concepts are used to construct a citizenry that “look[s] inward: rather than confronting austerity measures or other matters of social justice through political action.”184 Those individuals who are not resilient and/or who do not recover are framed as individual social, moral, and economic failures, rather than as people who have been subjected to unjust normalization standards. As Stiker notes,185 from its very beginnings, rehabilitation efforts towards integrating some – who thus gain a precarious “toehold on respectability”186 – have always been accompanied by identifying others as non-integrable, which thus furthers their moral denigration and normalizes ongoing violence against them.187 Second, as the story goes, intensive and coordinated efforts have created every possibility for unfortunate victims of circumstance so that rehabilitation is accessible to all, and therefore there is a general moral condemnation of those who do not become folded into the norm and the world of industrial capitalism, whether in paid labour or gendered caretaking. Any failure or harm done by the system is held to be entirely the fault of service users, however widespread it may be. It is never a cause for patient and careful reflection about what service providers could and should be doing drastically differently. Such needed reflection is prevented by “the moral exaltation/denigration in which staff are disproportionately responsible for positive outcomes, while inmates/consumers are disproportionately responsible for negative outcomes.”188 Individuals under treatment are held responsible for treatment failures; and they’re even more erroneously held to be responsible for treatment violence, such as the use of restraints, forced drugging, and other similar measures. Chris reflects upon work they once did with disabled Indigenous children, in reference to the stories that circulated among staff following restraints: “Their discursively construed and structurally coerced ‘responsibility’ shaped their – and our – ethical and political possibilities of becoming who we were becoming. We were all being trained to more fully inhabit our respective positions within systemic oppression, and to feel fully responsible or not at all.”189 In such contexts, staff violence is framed as only ever being a necessary and unavoidable response to the violence framed as inherent to social service users. Third, because rehabilitation is such a straightforwardly good thing within popular and professional discourse, it has a practical monopoly in relation to

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professional and large-scale interventions into the social world of disabled people. A.J. has therefore traced how eugenics and the “tyranny of the norm” continue to shape contemporary medical and charity responses to disability.190 Most resources devoted to disability services are devoted to preventing or curing disabilities, while very little goes directly to disabled people to make their lives more manageable in the context of being disabled. Like other monopolies, and like professional social work more generally, the dominance of rehabilitative services has displaced countless local alternative systems and practices, causing some to be marginalized and others to fizzle out. As rehabilitation became the taken-for-granted response to disability, concrete possibilities were taken away from disabled people to make life more liveable – such as the condemnation and criminalization, led by the Charity Organization Society, of accessing multiple charitable sources and begging. These efforts took services and resources away from many of those most in need who might have previously had greater access to more flexible supports and services, back when things were not so rigidly standardized and controlled from afar. Ever since, when services are offered, they are rarely offered without an accompanying life lesson that implies that you wouldn’t really need this if you were already living your life in closer alignment with white, nondisabled, cisheteronormative, and ruling class mores. Would you like a side of unsolicited and condescending advice with that burger? Finally, it is not only moral denigrations of disability that determine who can and can’t access rehabilitative services, or how they are offered (although that would be bad enough). Hébert Boyd’s history of the work of the Rehabilitation Committee following the 1917 Halifax Explosion, in which social workers from larger cities in the United States and Canada rushed in to show the importance of the new professional social work, illustrates how intimately classism and racism intersected with practices of means testing that are still so common in disability-related and other social services. When poor white people received relief, it was official policy to ensure that they did not receive enough to improve their class positioning.191 Therefore, certain luxury items were only given to wealthy applicants. We’re not critiquing that relief funds were devoted to things like phonographs; the problem is that it was so carefully determined who could and couldn’t receive a phonograph based on an applicant’s class positioning and, therefore, on how much they needed to receive in order to approximate their former degree of comfort. This classism was official policy at a unique time when the city would have had the resources to undo some of the inequities and degradations of capitalism. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, the Black community of Africville was impacted by the explosion, but its residents were systematically denied assistance. “Quickly but quietly, the HRC had made the decision to keep Africville out of the newly constructed city,” and, therefore, by

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“neglecting the community when it had both the opportunity and the financial ability to help it, the HRC ensured Africville’s eventual destruction.”192 Another aspect of rehabilitation we haven’t touched upon, but which is no less concerning, is that it sometimes doesn’t even try to live up to its own rhetoric. Rehabilitative services sometimes have no intention of actually returning people to any state of normalcy or respectability. At times, they are much more simply a matter of control and management. For example, Ellen Samuels describes a labour project targeting epileptic boys in the 1890s in which “there is no suggestion that this labor is or could be curative.” In this program, their “labor functions merely to palliate their symptoms, rendering them more manageable within the institution, while simultaneously benefiting that institution with their uncompensated labor.”193 Here, labour and integration into the capitalist economy (sort of) is used to facilitate institutional functioning, rather than aiming towards facilitating a trajectory in which these boys might ever live non-institutionalized lives. Samuels describes the debates that existed, in both disability discourse and colonial discourse (which we turn to in the next chapter), as to “whether even supposedly inassimilable subjects … could be rehabilitated to some extent.” It was argued at the time that Indigenous people and those labelled as feebleminded “could be partially rehabilitated through hard work.”194 Even in the absence of the optimism about human malleability that originally made rehabilitative rhetoric possible, rehabilitation can be used simply and straightforwardly as a means of control and a tool for marginalized assimilation into the normative body politic. We might recall yet again the distinction we drew between the first hospital of the Hospitallers, which provided nonjudgmental care and imagined that those they served personified their God, versus the first Indian reserve, in which later Hospitallers and Jesuits only ever offered material comforts with the expectation that those accessing them would become more like those providing the services. Mapping neatly onto this division, Stiker’s challenge to readers of his History of Disability is remarkably simple: “Not to convince another to be like ourselves and not to force another to conform.”195 He suggests that the framing of disability as tragic is what makes disability tragic. Bodies do lots of inconvenient, painful, embarrassing, annoying, and regrettable things. All bodies do so, in fact, although some do more of this or that than others. Roughly the same can be said of minds or souls. But how such things are framed has an enormous influence on the quality of real people’s lives. The problem isn’t that so many individual bodies have cumulatively gone wrong; it’s rather a social world that has gone terribly wrong, and, central to this, it’s normative, widespread, professionalized, nonprofit and state-sponsored interventions into our social world that have gone terribly wrong. Bodies

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and minds will always do lots of different things, and some of those things are going to be things we might generally prefer they wouldn’t (although for some commonly denigrated qualities or characteristics, “wrong” is simply a matter of interpretation). As Stiker puts it: “Disability happens to humanity and there are no grounds for conceiving of it as an aberration.”196 Or, as Audre Lorde articulates her critique of the pressure on women cancer survivors to wear postmastectomy prostheses, we need to work towards “the acceptance of difference as part of our lives.”197 The tragedy of disability is therefore not to be found in disabled bodies and minds. Rather, as Stiker writes, “the tragic … lies in the conditions [that conceive of disability as] an anomaly or as an abnormality.”198 A challenge to all of us today is thus to work against these normalizing and oppressive social, political, and moral conditions under which we’ve suffered for much too long.

6 Assimilation/Genocide

The Moral Economy of Assimilation Henri-Jacques Stiker asserts that what he calls “the birth of rehabilitation”1 around 1920 wasn’t simply an innovation in policy and practice; rather, he says, it marked a new way of knowing and perceiving. It furthered the perceived ability to make a person fit into imaginary and moralizing norms, and it extended the political dream in which all people could and should be aligned with such norms. This way of thinking followed logically from the 1790s concurrent developments of the first penitentiary, the advent of moral treatment, and the first argument for massive British education of colonized peoples. Further, the surveillance and discipline of the new penitentiary and asylum resonated with even earlier colonial projects in Paraguay, which directly influenced colonialism in New France through the earliest Indian reserves in what’s now called the United States and Canada. Certain aspects of this historic trajectory – and the violent and paternalistic ethic that animates it – can arguably be traced back nearly a millennium to the earliest organized caregivers in Christendom and the conflation of caring labour with the aim of ridding the world of certain kinds of humans. What the early twentieth century marked in this long legacy, first through professional social work and then through legislative efforts targeting Indigenous and disabled peoples, was the massive coordinated effort to seriously work towards the political dream of a fully homogenous social body in which all people within it would be successfully rehabilitated or assimilated to the white norm; and – crucially – in which those who wouldn’t or couldn’t be normalized, civilized, or educated were therefore held to have proven themselves unworthy of further compassion, care, efforts, or life. Rehabilitation and eugenics were intertwined from the beginning of their emergence, forming two poles

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delimiting new parameters in which non-normative bodies and minds were thought about and intervened upon. They shared the common dream of getting rid of all bodies, minds, and lifeworlds deemed morally inferior. With this discursive and material development in mind, we can situate the concurrent developments in colonial assimilation and genocide as discursively interlocked with discourses and practices of rehabilitation and eugenics. The two realms of intervening into the social world shared a political imaginary and moral sensibility. Each followed a trajectory specific to developments most closely related to it (that is, those within European and white settler practices and beliefs regarding Indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and disabled people, on the other). However, it may be politically important to also situate these developments as resonating and interlocking across targeted populations, as a means of reflecting upon how white ruling classes have more generally come to understand themselves, the world, and their relationships, responsibilities, and entitlements across stratified difference. Germany and France had nationalized their rehabilitation programs by 1920, but Canada and the United States both waited until eugenics had been discredited through widespread moral revulsion to Nazi atrocities before tipping the scales of disability policy towards rehabilitation and away from eugenics. However, at precisely the time that Germany and France were nationalizing their rehabilitation programs, both the United States and Canada expanded the scope of legislation aiming to correct another group of people long denigrated in the moral economy distinguishing humans framed as valuable from those considered “less than human,” as Marian MacFarlane articulated the attitude towards the children in the Indian residential school where she’d worked.2 In 1920, Canada amended the Indian Act, implementing several assimilationist policies designed to “exterminate the Indian but develop a man.”3 As Duncan Campbell Scott, deputy superintendent of Canada’s Indian Affairs Department, stated in 1914: “The happiest future for the Indian race is absorption into the general population, and this is the object and policy of our government … [to] finally overcome the lingering traces of native custom and tradition.”4 In 1924, he asserted that Canadian policy towards Indigenous people had “always been to protect the Indians, to guard their identity as a race and at the same time to apply methods which will destroy that identity and lead eventually to their disappearance as a separate division of the population.”5 This political dream of what Scott considered “protection,” alongside explicitly articulated intentional destruction, can only really be understood as making sense in the context of ongoing settler colonial land occupation and theft.6 Dean Neu and Richard Therrien suggest that assimilation resolved the conflict between white settlement and Indigenous collective guardianship and usage of the land. The state

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would “forcibly, through legislation, separate Indigenous peoples from their way of life, their hunting territory, their agency over their land and behaviours.” Simultaneously, Indigenous people would be made “‘Indian-less’ through initiatives like compulsory enfranchisement and marriage with non-Indians.” With respect to what government representatives called the Indian problem, “the solution was bureaucratic.”7 The effort to integrate Indigenous peoples into white settler society was an overt and fully purposeful effort to fold all Indigenous bodies, souls, and lands into the American and Canadian nation-states. Sherene Razack writes that “many [settlers] will not see themselves as participating … [in colonialism], particularly when we believe ourselves to be engaging in practices of reconciliation and improvement.”8 For Razack, the belief that one is improving others’ lives significantly affects their capacity to imagine that they’re participating in violence. She theorizes this self-ascribed innocence and benevolence as key to what makes settlers into settlers: “The settler/police subject [or settler/social worker subject] comes into [their] own personhood through these acts [of colonial assimilation and violence], becoming a settler through the control and regulation of the Indigenous subject.”9 Benevolent intentionality or self-perception is therefore one aspect of the fundamentally political and moral (rather than individual-psychological) process of becoming entitled, knowing better, and dominant. Razack ties this process back to continued land theft, framing “colonial violence as a project into which settlers are repeatedly interpellated. It is clear that the Indian must disappear if settlers are to have their land, oil, diamonds, and gold.”10 If Indigenous people won’t literally disappear, then the moral and political legitimacy of Indigenous claims needs to be disappeared in the continued settler colonial project of dispossession and violence. If Indigenous people are to remain, their legal ties to the land must be severed through legislation, while they’re discursively framed as never having been entitled to the land in the first place through the moral economy separating valuable and worthless life. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang discuss the central significance of land to settler colonialism: “Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence.” The violence against Indigenous people’s ways of understanding and interacting with the world is perpetuated with continued land occupation. Tuck and Yang write that Indigenous people are framed as “pre-modern and backward. Made savage”11 in the act of constructing and simplifying land as property. In ongoing interaction and meaning-making, settlers are exalted as superior, innocent, benevolent, and legitimately entitled to land, property, and resources (due to what’s construed

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as their hard work and that of settlers before them, and sometimes also partially due to hardships they’d fled). Inseparably, Indigenous people are denigrated as undeserving and politically and morally inferior. Assimilation aims to eradicate what white settlers deem inferiority, which makes it possible to frame just about anything done to Indigenous peoples as kindness rather than violence. This white supremacist framing denigrates nearly everything that distinguishes Indigenous lifeworlds from those of Europeans and white settlers. Thomas King writes: Yes, Indians had been defeated militarily. Yes, most of the tribes had been safely locked up on reservations and reserves. Yes, Indians were dying off in satisfying numbers from disease and starvation. Yes, all of this was encouraging. But, at the same time, Indians were still being Indians. How could this happen?12

The white settler state concern that “Indians were still being Indians” was addressed by the Canadian government in two assimilative measures in the 1920 amendment to the Indian Act. The first was to make the removal of all Indigenous children to Indian residential schools compulsory. The second was a policy that forced Canadian citizenship onto certain Indigenous persons, resulting in their loss of “Indian” status. Scattered assimilative church-run “schools” for Indigenous children had existed since the 1600s. The government in what is now called Canada first fully supported them in 1843.13 In the late 1870s, a standardized model for these schools, based upon a military prison, was legislated in both the United States and Canada. Yet, assimilative schooling had never before been mandatory and, as such, truly aiming to raise every single Indigenous child away from their family and community.14 In addition to widespread abuse and neglect, Indian residential schools had extremely detrimental impacts on all students, including their ability to retain their culture, language, and connection to family, community, and nation.15 Even Prime Minister Harper’s 2009 apology for the system acknowledges that “two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.”16 As Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young articulate: “The schools attacked our languages, our religions, our family structures, and our very sense of who we are.”17 The connection between assimilationist policies and rehabilitation is not coincidental. This era saw a shift in white ruling class sensibilities, which shaped the direction and form of colonization as much as it shaped disability policy and practice. The two arenas were not understood at the time as identical, and they

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didn’t have the same consequences for those subjected to the various policies and practices of the day, but they were understood as intimately connected in white ruling class discourse, as were many other sites of moral denigration and intervention into the social. Michel Foucault says the nineteenth century saw evolutionism become the lens through which Europeans understood “colonization, the necessity for wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness, the history of societies with their different classes, and so on.”18 Edward Said discusses how Middle Eastern and Asian people were framed within these interlocking logics: Along with all other peoples variously designated as backward, degenerate, uncivilized, and retarded, the Orientals were viewed in a framework constructed of biological determinism and moral-political admonishment. The Oriental was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) … [and framed] as problems to be solved or confined or – as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory – taken over. The point is that the very designation of something as Oriental involved an already pronounced evaluative judgment, and … an implicit program of action.19

Orientalism and other colonial/racist discourses were inextricably tied to attitudes towards those construed as “problems” within Western society, such as “delinquents, the insane, women, the poor,” all of whom were considered intrinsically inferior to nondisabled, ruling class, cis, straight white men. As Said notes, this discourse had material effects because it contained an “implicit program of action,” and it was held together through what he describes as an already existing “evaluative judgment” of “moral-political admonishment” – that is, of moral economy.20 Said is analysing historical discourses from his vantage point of the late twentieth century, but the interlocking of disability, penalty, and colonization wasn’t retroactively superimposed upon the past. It was central to the discourse enabling the interconnected births of professional social work, rehabilitation, eugenics, compulsory enfranchisement, and the Indian residential school system. Indian residential schools were explicitly designed to resemble earlier sites of confinement,21 and were thus specifically intended to transform people’s very selves, souls, or identities in a way analogous to the work of other institutions in Europe and white settler colonies since the advent of moral treatment and the penitentiary. Over a century earlier, this institutional intention was explicitly articulated by Gabriel Bonnot de Mably in reference to the prison: “Punishment, if I may so put it, should strike the soul rather than the body.”22 Like the penitentiary, Indian residential schools decisively aimed to “strike the soul.”

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Indian residential schools mobilized practices intended to make Indigenous children into something else. It is straightforwardly clear and uncontested that students were to leave the “schools” fundamentally different from what they would have become if left in their families and communities. They weren’t simply there to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, but were to undergo a “total reformation of character.”* Because of the scale on which this program was operating, and because the political dream was that every Indigenous child would be confined to the schools and come out fundamentally different from what they would have otherwise become, Indian residential schooling was an effort to end Indigenous ways of living and being. This eradication was the explicitly intended purpose of the system and its many agents. Whether in Australia, the United States, or Canada, colonial-assimilationist schooling was therefore genocidal regardless of death toll. Referring to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Chrisjohn and Young† and Ward Churchill23 amply demonstrate the genocidal aspects of this schooling. Indian residential schools had alarming death tolls, and knowledge of these deaths was circulated among both the Canadian government and the general public.24 However, it is not only based on death toll that the case for genocide is most clearly made in relation to Indian residential schools. According to the UN Convention on Genocide, genocide does not require killing or death. Even if no child had died within them, Indian residential schools rest squarely within article 2(e) of the Convention on Genocide, which names “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” as one of five legally recognized forms of genocide.25 This action is as sure a method of destroying lifeworlds as is mass murder – and ending lifeworlds is what genocide, in its essence, means: the attempt or practice to put an end to a people’s way of being. It is not surprising that the United States took forty years to ratify the Convention on Genocide and then, when they finally did so, attached a “sovereignty package” arguing that US domestic laws supersede international law. Or that Canada removed article 2(e) and two other internationally recognized forms of genocide it had

* As discussed in chapter 4, Alcatraz Park Ranger Matt Murphy says that this description was given for what had supposedly been accomplished when fourteen Hopi adults were confined to the Alcatraz military prison for trying to defend their community’s children against Indian boarding schools; however, it aptly sums up the ethos of the day that animated Indian residential schools. † The entire text of the United Nations convention is Appendix A in Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game.

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been perpetrating from the Convention on Genocide before ratifying a modified version of it – a version including only two of the five internationally recognized forms of genocide.26 In contrast, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted in 1998, continues to define genocide as all five forms specified in the original Convention on Genocide.27 Without even taking into account the death toll, the Indian residential school system in Canada and the United States was unambiguously and incontestably genocide according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. This resolution was adopted after Indian residential schools were made mandatory and beyond the point at which many children were known to have died, and it was still several decades before the schools were abolished. In considering the implications of this history, we might also recall that the Convention on Genocide was legally applied retroactively to Nazi atrocities. No legal definition of genocide existed when Nazi death camps were in operation, and yet the law was applied to what had already taken place in persecuting Nazi war criminals. However, even if we only consider that Canada and the United States enacted genocide starting in 1946 (as then defined in international law), both countries clearly did so through the Indian residential school system for several decades. Canada’s and the United States’ genocidal programs were not limited to article 2(e). In discussing the difference between what has often come to be distinguished as physical genocide (mass murder), biological genocide (extinguishing reproductive capacity – that is, eugenics), and cultural genocide (destroying practices that make a people what they are), the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada states that “Canada did all these things,”28 which is equally true of the United States.29 Furthermore, Patrick Wolfe challenges the distinction between kinds of genocide – which is not found in the UN Convention on Genocide – because “it confuses definition with degree.”30 In centring discussions of Indian residential schools, we hope to avoid framing them as an isolated exception that implicitly constructs Canada and the United States as otherwise innocent, as Harper does in his apology. In contrast, we are using the Indian residential schools as an example because of their particular resonance with continued social work today. Survivors of the Kuper Island Residential School referred to the “school” as “our Alcatraz,”31 and the relationship between prisons and Indian residential schools was no accident. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s analysis of asylums, prisons, and similar sites,32 Chrisjohn and Young situate Indian residential schools as “total institutions.”33 Ella Callow and Chris Chapman, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Allison Carey trace how the development of Indian residential schools interlocked with concurrent histories of disablement and imprisonment,34 explicitly

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stated as intentional by policy makers: “In 1891, U.S. Indian Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan himself proudly compared the schools to ‘asylums’ and ‘houses of correction.’”35 This comparison would have been no surprise to anyone within the US government, given that in 1878 the US government had appointed Captain Richard Henry Pratt* as the superintendent of the prototype Indian industrial school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.36 As Churchill notes, Pratt’s “major qualification for the job could only have been that he’d previously served as warden of the army prison at Fort Marion, Florida, to which those viewed as the most ‘recalcitrant’ figures among what was left of Native North America’s military resistance were often sent to be ‘broken.’”37 The Canadian government adopted Pratt’s militaristic model the following year, as per the recommendations of the 1879 Davin Report.38 In his previous position, Pratt had “demonstrated considerable success, pioneering techniques for compelling ‘ideological conversion’ – or, in the alternative – reducing prisoners to a permanent state of ‘psychological incompetence,’”39 and it would seem that this work experience qualified him for his new role as educator of Indigenous children. As another illustration of the then existing relationship between Indian residential schools and penal imprisonment, consider Arthur Fourstar’s account of being taken from his home and community as a little boy: I remember screaming. I remember my mom doing the same thing. But the police officer held onto her. When Mr. Findlay threw me in the car, I went out the other door and I ran. But he ran after me and caught me. I like to think of the word abducted.40

Of course, colonial violence and racism were not new in the early twentieth century. But they were now mobilized to do new things for the first time. As Talal Asad writes: “Everybody generally has an opinion about the customs and beliefs of other people … But in my view that view is less interesting than the question of the kind of violence (moral, legal, military) that judgments justify.”41 The parallel developments in rehabilitation/eugenics and assimilation/ genocide were precisely developments in what Said describes as the “evaluative judgments” and related “program[s] of action” that these judgments ratio-

* Pratt’s paper “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites” – the source of the infamous phrase, “kill the Indian … save the man” – is discussed in chapter 1; his liberal/culturally determinist white supremacist contention that “the Indian … is born a blank, like the rest of us” is discussed in chapter 4.

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nalized.42 By contrasting the assimilative measures of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with earlier measures of military extermination in the US Indian Wars,43 or in Governor Cornwallis’s bounty placed on Mi’kmaq scalps in the founding of Halifax,44 we can see that the moral economy of whose life was worth living had not changed, but the programs of action had.45 Destroying Lives George Tinker sums up Indian boarding schools as having “deliberately inflict[ed] the most severe forms of psychological trauma upon entire generations of someone else’s children as a means of accomplishing a desired result.”46 The violence of Indian residential schools has been well documented.47 This history of violence – and its varied continuities today – demands a rethinking of many aspects of how Canada and the United States are imagined, and even perhaps of how violence is imagined. It’s not enough to learn these histories as facts. Grappling with these histories, however one is positioned in relation to them, requires an undoing and reconsideration of fundamental questions including what it means to live on colonized land, “do good” or help others, and maybe even be human. As an example of such undoing and reconsideration of previously taken-for-granted assumptions, Andrea Smith suggests that sexual violence is as fundamental to racism and colonialism as it is to patriarchy – in part through exploring the pervasive sexual violence in Indian boarding schools, where gender didn’t play the decisive role that race did in differentiating perpetrator from victim.48 She says that this and other examples in which sexual violence has been used as a tool in the genocide of Indigenous peoples demands a fundamental reconsideration of the anti-violence movement and the shape it has taken to date. Relatedly, Indian residential schools were violent well beyond specific acts of interpersonal violence. It might be easy to forget the intensity of the everyday degradations that all children were subjected to, when heard alongside the many stories of sexual and physical assault. But in survivors’ stories, the violence of being forcibly removed from one’s loved ones, kept apart from siblings, or not being allowed to do kid things like playing with toys all have a very prominent role, even when accompanied by stories of torture or rape. Brenda Bignell Arnault remembers, for example, that “the worst part, besides the second thing of being there was not having your family, not having anybody to hug you and tell you they loved you. You come from a loving family to a sterile environment.”49 Percy Ballantyne recalls: “I had just come from a place, my environment, where it was nice and safe with family around … The next day all of a sudden I wake up in this strange place and … it was terrifying.”50 Even if

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no further violence had taken place, it was violence when these children were taken from their families and communities. Yet, there was further violence. Without going into an exhaustive account of the varied violences that students were subjected to in the Indian residential schools, we will highlight a few examples – partly to illustrate some ways these violences exceed how abuse within Indian residential schools tends to be imagined.51 Violence is normatively imagined in white discourse through what Angela Davis calls “dangerous individualism.”52 An exploration of the dangers of “methodological individualism” to understand structural violence is a central part of Chrisjohn and Young’s critique of the standard account of Indian residential school history.53 They critique these dangers because, as Sunera Thobani also observes in reference to Indian residential schooling: “By placing the blame solely on individual perpetrators when recognition of the extent of the abuse cannot be avoided, the systemic nature of the violence can be denied.”54 Cindy Blackstock specifically interrogates how social workers relate to historical colonial violences of professional social work, and concludes: “We often default to rationalizing the occurrence as exceptional.” She says exceptionality is often narrated in one of four ways: 1) they acted based on the sensibilities of the day – we know better now; 2) they did not know about the harm; 3) it was outside of their mandate, and; 4) if the harm is so appalling that it can not be rationalized as coming from a place of good intentions, they were immoral or bad individuals who are exceptions.55

Survivors’ stories certainly feature accounts of particular staff and bureaucrats who seem to be monsters. Yet, the political and ethical challenge to non-Indigenous peoples in witnessing these accounts is to hold the actions as monstrous without confining responsibility to a handful of aberrational perpetrators. Sara Ahmed grapples with exactly this issue in her reading of survivors’ accounts from Australia’s “stolen generation.”56 The stolen generation refers to Indigenous children who were taken from their communities and sent to white boarding schools in Australia at the same time as this same violence was being committed against Indigenous children in Canada and the United States. Ahmed catches herself wishing to hold particular individuals fully responsible for the violences she’s reading about, which she realizes would enable her to ignore her own complicity by virtue of being raised a settler on Indigenous land and taught to consider it hers. She realizes that individualizing the responsibility for these colonial atrocities functions to secure her own innocence.57 For those of us who fancy ourselves critical or progressive today, it should be remembered that it was predominantly liberals and progressives driving Indian residential schooling.58 Indian residen-

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tial schools fit perfectly with the sensibilities and practices of the Progressive Era – just like eugenics; just like professional social work. We shouldn’t minimize the responsibility of those who directly perpetrated acts of violence. They are each fully responsible in the sense of having materially done what they did, rather than choosing to navigate their context less violently or altogether resisting the then-normative violences – as some others did. But immediate perpetrators are not “fully responsible” in the sense that all responsibility for what they did ends with them as individuals. Every beating, every sexual assault, every act of humiliation, cruelty, and degradation, and every removal of a child from their loving family and community was collectively perpetrated. Darja Zaviršek challenges us to recognize “violence as a structure, although it takes the appearance of a unique occurrence.”59 Of course, some individuals were particularly harsh or inhumane, and their responsibility should not be minimized. However, these individuals wouldn’t have been able to do so much damage on such a large scale without an entire network of white settler nation-states working in harmony with one another, effectively facilitating every particular act of cruelty.60 Trigger warning: Please be advised that the remainder of this section describes violence against Indigenous children. Marian MacFarlane worked at the Alberni Indian Residential School in British Columbia (BC). She recalls the following story, illustrating the intimate connection between normalized everyday dehumanizing cruelty and a single interpersonal act of life-threatening violence: The local dentists were given free Novocaine by the government for the Native kids, but the traditional practice after the war years was for them to hoard the Novocaine for their practice in Port Alberni and just work on the Indians without painkillers. Everyone in the school knew about this and condoned it, from the principal on down. No one minded when Indians were hurt, naturally; they were being beaten every day … I once caught a matron beating a little girl with a piano leg. She was just murdering that kid, who was maybe six years old, and she would have killed her if I hadn’t have grabbed the matron and socked her one. So off the matron goes to complain to John Andrews, the principal … He fired me for hitting the matron! … The lives of the Indian kids were completely expendable. They were considered less than human, almost like a disease we had to get rid of.61

MacFarlane’s account illustrates different degrees of complicity, cruelty, and dehumanization among those running and staffing Indian residential schools. She stood up for the little girl and was also an active participant in a system that worked to destroy the girl’s universe.62 She appears to have been a silent witness

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to the dentists’ abuse, and each of the dentists and the principal should perhaps invite as much moral revulsion for what they did and condoned as the matron, even if they were not literally killing anyone. The collective enabling of individual acts of violence is also demonstrated in how the violences that Indian residential schools are now renowned for also targeted Indigenous children outside of institutional walls. Carol Dawson, for example, ran away from St Michael’s Indian Residential School in BC, and was raped while on the run. The RCMP officer who caught her sexually assaulted her, and the minister who ran the school and had called the police “was furious” with the officer when he found out.63 The Indian residential schools themselves were not the only place where Indigenous girls and boys were vulnerable to such violences, and it wasn’t only ministers, priests, and teachers perpetrating them. Blackstock reflects: Evil happens in degrees – there are those who beat children to death, those who issued edicts without following up, and those who lived next door and said nothing … Are they all accountable? If so – how, and why? To what standard of courage and compassion should we hold social workers – are we willing to support them when they identify acts that upset our sensibilities or are we as a society willing to tolerate their silence in the face of atrocities. These are difficult questions that have remained underground in social work and need to be unearthed if we are to deconstruct our past reality in a way that makes obvious the thinking that fuels colonization.64

This sobering reflection, specifically surrounding professional social work’s implications in Indian residential schools, asks questions we intend to raise throughout this book. What role can social work – and each one of us – play in moving towards a very different future? Furthermore, survivors’ accounts describe horrendous individual acts of violence outside of the physical and sexual violences that tend to be centred when violence is conceptualized.* As an example, Brenda Bignell Arnault and

* As an illustration of this normative framing, the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project’s “Power and Control Wheel” is used in work with victims and perpetrators of men’s violence against women and has been adapted to many other forms of interpersonal violence. The wheel documents a wide range of forms of abuse on its “spokes.” Physical and sexual violence are placed on the outer rim of the wheel, suggesting that they, and their constant threat, structurally enable the violences named on the spokes, such as “emotional abuse” or “using male privilege.” See also Koyama and Martin’s “Abusive Power and Control within the Domestic Violence Shelter” power and control wheel, which may resonate more closely to the violences most normatively committed in Indian residential schools.

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her sister Edna survived the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario. Brenda describes the time that Edna “puked up that bowl of cabbage soup into her bowl and Miss Rasmussen made her eat it twice! Can you believe that? I mean, how ignorant can some people be, torturing little people like that?”65 Even though Tinker writes the following passage about rape, it can apply equally to being beaten near death, as MacFarlane describes, or being forced to do something like eat vomit, as Edna was subjected to: “Such things did not happen to all children who passed through the system, of course. Equally true, however, is the fact that virtually every child knew another – or several – to whom it did happen, or was happening …The same thing(s) could happen to any – or each – of them, at any moment.”66 This observation accounts for one way of conceptualizing the entire system as violent, beyond the interpersonal violences one person did to another single person. The fear of such extreme violences and the very real threat of extreme violences were an everyday part of most students’ lives. As survivor Percy Ballantyne recalls: “It affects you, being exposed to abuse. Like it really blows your mind away to be put into the care of people, your parents expecting that you are going to be well taken care of and here’s these things happening to children … If [white people] could place themselves in the shoes of our parents and exchange their children for us … What kind of uproar would happen?”67 What’s perhaps even more unsettling is that, in fact, there was uproar at the time. Yet, the system prevailed. Churchill notes that officials were often presented “details of specific atrocities,” but the common recommendations that the perpetrator(s) be fired were ignored. Instead, perpetrators of direct abuse were kept on, and those who showed compassion for the children were penalized.68 Furthermore, in spite of the forced separation of the children from their communities, some Indigenous adults came to know what was happening to their children and attempted to stop it, but usually to no avail. Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey discuss an 1889 case of people filing a complaint about the Rupert’s Land Industrial School with the Indian commissioner because “young girls of eight or nine still bore bruises on their bodies several weeks after being strapped,” and “the Anglican principal admitted he fed the children rancid butter and crept into the dormitories at night to kiss little girls.” He was only reprimanded.69 It’s easy for contemporary readers to mobilize the “prejudice of progress”70 in reading and making sense of all this violence. But this framing is no more than a prejudice. Some people at the time recognized that what was going on was wrong and fought to stop it. They were unsuccessful, but they knew it was wrong and they tried. To be clear, many specific incidents of abuse were kept secret, but the fact that abuse was taking place was no secret. Blackstock notes that “some

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rationalize the lack of social work efforts to stop residential schools by noting that child abuse just recently surfaced on the societal radar screen as a problem deserving attention … and thus it went unnoticed.” She counters, however, that some people living within “the sensibilities of those times, found the treatment of these children unacceptable. And yet, despite having received the reports, government officials typically did little to stop the abuse, and in some cases deaths of children.”71 People knew, and they knew it was wrong. Adult violence towards children had already been problematized for some time among social workers and temperance activists. Even the act of removing children from their own community or culture was critiqued much earlier, as discussed previously. Decades before the coining of the word genocide, social workers from across Canada and the United States rallied to ensure that white orphans of the 1917 Halifax Explosion were raised by other white Nova Scotians: “Blois and the Children’s Committee felt the children belonged in Nova Scotia, and that they ‘had sacred rights which would be fearlessly and strongly safeguarded.’”72 Yet, only a few years following this important advocacy work for these white orphans, Nova Scotia’s only Indian residential school was opened. It’s not true that professional social work’s complicity with Indian residential schools was a matter of nobody having considered that sexual and physical violence were morally wrong and damaging to children; it’s not true that it had never occurred to anyone that it was harmful to remove children from their families and communities. It rather seems to be the case that most white people – social workers included – didn’t consider these things a problem when they were done to Indigenous children.* The discourses and associated practices of assimilation/genocide – or the forced “emancipation of the Indian,” as the Department of Indian Affairs outrageously called it in 188773 – were behind each act of individual-to-individual cruelty and dehumanization. These larger structures and ways of understanding the world created the parameters of freedom that individual perpetrators navigated in doing what they did. Although always true, this systemic and

* The parallel with today’s fairly widespread knowledge of the discrepancy between the numbers of Indigenous and Black children apprehended from their families, on the one hand, and the numbers of non-Black and non-Indigenous children, on the other hand, screams out to be considered here. Ballantyne’s question about the uproar that would happen if white children had been subjected to the Indian residential schools also applies to the ongoing mass apprehensions of Indigenous and Black children from their families and communities. When the knowledge of these apprehensions is freely available to the general public today, what prevents a more widespread political uproar?

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colonial shaping of the individual choices of perpetrators may be most evident in the cruelty with which student/inmates were punished for speaking their mother tongues – a transgression only against the moral imperative to become more like a white child. Churchill describes a number of instances of such abuse in 1920s Indian residential schools. These punishments include the “especially vicious treatment” bestowed upon one boy who was stripped and “then whipp[ed] naked until he became unconscious” at the Spanish Indian Boys School in Ontario. In BC’s Alberni Indian Residential School, children’s tongues were pierced with sewing needles for “talking Indian.” “At other facilities,” writes Churchill, “scalding seems to have been the preferred method of punishing repeat offenders.”74 In bearing witness to these terrible abuses as readers today, the easiest thing to do is imagine that so many aberrational monsters perpetrated them – people somehow utterly different from you or me. But such particular acts of violence took place in the context of the genocidal civilizing mission, its moral certainties about right and wrong, and its political certainties about what was of utmost importance. This “mission” was not confined to the Indian residential schools, although children were its most strategic and sustained target. Such tremendous efforts strategically targeted children because, as the 1879 Davin Report opined: “Adults could not be rescued from ‘their present state of ignorance, superstition and helplessness,’ as they were ‘physically, mentally and morally … unfitted to bear such a complete metamorphosis.’”75 This common understanding shaped white individuals’ perceptions and feelings when Indigenous people died. Margaret Butcher, for example, was a Women’s Missionary Society worker at the Kitamaat Residential School in BC. She recorded: “On Friday night ‘Maria,’ an old woman of about 100 yrs died ... The death of these old folks is good for the Christianizing of the people because with them die many of the old heathen customs … Each old person’s death aids advancement.”76 Tinker writes that Indigenous deaths were “considered an ‘acceptable loss’ attending settler policy objectives.”77 Immanuel Kant, whose intellectual influence on making possible Indian residential schools and other resonant institutions was explored in chapter 4, theorized: “Humankind can make progress even if many humans cannot.”78 He meant that social change could only be achieved on an individual basis, and therefore the deaths of those who could not or would not change would “aid advancement,” as Butcher put it. Lawrence Vankoughnet was the deputy superintendent of Canada’s Indian Department from 1874 to 1893. Neu and Therrien say his “paternalism and racial biases were typical of the time. When Natives were able to prove themselves capable of white behaviour, he felt they should be rewarded or encouraged

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to improve, on an individual basis.”79 But when Indigenous people did not adopt white ways, he attributed this refusal to “indifference or laziness. And then he wiped his hands of them – if such Indians would not help themselves, there was nothing the department could do for them.”80 Such hand-wiping is crucial to making sense of the death tolls accompanying Indian residential schools, as well as the death tolls surrounding many rehabilitative sites for convicts and disabled people and the “social death,” such as indefinite detention, that frequently accompany these sites alongside their “personal transformation” rhetoric.81 In these sites, “success or failure hinged only upon whether the ‘man’ was ‘saved’ by being made ‘new’; whether the person died or suffered was not the focus. The only ethically significant question was whether she was successfully civilized, assimilated, or cured.”82 Further, Neu and Therrien reflect: “High mortality rates were not inconsistent with an objective of decreasing the percentage of Aboriginal peoples who deviated from the norms of settler society. Thus, while Victorian sensibilities may have precluded direct annihilation, genocide through indifference or a withholding of funds seemed acceptable.”83 Many children died as a direct consequence of Indian residential schools – as of the early 1920s, they had a fatality rate of nearly 50 per cent according to a government of Canada study.84 Although national evidence isn’t available in the same way for the United States, Churchill writes that examination of the death rates at those Indian boarding schools that do have such records available suggests that death rates in the United States were about the same.85 For the sake of comparison, he also notes that mortality rates at the infamous Dachau and Buchenwald Nazi concentration camps – mostly from disease and malnutrition, as in institutional sites in Canada and the United States through this time – were 36 per cent and 19 per cent respectively, and that Mauthausen had the highest death rate of any Nazi concentration camp,* at 58 per cent.86 Given the almost 50 per cent death rate in Indian boarding schools, Tinker observes that because about half of all Indigenous children were sent to them in the early twentieth century, roughly one-quarter of the Indigenous population born during those years died as a result of Indian residential schooling.87 Yet, reflecting on these very numbers, Duncan Campbell Scott framed this tragedy as so few children “liv[ing] to benefit from the education they had received therein.”88 Even though it was aware of these statistics, the Canadian government increased attendance at Indian residential schools by 110 per cent in the twenty-two years between 1910 and 1932.89 For those who feel that forcibly removing children from one group to another group cannot constitute

* The death rates at Nazi extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, were obviously higher.

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genocide no matter how the United Nations or the International Criminal Court define genocide, perhaps these statistics may invite reconsideration of why so many Indigenous people feel that this word is entirely appropriate to describe what has taken place in the United States, Canada, and other white settler colonies. The extent to which the fatality rates in the Indian residential schools were known – by the Canadian government and general public alike – might be one of the most shocking details in the history of Indian residential schools. Fournier and Crey note that “in 1907, both the Montreal Star and Saturday Night reported on a medical inspection of the schools that found aboriginal children were dying in astonishing numbers … 42 per cent counting the children who died at home, where many were sent when they became critically ill.”90 The government of Canada did nothing in response, apart from increasing mandatory enrolment and firing the medical inspector, Dr Peter Bryce. In response, Bryce published a book in 1922 about the outrageous death rates and the government’s indifference to them called The Story of a National Crime. Again, this outcry resulted in no policy changes, other than expansion, until the 1960s.91 Rather than improving the conditions in Indian residential schools or shutting them down entirely and returning children to their families, Duncan Campbell Scott instead eliminated the position of medical inspector in 1918. Neu and Therrien suggest that the 1920 amendment making attendance mandatory for all Indigenous children was implemented “although conditions in the residential schools had not improved, [because] Scott’s emphasis was on increasing system efficiency – defined as the percentage/number of Aboriginal youth being subjected to social engineering techniques – rather than on correcting the problematic mortality outcomes.”92 The number of children dying was considered less important than the number of children who were becoming separated from Indigenous ways of being human. The only people doing anything that might be considered “child protection” in relation to Indigenous children were those parents and communities who were sometimes able to prevent their children from being abducted, as well as scattered workers in the “schools” who occasionally took a stand against particular acts of violence. The children confined to these terrible institutions also did various things to resist and survive, from supplementing their starvation rations by taking from those who ran the schools and had plenty to eat93 to looking out for younger students when staff weren’t watching.94 Conspicuously absent from any such child protective measures in the historical record are professional social workers. When involved at all, it was to abduct

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children and “place” them in Indian residential schools.* Raven Sinclair writes: “Social Workers were tasked to accompany Indian agents onto reserves to remove children to residential schools.”95 Blackstock, too, reflects upon the roles social workers did and didn’t take up in this history. She points out that children’s aid societies began to be established in the early 1900s, but these agencies did nothing to protect Indigenous children from the abuse of Indian residential schools, “even as reports of abuse and neglect at the schools mounted across the country.”96 Blackstock also documents the active complicity of professional social work: in 1946, the Canadian Association of Social Workers (CASW) and the Canadian Welfare Council (CWC) maintained that even though there were problems with Indian residential schools, “we feel they have a place in a well rounded system of Indian education, particularly in so far as they meet special needs.” Blackstock observes that “there is no evidence that CASW or CWC took up any meaningful campaigns to address the problems … CASW and CWC did successfully advocate with the federal government to ensure child welfare services were provided to Indian children on reserves,† but this advocacy was not accompanied by a persistent campaign to close the residential schools themselves.” Rather, as Blackstock tells us, “Social workers were active participants in the placement of Aboriginal children in the residential schools as late as the 1960’s.”97 Edward Lee and Ilyan Ferrer also document the historic role of social workers in the genocide of Indigenous people, exploring the role of the “Indian Affairs” committee of the Social Service Council of Canada. They conclude: “It is clear that the growing social work profession was very much involved with the residential school system during its early and most devastating stage in the first few decades of the 20th century.”98 Social workers placed children in Indian residential schools and advocated their continued place in the work of civilizing Indigenous people. As a rule, historically, organized professional social work has not tended to take the * Mohawk social work scholar Ruth Kolezsar-Green brought professional social workers’ active participation in the Indian residential schools to Chris’s attention during a conversation about social work and colonialism in 2014. Chris told her that they were once challenged at an academic social work conference when they contended that social workers had been directly involved in Indian residential schools and, when they went back and couldn’t find the source of their belief that social workers had been directly involved, Chris assumed they’d been mistaken. Ruth responded by saying that it’s common knowledge in Indigenous communities – based on people’s stories of their childhood experiences – that social workers were sometimes involved in taking children from their homes and placing them in Indian residential schools. As a follow-up to this conversation, she shared the citation from Raven Sinclair with Chris. † Again, this is also around the time that Child Protective Services were first provided for Black children too – all justified through the language of racial desegregation.

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stance against normative injustice that it claims to take – such as claiming a “Respect for the Inherent Dignity and Worth of Persons” and the “Pursuit of Social Justice” as the first and second “Core Social Work Values and Principles” in the Canadian Association of Social Work’s Code of Ethics.99 This observation holds strikingly true for Canada and the United States in relation to Indian residential schools, eugenics, racist immigration policies, contemporary mass incarceration of Black and Indigenous persons, contemporary mass apprehension of Indigenous and Black children from their families, and other injustices. Social work has actively participated in structures of violence, and, of course, the responsibility for these violences also extends well beyond the boundaries of organized professional social work. In the decades immediately surrounding the birth of social work, it seems that virtually no white settlers questioned the righteousness of the “civilizing mission.” Even Peter Bryce, the whistle-blower/medical inspector who advocated for better health conditions in Indian residential schools, was not the hero we might wish him to be. As Chrisjohn and Young note: “Bryce was hardly the ‘bleeding heart’ he might be portrayed as today: he didn’t have any problem with the ‘civilizing’ mandate of the Indian Department, and assisted in the program of demonizing” people who were labelled as feebleminded.100 Angus McLaren documents Bryce’s diverse and active role as leader of eugenics discourse, policy, and practice in Canada. McLaren names Bryce one of the four most prominent and influential Canadian doctors who were “preoccupied with hereditary defect”101 – including having overseen eugenic immigration restrictions “from the time of his appointment as chief medical officer of the Department of Immigration in 1904.”102 It wasn’t a matter of Bryce fighting for justice for Indigenous peoples alongside practising and advancing eugenics. As Chrisjohn and Young point out, even though Bryce is the one historical white person recorded as having so significantly resisted the conditions within Indian residential schools – and is therefore mentioned in many histories about them – he had no problem with the broader project of “civilizing” Indigenous peoples. That this project was the correct course of action appears to have been nearly unanimous among white people at the time. White and settler readers today should perhaps be careful before we’re too quick to imagine that this attitude is a thing of the past. The Unquestionable Good of Imposing Whiteness onto Others At the same time that all Indigenous children in Canada could first be legally forced to attend Indian residential schools (six years after Duncan Campbell Scott publicly stated that they had a 50 per cent mortality rate103), the Canadian

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government also instituted a system of forced enfranchisement.104 Enfranchisement was the second of the two key assimilative components to the 1920 amendment to the Indian Act, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Of enfranchisement, King writes: “If you look the word up in the dictionary, you’ll find that ‘enfranchised’ means ‘to be liberated.’ A Blackfoot friend once told me that ‘enfranchised’ was French for ‘screwed.’”105 Enfranchisement meant that one was no longer a legal Indian. White people imagined that Indigenous liberation necessitated ending Indigenous identity. Scott, the deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, described enfranchisement in the same 1914 text as he framed the 50 per cent mortality rate as regrettable only because fewer children wouldn’t benefit from the “education” he and the Indian Department provided. He wrote: “Under certain somewhat oppressive regulations an Indian may become enfranchised. He then ceases in all respects to be an Indian.”106 His use of the word “oppressive” surely doesn’t mean exactly what contemporary readers might read in it, but it was certainly a strong word. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “oppressive” as “weighing heavily on the mind, spirits, or senses; burdensome; overwhelming; constrictive; depressing,”107 which suggests he was well aware of the toll his department’s policies was taking, even if he also believed they were morally just.* Scott also says that the enfranchised Canadian citizen “ceases in all respects to be an Indian.” This comment was made during the same time period in which it was stated: “The Disabled Man Who Is Profitably Employed Is No longer Handicapped.”108 It appears that the bureaucracy actively creating these legal identifications truly imagined them only as bureaucratic categories, rather than as having significance to people’s sense of who they are. King observes: “The Legal Indian was one of those errors in judgment that North America made and has been trying to correct for the last 150 years.”109 The system of enfranchisement has been one of the primary means of “correcting this error.” Enfranchisement has existed since 1869 in Canada, when a person could voluntarily apply for enfranchisement if “the degree of civilization to which he has attained, and the character for integrity and sobriety which he bears, appears to be a safe and suitable person for becoming a proprietor of land.”110 Note, here, two aspects of colonial oppression, working in tandem: the assimilative moral economy that imagines “character,” “integrity,” and “sobriety” as white attributes and also the central importance to this assimilative “civilization” of being imagined capable of responsibly owning land, which highlights

* Scott was a renowned poet and was therefore very conscious of the use of language.

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the specific context of settler colonialism as ongoing land theft.111 Fifty-one years later, and six years after Scott described enfranchisement as “oppressive,” the 1920 Amendment to the Indian Act now permitted enfranchisement to happen non-consensually, based on a government official’s determination. Once enfranchised, a person became a Canadian citizen and was no longer legally an “Indian.” Indigenous people occasionally chose enfranchisement, but these decisions were hardly made freely. For example, some parents elected to become enfranchised to prevent their children from being apprehended and put in Indian residential schools;112 in doing so, they severed their Indigenous rights, legal identity, and legal ties to the rest of their family and community (as collective guardians of the land). Tinker points out that these new colonial violences of forced assimilation – compulsory enfranchisement and assimilative “schooling” – emerged right at the time that “the military capacity of North America’s indigenous nations to resist dispossession was thought to have been largely exhausted.”113 This development allowed for a shift from brute violence to bureaucratic force, but for no shift at all in the moral economy that continued to devalue and seek to extinguish Indigenous lifeworlds.114 It was now through legislation, education, and citizenship that “the remains of native North America might be most expeditiously digested,”115 as Tinker puts it. Ruling class white people often struggle to make sense of radical critiques of things normatively valued in liberal democracy, such as education, rehabilitation, or citizenship.116 How can things that so many people find life affirming and even (individually) emancipatory be violence? Whether in 1920s colonial policy or elsewhere, forcing upon people what can otherwise be (for some people, at some times, and in some situations) life affirming can make such interventions violent. But Indian residential schools and enfranchisement were forms of violence before this time, and they were oppressive beyond those occasions when they were compulsory. The violence of citizenship and classroom education is simply and straightforwardly the violence of colonial imposition – of forcing European governance, norms, and mores onto others. Radical hip hop group Dead Prez critique these two systems and their role in anti-Black racism in the United States today in their “They Schools” and “I’m a African.”117 In both songs, they stress the violence of one people’s imposition on another as the problem. Rage Against the Machine also critiques the Eurocentric US education system in “Take the Power Back.”118 Neither Dead Prez nor Rage Against the Machine hold education per se to be the problem, as they make clear – for example, Dead Prez say, “I love education” in “They Schools.” The problem is rather one people’s imposition

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of a version of education (in content, form, philosophy, and so on) onto others. This strategy can be accomplished by making a system compulsory, but it can also be advanced by delegitimizing all other options, which has happened consistently and relentlessly to both Indigenous educational and governance systems in the United States and Canada for centuries. Taiaiake Alfred writes that Canada has worked to fold Indigenous peoples into a homogenous political and social body that traces its shared practices to Europe. This policy “potentially represent[s] the final solution to white society’s ‘Indian Problem,’ [in that] they use the cooperation of Native leaders in the design and implementation for such systems to legitimize the state’s long-standing assimilationist goals for indigenous nations and lands.” Using the establishment of Nunavut to illustrate his point,* Alfred argues that Inuit people are framed as “heads of government,” but have no real authority because “the apparatus of the government is staffed and controlled mainly by white southerners.”119 There’s a formal and apparent sameness: the same kind of government, the same decision-making process, the same ballot. Yet, Inuit people remain subjugated within colonization because this sameness is imposed by white settler government structures. Even in the seemingly empowering gesture of dramatically increased self-government, Inuit people continue to be pulled into the European-descendant white settler colonial governance structure. This system of self-government hasn’t brought about justice; it hasn’t brought about decolonization. Inuit people’s political participation is constrained and shaped in advance by the political institutions and conventions forced upon them. As David Goldberg observes, “State practices remain crucial to the project of constructing ‘national’ homogeneity out of heterogeneity.”120 Five hundred years ago, there were many different systems of law, education, custom, belief, morality, ideals, standards, understandings of gender, and practices of justiceseeking or conflict resolution – differing from one nation or community to the next – across the lands that are now called the United States and Canada. British, French, American, and Canadian governments have consistently worked towards homogenizing such practices. Such homogenization is not valueneutral. It delegitimizes everything outside of the singular European-descendant structure that is made to appear universal, objective, or neutral, and also as unquestionably superior. Rather than being a compromise or negotiation of all parties involved, everyone is forced to assimilate into one system of supposedly “shared” values and practices, and virtually all aspects of prevailing ruling

* In 1999, Nunavut was divided from the Northwest Territories and given legal territory status (similar to a province but with less autonomy).

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systems have been created and institutionalized by white ruling class men. This reality extends to Indigenous self-government and the limits in which it is allowed. It extends to things like how restorative justice might become incorporated into an otherwise unchanged system of penalty. As Thobani notes: “The existence of such a sovereign authority in the context of the ongoing colonization of Aboriginal peoples reflects the deeply racialized nature of this sovereign power, its politics, and its laws.”121 Yet, the majority of non-Indigenous Canadians take this assimilation and homogenization for granted. According to Dale Turner, they tend to “believe that Aboriginal peoples and their rights are unquestionably subsumed in the Canadian political landscape and that it is nonsense to think that Aboriginal peoples might be ‘nations.’”122 Indeed, Tom Flanagan, prominent pundit and long-time advisor to former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper,* says that “the majority of Canadians support [Indigenous people’s] integration or assimilation.”123 This statement may be true, but we can ask: How are “the majority of Canadians” shaped to perceive certain things as self-evident and just (as they were shaped during the period that normalized killing Indigenous people to steal their land, or the period of Indian residential schooling)? Turner counters Flanagan’s claims, saying that the central issue for Indigenous people is “how governments can come to recognize the legitimacy of Aboriginal forms of sovereignty in order to renew the political relationship on more just foundations.”124 If justice is the goal, then integration and assimilation cannot be how injustices stemming from integration and assimilation are addressed. The majority of settler Canadians and Americans, like the governments of both countries, may well have long agreed that assimilation and integration is the key to resolving what Scott called “the Indian problem.”125 But assimilationist settler colonialism is the problem; it can’t also be the solution. Integration and assimilation, when imposed by one group onto another, are colonial violence. The violences of colonial imposition aren’t unique to Canada and the United States. They take particular forms in white settler societies, and they also resonate across the British Empire. Perhaps widening the lens in exploring these histories might help to unsettle the normative framing of the problem as Indigenous people, whether individually or collectively. In 1883, James Stephen said of India: “The government which now exists has not been chosen by the people. It is not, and if it is to exist at all, it cannot look upon itself as being, the representative of the general wishes and average

* In 2013, Harper distanced himself from Flanagan over comments Flanagan made about child pornography.

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way of thinking of the bulk of the population which it governs.” European colonizers “attache[d] supreme importance” to what Stephen called “all the commonly accepted principles of European morality and politics.”126 These world views, ideas, and political and moral imaginaries are the very stuff of colonization. They include “the unexamined implication that the lives of Native people [need] improvement,”127 as King puts it, and the assumption that such needed improvement can only come about by adopting European mores, norms, and lifeworlds – whether voluntarily or by force. The “commonly accepted principles,” of course, frequently use instrumental violence to encourage such improvement. King therefore writes: “The implication could not have been clearer. European culture, religion, and art were superior to Native culture, religion, and art.”128 In the context of this moral economy, which holds some lifeworlds superior to others, colonialism is violence rather than being a cross-cultural encounter or exchange; it was, and continues to be, designed “to be a unilateral surrender.”129 Indigenous people are expected to abandon their cultures, beliefs, mores, world views, and languages, and to replace them with European ones – through to today. This structure of relationship and its violences was never what Indigenous peoples understood in their negotiations with Europeans. For example, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy established an agreement with Dutch traders and later with British and American governments, which was very different from what colonizers enacted. The Two-Row Wampum agreement articulates this agreed-upon understanding of the relationship between Indigenous and settler peoples. According to Tehanetorens, “These two rows will symbolize two paths or two vessels, travelling down the same river together … side by side, but in our own boat. Neither of us will make compulsory laws or interfere in the internal affairs of the other.”130 But the British, American, and Canadian governments have not upheld the Two-Row Wampum agreement of peaceful, reciprocal, friendly, and mutually non-intrusive cohabitation. Instead, cohabitation was framed as “the Indian problem,” and colonial imposition was rationalized by the “commonly accepted principles of European morality and politics.”131 These principles constrained possibilities for Indigenous sovereignty a century ago, and they continue to do so today. Turner challenges the Canadian government’s framing of Indigenous people as “exist[ing] or hav[ing] legitimacy only within the Canadian state.” Indigenous people, he writes, “do not view their rights as somehow legitimated by the Canadian state”; rather, they view themselves as nations on equal footing with Canada.132 One aspect of the violence of colonization is its homogenizing force, which holds European mores, knowledge, pedagogies, traditions, laws, literatures, and

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understandings as the unwavering point of reference to which all people and practices must be subjected. The violence of colonization also shapes how this assimilation actually takes place, which again resonates with disability critiques of rehabilitation. Stiker claims that rehabilitation strives “to make identical, without making equal,”133 and something akin to this sentiment is found in critiques of twentieth century assimilationist settler colonialism too. Minister of Citizenship* Walter Harris reflected in 1951: “We have thought of enfranchisement as being the ultimate role of Indian policy, and let us say frankly that we rather expected that the Indian would want to become enfranchised in order to be like us.” Harris is speaking against the status quo here. He continues: “Nothing can be further from the truth.”134 Nevertheless, his stated surprise that enfranchisement wasn’t welcome might warrant a pause to consider its implications. The most generous reading of assimilationist policies explicitly aiming to “kill the Indian … save the man” is that white people honestly assumed that Indigenous people would want to be like white people and therefore imagined that they were helping them. It was likely sometimes true that white politicians and others honestly believed they were acting benevolently – that much colonial violence can be partly attributed to one person or group unilaterally determining someone else’s “best interests” (which remains endemic in social work). However, to whatever extent historical abuses may have been motivated by what their perpetrators understood as good intentions, those motivations don’t excuse the abuses. Narrations of benevolence accompanying historic atrocities need, rather, to invite critical engagement with common justifications for present-day abuses. We hope that exploration of the apparent contradiction between “good intentions” and intentional genocide might invite careful consideration of the violences that continue to be normatively perpetrated and rationalized today. The limitations of simply accepting that good intentions fed colonial assimilation also must be acknowledged. In contrast to the Canadian government’s stated understanding as presented earlier, Chrisjohn and Young assert that the goal of Indian residential schooling was far from “to make identical.” They argue that “Residential Schools implemented a well-established technology,” which was previously used and studied in asylums, prisons, the colonization of the British Isles, and elsewhere. “Its goal was not so much to create as to destroy,” to ensure its graduates “would offer no intellectual or spiritual challenge to its oppressors,” that instead they would “learn [their] place on the

* This ministry was the branch of Canadian government responsible for Indian Affairs from 1950 to 1965.

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margins of Canadian society.”135 The gap between the Canadian government’s stated expectation and Chrisjohn and Young’s critique resonates with Stiker’s description of rehabilitation as working towards sameness “without making equal,” and a similar concern is frequently found in anti-colonial critique. Herman Merivale clearly articulated such a stratified assimilation in 1841: “Native races must in every instance either perish, or be amalgamated with the general population of their country. By amalgamation, I mean the union of natives with settlers in the same community, as master and servant … [This] is the only possible Euthanasia of savage communities.”136 Seven years after writing this lecture, Merivale was appointed to the post of undersecretary of state for Britain’s Colonial Office;137 his violent articulation was not a marginal or extreme one. Partha Chatterjee maintains that colonial rule was fundamentally a “modern regime of power destined to never fulfill its normalizing mission because the premise of its power was the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group.”138 That is to say, white people must be continuously exalted as morally and politically superior so that the homogenizing violences of the colonial state can be rationalized. The denigration of Indigenous lifeworlds is only possible in relationship to this ongoing exaltation of whiteness and white lifeworlds. As Thobani writes, white and racialized – and, relatedly but distinctly, settler and Indigenous – identities are relationally formed in “the ‘encounters’ between national subjects and their various others.”139 Because this inextricable denigration/exaltation is so extensive, it shapes the extent to which assimilation is understood to be achievable, and it shapes the encounters that tend to take place between colonizer and colonized, how these encounters are made sense of, and how these encounters are navigated. Illuminating the power imbalance in such “typical” encounters, Razack writes: “There can be no encounter in settler colonialism more typical than the one between a police officer and an Indigenous person arrested for drunkenness.”140 We would only add that the encounter in which a white adult makes the decision to remove an Indigenous child from their home and community, or in which a white adult is granted authority to care for an Indigenous child, is every bit as typical and power-laden as the one Razack names. One way that exaltation/denigration is concretely accomplished through assimilation is through the interlocking of race and class stratifications. Indigenous people had to be integrated into the capitalist system. This integration was so centrally a strategy of assimilation that King calls Christianity “the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism.”141 In 1883, a group of white people who called themselves “Friends of the Indians” met for the first time in Lake Mohonk, New York. They included “a range of high government officials, including three [US]

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presidents.”142 Merrill E. Gates, one of the Friends of the Indians, described their goals: To bring him out of savagery into citizenship we … need to awaken in him wants … The desire for property of his own may become an intense educating force. The wish for a home of his own awakens him to new efforts. Discontent with the teepee and the starving rations of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers … with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars.143

But Indigenous people weren’t freely integrated into the free market economy; they were purposefully integrated into its lower rungs. In Indian residential schools, Indigenous people were educated to do low-paying and normatively unvalued labour. This practice resonates with the treatment of other denigrated populations at the time: “Residential Schools, penitentiaries, and the various specialized schools and institutions for disabled people never oriented their efforts toward graduates who would be leaders or professionals. The secular dream that people are masters of their own destiny only extended so far, and it intersected with the capitalist requirement for cheap labor.”144 As Tinker puts it, Indian residential schools taught “young Indian women to become maids and household servants – or to toil in commercial laundries – while young men were expected to master the skills needed to place them in the cheap hire of ranchers and farmers – and sometimes factory, mine, or mill operators.”145 An Indian Affairs report found that in 1930 three-quarters of children in the “schools” did not surpass grade 3, and “only three in a hundred ever went past Grade 6.”146 This outcome wasn’t by chance; it was orchestrated. In 1897, Canada’s Western Interior Minister Clifford Sifton advocated that “in ‘civilizing’ native children, utmost care should be taken not to ‘educate [them] above the possibilities of their station.’”147 As cited previously, Homi Bhabha therefore describes colonial rule as the purposive production of colonized subjects who, if they survive at all, will be engineered to be “almost the same, but not quite;” “almost the same but not white.”148 Destroying Lifeworlds “What to do?” asks Thomas King. He continues: Indians. You can’t live with them. You can’t shoot them. Well, not anymore. So it’s just as well we have legislation. And legislation, in relation to Native people, has had two basic goals. One, to relieve us of our land, and two, to legalize us out of existence.149

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Not anymore, he says. The nineteenth century marked a significant reduction in unapologetic public acts of white supremacist physical violence, torture, and killing – such as the violences of the transatlantic slave trade and the Indian Wars. This shift forwarded a trajectory of reforms of physical violence that had begun earlier in Europe in the treatment of white paupers, disabled people, and convicts.150 However, as was true of these earlier European and white settler reforms, previously normative violences were not replaced with nonviolence; they were instead supplanted by new forms of now normative instrumental violence that targeted the soul, psyche, self, or spirit with explicitly articulated anticipated outcomes. These new violences aimed to transform a person’s very being, which was never intended by acts such as public floggings. When directed at communities rather than individuals, instrumental violences therefore aim to eradicate entire ways of living and understanding, just like attempts at physical extermination do. As Chrisjohn and Young point out: “When carried out by an oppressive society upon the members of another society (or societies), there is another word for normalization: genocide.”151 The distinction here between strategies of normalization imposed on an individual versus resonant strategies being imposed upon an entire society is what makes massively removing children from one group to another group – like several other actions outside of mass murder – genocide, according to international law. This understanding is crucial: the white supremacist genocidal political dream of creating people who are Indigenous or racialized in body but just like white people in spirit, is alive and well today. That political dream continues throughout the world, tracing back to the multiple branches of European imperialism and colonialism. For this reason, in her critique of present-day and supposedly progressive analyses of Islam, Saba Mahmood challenges her readers to consider that we still have substantial work to do towards “a vision of coexistence that does not require making others[’] lifeworlds extinct or provisional.”152 The political dream of making others’ lifeworlds extinct has been around for a long time. Asad writes: “Lord Milner, undersecretary for finance during the British occupation of Egypt that began in 1882 [described] Britain’s imperial task in the country as follows: ‘Our task … ultimately involved new men.’”153 Milner was voicing what was then still a fairly new kind of racism, a new white supremacy, a new framing of white European superiority that had become a principal force guiding policy and practice in the 1800s. As discussed in chapter 4, this liberal and culturally determinist white supremacy held that people outside of Europe were just as backward, ignorant, and uncivilized as Europeans had believed they were in previous centuries, and as

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conservative white supremacists continued to believe; what was new was that liberals now thought individual colonized people could overcome their ignorance, savagery, and backwardness through European education, in both content and style. Critics of this new moment in white supremacy and its enduring legacies154 often discuss Thomas B. Macaulay’s 1835* “Minute on Indian Education” – Indian referring here to the Indian subcontinent. Macaulay is unflinchingly racist, alongside what many today might still consider liberal and non-racist judgments. This particular racism lives on today, often loudly proclaiming itself non-racist. It maintains that some people are superior and some inferior, and preserves the same broad stroke dividing lines – but peppered with upwardly mobile exceptions to the unchanged rule. But it’s framed as cultural determinism rather than biological determinism. Culture, rather than blood, makes a person superior or inferior, worthy of life and dignity or unworthy. According to this framework, if we extinguish inferior cultures or lifeworlds, we can thereby work towards racial equality. Macaulay can therefore write that “a single shelf of a good European library [i]s worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,”155 but he uses this quintessentially white/European supremacist assertion to advocate for the education of children in the Indian subcontinent with British-style lessons teaching English language, literature, and science. This proposal was only possible because he believed South Asians were capable of learning, which conservative racists of his day did not believe. He observes: There are in this very town natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language. I have heard the very question on which I am now writing discussed by native gentlemen with a liberality and an intelligence which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction.156

* This period was an intense time for the intersection of liberal individualism with the continuing moral economy distinguishing valued humans from those deemed worthless. Anne O’Connell in “Building Their Readiness for Economic Freedom” notes that the British New Poor Law and the abolition of slavery in Canada and other British colonies took place the previous year (1834). Both of these legislations held that people would need to be trained for their contingently granted economic freedom. Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe note, citing O’Connell, that over the next seventeen years, many institutional sites emerged in what is now called Canada and the United States, which aimed to transform various groups formerly imagined as irredeemably inferior, each site using the now normatively paired strategies of confinement and instrumental violence.

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Grounded in this new liberal white supremacy, Macaulay infamously advocates for an education directed at creating “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”157 As mentioned earlier, and as Tinker notes while discussing Macaulay, many things distinguish colonization of the Indian subcontinent from the settler colonialism that continues in the United States and Canada,158 but there’s nevertheless a resonance shared across sites of empire in relation to the political dream of making “new men,” as Lord Milner put it. This echoing refrain is the still-enduring political dream of a world filled with racially diverse peoples unified by their homogeneous English tastes, opinions, morals, and minds. Discussing Milner’s articulation of “new men,” Asad clarifies that his point “is not that colonial administrators lacked ‘humanitarian’ motives, but that they were guided by a particular concept of ‘humanness.’”159 The particularity of this “concept of ‘humanness’” has lived well beyond the 1800s – through 1920s forced assimilation, through the contemporary feminist discussions of Islam that Mahmood critiques, and through the continued apparent self-evidence in which Indigenous peoples can only have rights within the framework of the American or Canadian nation-state. The “new men” that were to be made in Canada and the United States were to fully adopt white European social mores and norms, leaving no trace of Indigenous lifeworlds behind. This political dream shapes encounters between settlers and Indigenous people, reinscribing the moral stratification separating the two over and over again. As an example, an Indian residential school employee in 1916 offered a delighted first-hand account of the genocide taking place all around her. She describes “a line of happy children going to church to sing Christmas carols in a village where 30 yrs ago the people were savages & the medicine man ran naked through the village in a frenzy.” She reflects: “That thought alone was uplifting.”160 In the same letter, she writes: “I wish you could see these Indian young men. They have earned good money at Swanson Bay & are all welldressed. Heliotrope cotton shirts with purple or red ties become them well. Many of them have been educated at Coqualeetza so that they speak good English & have some manners.”161 These letters excitedly and optimistically express the dream of extinguishing Indigenous lifeworlds. European religion, clothing, language, and mores: these things are imagined as solutions to Indigenous people’s struggles, rather than causes of their problems. Stephen’s “commonly accepted principles of European morality and politics”162 shaped the “care” that settlers imposed upon Indigenous people, which in turn shaped what encounters of care were more generally normatively becoming – all of which persists today.

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White Supremacy and Care Asad discusses various Enlightenment thinkers’ articulations of the “utility” of pain in discourses surrounding colonization, which he relates to the concurrent discourses surrounding the reform of penal imprisonment from a simple removal from society into a place where one is to be personally transformed. For example, Lord Cromer, speaking about the impact of British legislative changes on Egyptian peasants, said: “Civilization must, unfortunately, have its victims.”163 Asad notes that some forms of suffering were viewed as needing to be abolished, but these ills were “distinguished from suffering that was necessary to the process of realizing one’s humanity – that is, pain that was adequate to its end, not wasteful pain.”164 It is not that pain here was framed as politically or morally neutral; certain experiences of pain were rendered politically and morally beneficial. “Pain endured in the movement of becoming ‘fully human’ … was necessary, in the sense that there were social or moral reasons why it had to be suffered.”165 The reform of the prison at the time was an attempt to “construct through judicial punishment the most efficient means of reforming offenders and of guarding society’s interests.”166 Similarly, the shift from the Indian Wars to Indian boarding schools was not a move away from violence. It was an attempt to construct the most efficient means of advancing continued colonial dispossession within the day’s moral sensibilities. It is within the specific parameters of this moral framework, which framed certain uses of violence as a good thing, that white settlers held themselves accountable for their actions. According to the framework provided by Kant’s moral philosophy, most white people at the time would have believed that, yes, in fact, it would be a universally good thing if all people in their circumstances did exactly what they were doing – whatever their specific role in assimilation/ genocide. It’s not really a contradiction, then, that those running Indian residential schools were intentionally harming individual children and destroying entire lifeworlds, while at the same time believing that this course of action was in the best interest of the children, all Indigenous people, and all of humanity. It is difficult to reconcile this apparent contradiction. But the difficulty often obscures facing such ongoing contradictions today. People harm others all the time, sometimes without any specific intent to cause harm and sometimes imagining that certain kinds of harm might lead towards a greater good. It doesn’t have to be that imposed experiences are imagined to be painless, as long as their sufferings are imagined to serve a greater purpose. The words of those who staffed and directed Indian residential schools demonstrate that violence perpetration is exactly this complex. Margaret Butcher, a

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worker in one of the Indian residential schools whom we’ve cited earlier, wrote of the Haisla Nation: They are a slow, indolent, dirty people, bound very strongly by custom and superstition. Matron says the young folk who have been educated in this school and at Coqualeetza will have more chance when some half dozen of the old folks of the Village, who still hold fast to their ancient customs, are dead and one hopes that it is so. In all our bunch of 37 children there are only two who appear cunning and they are half-breeds. The others are all quite manageable and some of the little ones, the offspring of Christianised parents are lively and merry and quite smart at their work so that if they can be shielded from tuberculosis they will be an advance upon the present inhabitants.167

This and other passages are incredibly racist. They also convey a certain kind of warmth – such as describing some of the children as “lively and merry,” or her desire to protect them from tuberculosis rather than wishing them dead. Such contradictions are found throughout her letters. As another example, apparently in order to counter others’ racist assumptions, but in such a way that her own racism shines through, she writes: “Indians have the character of being ungrateful but they are not. They are very slow & undemonstrative but they give warm affection & I can tell you I prized that thoughtfulness on the part of my little scamps.”168 It might be easier to read her letters if she were either racist or caring. But she’s both. In a now classic study of such contradictions, Hannah Arendt wrote of Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the Nazi mass murder of Jewish people: “He ‘personally’ never had anything whatever against Jews; on the contrary, he had plenty of ‘private reasons’ for not being a Jew hater … Alas, nobody believed him.”169 Elsewhere, in trying to make sense of their own participation in violence against disabled Indigenous children in a social service setting, Chris writes that this “‘alas’ is very significant to Arendt’s project. I believe she’s concerned that Eichmann is being misrepresented for the sake of what we can learn from his example if what he says is true (and even if it is only partially true).”170 Neu and Therrien, resonantly, explore Duncan Campbell Scott as a colonial administrator and also as a poet who wrote sympathetically of Indigenous people.171 This warmth and sympathy didn’t prevent him from being one of the key figures in Canadian state genocide against Indigenous people, any more than Arendt invites readers to consider that Eichmann’s personal feelings about Jewish people somehow cancel out responsibility for his significant role in the Nazi Holocaust. Eichmann, Scott, Butcher – and one of us (Chris, having participated in the confinement and abusive restraint of Indigenous children

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in a residential facility)  – were responsible for doing exactly what we/they did. Eichmann and Scott were both what Guatemalan activists call “intellectual authors of genocide,” who governed its workings from a distance without much direct contact with those against whom they perpetrated such violence; Butcher and Chris were both “material authors,” who concretely carried out the day-to-day tasks of eradicating Indigenous lifeworlds.172 But it absolves the rest of us of all responsibility when any such perpetrators are framed as exceptional. The political and ethical project that mass violence demands is to unsettle our own situated innocence. Margaret Butcher’s published letters are edited and introduced by Mary-Ellen Kelm. In a review of the publication, Peggy Brock critiques Kelm for framing Margaret Butcher’s letters as racist and colonial. Brock counters that Kelm’s emphasis obscures Butcher’s “basic humanity and empathy.” Brock points out that Butcher “enjoys the children’s company and is thrilled when they express affection and concern for her.” She continues: “Butcher appreciates the quickness and intelligence of some of her charges, and even the good qualities of the old people, whose passing she believed represented progress.” Brock therefore maintains: “Butcher is certainly a product of her time, influenced by its prejudices and ideologies, but basic humanity and empathy still come through her letters.”173 The final sentence is instructive. First, saying “Butcher is a product of her time” is a way of framing historical racism that can minimize agency and the real complexity and diversity that always exists in any society in terms of different levels of humility, prejudice, complicity, and other qualities, as well as different degrees of willingness to participate in various kinds of violence. Then, there is the “but”: “but basic humanity and empathy still come through.” “Buts” in sentences like this one often serve to trump whatever comes before. There is some racism, understandable given her era, “but” her basic humanity comes through. To problematize this minimization of Butcher’s racism, we don’t have to meet Brock’s position with an opposing argument using a “but”-sentence to make the opposite claim (that is, she appreciates the intelligence of some children, “but” she’s racist). Perhaps the challenge is to notice that such debates – is it humanity or racism? – demonstrate the extent to which we are all products of our time, and our time has us framing people and events in this either/or way. As an alternative to such a back-and-forth, Asad says he’s interested in how colonizers were “guided by a particular concept of ‘humanness.’”174 Within this particular concept of humanness, “basic humanity and empathy” can coexist with white supremacy and genocidal political aspirations. Maybe a serious political task today is to work towards a world in which basic humanity and empathy would no longer accommodate genocide.

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As discussed earlier, Asad writes that the Enlightenment brought with it a “readiness to cause pain to those who are to be saved by being humanized.”175 He writes that secular liberal discourse uses “violence to connect an optimistic project of universal empowerment with a pessimistic account of human motivation in which inertia and incorrigibility figure prominently.”176 That is to say: a better world is potentially within our reach, but some people will never do the work they need to do to improve their lives unless they’re made to do so by people who know better. This discourse continues to shape normative helping professionals’ practices, with Indigenous peoples and beyond. As Carol Gill observes: I saw the people in power, the medical and the allied health professionals [which includes social workers] all too often talking about people with disabilities as manipulative, as needing instruction, and needing direction, and needing to be pushed. That was a big word. They needed to be pushed to do what was right for them. And of course what was right for them was being decided by people who were outside the immediate disability experience.177

The violences that are a central component of this discourse and its associated practices of care are fully compatible with warmth and affection. King describes this contradiction as a “racism that is cut with a genuine fondness for Natives and Native culture.”178 But his recognition of fondness and gentleness doesn’t prevent him from connecting this particular racism to genocide. It would seem that many of those who ran Indian residential schools believed they were doing the right thing and perhaps experienced warm feelings towards some of the children; this sentiment doesn’t take away from the fact that they were seriously damaging individual bodies, minds, and souls, as well as perpetrating genocide. What do we do when stated noble motives are found in accounts of the most horrendous events? Butcher’s “basic humanity” was guided by “a particular concept of ‘humanness.’”179 It is this concept of the human that needs to be challenged today, because it continues to guide professional helping. On an individual level, we can say that some Indian residential school staff were particularly cruel, while others sometimes advocated for the children even though they were punished for doing so. This story is true on an individual level, and it was materially significant on that level by concretely preventing or enacting individual acts of violence. In some cases, it would have made the difference between a child living or dying. Yet, it also obscures the degree to which entire societies were operating so as to make Canadian Indian residential schools, US Indian boarding schools, and removing the stolen generation in

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Australia seemingly nonviolent, benevolent, and educational. The engines of genocide are subtle, as Chrisjohn and Young put it.180 That many aspects of colonial violence have survived today’s widespread discrediting of Indian residential schools shows that we need to expand the scope of our critique, horror, and moral revulsion. We need to cultivate moral revulsion in relation to the revolting things that continue today. We should feel revolted not just by individualized phenomena like the fatal beating of Tina Fontaine, an Indigenous girl who ran away from foster care in Winnipeg, but also by the systems that resulted in the state taking her out of her community in the first place. Yet, tellingly, in response to the widespread politicization of Fontaine’s murder, Prime Minister Harper countered that this incident was entirely an individual issue, saying: “We should not view this as sociological phenomenon. We should view it as crime.”181 But only by understanding this particular tragedy in its social context can we transform the forces that denigrate Indigenous lives and lead to disproportionate rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls.* People are still abused, and lifeworlds are still destroyed, both outside and inside sites of professional “care.” How can we situate genocidal and benevolent aims in the same institution, the same act, the same mind, heart, or soul? How can we work towards understanding the significance of Amy Rossiter’s recognition that, while working at a homeless shelter, she was “giving soup and making class at the same time”?182

* To say that this murder was not “sociological” is to deny the impact of colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy in contributing to the parameters in which the perpetrator governed themself in killing Fontaine. Anti-racist activists and scholars have long pointed out that when people of colour enact violence, it is often framed as evidence of cultural or racial deficit, whereas when white people enact violence it is nearly universally framed as individual deficit and often as “mental illness.” Jin Haritaworn and Shaista Patel both complicate this distinction (which is not to say that they refute it altogether), showing that individualizing, too, can be mobilized in the service of white supremacy: Haritaworn by tracing how psychological labels denoting propensity to violence and lack of empathy are more likely to get applied to people of colour; Patel by exploring how Muslims held indefinitely by the United States government as “terror suspects” are framed as “mentally ill” rather than as politically motivated. Furthermore, the ways in which entire peoples are normatively held culpable for violence perpetration has been shown to be more complicated and site-specific than is often considered. By thinking through the particularities of anti-Black racism versus Orientalism, Alissa Trotz notes that Black people are more likely to be criminalized because Black Americans were frequently the subject of early sociology and criminology, whereas South Asian folks are more likely to have violence or other deficits attributed to their cultures, as a result of the ways that anthropology formed its gaze through studies of South Asian societies. She contends that these now normative racisms resulted from these and other white interventions, rather than having to do with any real and enduring differences between Black and South Asian populations.

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In the moment of giving soup to a homeless man, she recreated and sustained the moral and political lines between haves and have-nots, exalting those who already have and who can therefore be in a position to give without sacrifice. How can this framing help us to change the system that makes it so? And what difference does it make that this man was Indigenous? She was giving soup and furthering the normalization of Indigenous dispossession of land and sovereignty, as well as the continued moral denigration of Indigenous people, all in the same caring gesture. Thobani discusses child protection workers’ mass abduction of Indigenous children who were placed in white homes once Indian residential schools were abolished. She suggests that they must have been aware of the “level of control they had over Aboriginal families and communities” when deciding who got to stay home and who was removed. According to Thobani, they worked towards “digesting and reforming Aboriginality,” but this project was enabled through narratives of good intentions and care; the violence was “concealed in the characterization of their work as an expression of their innate human(e) sensibilities.” Yet, as she says, “no level of recourse to the good intentions” of social workers can undo the consequences of this work and the genocidal political dream animating it.183 Thobani isn’t dismissing social workers’ “caring” or “good intentions” as a ruse. She’s not framing them as a “devious form of manipulation” intended to secure power by the individuals involved, as in Alice Miller’s depiction of early childrearing guide authors.184 Rather, Thobani seems to be suggesting that their care and concern may have been honest-to-goodness care and concern. Yet, however benevolent in intent and self-understanding, that care and concern is rooted in white supremacy and settler colonial power. Resonantly, according to Patrick Johnston, one BC government employee “admitted that [during the Sixties Scoop] provincial social workers would, quite literally, scoop children from reserves on the slightest pretext,” alongside saying that “she and her colleagues sincerely believed that what they were doing was in the best interests of children.”185 Care, whether professional or otherwise, might very well be genuine, heart-felt, and sometimes even appreciated, but this characterization doesn’t disentangle it from the political dream in which it’s rooted. If that political dream is one in which others’ lifeworlds are to be extinguished for the good of all, then the violences of genocide and eugenics live on in even the gentlest and most necessary gestures of care. The crucial, tragic lesson of Indian residential schools for non-Indigenous settlers cannot be that some individuals did terrible things, however true that is. The take-away from this story has to be a much more fundamental questioning of those things that are still imagined as acting in others’ best interests or in the

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name of righteousness, justice, and other such valued commitments – whether in contexts easily recognizable as colonial or not. The most enlightened Enlightenment philosophy and the most progressive Progressive Era reformers believed that suffering could be transformative as a way of bringing about an initial “revolution in the disposition of the human being,”186 as Kant put it, and they believed that continued suffering was a suitable and effective means of further moral cultivation. It was this enlightened and progressive discourse that shaped Indian residential schools. Discussing aspects of the Indian residential schools that squarely targeted children’s Indigenous identity, such as cutting their hair, removing personal belongings from them, and changing their names, Churchill shows that these aspects of the Indian residential schools were explicitly intended to cause suffering. The resultant despair “rendered the already malleable children still more so … The schools operated under the mandate of effecting a ‘complete change’ in their charges.”187 He notes that survivors describe how being renamed with English names, in particular, left them with “an abiding sense that they’d ‘lost’ themselves and were thus ‘stranger[s,] with no possibilities’ for the future.”188 Many survivors’ testimonies support this sentiment. For example, Percy Ballantyne describes his first impression of the Birtle Indian Residential School in Manitoba: My first instinct was I want to get out of here. I don’t belong here … The first thing I noticed was that kid that looked at me straight in the eye … This kid’s spirit is not in the right place … That’s what really hurts me today, little kids, having the spirit of a prisoner. It stays with me. It never goes away.189

We can never forget the rapes, sewing needles through tongues, force-feeding of vomit, and other intensely violent interpersonal acts that white caregivers perpetrated against Indigenous children. But alongside our moral revulsion and political outrage about such acts, we also need to remember that every one of these specific acts took place within the context of a genocidal political dream, in which all Indigenous children would ideally be placed in an institutional site that would have an analogous effect on them as prisons were known to have on inmates. This orchestrated harm was part of the plan. It was not a mistake. It was not a secret. It was not that many individuals who happened to work in these places just happened to be particularly cruel. Individual cruelty was enabled and supported by the cruelty of the system itself, of the society itself, which aimed to eradicate Indigeneity. The schools have closed, but their dream lives on.

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Conclusion Colonial assimilation/genocide continues. Just as individual acts of violence in Indian residential schools need to be held within the context that enabled and supported such violence to be so common and for its perpetrators to have almost total impunity, so too must today’s normative or disproportionate violences be so contextualized. For example, Indigenous women within Canadian borders are about 4.5 times more likely to be victims of homicide than nonIndigenous women. Over 1,000 Indigenous women and girls were confirmed murdered by the police in Canada between 1980 and 2012.190 However, activists estimate that the number is much higher, with the total number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls surpassing 4,000.191 Furthermore, Indigenous women are three times more likely to be subjected to interpersonal violence than non-Indigenous women.192 All of this disproportionate exposure to violence is best understood as grounded in long-standing and continuous moral economies that exalt white people and settlers while denigrating Indigenous peoples and, inextricably, also exalt men while denigrating women, as colonialism and patriarchy interlock. As Dian Million points out,193 moral economies of transphobia also interlock with the moral denigration of Indigeneity, so that Two-Spirit and trans Indigenous folks are also vastly disproportionately targeted by both interpersonal and state violence.* What’s more, the reporting of these figures is tainted by colonialism at every step of the process – leading to the likely dramatic underreporting by police. From failure to take seriously crimes against Indigenous people, to refusing to log missing persons cases, to classifying murders as suicides, it is widely believed that the actual number of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people are considerably higher than official numbers suggest. Smith writes: “Because Indian bodies are [constructed as already] ‘dirty,’ they are considered sexually violable and ‘rapable,’ and the rape of bodies that are considered inherently impure or dirty simply does not count … [T]he history of mutilation of Indian bodies, both living and dead, makes it clear that Indian people are not entitled to bodily integrity.”194 Indigenous people’s lack of entitlement to bodily integrity is shown just as strongly in various state practices as well.

* While there are two more long-standing acronyms around this crisis – MMIW (missing and murdered Indigenous women) and MMIWG (missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls) – more recently people have begun adopting and discussing MMIWGTS (missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit). This addition is a clear indication of the understanding of the specific and targeted violences that Two-Spirit people face.

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Indigenous people are more likely to die while in police custody in Canada than any other group, as Razack discusses. This otherwise blatant example of colonial violence is obscured by its interlocking with disablism, through which Indigenous deaths are depoliticized and attributed to chronic disease, mental illness, “excited delirium syndrome,” or alcoholism, even when evidence suggests or clearly demonstrates police violence before the person’s death.195 A similar dynamic exists in contemporary colonial child apprehensions. Indigenous children can be apprehended and confined to white residential institutions outside of their community, without this action seeming outrageously colonial and continuous with Indian residential schooling, due to the individualizing and depoliticizing work accomplished through their individual diagnoses.196 Callow documents the interlocking of disablism and colonialism in US child welfare, rationalized due to either children’s or parents’ disabilities: “Despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, parents with intellectual disabilities lose custody of their children 40 percent to 80 percent of the time, and parents with psychiatric disabilities lose custody of their children 70 percent to 80 percent of the time.”197 Even though the Indian Child Welfare Act attempts to prevent Indigenous children from being taken from their communities, it doesn’t overrule state laws. And “thirty-seven states include parental disability as a ground for removal of a child and termination of parental rights.”198 This state law should be considered alongside the fact that Indigenous people have higher rates of disability than any other racial group.199 Once taken from their families, it is “preferred” that Indigenous children be placed with extended family members. Yet, “a child’s disability is commonly cited as a ‘good cause’ exception to the preferred placement.” Furthermore, “extended family members with disabilities suffer the same discrimination as disabled parents and are often denied placement of the child based on their disabilities.” Callow notes that because “extended family members’ rights are more tentative and the issue so little understood, this discrimination goes legally unchallenged.” She describes a case in which an Indigenous child was to be placed with his grandmother after being removed from his mother, which was justified by her intellectual disability. Yet, child protection workers had “concerns” about the grandmother’s “capacity to care for him considering her recent broken arm” and her arthritis.200 Callow invites us to consider that the workers would not have been so concerned if the grandmother was white. A broken arm and arthritis would typically not have been brought into the calculation of capacity to care. At the same time, their white supremacist concern may have had no means to disqualify the grandmother’s capacity without the interlocking disablist policies they mobilized to articulate their concerns.

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Colonialism also goes beyond such cumulative interpersonal instances between humans. Across the Americas, resources are extracted from Indigenous lands without community consent, frequently with negative consequences to the community and little or no benefit to them. Indigenous people frequently live in poverty, have inadequate housing,201 inadequate water,202 and again are much more likely to be disabled.203 On this last point, the politically crucial project of disability pride and the refusal to situate disabled bodies and minds as abnormal or less valuable – which they’re not – needs to be held in tension with the structural conditions through which some groups of people are more likely to become disabled in various ways, and are likely to experience “slow death” as a result of these conditions, as a direct consequence of systemic violence.204 Such examples are not simply legacies of colonialism; they are colonialism today. The desire to assimilate Indigenous people continues. The 1969 White Paper under the leadership of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and presented by Jean Chrétien, who later became prime minister himself, worked towards “recreating ‘Indians’ as ‘Canadians,’” according to Kiera Ladner and Michael Orsini.205 The Liberal government at the time articulated this policy as a measure “that would lead gradually away from different status to full social, economic and political participation in Canadian life,”206 echoing earlier initiatives that imagined total assimilation as the only possible endpoint for Indigenous peoples. Tellingly, in proposing this policy, the federal government described status Indians as “handicapped” because they were not able to fully engage in the economy,207 echoing back to the federal government’s linking of handicap and economic self-sufficiency surrounding the First World War. The White Paper also proposed that treaties be “equitably ended,”208 and, according to Ladner and Orsini, it sought to continue “the process of civilizing and assimilating or ‘municipalizing’ First Nations governance.”209 While the White Paper was unable to be enacted because of “swift, organized, and strongly critical” resistance from Indigenous communities,210 the Canadian government has continued to maintain assimilationist policies. The federal government has worked to municipalize reserves, which Ladner and Orsini describe as “another assimilationist strategy for Indian bands that are ‘civilized’ enough to assume responsibility for their own affairs and to do so using a municipal form of government” – which is a Euro-Canadian form of government.211 Municipalization includes the privatization of collectively held lands, carrying on the nineteenth and twentieth century priorities of both the Friends of the Indian and the Indian Affairs Department. Municipalization is therefore an assault on Indigenous government and land, and is also an assault on Indigenous lifeworlds and identity.

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It is important to keep in mind that it was not the Conservative Party, or its predecessor the Progressive Conservative Party, that put forward the White Paper or a 2003 plan for the municipalization of reserves; it was the Liberal Party.212 Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered a historic speech at the United Nations in 2017, where he acknowledged that “treaties … have not been fully honoured or implemented.”213 Of course, he used the past tense, separating himself from past prime ministers – mirroring Harper’s Indian residential school apology. He then acknowledged the present-day realities: lack of drinking water, high suicide rates, high rates of violence against Indigenous women, saying that this situation “is the legacy of colonialism.” However, he then said: “The good news is that … [we have] a rare and precious opportunity to act,” which simply isn’t true – we always have an opportunity to act. He made this speech between the third and fourth order from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to the government to stop discriminating against Indigenous children,214 and just months before one of his ministers would threaten to use the army against Indigenous people protesting a pipeline.215 Colonialism is an active and ongoing process. The liberal individualism often taken for granted among ruling class white settler nationals and Europeans is not a universal phenomenon. As in other colonial spaces, Indigenous people in Canada and the United States have long been targeted to adopt this liberal individual version of self-understanding. “As U.S. Indian Commissioner George Maypenny put it as early as 1856, for assimilation to occur, it was necessary that Indians learn to say ‘I’ instead of ‘we,’ ‘me’ instead of ‘us,’ ‘mine’ instead of ‘ours.’”216 Individualist world views were imposed upon Indigenous peoples in an effort to erase Indigenous understandings of community, nation, spirituality, and relationship with land.* There are also further continued assaults on Indigenous identity. The Canadian and American governments continue to grant themselves authority to determine who is a legal Indian. In Canada, Linc Kesler points out: “Even though many Aboriginal people viewed the entire system of governmentconferred status with wide skepticism as a colonial incursion into Indigenous identity, possession of a status card, ironically, is still often the ultimate arbiter in identity debates and challenges.”217 In the United States, “the government defines whether someone is a ‘real’ Indian or not” through the allotment of “blood quantum.” According to Orrin Lewis, “They’re just trying to see how close we are or are not to white.”218

* Also, all of these things are interconnected within many Indigenous lifeworlds and not necessarily understood to be separate, as we have listed them here.

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Although she’s referencing Maori experiences in New Zealand, Linda Tuhiwai Smith could as easily be writing of the United States or Canada when she notes that “legislated identities … were all worked out arbitrarily (but systematically) to serve the interests of the colonizing society.”219 The logic behind what Neu and Therrien discuss as the bureaucratic solution to the “Indian problem” a century ago continues today.220 King explains current regulations governing who is and isn’t legally understood to be Indigenous in Canada today through the regulation of Indian status: “Six-one Indians [so called because of the section of the Indian Act that applies to them] are status and, for legal purposes, are considered to be full-bloods even if they aren’t, while six-two Indians are status and for legal purposes considered to be half-bloods even if they aren’t.” Long story short, if two six-twos have children, their children will never have status. This rule is termed the “two-generation cut-off clause.” King notes that legal or status Indians are disappearing as a result of this legislation, because about half of all status Indians tend to marry either non-status Indians or non-Indigenous people. At this rate, there could be no legal Indians left in Canada by as early as 2043. “We just won’t have any Indians. Legally that is,” says King.221 This projected end to “legal Indians” means that nobody would be legally entitled to Indian land. In 1914, Duncan Campbell Scott named the “great forces of intermarriage and education”222 as the two primary means towards the vision of the eradication of Indigeneity. He famously articulated this vision a few years later in a 1920 speech while advocating for compulsory enfranchisement in front of the House of Commons: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem … That is my whole point. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department and that is the whole object of this Bill.”223 Although the specific injustices associated with compulsory enfranchisement and the Indian residential school system have been abolished, Scott’s genocidal political dream is alive and well; again, King estimates that by 2043, the policies currently operating in Canada could result in no more legal Indians. Lewis describes a similar situation in the United States, although with different rules and language. He describes this system as a colonial imposition: “Before white people came here, the tribes all mixed around a lot, and it didn’t make anyone’s culture disappear.” Colonial understandings of Indigeneity, he notes, mean “a person can get more white, but not more Indian.” Lewis asserts: “Personally, I would rather see five non-Indians get Indian status than one Indian be denied it. Not all Indians agree with that, but it’s what I think. The white politicians, of course, want just the opposite.”224 “Of courses” are often telling. He adds the “of course” in the last sentence to convey that this statement is obviously true. He

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assumes that those accessing his website will readily agree it is self-evident that white politicians desire an end to Indian status. It means something that he can write that sentence with the assumption that people reading it will all know it to be obvious. It means something like this: as is widely recognized by those likely to find themselves reading about blood quantum, white politicians as a whole would like to see an end to Indigenous legal identity. White politicians still want what Duncan Campbell Scott articulated a century ago, and it may be – as Flanagan, quoted earlier, suggests – that the majority of non-Indigenous people want assimilation and integration too. Perhaps most people in the United States and Canada desire an end to Indigenous people as a distinct entity. But that doesn’t make this desire and its projects any less genocidal. Normative violence is no less violent simply because it’s widespread and popularly sanctioned. Yet, up against such normative white supremacist violence, Indigenous peoples have long resisted assimilation/genocide. Indigenous people and nations resisted Indian residential schools – preventing many children from being stolen from their homes and then resisting the schools in various ways when children had been taken, both from within and outside of their walls – and they also refused enfranchisement.225 Razack cites Audra Simpson’s account that many Indigenous political efforts “amount to a politics of refusal, the refusal ‘to stop being themselves.’ As a ‘political and ethical stance’ … refusal is a direct engagement with a colonial legal system.”226 From historic flashpoints like the Red River Resistance, where Métis people fought to protect their culture and communities,227 and the Indian Wars or anti-colonial wars,228 to Kahniakenhaka (Mohawk) resistance of the imposition of the band council system,229 to times when those engaging in Indigenous cultural practices and keeping Indigenous knowledges “went underground” to protect those practices and knowledges,230 Indigenous people have resisted colonialism in countless ways. These traditions of resistance continue: from the early Mi’kmaq resistance of the English occupation of Halifax,231 through the Hopi elders imprisoned at Alcatraz for refusing to let their children be taken from their community and the thirty-five other Indigenous people incarcerated there during the Indian Wars, through to the eighteen-month Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz Island starting in 1969232 and the organized Indigenous resistance to the White Paper in Canada the very same year, through to the armed standoff at Kanesatake in 1990 to protect sacred Indigenous land,233 the Esgenoopetitj fight for fishing rights a decade later,234 the many rail and/or road blockades* engaged

* These acts of resistance include the longest running blockade in Canadian history at Grassy Narrows and the blockade of railroad lines and Highway 401 by the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte.

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intermittently or continuously,235 Idle No More,236 the water protectors fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock,237 efforts to secure Indigenous rights by working with the United Nations and speaking out about abuses in Indian residential schools,238 and the intentional preservation and practice of Indigenous traditions and knowledges.239 Given the political contexts explored throughout this book, it can also be resistance when people are non-compliant with social work.240 For example, Brenda LeFrançois recalls, from her time as a young social worker, an Indigenous mother’s response to another social worker’s suggestion. Jennifer, the other social worker, advised the mother to take her adolescent daughter to the United States where she could have her involuntarily committed to a mental health facility due to different laws than those operative in Canada. The mother countered: “But Terra … is just hanging out with her friends on the reserve and getting into trouble.” “I don’t want her to get into trouble anymore but …” ‘Mom’ continues to inform Jennifer and me that she would never do anything to disrespect her daughter; she would not lie to her. She would never kidnap her daughter and admit her into a mental hospital against her will. She is getting angry now, talking faster. She is questioning what kind of help we have on offer. She is questioning our ethics, our humanity, our personal and professional integrity. She orders us to leave her home; she wants us out now, out of her life now.241

Whatever Jennifer may have felt or believed in that moment, surely many people today would read this story and be able to immediately understand that the mother is the only person who was doing the work of “child protection.” She was protecting Terra from involuntary psychiatric confinement, from institutionalization in a colonial/white facility (within the legacy of Indian residential schooling), and from “child protective services.” Like this mother, herself a graduate of the child protection system, many Indigenous people refuse to comply with social workers’ requirements. Following Simpson’s articulation of a “politics of refusal” discussed earlier, refusal can be a powerful site of resistance. One challenge for social workers, then, is to respond to non-compliance as “resistance” in the politicized sense rather than in the psychologized sense.242 The more senior social worker in LeFrançois’s story enacts the moralizing judgment and shaming that flows so easily from believing we know what’s best for others. Just as it’s important in this story that the mother is a graduate of the child welfare system, it’s also important that Jennifer had been her social worker:

Assimilation/Genocide 319 Jennifer doesn’t budge. She does not move in her chair. Her face becomes red, red with anger more than embarrassment. “Let me tell you something …,” begins her aggressive response to ‘mom’s’ resistance. “… I am not just a social worker, I am also a mom.” She is offended and shouting. “If Terra was my child, I would have a responsibility to her not just as a social worker but also as a mom.” “I would need to do everything in my power to keep her safe, to do what I had to do to keep her from harm.” She is livid, defending herself. “I’ll tell you something: I don’t care one bit about her rights, about being respectful. I care about keeping her safe.” She stands up, bringing her physicality into the verbal tirade, and pointing into ‘mom’s’ face: “You have a responsibility as a mom. Nothing else matters. You are responsible for protecting her.” She turns from her and walks out of the house.243

LeFrançois invites us to consider how terrible Jennifer’s actions were here: how colonial; how genocidal. She also invites us to consider her own silence, situated as professional white witness to the entire encounter. She knew that what Jennifer was suggesting was racist and sanist. Yet, she did nothing. As King repeatedly challenges his readers, we can let ourselves journey through the discomfort of LeFrançois’s story: “Don’t say in years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.”244 Jennifer Clarke describes resistance among Black mothers and youth she interviewed about their involvement with child protective services. The moms “utilized various strategies of resistance, challenge, and cooperation, depending on how they perceived the workers, how they felt the workers perceived them, how they were treated by previous workers, and how they perceived the risk of their children’s being removed.” Clarke shares the example of “one youth [who] told how she ‘liked workers that are young because they let you get away with more. So whenever they changed the worker and give some older person, I would complain until they change her again. That’s how I survived in the system.’”245 These behaviours are often denigrated as manipulation, duplicitousness, and scheming – but workers who desire to practice anti-oppressively or critically can’t let themselves get caught up in assuming that social workers and social work systems know best; that assumption is grounded in the violent and imperialist ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. Every one of the varied but resonant practices and discourses we discuss in this and the previous chapter were resisted by the populations subjected to them: poor people resisted and defied rehabilitative attempts by charity organization societies;246 during the First World War, some injured soldiers resisted rehabilitation programs;247 queer liberation struggles are both anti-assimilation and antirehabilitation;248 and disabled people have frequently critiqued rehabilitation

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ideologies and practices249 – defiantly articulating pride in disability rather than the shame and desire to get rid of disability that rehabilitation invites, relies upon, and perpetuates.250 The diverse lifeworlds indigenous to the land now called Canada and the United States, like the many qualities and conditions represented by the terms “disability” and “queer,” and like poor people’s ways of living together and strategies of survival in the face of structural violence, all represent lifeworlds that have lessons of value for the rest of the world, rather than ways of being human that would be best eradicated. Moving away from still normative attempts to eliminate Indigenous and other denigrated lifeworlds would be a shift away from the prevailing discourse of liberal multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, in practice, is the tolerance of cultural diversity only so long as no difference is disruptive of already existing structures of white supremacy and colonialism. It therefore aims to eradicate any differences that do not align within its regime.251 Looking at how Indigenous practices such as sharing circles or restorative justice get taken up by mainstream practices and institutions is a prime example of this orientation. They are not understood as alternative ways of approaching a phenomenon; they are instead fit into an existing framework that derives its practices and rationales from European and white settler precedents, discourses, and structures. A similar phenomenon shapes both Canadian and American articulations of policy on persons with disabilities (in their language) in which people with disabilities are celebrated up to the point where “reasonableness” is considered to end.252 Working towards disability justice,253 in contrast, would entail dismantling disabling notions of reasonable and excessive, normal and abnormal.* Likewise, especially in Canada, LGB (lesbian, gay, bisexual) people have been increasingly embraced, and rights have been granted to those whose lives closely resemble heterosexual norms. But liberation struggles would also mean liberating the 2S (Two-Spirit), the Q (queer), the T (trans), the I (intersex), and the A (asexual), including gender variant and genderqueer people, and working to eliminate heterosexism and cisism. It would also mean working against site-specific interlockings of class, race, and disability with heterosexism and cisism to address continued structural issues such as police killing and harassing (usually poor, racialized) people, especially trans women of colour. It would ensure that those who are directly impacted by these violences remain centred in the leadership of these movements, rather than displaced by efforts towards normalizing rights and respectabilities.254

* We return to the importance of the disability justice movement in the concluding chapter.

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In all of these arenas, one thing at stake is whether or not the “normal,” “dominant,” or “point of reference” is unsettled and dislodged – a world in which trans folks are no longer measured against a “normal” gender binary, disabled folks against a nondisabled norm, or Indigenous and racialized folks against a white one – or, for that matter, a world in which racialized and Indigenous trans and/or disabled folks are no longer measured against a white trans and/ or disabled norm. These norms are not materially real – it is no more normal to be nondisabled than it is to be disabled, or to be white than to be part of any other race. These norms are merely a product of discourse, an aspect of power. Working for justice means destabilizing these points of reference and refusing to measure people against them. It’s not that there’s no place for whiteness, nondisability, cisgender lives, or opposite-sex love and/or sex. Nothing’s wrong with these things. But nobody should be measured against any such particularities as if they’re a golden standard. There’s nothing antiwhite or anti-straight about the politically crucial gesture to reconfigure how we think about difference so that nothing remains a privileged point at the centre to which everything else is compared. In 2013, the Ku Klux Klan in Harrison, Arkansas, sponsored a billboard that said, “Anti-Racist Is a Code Word for Anti-White.” In the middle of the night, some folks took it upon themselves to intervene in their social world – the fundamental meaning of social work, as we’ve suggested – and they graffitied the billboard to read, instead, “Anti-Racist Is a Code Word for Love.”255 This chapter and the previous one have explored a variety of practices targeting a wide range of diverse embodiments that are gathered together under the umbrella of disability and, likewise, a widely varied number of geographical and cultural contexts in which local Indigenous peoples were targeted for colonial assimilation. Although each site, each violent strategy, each specific rationalization, and countless other details make it important not to conflate any one of these injustices with any other, holding them in tension and resonance with one another may help to expose a fundamentally violent discourse shaping our society and its normalized practices and institutions such as social work. Fundamental to this discourse is the notion that some lifeworlds and some persons are more valuable than others. Starting from this basic premise, innumerable specific details of what makes a person worthwhile or not can be generated, and countless practices can be honed to solve the problem of so many diverse deficiencies. Whether because of race, nation, or status, seeing or hearing things others don’t, gender identity, sexual desire, brownness, Blackness, blindness, deafness, hyperactivity, anxiety, hopelessness, missing limb, limp, lisp, limp wrist, or countless other characteristics and experiences long considered of no moral,

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political, or social value, organized professional social work and the white settler nation-state have largely approached interventions into the social world through “the unexamined implication that the lives of [those receiving intervention or assistance] needed improvement.”256 But what if assistance and other kinds of social intervention could be approached outside of the moral imperative to improve others’ lives? What would we have then?

7 What If It Isn’t Getting Better? What Do We Do Then?

The Significance of Implicating Ourselves in Interlocking Legacies of Violence The legacies we’ve traced in earlier chapters carry on today. They create the possibilities within which both professional and non-professional social working takes place; they shape social workers’ sense of purpose, sense of self, and sense of responsibility. We need to work for fundamental social and political change. Alongside these efforts, we can’t imagine that we’re innocent of these legacies, moral economies, and violences just because we’re critical of them. In this chapter, we demonstrate that things aren’t so clearly improving. We return to the gap between what’s normatively said and what’s normatively done, and we advocate that closing this gap implies a few things. It means rigorously acknowledging the everyday violences and moral degradations we perpetrate and are complicit in; and it also means working vigorously to resist these violences and degradations. We end by discussing several contemporary political movements’ alternative operationalizations of the varied activities that make up social working, suggesting that these movements offer valuable resources for all of us in pursuit of social justice. Is It Getting Better? As we have demonstrated throughout this book, histories like the standard account of social work make narratives of progress easy to believe. The standard account of the birth of social work starts abruptly with dire poverty in urban centres (as if they’d existed as such forever), moves on to unorganized volunteer helping, through to the new coordination of relief, and finally arrives at modern

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social work education and professional legitimization, including centralized accreditation standards for its schools and the formal oversight and discipline of its members. According to the standard account, while individualistic social workers like Mary Richmond honed the necessary but inadequate relief work of feeding, clothing, and housing families in immediate need, radical social workers like Jane Addams fought for the rights of women, workers, poor people, and people of colour. And while professional casework and counselling became increasingly effective, political progress was achieved in women’s rights, labour protection, the welfare state, and civil rights. It seems obvious that things have improved. However, the overarching framing of history as straightforward improvement only makes sense if many ongoing injustices of capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, disablism, white supremacy, and colonialism are left out of the picture. The prejudice of progress perpetuates the myth that things are getting better through the gradual implementation of social reforms. A critique of the prejudice of progress has been woven throughout this book, and here we underscore it again, referring to the contemporary context in which social working takes place. Without a doubt, things are different from a century or two ago. Things inevitably change, which is a cause for hope. However, in terms of the changes that have happened, life has gotten worse for some people. For many, some aspects of life are worse while others are better. The standard account of social work effaces this complexity, partly by focusing on white social work with white poor people. Many of these poor people were Irish, Jewish, Eastern European, or Southern European immigrants who – as populations – were discursively denigrated and materially disadvantaged as non-preferred races a century ago, but have now been folded into the exalted category of whiteness.1 The normative progress narrative is also enabled by the standard account’s starting point. The large, chaotic, and crowded urban centres that settlements and the Charitable Organization Society (COS) responded to were relatively new phenomena, rather than having been part of the human condition since forever. They were a product of major social transformations that internally displaced long-standing community practices throughout Europe and were imposed upon the rest of the world through imperialism and colonialism. Taking all these histories into account, the gradual, real, and important gains in rights for Indigenous, queer, Black, female, racialized, working class, unemployed, and disabled people, over the last century or so, only manifest as clear-cut progress if we start the story after the effects of the many violent displacements of European imperialism and capitalist industrialization had already taken place. If we consider the resultant crowded, unsanitary, and chaotic cities instead as a collective “rock bottom” experience, then across-theboard progress is not so clear cut. What’s more, some of these histories only

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suggest generalizable progress if policy shifts in the last few decades are also left out. For several decades now, neoliberal policies have eroded social welfare gains that had previously been won. Contemporary social working takes place within a neoliberal context, and neoliberalism is significantly continuous with earlier liberal discourse and practices we’ve discussed, such as the instrumentalization of violence through poverty-level welfare provisions. While always inadequate as a solution to the injustices of capitalism and interlocking oppression, state social welfare lessened the devastation that capitalism causes in so many lives. Between the Second World War and the 1970s, the welfare state expanded, but this trend has since reversed. Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney began implementing neoliberal policies with full force in the 1980s. These initiatives were then entrenched in the 1990s, not only by other Republicans and Conservatives, but just as relentlessly by Democrats, Liberals, and New Democrats.2 Even selfidentifying progressive parties, like Ontario’s Liberal government, have enacted austerity agendas while claiming to promote social justice.3 Consequently, over the last few decades, things have become much worse for many poor people and are continuing to get worse. Anti-poverty activists in Ontario estimate that people on welfare, alongside losses to inflation, have lost 55 per cent of their real income since 1995.4 Less than half the spending power compared to twenty years ago for rent, groceries, and other expenses hardly counts as progress. Around this same time, American food stamps were cut from $0.80 to $0.66, and many people lost their social assistance benefits entirely.5 Workfare programs, in which welfare recipients are forced to work to receive all or part of their benefits – often at sub-minimum wage levels and without labour protections – were also introduced in jurisdictions in both countries through neoliberal welfare reforms.6 As neoliberalism becomes more entrenched, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing. Since the 2008 economic crisis, the gap between rich and poor has grown bigger.7 The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population now owns half of the world’s wealth.8 In the United States, the twenty richest people own as much as the poorest half of the country, and the hundred wealthiest households own as much as its entire Black population combined.9 In Canada, the richest 10 per cent own about half of the entire country’s wealth (48 per cent). Things are improving materially for the richest, but the prejudice of progress only rings true more generally if you leave out many details. This inequality and its masquerade is the context of social working today: people frequently hear about how life is getting better for everyone, and yet their everyday lives may look very different from this pervasive myth. What’s more, liberal individualist framings attribute worsening struggles to individual deficits,

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rather than understanding them as continuities in both moral economies and structural violence. The gap between imagined across-the-board progress and real people’s ongoing struggles has been rigorously critiqued in relation to recent gains made in LGBT rights.* These critiques resonate with many of the central concerns of this book: the dangers of individualism, the prejudice of progress, the centring of whiteness, the importance of interlocking oppression analyses, and so on. These concerns have often been raised through a critique of the popular campaign “It Gets Better.”10 This slogan and its associated campaign imagine it inevitable that LGBT kids’ lives improve after high school.11 However, Morgan Bassichis and Dean Spade show that “the fantasy of life ‘getting better’” reflects the experience of only the most otherwise exalted LGBT folks insofar as it “imagines ‘violence’ as individual acts that ‘bad’ people do to ‘good’ people who need protection and retribution from state protectors … rather than situating bodily terror as an everyday aspect of a larger regime of structural racialized and gendered violence … targeted at black people at the population level.”12 For some LGBT youth (especially white, gender normative, nondisabled, ruling class folks) it does get better, but many others get left behind, and for many it only gets worse. For those adults whose lives became safer and easier after high school, it’s easy to assume that this pattern is universally true. But such generalizations based on limited (and relatively exalted) experiences are dangerous to impose upon others. According to the It Gets Better Project (IGBP), which is sponsored by a large bank,13 the legalization of gay marriage is key evidence that “it gets better.”14 But the legalization of marriage does very little for those whose queerness interlocks with other arenas of political oppression and moral denigration. Against Equality, a queer anti-marriage group, argues that in this system in which the gap between rich and poor is growing, “gay marriage increases economic inequality by perpetuating a system which deems married beings more worthy of the basics like health care and economic rights.”15 Spade therefore argues that marriage and other normative equality rights are ways that the mainstream LGBT movement has adopted “trickle down rights” – rights that benefit the most exalted, with the flawed assumption that this advance will then “trickle down” to others. Rather than working for increased rights for those with the

* Our use of LGBT here rather than the broader 2SLGBTQIA is intentional, as these rights are obtained through individual and normalizing processes that are not extended to the most marginalized people, sexualities, and sex/gender identities. Similarly, we do the same later in our discussion of the It Gets Better Project, as it expressly targets the LGBT population.

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most, Spade advocates that struggles should work towards “bottom up justice”* by centring efforts to improve the lives of those with the least.16 Basic economic and social justice should be made accessible to all, and shouldn’t require the performance of white, ruling class, assimilative homonormativity. Some other examples the IGBP gives for how things have supposedly gotten better in the last five years include federal court judge nominations for openly gay people; the acceptance of openly gay people into the US military;† and It Gets Better videos made by celebrities, politicians (including Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton), and employees of a number of corporations that have been linked to human rights and labour violations and/or environmental devastation, including Google, Eli Lilly, Apple, Dell, General Motors, Nokia, and GlaxoSmithKline.17 Concerns about these corporations’ labour or environmental exploitations are glossed over or forgotten when they’re celebrated for denouncing homophobia. Furthermore, all of these indicators of progress only make a difference to some individuals. They’re evidence that some LGBT folks have achieved upward mobility within systems of imperial and structural violence, which has the effect of reinforcing those systems. Earlier, we discussed denigrated groups achieving a “toehold on respectability” that leaves systems of interlocking oppression largely unchanged.18 When this respectability is gained through entry to the military or the criminal justice system, it means being directly implicated in violence against those left behind. It means shooting, bombing, and imprisoning them. It’s not getting better for those who are shot, bombed, and imprisoned. It’s also said to have gotten better due to an increase in LGBT representation among prison guards. But for an ever-increasing number of prisoners over the last few decades,19 often in cramped and terrible living conditions, it isn’t getting better.‡ For sweatshop workers in companies that support the IGBP and have

* John Holloway offers a critique of “bottom up” organizing because it does not inherently reject the hierarchy itself. While his intervention is an important one, we think that bottom up organizing remains useful and does not necessarily result in the perpetuation of injustice or hierarchy – although it is important to be cognizant of this danger. † These videos also cited the acceptance of trans people in the military as an example. However, since that time, President Donald Trump has banned most trans people from serving in the military, provoking protests for (certain and specific) trans (respectability) rights. ‡ According to Roy Walmsley’s World Prison Population List (11th edition), at the end of October 2015 the United States had the second highest rate of imprisonment of any country in the world (surpassed only by Seychelles) and the highest rate among countries deemed “first world,” developed, or Global North by a very considerable margin – about one-third higher than Russia and well over twice as high as almost all other countries in Europe or North America.

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been supported in their exploitative labour practices by increased neoliberal trade deregulation for several decades,20 it isn’t getting better. For LGBTQIA folks in Afghanistan who are under occupation by (a now higher percentage of LGB) US troops,* it isn’t getting better. And for many 2SLGBTQIA people of colour, poor people, sex workers, disabled people, and Two-Spirit people, and for those who fall into any interlocking combination of those groups, it isn’t getting better – or at least it isn’t getting better across contexts or consistently. It gets better as a general tendency in your life only if you individually achieve upward mobility within systems of capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, and interlocking oppression. If what you need is fundamental, sweeping, and systemic change to achieve safety, freedom, and comfort, it isn’t getting better. Furthermore, it has been importantly noted that these civil rights gains have taken place alongside “the war on terror.”21 In this context, queer gains of relative exaltation and respectability have been made in a context that makes homonormative, and usually white, gays and lesbians stand in for Western values of tolerance and nonviolence in what amounts to a devaluing of Muslims and other non-Western bodies and identities.† As Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kunstman, and Silvia Posocco write: “Moral economies … engender differential and differentiating mourning where only some deaths are acknowledged and constituted as grievable.”22 Although not discrete from queerness and other forms of structural violence and moral denigration, a focus on anti-Black racism also highlights the limitations of the prejudice of progress. Again, details can all be true without painting an accurate or complete picture. It’s widely held as self-evident among

* According to CBS News, the number of US troops in Afghanistan reached its highest point in 2011 at 101,000. The US military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy for cis LGB people was lifted that same year. † As an illustration of this point, the World Net Daily is profoundly homophobic, as can be seen by simply perusing the titles of the articles it publishes by Bob Unruh; he places “gay” in scare quotes and spins tales of sinister “gay” plots, plans, and agendas. Yet, within this same far-right publication, Diana Lynne’s “Littlest Victims Largely Overlooked” discusses the tragedy of the death of three-year-old David and his two dads during the 11 September 2001 attacks. She mourns the men as loving fathers, even though the publication otherwise reviles and denigrates queerness. What purpose is served by their being queer-positive here, given their customary homophobia? Is this article not actually humanizing the little boy and his fathers but rather serving to objectify them for the political end of justifying the American killing of Afghani three-year-olds, given that it explicitly questions whether any Afghanis – however young – could be legitimately called “innocent victims”? What does it mean to publicly enact the mourning of the loss of David and his dads in a context that would never otherwise fight against homophobia, heterosexism, and heteronormativity?

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white people that the United States and Canada allowed but then abolished slavery;* that racism was really bad after that, but not as bad as it had been under slavery; and that things have slowly progressed ever since. Contemporary child apprehension, murder by police, poverty, and imprisonment rates among Black people are normatively understood to have nothing to do with these now long-discontinued atrocities. Yet, the normative devaluation of Black lives has persisted well beyond the abolitions of slavery, lynching, and legal racial segregation. As mentioned in chapter 2, Malcolm X was apprehended as a child and described such apprehension of Black children as continuous with practices of slavery in which white people owned and controlled Black people and shamed Black mothers.23 As one Black child protection worker put it: “It is a powerful thing to be an agent of the state who controls and regulates the lives of poor, racialized women.”24 White society tends to imagine child protective services and the police as entirely distinct arms of the state, but the connections between anti-Black racism in policing, imprisonment, and child protective services is often felt acutely by those subjected to them. Jennifer Clarke’s interviews with Black mothers and children who’d been involved with child protective services found that Black mothers “felt they were unfairly judged and criminalized.”25 One youth described the “whole child welfare system [a]s painfully racist … I could tell that they think we Black males are all criminals.”26 Like Malcolm X’s account of his childhood experience, contemporary Black clients describe intense surveillance, control, and shaming from white social workers. “Both mothers and youths expressed anger toward child welfare workers for how they controlled them during their involvement with the child welfare system. As one mother stated, ‘The case is closed but the wound is still deep.’”27 Black people are also disproportionately imprisoned and, while in prison, are often forced to perform prison labour that Black anti-prison activists frame as historically continuous with labour exploitation under slavery.28 As discussed previously, this exploitation of convict labour became US policy in the same act that other slavery was abolished in the United States, through the Thirteenth Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”29 Black activist-scholars have also drawn attention to continuities in tactics of racialized surveillance and control from plantation slavery through to the contemporary prison.30

* Slavery is often left out of histories of Canada.

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Black people are also vastly disproportionately killed by police in the United States.31 Unarmed Black people are nearly twice as likely as unarmed white people to be killed by police.32 There are seventeen American cities in which police kill Black people at a higher rate than the national homicide rate.* In Canada, race is rarely recorded by police, which makes it hard to track the scale of racialized police violence.33 However, in Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, Robyn Maynard documents systemic police violence, including a number of specific cases of individuals who were killed at the hands of the police.34 In Toronto (where four out of ten Black people in Canada reside35), at least 35 per cent of those killed by the police are Black, while only about 9 per cent of the total population is Black. Furthermore, based on an investigation using media reports, the number could be much higher.36 As mentioned previously, “Black Lives Matter” importantly gestures towards the moral economy underlying such racist violence: Black lives are normatively held as insignificant within white power structures and institutions; they are considered worthless. Tellingly, anti-lynching activists framed their refutation of lynching in the same way a century ago. Black Lives Matter points below the surface manifestation of outrageous and tragic police violence to the ongoing moral denigration of Black people that was unfortunately not abolished along with slavery. Moving forward in time, it’s often understood that racism continued to be a serious problem in the United States during Jim Crow racial segregation but that this issue was solved by the legal desegregation of schools and neighbourhoods in the 1960s and 1970s. In Canada, according to dominant framings of history, racism was never really so bad. Both of these frequently encountered claims of relative innocence are untrue. Still “Forcibly Transferring Children of the Group to Another Group” The particular interlockings of poverty, colonialism, and racialization, of white supremacy and capitalism, has implications in every single aspect of people’s lives, from cradle to grave. For example, Black people have lower life expectancies37 and are also more than twice as likely to be apprehended by the state as white children in both the United States and Canada. In the United States, Black children are placed in foster care at rates more than double their populations (15 per cent of the youth population, but 32 per cent of foster care placements).38

* Readers can visit the Mapping Police Violence website for a great deal of research translated into a graphic format.

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These discrepancies are about the same in Toronto, where 41 per cent of children apprehended by child protective services are Black, but only 18 per cent of the youth population of the city is Black.39 Such discrepancies construct the relative risk of or safety from apprehension for both those who are disadvantaged by them and those who are advantaged, and so we can also consider the flip side of these statistics. The remaining youth – that is, all youth who aren’t Black – make up 82 per cent of the population, but they only represent 59 per cent of all children who are apprehended from their families. That is to say, non-Black children don’t represent a baseline/average amount of likelihood for apprehension, in which a particular child is as likely as any other to be apprehended (if this were the case, the 82 per cent of non-Black youth would experience an 82 per cent rate of child apprehension). Rather, non-Black children are 20 per cent less likely than the (abstract and non-existent) statistically average child to be apprehended. Therefore, while Black children are a little over twice as likely to get apprehended compared to the abstract statistical average, they are over three times as likely to get apprehended from their families as compared with those within the actual living population of non-Black children. Furthermore, if we take into account that Indigenous children, poor children, disabled children, and children of disabled parents are also all disproportionately likely to be apprehended from their families,40 white ruling class nondisabled families are considerably less likely to have children taken than the statistically average rate of apprehension. Real, significant, relative material safety from apprehension, as well as the sense of comfort and security that comes with such safety, is a material effect of exalted whiteness, non-Blackness, non-Indigeneity, class power, and nondisability, each one on their own and also as they interlock. These same exalted groups also experience the feeling and the material reality of relative safety from penal incarceration.41 Bridging the two apparently distinct contexts by folding in sites of confinement that target young people,* * We tend to imagine that child apprehension and penal imprisonment are two entirely distinct systems. However, centring criminal justice confinements, Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, calls the variety of diverse forms of confinement “the carceral archipelago” (an archipelago being a cluster of islands that are so close to one another that they are considered one coherent space, such as the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago). Nuancing Foucault’s term to include non-locked sites that nevertheless centrally feature power relations and routines that disability activists and scholars trace back to sites of confinement (such as day treatment programs), Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe discuss this system as the “institutional archipelago.” This framing highlights the degree to which child apprehension and penal imprisonment both function as one aspect of larger systems of control, violence, surveillance, and moral denigration. See also Adams and Erevelles, “Unsuspected Spaces of Confinement,” as well as Spivakovsky, “Governing Freedom,” for related analyses and discussions.

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apprehended Black youth are much more likely than apprehended non-Black youth to be placed in some kind of group facility rather than a family. According to Clarke, 65 per cent of youth in Ontario group homes in 2006 were Black – significantly higher than the 8 per cent rate of Black youth in the province. While Black youth are twice as likely to be apprehended, they are eight times as likely to be institutionalized when apprehended. This statistic is incredibly concerning: studies have found that “children living in group homes scored lower on competence and higher on all problem scales than children living in foster families.”42 While there are a vast range of practices and discourses within group facilities, and an even vaster range among foster families, relationships and routines in group homes tend to be more institutionalized than in families. The imagined healing power of control, surveillance, and routine that are central to such institutions damages people.43 Furthermore, if it is violence to be taken from your family, which it is, then the quicker a child is returned to their home the better. Yet, Clarke found that “Black children are more likely than other children to … remain in care longer, and less likely to be reunited with their families.”44 One explanation for the overrepresentation of Black youth in child apprehensions is that most calls to child protective services are from police or schools.* Systemic racism within the criminal justice and educational systems, which includes intrusive suspicion and surveillance of racialized persons and communities,45 shapes both a person’s involvement with these racist systems themselves and also increases the likelihood of involuntary contact with professional social workers. Racism within child protective services targets particular communities in particular ways. Of refugee families, Dumbrill and Lo write “that child protection services did not understand their unique family needs.”46 They note factors such as refugees not knowing local laws – for example, the age at which children can take care of their own siblings (which varies drastically across the globe). They also note the oddness of “child protection” being imagined only as the responsibility and work of the state, and the specificity of this oddness in relation to refugee families. In fact, “by bringing their children safely to Canada, these parents had succeeded in a remarkable child protection process of their own.”47 The specific experiences of care and protection by these parents, who are most often people of colour, are erased while they’re under heightened surveillance for risk or negligence or abuse. At the same time, official discourse

* Reporting for the Toronto Star, Contenta, Monsebraaten, and Rankin found that Children’s Aid was called by school staff in one instance because a student came to school with a roti for lunch, and because a child was from Jamaica in another.

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of child protection is one of non-racism, commitments to multiculturalism, equity, or diversity, or even an anti-racist or anti-oppressive political stance.48 The gap between what we say and what we do, and the claim that either everyone already gets treated the same or that treating everyone the same is the key to ending oppression,49 is perhaps nowhere more blatant than in the state apprehension of Indigenous children. Here again, the prejudice of progress does real damage. Indian residential schools began to be abolished at a heyday of anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist struggle: it was during the height of American Indian Movement and Red Power activism, alongside Black Power and civil rights struggles, anti-imperialist protests against the Vietnam war, and anti-colonial struggles and victories around the globe (as well as feminist, antiprison, disability, queer, anti-psychiatry, and anti-poverty struggles50). Alongside the end of racial segregation and the shutting down of sites of mass disability confinement, the successful abolition of Indian residential schools should be recognized as one of the great political victories of this era. However, as Angela Davis reminds us, there is often a gap between the change that was fought for and the change that’s actually achieved.51 As narrated by organized professional social work and white Canada more generally, these terribly oppressive and race-specific institutions were supposedly replaced with equality, or with what all Canadians have: child protective services.* Yet, through this transition to supposed equality, an even greater number of Indigenous children came to be taken from their families rather than fewer, and many were now separated from any contact at all with their siblings in addition to the separation from their languages, cultures, communities, and families that they’d been subjected to in the Indian residential schools.52 As the profession of social work expanded after the Second World War, “eager social work professionals needed employment and reserves provided a ready-made industry.”53 Even though this period was a time of “relative prosperity” that could have been used to improve the lives of Indigenous people, “children were taken from parents whose only crime was poverty – and being aboriginal.”54 Although the vastly disproportionate apprehension of Indigenous children continues today,† framing the first mass targeted apprehensions as the Sixties Scoop erroneously positions this practice as a thing of the past and carries the implication, like stories of Africville, that it was from a distant time before Canada got its act together to put an end to officially sanctioned state racism. * Again, this period is also when Black children and families first came to be normally subjected to child protective services – in a move narrated by white reformers as racial desegregation. † To be fair, some of the practices of the 1960s and 1970s no longer exist, such as the massive adopting out of Indigenous children who were apprehended so that many had no trace of where they had come from.

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Sunera Thobani writes that “the apprehension of Aboriginal children has remained unabated into the twenty-first century.”55 She also offers a political economy analysis of the Sixties Scoop, highlighting how white professional social work materially benefits from the massive apprehension of Indigenous children: “The federal government provided funds to the provincial government for every child apprehended, thus deepening the stake of the provinces in the numbers of Aboriginal children taken into ‘care.’ Aboriginal activists note that such funds were used to create employment for social workers.”56 This practice enabled white women’s large-scale full-time employment, albeit at lower wages than white men, and it thus reduced white women’s economic dependency on men. Alongside this analysis, Thobani also traces the moral economy in which women in the helping professions were exalted as caring and compassionate. Within this moral economy, white Canadian society was framed as aligned with feminist ideals because more white women were working, and all white mothers and families were exalted in the same process that denigrated Indigenous mothers and families. “This continued denigration of Aboriginal families, and of Aboriginal mothers in particular, feeds the culturally supremacist exaltation of Canadian mothers and families.” At this time, granting state social assistance and social services to non-Indigenous families worked “to help preserve the family unit (except for the very poor and low-income single mothers). It thus promoted the social and symbolic value attached to these families.”57 As a result of these colonial apprehensions, Indigenous people are vastly overrepresented in all the various sites of colonial and moralizing confinement and social service that emerged from the early hospital and its various reforms.58 Indigenous people are disproportionately found in the child welfare,59 prison,60 and shelter systems (or are otherwise homeless).61 While Indigenous people make up about 4 per cent of the Canadian population, almost half of all children under the age of fourteen in foster care are Indigenous.62 A study of homeless people in Winnipeg found that “more than 75 per cent identify as Indigenous and almost 50 per cent have been in foster care or group homes.”63 Once again, it would seem that all peoples at all times had means of intervening in their social contexts in order to work towards greater safety and comfort for children who didn’t experience these things with their biological parent(s) or other primary caregivers. The practice of outsiders determining what should happen to a child, however, and of removing that child from their family and community is a very recent practice that we should not simply accept. Furthermore, in relation to particular marginalized groups, ongoing disproportionate child apprehensions need to be situated within the legacies that create today’s disproportionality. Poor white communities were the original targets of mass child apprehension (that is, under the guise of “child welfare” rather than “civilizing”

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or slavery), and legacies of disproportionate apprehension and child protective services involvement are alive and well for all poor people today. Disabled parents and disabled children also have specific histories of being controlled, monitored, removed from their homes, and confined. These legacies continue to live every time an apprehension or confinement or other mandatory intervention is imposed due to someone’s disability, including that disabled parents are more likely to have their children apprehended.64 And for Indigenous children and families, a vast array of historical white supremacist control and violence lives on every time an Indigenous child is apprehended. There’s an increasingly widespread recognition that the Sixties Scoop was wrong, just as the Indian residential schools were wrong. This recognition includes a public apology from the premier of Manitoba. On 18 June 2015, Premier Greg Selinger said that the apprehension of Indigenous children “has left intergenerational scars and cultural loss. With these words of apology and regret, I hope that all Canadians will join me in recognizing this historic injustice.”65 Although Selinger’s acknowledgment is long overdue, his particular articulation “of apology and regret” only makes sense within the relentless prejudice of progress. He frames the mass apprehension of Indigenous kids, which again is very clearly an ongoing practice, as a “historic injustice” that has lingering effects but is nevertheless a thing of the past. Like Harper, Selinger says this practice was wrong back then and thus implies that he, the government of Manitoba, child protective services, and white settler Canada now know better. This underlying assumption is simply untrue. Or, if true, then knowing better doesn’t translate into doing anything differently. When the premier apologized, about 90 per cent of the children in provincial care in Manitoba were Indigenous, even though Indigenous people only make up about 25 per cent of the population.* What’s more, Manitoba has one of

* Following from an earlier thread, this figure means that non-Indigenous Manitobans make up 75 per cent of the population but only represent 10 per cent of all the children apprehended. Safety from the threat of having your child taken from you isn’t normal, natural, or politically neutral, especially while living in a province in which children are apprehended at a higher rate than almost anywhere else in the world; in Manitoba, such exceptional safety is very clearly an effect of settler colonialism and its exaltation of non-Indigenous persons and families. Again, we’d surely get an even more drastic picture of the relative freedom from Canadian state violence that white ruling class nondisabled families experience if we further intersected anti-Black racism, disablism, and classism into Manitoban statistics on child apprehension. The sense of security that comes from never worrying that your child will be taken from you is an effect of the political power and moral exaltation attached to whiteness, non-Indigeneity, non-Blackness, nondisability, and middle or upper class positioning. It is not normal, natural, or neutral, and it is always constituted and reconstituted through the ongoing violence and denigration of those who aren’t thus exalted.

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the highest rates of child apprehension on the planet,66 which means that this 90 per cent is out of a larger rate of the population than it would be in most of the world. Manitoba’s child protective services have been taking approximately one newborn a day from the hospital since at least 2008.67 Taking these facts into account, we can say that on the very day that Selinger gave his apology, there’s a roughly 90 per cent likelihood that a social worker removed a newborn Indigenous child from the hospital before they ever made it home.* But, you know, sorry about doing it fifty years ago. Indigenous children within the borders of Canada continue to be taken from their families at a vastly disproportionate rate compared to white and other non-Indigenous families (Black families being the only other racial group coming anywhere near the rate at which Indigenous kids are stolen from their families). The openly stated intention behind these apprehensions is no longer assimilation or “mingling Indians with whites”; apprehensions are now justified as humane responses to neglect and abuse, just like any other child welfare apprehension is rationalized. But underlying the discrepancy by which so many more Indigenous kids are taken from their families is the enduring moral differentiation in which Indigenous families and communities are held to be inferior to non-Indigenous ones, especially white ones. The result of apprehensions on this scale is forced assimilation and ongoing colonial violence. Furthermore, given the scale, we believe that the legal international definition of genocide still applies: “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” As discussed previously, this act is explicitly listed as one of the five legally punishable forms of genocide in article 2(e) of the United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. We’re no longer talking about injustices from the past; this crime of genocide is taking place today. As was the case historically with Indian residential schools, the structural factors shaping and normalizing the disproportionate apprehension of Indigenous and Black children go well beyond Canadian or American borders. This fact is important to consider when we think about the role that child apprehension plays in globalized white supremacy. Clarke writes: “In many Western countries, such as Canada, the United States, Australia, England, Ireland, and New Zealand, racialized people are overrepresented in the child welfare systems. Child welfare data in these countries show evidence of racial disproportionality

* According to Cinta Puxley, one newborn was taken from an Indigenous family because the twenty-year-old mother had run away from child welfare after she experienced sexual abuse while in their “care” when she was younger, and, later as an adult and new mom, she didn’t contact the agency when it was trying to find her.

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and racial disparity.”68 In each of these six Western countries, four of which are white settler colonies, “racialized children and families are more likely to be reported to child welfare authorities by both mandated and nonmandated professionals, are more likely to be investigated and have the cases against them substantiated.” The children who are removed are also more likely to be placed outside their homes, stay there longer, “and are less likely to be reunited with their families or be adopted.”69 As cited in the previous chapter, Percy Ballantyne, reflecting on his own apprehension and confinement to the Birtle Indian Residential School, asks: “If white society … could place themselves in the shoes of our parents and exchange their children for us, let them sit where we were, I wonder how society would be like. What kind of uproar would happen?”70 His question remains crucial today. How can such racial disparities exist in the child protective services of at least six different “first world” nation-states? In the face of such outrageous evidence, what prevents these systems from being completely dismantled? One factor that works against more widespread uproar is the persistent liberal individualization of political problems. Clarke notes that the “framing of neglect as personal failing or lack of responsibility blames mothers and removes responsibility from the state for not providing adequate child care with flexible hours that allow women to participate in the workforce fully and pursue their education.”71 Black social workers she interviewed, both male and female, noted that they should factor gender oppression into their interventions with mothers, but that there is no space for them to do so, and they expressed an awareness that they actively participate in mother-blaming.72 They more generally acknowledged that a focus on personal blame and deficit obscures the ways that parents’ lives are shaped through oppressive systems and discourses.73 One worker gave the example that “poor families are assessed with the same standards as a wealthy family who has money to buy a nice home and a full-time nanny. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s what we do.”74 Even workers who are aware of such classed, gendered, and raced biases, and come from similar backgrounds as the families they interact with, express being forced to work with families in a standardized, depoliticized, and pathologizing way. “According to workers in the study, the exclusion of structural inequalities from the legal definition of abuse and neglect perpetuates a discourse of individual blame, which ensures the involvement of Afro-Caribbean families in the child welfare system.”75 Furthermore, “workers also expressed concern that through the use of this definition, they help to maintain and reproduce the racism, classism, sexism, cultural biases and other forms of oppression in the child welfare system.”76 These forms of oppression don’t only determine who is and isn’t subjected to

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child welfare intervention; they also breathe common sense into the oppressive ways that families are treated when they receive services. As discussed throughout this book, organized professional social work often assumes clients’ immorality and ignorance, and therefore attempts to change people, whether instead of or as a condition attached to more material forms of assistance. As an illustration, Clarke writes: “Afro-Caribbean mothers reported that they were often referred to psychological services, parenting classes, and anger management groups rather than being offered practical supports regarding housing, education, daycare, and employment.”77 Not surprisingly, she says that many of the mothers were angry about this treatment. According to many folks who have been through the child protection system, it creates more difficulty in your life than it alleviates.78 As one Black mother stated: “They didn’t really help me with nothing … I was just going crazy and when I started to lose my hair and shake and everything they come talk ’bout I need to see a psychiatrist. What they were doing to me and family would make anyone go crazy.”79 Idil Abdillahi, Sonia Meerai, and Jennifer Poole use the term “anti-Black sanism” to specify the highly particular ways that anti-Black racism interlocks with sanism.80 The individualization of responsibility always shapes child welfare. When Black families are involved, this individualization always interlocks with legacies, structures, and discourses of anti-Black racism. And some of the time, the depoliticization and individualization of responsibility interlocks with anti-Black racism and is then framed through sanism as the problem of mental illness. If the problem is one person’s illness, then there is no need for large-scale fundamental change. As Davis advises, “We should absolutely refuse to grant permanence to that which is simply because it is.”81 Just because institutionalized “child protection” looks a certain way, we can’t let ourselves assume that it has to be like this or will necessarily be like this tomorrow. It certainly wasn’t always this way. Cindy Blackstock writes: “No society was ever without its challenges and each community had laws and responses to help children who were receiving inadequate care.”82 Indigenous social responses were varied and “included placement of the child with other community members, conflict resolution and redistribution of community resources to ensure parents had what they needed to care for their children.” Blackstock points out that “unlike today’s social work,” when children went to live with other adults, the parents maintained their ties to their children, but their “parental roles were simply redefined.”83 Similarly, the early Order of the Hospitallers assisted mothers in need, placed children in other homes when their mothers were sick, and raised and educated abandoned children when needed – but all on a voluntary basis, according to historical records.84 And some communities of

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women, especially in Black communities, raise children collectively as a form of “child protection” or “social working.”85 The forced removal of children from their homes, families, and communities is incredibly traumatic for everyone involved, including the children.86 But this violence is often entirely neglected or profoundly minimized in considerations of what’s called “child welfare” or “protection.” One problem is that the impact of child apprehension is difficult to research in our political climate, given the taken-for-grantedness of the necessity of apprehending some children. It’s imagined self-evidently unethical to have some children stay in environments deemed unsafe in order to compare them with those who are apprehended.* However, one researcher found a way around this difficulty. Joseph Doyle evaluated the effects of apprehension on children’s long-term well-being within the range of responses where some workers err on the side of apprehension and others on the side of family unity. He found that children within this grey area of acceptable child protective practices fare better in the long term if left to live with their families rather than being removed from them.87 This finding will not be surprising for those who have talked with multiple people about the effects of being removed from their families as children. While not universally true, many children and adults express anger, resentment, and grief in response to having been removed from their homes as children.88 Similar research results were obtained as early as the 1940s, when an attempt to study the adverse effects of being left with families in cities that were being bombed found instead that children left with their families in precarious circumstances fared much better than those removed to the peace and tranquility of professional care in the countryside.89 This finding should at least wear away at child apprehension’s normative self-evidence as good, necessary, and accomplishing what it claims. Could we at least open up a little more space to be curious together about whether this system is doing what we say?

* Referring to 2013 Ontario Child Welfare Research Portal statistics, Heather Bergen documents that the popular sense of the reasons children are apprehended from their families is profoundly skewed. Only 2 per cent are apprehended for substantiated sexual abuse, and 13 per cent for substantiated physical abuse. Of the latter, 95 per cent of substantiated cases of physical abuse involve no physical harm, and another 4 per cent involve harm that does not require treatment. As Bergen is careful to point out, these statistics shouldn’t be taken to minimize the seriousness of child abuse. However, if balanced out with a more serious consideration of the impact of child apprehension on children, perhaps there are very few children who are being “protected” in a more holistic or consistent sense when they’re apprehended.

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Towards Addressing the Chronic Gap between What We Say and What We Do In an earlier chapter, we cited Leslie Margolin’s contention that “social workers may claim Jane Addams as their source of inspiration, but they do Mary Richmond.”90 Social workers claim to be rooted in concerns about fundamental political transformation, but they tend to intervene only with individuals and families – frequently in a manner totally divorced from political context and very often advancing oppressive structures and discourses in doing so. We’ve also suggested that diverse forms of oppression are characterized today by a gap between what’s said and what’s done; for example, nearly everybody says racism is bad, but white supremacy fundamentally shapes lives, relationships, possibilities, and institutions. Margolin notes that this tendency in social work strengthened in response to Black Power movements over the last half century: “The rise of the concept of black power made it unacceptable to speak of minority populations as ‘maladjusted’ or pathological … What they did not need – at least from social workers and other government agents – was nurturance, parenting, sound advice, role models, therapy, all the things that social workers have always offered.” Rather than changing its practices, however, social work made its politicization of problems more consistent in theory “while keeping the discourse focused on individual-level interventions. So the discourse on racial oppression … is matched to a counterdiscourse on how to successfully influence the lives of people of color … on a person-by-person, family-by-family basis.”91 Although details and nuances are unique to each form and site of oppression, such a gap is typically characteristic of all contemporary oppression. An Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services report provides an excellent illustration of the depoliticization of responses to social issues accompanying a clearly stated political analysis. The authors of the Review of the Roots of Youth Violence interviewed marginalized youth about their understandings of the causes of youth violence. The authors reiterate the youth’s analyses in their report, but they then recommend something very different – as if there were a relationship between what the youth said and the report’s recommendations.92 In her analysis of this report, Katie Aubrecht observes that it “acknowledges that there are multiple reasons given for becoming involved in violence. But, in keeping with its stated interest in coordination and collaboration, it orders these reasons and subordinates them to one dominant explanation for youth violence: the prevalence of alienation in specific communities.”93 Aubrecht shows that youth clearly named the problem of violence as stemming from structural issues such as “poverty, racism, community design, issues in the education system, family issues, health, lack of a youth voice, lack

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of economic opportunity for youth, and ‘issues’ in the justice system,” but that the report’s recommendations translate these systemic issues into cumulative psyches and deficits to be individually fixed, taught, and supported. She writes: “Violence is then transformed from a lived reality [inclusive of systemic and political forces] to an isolatable problem that can be resolved given greater collaboration between the government and community leaders, the coordination of existing educational bodies and assimilationist policies, and the creation of a universal mental health system that targets children.”94 This depoliticizing gesture advocates neoliberal, inclusion-based, and psychological strategies to redress individual “alienation,” rather than the collective, redistributive, and transformative strategies the interviewed youth had named as necessary for addressing injustice and violence. Such depoliticizations of stated radical critiques enable the Ontario government to then name programs like Career NavigatorTM as part of its initiative to “prevent youth violence across Ontario.”95 This United Way program “is an education-to-employment pipeline” that targets marginalized youth for employment training. While this program has very likely made a positive impact on some individual participants’ lives, programs like this do not address the roots of social problems. Indeed, when individual solutions are presented as the only solutions to social problems, they discursively work to blame oppressed people for their own oppression. Such programs imply that the problem isn’t capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and so on, but rather exists within individuals. In this instance, the problem is framed as many individual youth lacking the skills to get and keep employment. That conclusion is drastically different from what the youth interviewed for the Review of the Roots of Youth Violence said needed to change. Employment programs may do good work helping some individuals to find employment, but they don’t address police violence against racialized and poor youth, poverty as a structural factor, or an education system that disadvantages poor youth and youth of colour. The individualization and depoliticization of structural violence also normatively frames state violence against Indigenous people. As in the Review of the Roots of Youth Violence, discourses surrounding colonialism, at those times that the political nature of this violence is acknowledged by the state at all, erase its continued force. Sherene Razack traces how colonialism is sometimes factored into investigations into deaths of Indigenous people in police custody, but it is used to frame Indigenous people “as vulnerable rather than an oppressed group.”96 This repositioning enables investigations into their deaths to find fault with the deceased person due to individual health-related factors. The disproportionate number of Indigenous people who die in police custody makes it difficult to totally ignore the possibility that white settler state–Indigenous relations might have something to do with these deaths. Yet, when colonialism is

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brought into these investigations, it’s only taken up as a historical force that left Indigenous people wounded and exceptionally vulnerable in a world in which continued colonial violence no longer exists. Resonantly and tellingly, the Review of the Roots of Youth Violence employs a similar strategy of historicizing oppression – although in this case it’s a more recent timeframe in which the claim of relative innocence is accomplished by blaming the previous provincial Progressive Conservative Party for the difficulties that the then ruling Liberal Party were shouldered with: “Our point is not to unduly critique the present government for ongoing effects of past policies, most of which it inherited.”97 Similar to this report, and to Harper’s Indian residential schools apology, inquiries into Indigenous deaths in police custody may name colonialism as a violent force, but only in the past. In a particularly shocking example, a boot print on the chest of a Secwepemc man named Paul Alphonse suggested that police had likely assaulted him before his death. However, Alphonse is framed as having been wounded by his childhood in an Indian residential school, but not as wounded by the contemporary police in the hours leading up to his death. The police didn’t contribute to his death, according to this framing, although the staff of the Indian residential school he attended half a century ago may have indirectly done so. In the end, Alphonse is said to have died as a result of his individually unhealthy body, which may have something to do with now-abolished violences of the Canadian state, but the violences of the contemporary Canadian settler colonial state are said to have played no part whatsoever in his death.98 Dian Million reflects that persistent media representations of Indigenous women as subjected to violence make it “hard to imagine us not as simple victims.” She says she’s “been overwhelmed by the amount of data on our families … that shows our immiseration,”99 framing Indigenous families and communities as passive objects of poverty and misery. It’s not that Indigenous women and families are not subjected to ongoing injustices; it’s rather a matter of how these injustices get framed – what Razack characterizes as vulnerability rather than oppression. Million traces this framing out in the historical and ongoing discursive strategies through which the “colonized subject” who makes political demands of the white settler colonial state “became a trauma victim.”100 In one of these framings (“colonized subject”; “oppressed group”), the focus is on structural violence; in the other framing (“simple victims”; “immiseration”; “trauma victim”; “vulnerable”), the emphasis is on the inert fact of woundedness, rather than on the political nature of the violence that wounds. As Sara Ahmed writes, “The transformation of the wound into an identity … cuts the wound off from a history of ‘getting hurt’ or injured. It turns the wound into something that simply ‘is.’”101 In such framings, woundedness masquerades as

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the entire truth about a people, eclipsing any details that don’t conjure up pity, inferiority, and helplessness.* Indigenous women have been active in struggles to decolonize since colonization began. However, they’re continually constructed as straightforwardly and exclusively vulnerable victims. They’re framed as in dire need of individual assistance (like the youth in the Review of the Roots of Youth Violence), rather than recognized as analysing and intervening in our shared social world in active efforts to make life better for us all. Exploring this dehumanizing framing, Million carefully traces out how Indigenous women successfully and fundamentally changed the Canadian political landscape by speaking out against the abuses of Indian residential schools. They centred the abuses they and other Indigenous peoples had experienced through memoir and semi-autobiographical fiction, politically mobilizing affect in what she calls “felt theory” or “felt knowledge.” Million writes: “It is exactly this felt knowledge that fuels the real discursive shift around the histories and stories of residential schooling. One of the most important features of these stories is their existence as alternative truths, as alternate historical views. Native women told truths that challenged Canadian settler truths.”102 These stories of injustice transformed the narratives in circulation about white settler colonialism in what is now called Canada. However, Million also traces how the discursive context into which they spoke placed Indigenous women in the contradictory position of taking on identities of “victimhood at the same time they sought political power and autonomy.”103 Their important and effective political intervention involved Indigenous women tactically sharing their experiences of having been hurt by the state and its agents, but Million shows that these experiences were then individualized, depoliticized, medicalized, and psychiatrized, so that Indigenous women’s collective anti-colonial political demands were translated into the need for individual redress in the form of therapy and healing. Framing Indigenous people as desperately, exceptionally, and individually in need of healing, but not as legitimately and collectively seeking justice, land,

* Both the contemporary “Black Lives Matter” and the 1960s slogan “Black Is Beautiful” are outstanding for the precision with which they confront the denigrations underlying anti-Black racism. Resonantly, the disability movement’s slogan “Piss on Pity” hones in on the moral inferiority that always accompanies people getting framed as only damaged. Readers may refer to Harlan Hahn’s discussion of this slogan in Mitchell and Snyder’s Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back. The works cited here by Ahmed, Aubrecht, Million, and Razack all gesture towards one way that colonialism, racism, disablism, and sanism interlock in our historical moment. As Nirmala Erevelles shows, however, these same factors, alongside classism, can also result in disabled bodies of colour that are imagined to be particularly dangerous and violent.

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and sovereignty is only one way that Indigenous people’s political resistance gets depoliticized and morally denigrated. It also happens through criminalization. For example, when Chief Theresa Spence began a hunger strike in protest of the Canadian government’s refusal to honour its treaties, her actions were attributed to (gendered) “vanity” and (criminalized) “blackmail” by one newspaper columnist.104 Another wrote: “It is tempting to see the action as one of intimidation, if not terrorism.”105 In resonant examples, RCMP Corporal Wayne Russett described Idle No More as “like bacteria,” and he said of the movement: “The escalation of violence is ever near”;106 and the Canadian Forces listed the Mohawk Warrior Society as having the potential to use terrorist tactics. The political landscape has indeed shifted tremendously in Canada over the last few decades in relation to acknowledging the specific and contained colonial injustices of the Indian residential schools, and this shift is an incredibly important gain that Indigenous peoples fought hard to achieve. Yet, when Indigenous people continue to work against ongoing colonialism, they are often branded violent and criminalistic, which serves to delegitimize their claims. Branding someone a terrorist justifies ignoring their concerns, as happens frequently when political prisoners are framed as “mentally ill” rather than politically motivated.107 There is thus a connection, however indirect, between framing Indigenous people as exceptionally vulnerable and framing them as (probably “mentally ill”) terrorists. Statistics on disproportionate numbers of Indigenous children in state “care,” Indigenous adults in prison, Indigenous suicide rates, and so on are politically important for exposing the ongoing violences of colonialism. But they often focus on woundedness rather than on continued acts of settler colonial state violence. Furthermore, in the stories circulated about these statistics, Indigenous people are collectively cast as homogenously and exclusively vulnerable and damaged. For example, many readers will know of the high rates of suicide in Indigenous communities,* but in a careful study of the actual rates of Indigenous youth suicide in British Columbia, Michael Chandler and Christopher Lalonde found that some Indigenous communities had rates that were 800 times the Canadian * We can think of such widespread “knowledge” as doing something: it shapes what people can perceive, feel, know, and do. These statistics tend to bring up pity and perhaps a sense that more mental health services are needed. A different power/knowledge regime would have these statistics exposing ongoing colonialism, land dispossession, and so on, and would therefore logically point to very different responses. This framing here follows Foucault’s articulation of “power/knowledge,” which he suggested was one significant way that power operates: by shaping what people are able to perceive, believe they know to be true, think and feel, and so on. In “More on Power/Knowledge,” Spivak observes that Foucault’s French pouvoir/savoir both translates as “power/knowledge” and also as “able to know.” That is to say, power is operating when a person (or entire society) is “able to know” what they believe to be the truth.

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average and others had almost no youth suicides at all. They discuss how poverty is interlocked with Indigenous youth suicides, in that Indigenous people are the poorest in North America. However, they also found that, upon close inspection, there is no epidemic of youth suicides across all Indigenous communities; rather, particular communities have such high rates of youth suicide that they create an impression of an overall tendency. Of crucial importance to the question of decolonization, the central difference they found between communities with high and low youth suicide rates was what they call “cultural continuity factors,” by which they mean initiatives that are significantly community-led. They found that with the presence of these factors, the relative risk of suicide dropped by the following percentages respectively: “Land Claims 41%; Education 52%; Health 29%; Cultural Facilities 23%; and [community administered] Police/Fire [services] 20%.”108 Most significant of all, self-government reduced a community’s youth suicide rate by a staggering 85 per cent.109 This study suggests a radically different way of thinking about and intervening in what the Review of the Roots of Youth Violence calls youth “alienation.” One story is that what’s needed are more individually oriented social workers. The other story is that what Indigenous communities need most to prevent youth suicide is sovereignty. Discussing this and similar research, Blackstock notes that “women in government” also reduces Indigenous communities’ suicide rate.110 She asserts that such findings challenge “the assumption that Aboriginal peoples must build capacity to have decision making capacity passed to them.”111 Rather, “Aboriginal communities [already] have access to the information and resources needed to implement their own solutions.”112 That said, Blackstock doesn’t suggest that Indigenous communities should simply be left alone. She writes: “Non Aboriginal peoples must play a critical and active role in making space for [Aboriginal people to make] those decisions [and to exercise the sovereign political authority to do so] and [also in] ensuring adequate resources are available to implement them.”113 She’s suggesting that the discursive and structural conditions are not yet in place for Indigenous communities “to implement their own solutions,” and that transforming the discourses and structures that currently prevent or restrict Indigenous political agency is one aspect of decolonization we can all participate in, whether Indigenous or settler. Navigating Inherently Oppressive Systems: The Everyday Life of Many a Social Worker Merlinda Weinberg tells a story of two helping professional colleagues who both heard a mother’s statement to her son one day at work. The mother said, “You’re going to fly out that window in a minute if you don’t stop jumping

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around.”114 One worker called child protective services; the other was astonished her colleague had done so. This mother’s statement can be interpreted in very different ways, and these varied interpretations carry drastically distinct consequences for the son and mother. In one interpretation, the boy’s “jumping around” is understood as the anticipated cause of him possibly flying out the window. With this interpretation, there’s no need to intervene with the mother, because she’s intending to prevent the child from getting hurt. The statement means “be careful or you might fall out of the window.” That doesn’t mean it was necessarily effective. But if understood in this way, it’s not a “child protection” concern in the sense in which the mother poses a potential risk to her son. It seems, however, that the statement can also be interpreted as the mother threatening to throw the child out of the window unless he stops jumping around. This intent is not directly stated, but it’s the only interpretation that could possibly warrant a call to child protective services. Chris is a parent too, but they live with the safety and comfort that comes from rarely even considering that their children might be apprehended by the state. One difference between Chris and the mother from Weinberg’s story is that she made this fairly unremarkable statement while accessing a service that had two different helping professionals listening in on her. This relationship of “help” always carries the possibility that either worker might decide to call child protective services. There are other structural differences that interlock with this one, making it all the more likely that she would have her life intervened upon by mandated social workers, but even this one isolated difference means that Chris could say exactly the same thing at almost any moment of their life and be practically guaranteed to have no involuntary professional social work intervention in their family as a result. Once again, the freedom from such worries is not normal, natural, or politically neutral; it’s a consequence of exaltation within interlocking oppressive systems and discourses. Chris’s life would be very different if under such scrutiny. That some parents are under constant surveillance and others are not is an effect of the interlocking of various forms of oppression and the particular state and non-state institutions of surveillance, support, and control that we live with at this particular time in this particular place. As Clarke notes: “Poor African Americans as users of food banks, free clinics, and other free programs are more visible to child welfare authorities and mandated reporters.”115 Robyn Maynard writes: “In addition to police harassment and violence, the policing of Black women often takes different forms, and relies on different dehumanizing racial and gendered logics, than those experienced by Black men. Less visible forms of state surveillance and punishment are enacted by police, customs officers and

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welfare agents, all of whom have enormous power over the day-to-day lives of poor Black women.”116 Clarke describes how the Black mothers she interviewed “felt that they were always being watched, and that their children’s dress, behavior, and activities were always monitored and judged by teachers and daycare staff.”117 This surveillance is incredibly important to consider, especially for those who work in organized professional social work. Social service workers do things to and with people that the people may not have been made or asked to do if they were, for example, white, partnered, nondisabled, employed, less poor, older or younger, or if they had avoided* involvement with psychiatry, child protective services, or the police. Social workers have to be incredibly careful about how they navigate very real power and authority in people’s lives. In navigating the inevitable and ever-present potential to dominate and oppress, we should never forget that social workers aren’t in people’s lives only (or mostly) because of concrete things they did or didn’t do. Again, Chris and the mom in the story just recounted could do the exact same thing – from the statement she made to actual physical assault – and Chris would be much less likely to have child protective services intervene in response. This different treatment of Chris doesn’t mean they’re a better parent or that their children are any safer. It bears no straightforward relationship to these things. Rather, Chris is assumed to be safe and competent (due to exceptionally situated political and moral exaltation, rather than neutrality or averageness), and, in contrast, the mother is morally and politically denigrated and assumed to be incompetent, ignorant, and potentially abusive. The race, class, and disability statistics on child welfare and criminal justice involvement118 are much too skewed to support a liberalist belief that everyone has an equal opportunity in life and that these systems do what they are said to do – that is, serve and protect the innocent and deter, punish, help, or rehabilitate only those who transgress consensual norms of acceptable behaviour. Life is complex and nuanced, to be sure, but given the outrageous differences in the * Either avoiding such systems entirely, or accessing less coercive versions, is much easier for folks who are relatively exalted. For example, Chris has worked in both mandated and voluntary groups for men who had abused their partners. The difference between the two programs wasn’t whether criminalized acts of violence had been committed, but rather whether these acts were brought to the attention of the criminal justice system. The most striking difference between the two contexts was this: all the men in the mandated program were at least relatively poor, and the majority were racialized; the voluntary program, in contrast, was majority white and middle or upper class. Furthermore, without a doubt, the voluntary program was a better service – due in part to the freedom Chris and their co-facilitators had to gear their programming to specific needs within the group, work with men individually alongside their group involvement, and so on.

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statistics about who is subjected to these two systems, the explanation for such discrepancies has to be one of the following: either systemic anti-Black racism, colonialism, classism, and disablism determine involvement with these systems much more so than any individual choice, behaviour, or quality; or racialized, colonized, poor, and disabled people are intrinsically morally inferior and inherently more likely to abuse and neglect children and otherwise harm people. We are certain this difference is a result of systemic violence, and we reject a liberal stance as staunchly as a conservative one. No liberal middle ground adequately explains the real discrepancies in who is born likely or unlikely to be apprehended from their families or get imprisoned. We invite readers to make a choice: Are we going to believe that some people are inherently inferior to others, inherently less responsible for their actions, and inherently more violent? Or are we going to seriously engage with the clear and evident forces of ongoing structural violence? If the major determining factor in who ends up involved with criminal justice or child protective services is systemic oppression, which it is, then this oppression demands a fundamental reconsideration of everyday social services and other social relations within our society. Many social workers work in sites of structural violence, where oppressions intimately interlock in day-to-day interactions between those offering services and those receiving services. We cannot accept oppressive systems as they exist, and many of us work in oppressive contexts. Universities are as much sites of interlocking systemic oppression as are social services, after all, and both authors work in the context of these institutions right now. None of this critique is meant to shame others for decisions they make, will make, or have made. Any institution that wouldn’t exist in the United States or Canada if conquest and settlement hadn’t taken place is an institution of ongoing colonization and white supremacy, which always interlock with other forms of moral denigration, material inequity, and disproportionate exposure to violence. Given this fact, many of us navigate our roles as agents of places and forces we would like to fundamentally transform or abolish. Alongside work towards such fundamental change, we also need people who work in these places to locally cultivate dignity, agency, freedom, and more equitable distributions. The difference between how a person navigates their part in a dehumanizing system can make an enormous impact on those subjected to the system. Julie Devaney documents this difference in her memoir about her involvement with medical systems.119 According to Devaney, many of her doctors’ interventions left her feeling terrible about herself. This experience may be unsurprising to readers who have had significant contact with medical institutions. She also describes how those professionals who took the time and care to be more humane made a very significant difference: “The nurse looks in and sees

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that I’m crying. ‘Oh no’, she says. ‘You should never leave feeling bad, or like you’ve done anything wrong.’” Devaney says she knows this moment well – the “incredible, brave, strong, angelic nurse” swooping in to help mitigate the damage done by a doctor. “She does not apologize for him. In fact, she often gives me accounts of his history of temper tantrums. Usually, she indicates in some way that it’s not … my fault.”120 In her narrative, some of the nurses’ kindness curbs the harm caused by some of the doctors’ insensitivity. She also describes another group as agitating for change – “the young med students” who, like nurses, are relatively low on the professional hierarchy within hospitals. She writes: “They’re not going to tolerate having to work in conditions where people are horrible to one another. I met so many brave young people who are in med school these days that are willing to stand up and say when things are inappropriate.”121 Patients are often treated terribly in hospitals, and it’s important that folks within these systems work to change this practice. It’s also important that Devaney had those nurses to mitigate the impact of her doctors’ actions.* Neither of these strategies of navigating unjust systems is sufficient to create a fundamentally better world, but both are necessary. The importance of humanity in even the most dehumanizing and violent of institutional relationships and contexts may be nowhere more clearly expressed than in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account of his continued detainment in a US military prison.122 In discussing relative navigations of violence and kindness in this context, we wish to be clear that it’s not acceptable that the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp exists. Many readers may share this certainty – even more than those who share it about all prisons or about child protective services, hospitals, or universities as they exist today. We’re not defending any of these systems or their practices, and we’re not suggesting that carefully navigating one’s power and potential to dominate in such contexts is sufficient. However, we invite readers to consider that how we occupy our roles makes a real difference to the people we interact with, however humane or inhumane the context. Slahi’s memoir both advances this notion and also complicates it tremendously. Slahi paints a picture of extreme inhumanity – torture, beatings, threats, emotional abuse, and rights violations. This situation is depicted alongside accounts of a handful of guards who made his life less terrible than it otherwise would have been. While Slahi was being viciously beaten, and one guard held

* Of course, nurses, medical students, and doctors are all internally diverse groups who navigate their particular sites in interlocking systems of oppression in varied ways. We don’t mean to imply that they’re all the same.

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a barking German shepherd threatening to make it attack him, another guard spoke out: “‘You’re hurting the detainee!’ screamed [name redacted], who was no less terrified than I was.”123 This guard didn’t stop the abuse and may not have reported it, refused to work under these conditions, or made any further attempts to curb such violence. Yet, it seems important to Slahi that his readers understand that this violence doesn’t happen evenly or by consensus among all those perpetrating or complicit in it. He writes: “I discussed with some of my guards why they executed the order to stop me from praying, since it’s an unlawful order. ‘I could have refused, but my boss would’ve given me a shitty job or transferred me to a bad place. I know I can go to hell for what I’ve done to you,’ one of them told me.”124 Slahi then references Nazi soldiers, and says, “History repeats itself.” He seems to be challenging us to think about how this kind of violence is actively permitted to happen by real human beings who witness it, give orders to do it, and carry it out. He writes, for example: “Human beings naturally hate to torture other human beings, and Americans are no different. Many of the soldiers were doing the job reluctantly, and were very happy when they were ordered to stop.”125 This remark might feel like too kind a description of some people who torture. Yet, it seems important to Slahi to convey that most people don’t enjoy torture and that those soldiers who hate to torture nevertheless follow orders to do so. Slahi also invites readers to reflect upon the humanity he encounters. “Lately, I’ve become so vulnerable. What’s wrong with me? Just one soothing word in this ocean of agony was enough to make me cry.” He describes a Puerto Rican division who “were not as vigilant and unfriendly … Everybody liked them. But they got in trouble with those responsible for the camps because of the friendly and humane approach to detainees.”126 Being part of a community of Puerto Ricans seems to have made a difference. Perhaps this behaviour has something to do with their collective first-hand knowledge of American imperialism and white supremacy, offering a different angle on the race- and religion-specific imprisonment they’re perpetrating. But, resonating with the guard who carried out an order he knew to be immoral and illegal for fear of reprimand, the Puerto Rican division was punished for their humanity. What kinds of institutional structures, environments, and discourses make it more difficult to follow your own conscience?127 Chris teaches social work students and frequently has conversations with them about workplaces where they’re asked to do things they know are wrong. They’re frequently asked to do things they understand as unhelpful, harmful, and oppressive. When Chris worked in front-line social work, they were frequently in this position too – from being directed to do things that seemed incredibly damaging to things that seemed more ridiculous than anything, such

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as the “hoops” service users are constantly asked to “jump through.”* Social workers are often in the position of navigating such expectations. Slahi’s memoir highlights how significant such navigations can be for others. In another passage, Slahi describes the difference between two interrogators. He experiences sciatic pain, and one interrogator attends to this humanely while the other uses it against him: “When [name redacted] came I felt like I was meeting with a human being. [This interrogator] offered me the appropriate chair for my back pain, while [the other] always insisted on the metal chair or the dirty floor.”128 It’s unsettling how much of a difference everyday acts of accessibility, common decency, and basic humanity can make in a setting as violent and dehumanizing as the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp. It invites us to consider how important such gestures are, given that they remained crucial to someone being beaten, tortured, and unjustly imprisoned.† Although Slahi describes torturers more generously than might be expected, he describes the person who gave him the chair that exacerbated his sciatic pain as “good at being inhumane.”129 It’s counterintuitive that giving the wrong chair could be experienced as more inhumane than inflicting torture (at least when ordered to do so).‡ Yet, even in the midst of extreme violence, alongside writing to expose this violence, Slahi also invites us to consider how much difference everyday gestures of kindness and accessibility make. Slahi also unsettles what might be normatively imagined about guard– detainee relations. He describes his relationship with some of the guards as something along the lines of friendship – but never exactly calls them friends. He describes one guard who “related to me right … He used to put his mattress right in front of my cell door, and we started to talk about all kinds of topics like old friends.”130 He writes: “I picture him, and these other guards, as good friends if we would meet under different circumstances.”131 These particular guards, however, aren’t so hesitant to describe their relationship as friendship, and the gap between his experience of them and their

* Such “hoops” are oppressive. They require a great deal of time and energy from people who are frequently struggling to make ends meet or get through the day. For those not currently subjected to such nonsense, we may do well to reflect upon how much harder our lives would be if we did have to do them. † The politically pressing problem of everyday disablism in prisons is described by Ware, Ruzsa, and Dias in “It Can’t Be Fixed Because It’s Not Broken: Racism and Disability in the Prison Industrial Complex.” ‡ Probably he frames the interrogator who gives him the painful chair as particularly inhumane because he has a greater degree of freedom in his choice of chair, as compared to the degree of freedom among those who torture. Nobody orders the interrogators to give Slahi this or that chair.

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experience of him is important to reflect upon. They gave comedian Steve Martin’s novel The Pleasure of My Company to Slahi, writing in it: “Over the past 10 months I have gotten to know you and we’ve become friends. I wish you good luck, and I’m sure I will think of you often”; “Good luck with your situation. Just remember that Allah always has a plan. I hope you think of us as more than just guards. I think we all became friends”; and “For the past 10 months I’ve done my damnedest to maintain a Detainee-Guard relationship. At times I failed: it is almost impossible not to like a character like yourself.” How can we take seriously that they were “more than just guards” to Slahi, alongside what appears to be his own hesitance about the framing in which they “all became friends?” Resonating with this story is a finding from Clarke’s interviews with Black mothers involved with child protective services. She discusses varied ways these mothers resisted social workers’ control, degradation, and surveillance, and she includes their use of “cooperation” as a tactic of resistance. What might this finding teach us about the kinds of context in which friendship or cooperation can’t be what they usually are? These Black women’s cooperation is a form of resistance because of the hierarchical relationship in which it takes place. In this context, cooperation may simply be a way to get your children back. It may be pursued for that reason alone, rather than out of a belief that the worker’s recommendations are helpful or make sense. Maybe this strictly hierarchical and coercive context makes it impossible for parents and young people to actually consider whether a worker’s recommendations fit for them, given the clarity with which they need to obey regardless of their own thoughts and feelings.132 Clarke describes a mother who “spoke of how she cooperated with the worker to get what she wanted because she had ‘learned that if you follow their rules, you get good results.’ She described her relationship with workers as respectful but based on cooperation because she recognized … the power that workers have to remove or return children.”133 If this mom had met her worker under different circumstances, perhaps she might have found some of the worker’s ideas worthwhile. She might have tentatively, selectively, and freely applied some of them to her situation. However, under the actual circumstances of their relationship, cooperation was only a means to navigate a violent and oppressive system in which her own sense of what was and wasn’t helpful was prevented from factoring prominently into her decision making. Dumbrill and Lo report parents involved with child protective services saying they’d like peer support, “which would function independently from the child welfare agency,”134 and they’d also like to be more involved in decision making and to generally feel respected as human beings and granted some authority over their families’ lives.135 Henry Parada and Julia Krane and Rosemary Carlton therefore recommend that child protective workers be less confident about knowing what’s right for families;

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they advocate “not-knowing” stances,136 characterized by “uncertainty” and “fluid and flexible”137 approaches. Most parents would rather not have child protective services in their lives, at least as they currently exist, but as long as these institutional responses to child welfare continue, such recommendations would make a difference. Michel Foucault suggests that friendships are characterized by more freedom to negotiate unique ways of relating, as compared to kinds of relationship that tend to be more institutionalized.138 People might have friendships that vary widely in terms of emotional intimacy, shared activities, frequency of visits, and so on, but which all fall under the category of “friend.” We don’t tend to think that every friendship should function like every other friendship. Friendship is open ended enough to include many different specificities. In a related discussion, Foucault traces how Pinel and other early psychiatrists called their new work “direction,” which was used synonymously with “moral treatment” and was a direct reference to a very different tradition of relationship from those they were cultivating with their patients.139 Centuries earlier, “direction” had been provided by friends in a context of mutually expressed love and affection.140 There was often an explicit hierarchy present, in that the older friend was esteemed as wiser, but there was also a mutual intimacy that was entirely removed from the relationships created by early psychiatrists and subsequently taken up by social workers and other helping professionals. Here again is the healing power of hierarchy, differentiated human value, certainty, and domination. Early psychiatrists replaced the mutuality of “direction” with a clearly defined imbalance of moral worth, power, and knowledge. This new imbalance was now imagined as curative. Resonating with mad activism that positions friends as “the best medicine,”141 these historical explorations by Foucault have inspired Chris to reflect with students about what resources and skills might be available to them as social workers if they think outside of the institutionalized social worker–client relationship. When students ask things like, “What do I do if someone is considering suicide?” or “What if someone is experiencing intimate partner violence?” Chris might start a conversation by asking the group, “What might you think or feel or do if it were your sister or your best friend?” Chris feels this approach is pedagogically useful, in that it’s important for social workers to relate and reflect outside of institutionalized roles, discourses, and power relations to whatever degree possible. However, Slahi’s hesitance to describe his guards as friends, even though they describe him as a friend, is instructive here. We can’t just will ourselves out of systems, discourses, and relations of power and domination.142 Even if we create friendly, dignified, trusting, and reciprocal relationships, the parameters of our relationships with service

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users are shaped by systems and discourses that institutionally fix us both in place through the ethic of the healing power of unequal capacity and moral worth. In written assignments, social work students often articulate that clients may “perceive” a power differential between themselves and their social workers. But the power differential is real; it’s not a matter of perception. Slahi writes that under different circumstances, he and some of his guards might have become good friends, but as a prisoner made to stay in a dehumanizing and violent institution where they were paid to work (and some were paid to torture him or to prevent him from praying), even the most caring and equitable relationships aren’t friendship. But the guards didn’t recognize this enduring imbalance of power. Particular workers and their efforts, choices, and styles of relating can profoundly and positively impact service users’ lives on an individual level, but such an impact is always insufficient. The difference between how two different social workers might handle a situation – or even between the same worker’s good and bad days – might make the difference between eating and going hungry, freezing and being warm, life and death; but even then it doesn’t address the causes of unjust resource distribution, individuals being persistently held responsible for structural issues, settler colonialism and white supremacy as continuing forces, and other aspects of interlocking oppression. Devaney appreciated the nurses who comforted her, but presumably she would have preferred consistent encounters with a healthcare system that never brought her to tears. Slahi was grateful to the guard who provided a more comfortable and accessible chair, but this humane act didn’t end his detention or abolish the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp. He also seems to have been touched by the gift from the guards and their inscriptions in the book (even if he may also be inviting us to consider it a bit odd), yet surely he would have rather been liberated than gifted an American comedy book. As Loree Erickson points out, our navigations or responses to systemic problems, even the most “creative responses … should not be confused with answers” to those problems.143 Even the best social workers are often employed by oppressive systems and are therefore agents of structural oppression, even if less consistently or violently than some of their colleagues. As an illustration, Dottye Burt-Markowitz reflects upon her work as a social assistance worker in 1960s New York City. She considered herself one of the good social workers. She went out of her way to help her mostly racialized clients, such as finding extra funds for people with specific needs and advocating for them. She followed her own internal ethical code outside that of the profession. However, at the end of one workday, a group of welfare recipients occupied the building as a welfare rights protest. Knowing

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she was a “good worker,” Burt-Markowitz expected to be let out. The protesters, however, “saw her as a white social worker and therefore a part of the problem,” and so they threw soda bottles at her. She was shocked, but she suddenly realized that it didn’t matter how good a social worker or ally she was; she was still an agent of an unjust system. She also recalls learning that she had to constantly earn trust and respect, and not take for granted that people would view her as a “good social worker.”144 Furthermore, even if she was the best worker ever, she would have had bad days, would at least occasionally have said or done things that harmed those she worked with, and would have been ultimately unable to justly administer resources. The system she was navigating and benefiting from* was (and is) unjust. The inevitability of at least occasional harm is true of any relationship. However, the systems, relations, and discourses that shape specific kinds of relationship make a big difference to the extent of harm, the type of harm, and the ease with which harm happens. When one person is bestowed with greater authority and moral value by the systems and discourses that institutionalize a relationship, there’s a greater capacity for that person to abuse and oppress. Whether we take Devaney, Slahi, or one of the clients Clarke or Burt-Markowitz discuss, if any of them was having a bad day and took it out on their doctor, guard, or social worker, the person “on top” of the respective hierarchy who is paid to be in that position could very easily respond by restricting their freedom or access to material resources, making them do extra work for things they’re entitled to, or other consequences. In contrast, if a guard, doctor, or social worker has a bad day, the structure and discourses that institutionalize their relationship with prisoners, patients, or clients creates a kind of impunity for them, so that they can mistreat others with little or no consequences. Although there are often formal complaint systems, when real-life detainees, patients, or clients lodge a complaint, they’re more likely to face greater difficulty and harm as a result than they are to achieve redress or justice. How, then, do we work for a better, more just world when we know that so many before us thought they were doing good but were causing harm? How can we hold our responsibility to challenge capitalism, colonialism, the institutionalization of human relationships, the depoliticization of social problems, and the forces of interlocking oppression alongside the recognition that we’re

* Social workers materially benefit from the systems they work for through their paycheque and benefits, as well as through the political power and moral exaltation that comes from being employed, granted authority over others’ lives, and understood by other exalted folks as selfless and benevolent.

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complicit in these systems and will likely perpetuate them? Living this contradiction is difficult. As a result, many who view themselves as working towards social justice get so caught up in the fear they’ll cause harm that they never do anything concrete. Others are so certain of their righteousness that they act without reflecting upon their actual effects on others. Approaching social justice work from either of these extremes can be destructive and counterproductive. Each of us needs to find our own way of holding these extremes in tension and in conversation with one another: the need for action and the need for very careful reflection, self-scrutiny, and accountability to those we affect most directly. Moving Forward: Learning from Social Movements and Displaced Practices “Prefiguration” refers to attempts within political organizing to actively create relationships and structures reflective of the society we wish to live in so that the methods we practice in our organizing work, the institutions we create through it, and the relationships we facilitate within our movements and communities align with our ideals and political dreams. Marianne Maeckelbergh observes: “Practising prefigurative politics means removing the temporal distinction between the struggle in the present and a goal in the future; instead, the struggle and the goal, the real and the ideal, become one in the present.”145 Doing prefigurative work means that the divisions between individual casework and group organizing, or the immediate and the long term, which are so commonly said to divide social work, must be understood as false dichotomies. Ends or desired outcomes shouldn’t be used to justify means or strategies. Rather, means and ends need to be understood as cohesive and interlocked. Our social justice dreams can be collectively cultivated and won. There are many models for how to do this, and for what to build as alternatives, some of which are found in what we’ve called disqualified and displaced social workings. Harsha Walia, for example, writes: As a prefiguring framework, decolonization grounds us in an understanding that we have already inherited generations of evolving wisdom about living freely and communally while stewarding the Earth from anticolonial communing practices, anticapitalist worker’s cooperatives, antioppressive communities of care, and in particular matriarchal Indigenous traditions.146

Many foundations for justice-based community building are already present within communities – especially Indigenous communities and communities

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of colour. Because these communities have been excluded from or detrimentally targeted by social work interventions, they have therefore had to collectively work to maintain alternatives to these impositions or exclusions.147 Yet, we can recall, too, that in 1902 Addams knew that poor white Chicagoans practised resource distribution and care based upon very different moralities than that of the new social workers.148 All communities have knowledge, skills, and resources that can be cultivated and mobilized to more justly care for one another, respond to violence, and redistribute material and human resources. These foundations may be subjugated, disqualified, and less prevalent than they once were, but they can nevertheless be assumed to be there.149 Prefigurative political movements cultivate resources, skills, and knowledges that are assumed to already exist. One significant site of contemporary prefigurative organizing is transformative justice.150 Transformative justice emerged primarily from the efforts of Indigenous communities, as well as communities of colour, and usually refers to local and relatively small-scale collective endeavours to prevent or redress interpersonal violence such as child abuse or intimate partner violence  – alongside other organizing efforts to radically transform society. Transformative justice approaches strive to address interpersonal violence outside of the state-sanctioned violence and oppression of criminal justice and child protective systems – without replicating the violences of these systems in the alternatives practised; they therefore require fundamentally rethinking frequently taken-for-granted ideas about justice and harm. Responding to abuse without relying on state systems is an example of prefigurative politics: it is an attempt to create or strengthen systems of accountability and safety that do not mobilize oppressive forces. It is also grounded in the recognition that communities have the skills and resources to come up with their own solutions to serious problems. Transformative justice approaches are often based largely on Indigenous restorative justice practices and other approaches from within communities of colour and other marginalized groups for responding to violence that have been normatively displaced through European imperialism and colonialism. Transformative justice approaches work with the tension between careful reflection and concrete action, and also between immediate responses and longterm political change. Transformative justice practices and principles therefore offer a lot to social workers and social justice workers for thinking through the work we do, how we might want to do it differently, and what other things we might need to involve ourselves in while perhaps also navigating unjust systems and trying to transform them from the inside. Many activist communities in the United States and Canada, and particularly many communities of colour,

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engage transformative justice efforts as part of their broader social justice, antiviolence, and prison abolition work. Transformative justice invites us all to shift our analysis away from the notion that bad people do bad things and good people do good things. According to transformative justice, we all do good and bad things, and, in fact, many actions might be experienced as righteous by some and cruel or insensitive by others. We all do things that harm others, but that doesn’t make us inherently bad, morally inferior, or disposable.151 There’s always more nuance and complexity to a person’s life than the harm they cause; and there’s always more nuance and complexity to a person’s life than the good they do. Both of us, A.J. and Chris, have written about causing harm to others in our attempts to make positive interventions. Our writings are not intended to make it “okay” to harm others, but rather to try to carefully reflect upon how it is that real people come to harm others, so that others might resonate with such reflections as a resource for preventing further harm.152 As discussed previously, Chris has written about perpetrating physical restraints and other forms of denigration and violence in a residential facility for Indigenous youth.153 And we both have written about the harm we caused while trying to make social justice–based interventions with specific men who had inflicted violence against women.154 Binary good/bad or innocent/guilty ways of understanding people enabled us both to situate ourselves squarely on the side of good, as innocent, because we positioned ourselves as helping survivors and challenging those who perpetrated violence. In reflecting on their work as a part of various groups doing transformative justice in order to hold perpetrators of sexual violence accountable, A.J. writes: People who have worked in groups supporting survivors are generally very thoughtful and develop thorough critiques of how to improve this work. However, depicting ourselves as innocent means that we might not interrogate the ways that we also cause harm through these processes. Nonetheless, if we understand ourselves as wholly innocent rather than profoundly implicated, we may not reflect on how the practices of seeking justice can cause harm.155

Rejecting a narrative of one’s own innocence calls on each of us to consider our implications in both interpersonal harm and systemic interlocking oppressions. It means understanding that, even with “good” intentions, even if we see ourselves as “good” people, we can nevertheless cause harm and participate in structural violence, and we must strive to be accountable if and when we do so. It is through this ongoing emotional, intellectual, and behavioural work that, as transformative justice activist Julia Oparah asserts, “abolition becomes

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a present-tense verb, not merely a dreamed of utopian future.”156 When we do the work of accountability and self-scrutiny, we are working to embody and cultivate ways of living and relating that might enable a world without imprisonment, without outsiders dictating who is and isn’t a fit parent; perhaps we’re even inching our way towards a world free from the widespread injustices, violences, and inequities of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy. Moving beyond good/bad thinking, however, is much harder in practice than on paper. “Carceral logics” are ways of framing the world through a criminal justice framework.157 These framings extend beyond prison walls and include the belief that individual punishment (rather than healing and political transformation) is necessary and effectively deters violence. Carceral logics are hegemonic within white ruling class society and can be incredibly difficult to move beyond. It can take a lot of compassion, patience, and understanding – things that are very difficult to muster when a person harms another person. While we – Chris and A.J. – try to live our lives outside of carceral logics, they are persistent in our lives. Nonetheless, we think it’s important to do the work to engage with this principle – especially for social (justice) workers doing antiviolence work, working with people who have been criminalized, and working with people who have been defined as abusive or neglectful to others. Shifting our understandings and operating outside of carceral logics is an important component of working towards the decolonization and deinstitutionalization of social work and social relations. It is an important component of working towards a world in which political dominance and imagined moral superiority are no longer held as the key to personal and community healing. Disability Justice and the Democratic Redistribution of Dependence and Care Another contemporary political movement that offers important lessons for people working in the social world, which also coincides with efforts to decolonize and deinstitutionalize, is disability justice organizing. Disability justice practice and discourse emerged from the work of disabled people of colour, some of whom are also significantly involved in transformative justice organizing.158 A central concern for disability justice is that we need to move beyond the binary of helper and helped towards building “communities of care,” as Yashna Padamsee puts it.159 “We need to move the conversation from individual to collective. From independent to interdependent.”160 Indeed, the idea that each adult should be independent and self-supporting (and that we are failures as humans if we are not) is a myth that works to erase the beautiful interrelationships we all need

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to survive.161 Disability justice activist Mia Mingus says of independence that it “requires such a high level of privilege and even then, it is still a myth.” She asks: “Whose oppression and exploitation must exist for your ‘independence?’”162 Embracing interdependence – that is, recognizing that we are all fundamentally dependent on others – means acknowledging the contributions that each person makes, including disabled people, children, and elders, whose contributions to communities and lives are often diminished or erased. For social (justice) workers, moving towards creating prefigurative “communities of care” means moving beyond the hierarchical binary of helper and helped. From the earliest days of organized social work, social workers have had a tendency to set themselves apart from the people they are helping. Distancing is what long-time social justice activist and political prisoner Marilyn Buck calls the “social work mentality.”163 Identifying as a helper while refusing to acknowledge the very real ways that you receive help and have needs and dependencies establishes social workers as superior to the communities, families, and persons they work with, and certainly as distinct from them. Those whose work includes helping others may need to be very careful that they don’t imagine themselves as selfless, independent saviour outsiders. Those of us who imagine ourselves and are acknowledged by others as offering significant help and care to others would do well to position ourselves, rather, as fellow human beings, to acknowledge the help we get, and to ask for help when we need it. As A.J. has written: Asking for help makes it easier for other people to ask for help and shows that you understand that none of us are rugged individuals. As long as we structure help as nondisabled and helped as disabled, we are reinforcing problematic divisions that depict disabled people as excessively needy and nondisabled people as independent.164

By undermining the helper/helped binary, communities can cultivate the capacity to become the fluid and mutually supporting entities they can be (which organized professional social work has much too often worked against). Moving from helping/saving to working more mutually with can be conceptually difficult for people who have constructed their identities as helpers or allies. Just as nobody is only vulnerable or damaged, nobody is exclusively a champion of others’ needs and causes. Pushing back against the idea of being an ally (as a fixed identity) is the alternative framing in which allyship is something you do rather than who you are, as captured in the popular activist saying, “Ally is a verb not a noun.” Relatedly, bell hooks suggests that women can sometimes embody and enact patriarchy165 and, more generally, that “interlocking systems

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indict us all in some way.”166 The danger of positioning one’s identity as fixedly against injustice and innocent of oppression is significant for us all, however we are positioned within interlocking systems of oppression. We therefore need to be cautious of thinking that any of us can consistently “be” an ally to others. Conclusion Following upon earlier chapters’ critique of the prejudice of progress, this chapter showed that things are not getting better as an overarching tendency. Gains have surely been made in relation to individual rights and the possibility of individual upward mobility, but these gains have always been at the expense of those who were relatively more oppressed within groups that won these rights. When “women” were said to have secured the right to vote, many actual women still couldn’t vote due to racism or due to being confined in a penal prison or an institution for people with psychiatric or intellectual disabilities;* and although recent advances have been made in LGBT rights, these advancements too have tended to benefit white, ruling class, long-term monogamous, cisgender, homonormative gay men and lesbians. When such victories are celebrated as overarching progress, it’s forgotten that many are left behind. Those systemically left behind are then individually held responsible for continued difficulties as a result of erroneous narratives claiming that Western society has abolished the racisms, sexisms, and homophobias of the past. It’s good that it’s no longer as socially acceptable to openly state bigoted opinions, but many systemic forms of violence and associated moral denigrations continue unabated. Furthermore, over the last few decades, things have been actively getting worse for many of the most morally denigrated, oppressed, and poor.

* In Canada, the timeline for federal elections goes like this, although the provincial timelines vary considerably: In 1920, non-confined white women were first allowed to vote in federal elections. In 1947, South Asians and Chinese persons could now vote, although Doukhobors, Hutterites, and Mennonites briefly lost the right to vote unless they’d served in the armed forces. Japanese people were first allowed to vote the following year. Aboriginal persons could first vote in 1960. In 1988, folks confined due to “mental disease” (which was inclusive of both intellectual disabilities and psychiatric diagnoses) were allowed to vote for the first time. Those imprisoned within the criminal justice system for a sentence of less than two years first got the vote in 1993, and those serving a sentence for more than two years have been permitted to vote only since 2002 – although they are officially still not permitted to do so according to the letter of the law in the Canada Elections Act. Therefore, all Canadian citizen women were legally allowed to vote in a federal election only as of 2002, and this right is not yet put into effect. For further details, please see Elections Canada, A History of the Vote in Canada; CBC Television, “Lifting Voting Restrictions on the Mentally Ill”; Canadian Human Rights Commission, “Voting Rights.”

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Neoliberal policies increase the freedom to choose supportive services for those who can pay out of pocket or have private insurance, which enables the illusion of progress among the ruling classes. But these same policies have drastically reduced the social safety net available to poor people. Furthermore, the rising incarceration rate is indisputable evidence that things aren’t getting better for the much greater number of people now behind bars. And, as discussed earlier, incarceration rates don’t accurately represent all those who commit crimes or only those who commit crimes; rather, they paint a clear picture of systemic oppression. Some babies, especially Indigenous and Black babies, are born already more likely to grow up to find themselves arrested and imprisoned than white, ruling class, nondisabled folks, as well as relatively more likely to be harassed, assaulted, and killed by the police. Considering the increasing gap between rich and poor, reduced welfare and social services, increased policing and imprisonment (corresponding to no increase in crime), and first the war on drugs and then the war on terror, things have gotten significantly worse for many over the last three decades. This decisive neoliberal turn for the worse has dramatically intensified alongside the rise of overt white supremacy (through what is euphemistically called the “alt right”). It has enabled the enactment of racist,167 anti-poor,168 antimigrant,169 sexist,170 heterosexist,171 cisist,172 and otherwise oppressive173 policies by President Donald Trump. In Ontario, Trump-like Doug Ford rode a similar right-wing populist wave to victory. As we put the finishing touches on this book, the provincial parliament has sat for less than a week, and already his government has introduced or implemented racist,174 anti-migrant,175 and hetero/cisist176 policies – likely with other oppressive policy to follow. It’s important that we don’t kid ourselves into framing the impact of Trump or Ford as reversals in an otherwise consistent march towards progress; in actual fact, they are consolidations of already existing concentrations of power. Debunking the myth of overarching progress does not undermine the importance of social justice movements. Rather, it further demonstrates the need for sustained collective action to make life more liveable for all – not only for those who are already doing relatively well. Social movements need to remain vigilant to the pitfalls of liberalism and the associated tendency for gains to align with survival of the fittest values through which legislated individual rights are available only to the relatively exalted populations deemed deserving of “the right to have rights.”177 In this chapter, we presented it as absolutely commonplace for contemporary social workers to work within oppressive systems. We discussed present-day child welfare, in which systemic colonialism and anti-Black racism result in Indigenous and Black children born more likely to be apprehended

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from their parents than non-Black and non-Indigenous children. Intersecting poverty and disability into the uneven violences of the system reveals an even wider discrepancy between those who are born already likely to end up involved with child welfare and those who are almost certain to have no child welfare involvement in their lives – whether or not they are abused and/or neglected.178 Furthermore, when taken from their families, at least some of those disproportionately apprehended are also disproportionately institutionalized (rather than placed with another family). All of these injustices and violences need to be stopped. In the meantime, workers in these systems need to remember that it’s not primarily due to individual behaviour that a person finds themself apprehended, arrested, or institutionalized. That’s just not how these systems function. From the very beginning of professional social work, social workers claimed to be working in the interests of marginalized people while actively participating in their oppression, including both eugenics and genocide. We all need to grapple with this legacy, not as an unfortunate history but as an unacceptable present. A marked gap remains between the stated social justice goals of many institutions and organizations, on the one hand, and the experiences of those subjected to their services, on the other. We discussed the difficulty of working within oppressive systems and of trying to be as human and helpful as possible. We said that such careful navigations can have very positive impacts on individual lives but are never outside of the systems that subordinate those same individuals and others. There are no simple answers. We ended the chapter by suggesting that prefigurative social justice movements, such as transformative justice and disability justice, offer many lessons to others engaged in social justice organizing, professional social work, and other forms of social working. These and other social justice movements produce sophisticated knowledge and know-how that can be mobilized by diverse groups for varied social justice projects. However, there’s always a danger in taking these movements’ knowledge and practices out of context, appropriating them, depoliticizing them, and delegitimizing the work that had originally been done.179 This description, it seems, might accurately frame what white settlements did in relation to the earlier Black missions. It might also frame how medicine claimed the credit and authority for unchaining the mad, when, in fact, it was a woman and her ex-patient husband whose ethics and practices spurred this transformation. The appropriation and depoliticization of alternatives remains a danger today. For example, significant concerns have been raised about the use of Family Group Conferencing – adapted from Maori practices – in mainstream child welfare. Most importantly, it’s commonly experienced as more empowering by white and otherwise relatively exalted families but seen

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as just as coercive and disempowering as other “child protective” interventions by some Black and otherwise relatively denigrated families.180 Acknowledging these significant dangers, we nevertheless feel that some of the guiding ethics of these contemporary social justice movements – such as working to cultivate radical relational alternatives in our day-to-day interactions, refusing to draw upon violent institutions to address violence, and undermining the hard-and-fast distinction between those who help and those who receive assistance – could potentially make a very big difference to what social work is. The ethics guiding these movements, as alternatives to the imperialist and patriarchal ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority, could help to disrupt social work’s central role in perpetuating interlocking forms of oppression and the moral economies that animate and normalize systemic material violences. Collectively, we need to cultivate, and in some cases resuscitate, real alternatives to the ever-shifting but enduring ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. We can’t just wait for some figurehead to apologize in fifty years for the violence we continue to perpetrate today.

Conclusion: The Varied Paths That Brought Us Here

We could have written a factually accurate account of Mary Richmond and Jane Addams – of the Charity Organization Society (COS) and the settlement movement – as the origin of professional organized social work. But, as Lord Macaulay observed: “A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.”1 Whether “true” and “false” are exactly the right words here, the standard account of the history of social work is so very limited that it is not adequate. Medieval monks, the Egyptian Society of Muslim Ladies, eighteenth century childrearing experts, eugenicists, French, British, and German policy makers, and early twentieth century South Asian community organizers may seem unrelated, but each group was social working, and each group contributed to what has come to be understood and practised as “social work.” The gradual shift in European thought by which all individuals came to be understood as reformable or redeemable is at least as significant to laying the groundwork for what professional social work has become as the central coordination of charity – and it’s much more significant than the activities of the settlement movement to most professional social workers’ everyday duties and lives. Indian reductions, reserves, and reservations, the Black Codes, and racist immigration policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the continuous journey requirement are all relevant to a history of social work. So too are Indigenous efforts to protect children from Indian residential schools and preserve traditional practices outlawed by the state, anti-slavery and anti-lynching activism, and Chinese communities’ mutual aid efforts. These varied and contradictory histories are no more particular and situated than the ruling class white persons and organizations that were social working in Chicago or Baltimore. These varied histories can be told as a history, without collapsing them into a harmonious, cohesive, or equitable effort. This history was not harmonious or equitable, and legacies of unevenness and violence persist today. The violent

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suppression of Indigenous nonbinary genders and sexualities, the sexological and psychiatric classification of the invert and homosexual, the massive number of Progressive Era ruling class women who refused to marry men and often formed loving partnerships with one another, and the concurrent work (by these and other reformers and professionals) to classify some folks eugenically unfit because of their gender or sexuality and to institutionalize and sterilize them for this “defect” also all contributed to where we’ve come from as “social workers” today. These contradictory threads don’t cohere harmoniously, but they are nevertheless tensely interconnected in the emergence and development of professional social work. The same can be said for the creation of a new category of humanity, set apart from everyone else for their assumed, individualized, and generalized inability to work and banded together under the label of disability: social work wouldn’t be anything like what it is today, were it not for this development. By no means is our more expansive account of social work’s emergence complete. That would be an impossible task, and we look forward to others’ efforts to build upon what can be known about where we’ve come from, continuing to extend our understandings beyond the standard account of social work – just as we’ve built upon others’ work for our own. Such research is essential for understanding how social work came to exist; and it’s essential for understanding how social work continues to be and do what it is and does. It’s crucial that we don’t take normative contemporary social work for granted. This way of relating and intervening is not how things have to be. We therefore envision cultivating more nuanced, complex, and politicized understandings of how social work came to be as an aspect of working towards fundamentally transforming professional social work and the political system it supports, and we invite readers to consider taking up this struggle in their own life and work. Lord Macaulay’s observation about history that’s cited at the beginning of this chapter is insightful. Among other strategic uses, it can be mobilized to critique white supremacist framings of history. But readers may recall from chapter 6 that Macaulay occupied a central role in racist assimilationist colonialism through the imposition of British education in India. Like the rest of us, he too was complicated beyond the harm he caused. It’s not that this useful observation about history makes up for his violent impact. Rather, perhaps it will remind us all – yet again – to be more cautious when we think that we’re right, insightful, helping, or on the side of justice. If our historical account of interlocking oppressions in the moral economies of social working has one central lesson, that cautionary reminder might just be it. In this book, we traced out a genealogy of today’s normative and violent social working by suggesting that the ethic of the healing power of domination

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and imagined moral superiority was born out of particular, located, and exceptional circumstances. Across the time and space of humans living together, this ethic is relatively new and relatively exceptional. It’s therefore far from inevitable that we allow it to continue to reign as it does today. To this end, we explored a few examples of the countless alternative diverse ethical traditions that can be roughly grouped together as responding to the “call of the other.” We discussed examples of these varied moralities indigenous to Turtle Island and Nigeria, in medieval Jerusalem before the Crusades, among poor white Chicagoans at the advent of professional social work, and among some poor Torontonians today. In these diverse but nevertheless resonant ethical traditions, helping others comes with no imperative to change them or teach them how to think or live differently. Social workings rooted in the “call of the other” discussed in previous chapters include located and specific approaches to caring and sharing material resources, child protection, sexuality and gender variance, the distribution of moral authority and expertise, behaviours that are now criminalized, and understandings of the diverse embodiments called disabilities and the varied experiences now normatively psychologized and psychiatrized. Many of these social workings of community care and accountability carry on today, while others have been fragmented, displaced, or destroyed by generations of colonial genocide, capitalist dislocations, and imperialist social work. In exploring the initial shift away from the “call of the other” towards an initially Christian ethic characterized by a sense of superiority and entitlement to transform others’ lives, we described a transition in the trajectory of the Order of the Hospitallers from nonjudgmental caring to attempting to change people and eradicate their way of being – first targeting Muslims and later Algonquin people; first through outright war and later through coercive assimilation. We suggest that discursive and ethical shifts surrounding the Crusades marked an initial institutionalization of the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. Through the gradual spread of this new morality, it was now said to be in the interest of colonized people to colonize them, in the interest of imprisoned folks to imprison them. We trace this fabricated and imperialist “healing power” through the optimistic benevolent instrumental violences of the Enlightenment and Progressive Eras, and ultimately through to present-day neoliberal downsizing and contemporary child apprehension, mass imprisonment, and any social working that assumes that those providing services know better than those accessing them. According to this ethic, which is central to professional social work and also to many contemporary nonprofessional social workings, denigrated people’s lives will be bettered if they become more like straight, white, nondisabled, ruling class cis men. This basic ethic has taken many forms: colonial assimilation, ruling class friendly visiting

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to poor families, disability rehabilitation, penitentiaries, workhouses and other sites of forced labour, desegregation as “mingling” in externally enforced mixed neighbourhoods, and the imposition of ruling class European cisheteropatriarchal mores and structures onto peoples throughout the world. Through to today, those who implement these often horrifying policies and practices tend to articulate them as in the best interest of those subjected to them. This rationale was the historical justification put forward when social workers apprehended Indigenous children from their families and placed them in Indian residential schools; it’s the same justification that surely enabled social workers to apprehend Indigenous children from their families just last night. Yet, before the first apprehensions justified by either child welfare or colonial assimilation, no child had ever been stolen from their family alongside a “best interests” justification. It’s important that we think about the starting points of normative histories and the political work accomplished by these selective starting points. This need for a critical engagement with origin stories is true of child apprehension; it’s true of the liberation of the mad and other liberal reforms of the then relatively new practices of mass confinement; it’s true of professional social work. The standard account of the birth of “social work” positions the profession as responding to the poverty in large urban centres in the 1800s, often with little mention of anything before this point. These sprawling cities were a direct result of industrial capitalist displacements, which caused widespread social upheaval. Through to today, capitalism continues to harm people. The most obvious example is that societies governed by capitalism have an accepted poverty rate and unemployment rate. No matter how hard this or that individual works, no matter how many résumé-writing workshops they attend, no matter how upwardly mobile that one person may be, there remains an accepted rate of poverty and unemployment in the political arrangements that govern the United States and Canada. Until we redistribute resources so as to abolish poverty, homelessness, and other economic injustices, they will continue to exist on a societal level, even if every poor, unemployed, or homeless person works three times as hard as anybody else. Unemployment, homelessness, and poverty are created by our economic system. They are part of our economic system. They do not exist due to individual laziness or immorality; individual characteristics have nothing to do with a system that has only so many jobs and homes, a system set up to distribute wealth in such drastically uneven ways that some people starve. Furthermore, neoliberal policies are making life increasingly difficult for those who are the worst off by eroding the very limited social safety net that was established following the Second World War. With these reversions towards liberal individualism and unhampered capitalism, there is a renewed

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urgency for social justice work. And, alongside working to fundamentally transform unjust systems and discourses, those doing professional and nonprofessional social work urgently need to understand and reject their role in assimilation, rehabilitation, and normalization, as neoliberalism’s proponents attempt to even further displace mutual aid with rugged individualism and community care with self-interest and the imposition of professional and state expertise. This book strongly contests the prejudice of progress. One way it does so is to ask: Who is and is not included in the gains associated with this supposed “progress”? And, relatedly, from whose vantage point is progress being measured? It was celebrated as progress when COSs and other professional social workers successfully campaigned to eliminate charity outside of sites of confinement. But those who found themselves newly starving or imprisoned didn’t experience this change as progress. When “invalidity” was first institutionalized as grounds by which people were able to access state relief, this “gain” was tethered to a new objectification of disabled people as fundamentally incapable and morally inferior. The gain of disability pensions was intersected with the mobilization of instrumental violence to make inferior people work, so that disabled people have been forcibly impoverished ever since and are policed if they try to earn any extra money at all. The progress normatively attributed to European and white settler societies ever since the Enlightenment is merely how we’re taught to frame history. It doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on whether things are truly improving or for whom. That is to say, it’s an operation of what Foucault called “power/ knowledge,” rather than an actual access to any objective truth, when we all tend to “know” that Western or Global North societies have been steadily progressing since the 1700s. One significant arena in which we’re normatively led to believe that progress has been happening for centuries – and that this advancement has been consistently led by morally and intellectually superior ruling class white folks – is the advancement of women’s and 2SLGBTQIA rights and freedoms. However, as cited earlier, Gayatri Spivak counters that European imperialism has always been erroneously narrated through the trope of “white men saving brown women from brown men”2 – even at historical moments that we now look back upon as anything but feminist. Resonantly, Kenneth Hamilton challenges normative white supremacist framings of Black and racialized homophobia and the assumed queer-positive benevolence of imperialisms past and present: “The legacy of colonization has always historically meant the targeting of queer sexualities and spiritualties, the crushing of fluid sexual behavior to establish a heteronorm.”3

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It’s not that all pre-colonial/pre-Enlightenment communities around the world embraced same-sex love and sex, and celebrated folks who lived outside of rigid gender binaries. That’s not true either. However, many communities featured legitimated means for folks to love people with the same assigned gender, understandings of gender beyond the two “opposite” genders system, accepted practices of sexual and romantic companionship other than heterosexual monogamy, and distributions of authority that privileged women rather than men or treated genders as distinct but equal. Not a single community had ever exalted the specific nuclear family and companionate love marriage norm before the birth of capitalism in Western Europe. Furthermore, in those communities that did not have legitimate means of pursuing the varied lives and loves captured under the umbrella of 2SLGBTQIA, people have always found ways to live and love outside of their locally legitimized norms* – and such sitespecific navigations are interrupted when new ways of life are imposed upon people, whether in workers’ villages, Indian reductions/reserves/reservations, or mixed neighbourhoods. Although ruling class white folks are normatively framed as steadily and consistently spreading queer and women’s rights and freedoms to both the supposedly unenlightened racialized majority world and to ignorant poor and rural white communities, in actuality ruling class white folks have spread the imperialist norms of cisheteropatriarchalization to all corners of the globe. This ideology has normalized and exalted the nuclear family, men’s authority over women and children, heterosexual monogamy, and the rigid gender binary. Cisheteropatriarchalization has been a fundamental, central, and consistent component of European imperialism and colonialism; it’s been just as central to normative social working with poor and marginalized communities within white settler colonies and Europe. Histories of white queer and feminist gains are often much more complicated than commonly acknowledged. European women were slowly squeezed out of the helping professions by medicine for several centuries, right until the founding of the COS – which surely complicates the account in which social work’s professionalization enabled women to first enter the workforce. Furthermore, women were integrated into the new profession of social work without the autonomy that they’d had pre-professionalization in traditionally female helping endeavours in Europe. Instead, they were integrated into imperialist and cisheteropatriarchal mores of surveillance, restricting assistance, and always knowing better. Moreover, poor women had always worked to support their families, female slaves

* Relatedly, Puar notes in Terrorist Assemblages that white liberal norms and values are exalted when being “out of the closet” is legitimated as the superior way to live a queer life.

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had been forced to do work that was reserved for men in white society at the time, and distinct gender norms prevailed in Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities, so that women working outside of the home was entirely normal in most communities. The relationship between cisheteropatriarchalization, feminism, and queerness is also very complicated in the work of the earliest professional social workers. Many women leaders in social work – including both Mary Richmond and Jane Addams – refused to marry men and had long-term live-in female companions whom they loved dearly and openly. Whether this or that relationship was sexual (which we usually can’t ascertain) can’t be the barometer by which we decide if such “Boston marriages” were relevant to queerness and feminism today. These relationships forged new possibilities for women to live outside of heterosexual marriage. They cultivated new ways for women to openly live together in explicitly acknowledged love. They are therefore important to histories of feminism and queerness, whether or not they were also sexual (which would be important, if we could know). However, many of those doing this important political work in their personal relationships were doing remarkably contradictory political work in their professional relationships with poor and marginalized women. In those relationships, early social workers shamed women for not being womanly enough – clean enough, submissive enough, and so on. They also worked to institutionalize and confine people deemed eugenically unfit, which included women who had sex with other women, men who had sex with men, and those who defied the gender binary somehow or other. The history of eugenics, in which the settlement movement and the COS worked harmoniously with one another, is just one example of the partiality of the standard account when it portrays the COS and settlements as opposing poles of social work. The standard account portrays social work history as two coherent and self-contained lines, starting with the white COS and settlement houses, which are entirely distinct but merge into a singular profession. In some versions of the account, this merging was harmonious; in others it’s always been a struggle. But the two lines are held firmly in place as the parameters of what social work is, so that other histories – whether eugenic confinement, the coordinated settlement of escaped slaves, the state regulation of who can legally identify as Indian, or the increasing personal responsibility placed on people for their difficulties in life – can only be folded into this fundamental history on its margins. The alternative account we’ve presented is messy. The COS and settlements aren’t discrete endeavours that merge at a single point; they overlap and interlock at numerous sites, including eugenics; rehabilitation; intrusive surveillance; whiteness and settler nationalism; the moral exaltation and exaggerated

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capacity, agency, or efficacy of the social worker; and the inseparable denigration of service users as exceptionally dependent, needy, ignorant, and incapable. Without accounting for these and many other ways that histories interlock, we get a very narrow account of what either group was up to, none of which seems all that bad, and often a total exclusion of other groups’ work. This very limited history isn’t good enough. Indigenous peoples’ social workings and Black and other racialized communities’ social workings hold many lessons for contemporary social work, but only if these social workings are acknowledged in the histories we tell. Of those histories left out of white social work history, the most extensive research has been done on the social welfare systems that Black Americans created parallel to the white systems at the time. This extensive infrastructure included almost all aspects that white social workers were constructing during that period. Much of this social working predated the first white settlement houses in the form of Black missions. Furthermore, even earlier still, there were sophisticated networks across the United States and Canada enabling escaped slaves to survive and settle, and much of this infrastructure paralleled what gets called the birth of professional social work when white people later provided essentially the same services to white immigrants. However, of all the Black individuals and communities involved in professional and non-professional social working, it seems that not a single one prioritized establishing child protective services in the sense of strangers assessing and bestowing children’s safety. This fact is an astounding lesson for us today. Black communities created orphanages, settlement houses, charities, cooperatives, and basically all of the services and organizations characteristic of early social work, with this one exception of child protective services. They therefore could have used available resources, however scarce, to prioritize institutionalized and professionalized child protection. But they didn’t. Not once. Surely this absence can invite us to wonder whether this system really does what we ask of it and normatively proclaim that it does. The standard account of social work’s imagined polarity between the COS and the settlements also fabricates a much too clear polarity between individually oriented interventions and community-based interventions. In its radical versions, this polarity frames settlements and community-level interventions as good (or radical) and individually oriented interventions as bad (or conservative). However, that framing discounts the very real need for material and individually oriented relief and advocacy within unjust systems and societies. Furthermore, the ethic of the healing power of “mingling” and imagined moral superiority also animated both settlement work and community work. Settlement workers moved into the communities they worked with, but they

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remained ruling class examples for their denigrated poor and working class clients, who were still framed as ignorant and incapable of properly living everyday life. The division still remained and justified settlement workers’ livelihood and work. The same can be said of at least some of the early social work that was happening in Black communities, where wealthier Northern US Black social workers aimed to align Southern Black migrants more closely with ruling class mores – even if this tendency might have been less pronounced or consistent than in the white social working of the day. Furthermore, community-level social working carries the danger of violence against entire communities in one fell swoop, when animated by the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. When white ruling class experts who were external to targeted communities benevolently decided to reconstruct entire communities, these social workings were incredibly violent and oppressive. For example, when white liberals destroyed Africville, they considered it a success of racial desegregation; the community’s destruction wasn’t a pre–civil rights intervention, and it wasn’t animated by a conservative white supremacy that we’ve since left behind. Much of the violence and intrusion discussed in this book was grounded in liberalism rather than conservatism – for example, in culturally determinist liberal white supremacy rather than biologically determinist conservative white supremacy. Conservatives desire to maintain the status quo, whereas liberals attempt to change the world by changing individuals. It’s this liberal orientation that enables the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority. As Ameil Joseph puts it, this project must be understood “as colonization, as imperialism, as liberalism.”4 Understanding liberalism as individually oriented imperialism deconstructs distinctions commonly accepted between rehabilitation and eugenics, between assimilation and genocide. Rehabilitation and assimilation are liberal means of eradicating ways of being that have long been denigrated; they are no less eugenic or genocidal for their liberality. Relatedly, Mary Richmond, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, and many others normally remembered as conservatives clearly positioned themselves as liberals and critiqued conservative objectifications, much like most contemporary social workers. In telling histories of violence and oppression, it is tempting to separate oneself from the horrors of the past. This tendency, however, allows continuities of violent legacies to live on uninterrupted. Whether in governments’ apologies for highly contained horrors of the past, or in celebrations that “it gets better,” the prejudice of progress has us translating historical knowledge of oppression into complacency about ongoing injustices. Genealogies challenge this irresponsibility: they seek to uncover how historical violence continues, even if in

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less obvious ways for those not targeted by it. As a part of this project, then, we have reflected upon the stated intentions of historical figures – many of whom are now widely understood to have been harmful – so that we might consider how easy it is to be invested in one’s own benevolence and innocence, even while clearly and directly causing great harm. Just as Francis Willard, Mary Richmond, Jane Addams, Margaret Butcher, Charles Grant, Richard Pratt, and Stephen Harper seem to have imagined themselves benevolent and innocent, so too can each of us imagine ourselves totally immune to complicity in others’ oppression. We hope that by telling their stories, and by reflecting upon their actual words, we can work in the present to more squarely and honestly confront our own complicity, violence, and responsibility. Again, though, to say that we’re all indicted within interlocking forces of oppression5 does not mean that the political stakes are equal for us all. Fundamental political and social transformation is far more immediately and materially necessary for some than for others. Therefore, those most immediately and adversely affected by an issue should be granted greater authority than others on the direction of responses and solutions to that issue, taking into account that there will be a diversity of opinions and priorities in any community, with the result that negotiating how to proceed will not always be a simple or straightforward task.6 The effort to privilege the experiences of those most affected by an issue,* however complicated in practice, nevertheless entails a significant reversal of the traditional social worker–client power relationship, although it would be naive to think that a person can just will their way into making such a reversal. One important critical practice, as long as our social and political context remains roughly as it is, is to keep working against the things that position us, as social workers and social justice workers, as the experts on others’ lives, as morally superior and particularly effective, and as the kinds of people who rarely need help ourselves. Moral economies and interlocking oppressions are remarkably complex, as we hope to have shown and reflected upon throughout this book. Often wellintentioned past and present social work interventions have intersected with

* See Emi Koyama’s “Disloyal to Feminism: Abuse of Survivors within the Shelter System” for an excellent discussion of the need for greater accountability to the most marginalized service users in social services such as shelters for women who have experienced abuse. The “Abusive Power and Control within the Domestic Violence Shelter” power and control wheel, which she created with Lauren Martin based upon the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project’s original “Power and Control Wheel,” provides a visual account of the kinds of professional violences we have characterized as animated by the ethic of the healing power of domination and imagined moral superiority.

Conclusion: The Varied Paths That Brought Us Here  375

legacies of interlocking oppression in countless and contradictory ways. When endeavouring to make social justice–based interventions into the social world, this complexity should be kept in mind. Without a doubt, things are remarkably complicated, and this point should never be forgotten. At the same time, things can be said to be very simple. Social workers and social justice workers don’t know what’s best for other people or for communities or families we’re not members of. We don’t even know what’s best for all members of our own communities, families, or alliances. It’s crucial that we work towards mutuality in our activism and care work, rather than relate to others as disinterested, pitying, and superior experts, helpers, allies, or champions of social justice. However, we also can’t imagine that such crucial efforts create an actual equality or friendship when our relationships with others are unevenly structured by systems and legacies of inequality. We cannot forget that people have widely diverse needs, struggles, strengths, and histories; and that certain selected aspects of such varied experiences and qualities will tend to be roughly shared by members of shared political categories (such as disabled people, people of colour, or trans people). Whenever it’s imagined that a person isn’t moral, intelligent, or capable enough to get through the day, care for others, take responsibility for what they’ve done, or navigate life’s struggles, we need to at least recognize this evaluation as a common theme that’s justified violence and intrusion in countless lives, and realize that maybe we need to tread carefully and not be so sure of our benevolence. Each of us needs to engage in our own uniquely situated humble and ongoing processes of learning, reflection, and accountability. We must work against our own claims to innocence and recognize how we are complicit in systems of oppression and domination, even when we’re actively working against them. Each of us causes harm to others in our lives, and we must work to mitigate that harm and never use the inevitability of some harm as a justification for irresponsibility or selfcertainty. It’s not good enough to sacrifice people’s immediate material needs in pursuit of distant utopias, or to meet immediate needs in ways that uphold oppressive systems. As a counter-practice to assimilationist normalization, we need to work towards what Alan Jenkins describes as “opening up possibilities for tolerance and respect of difference” through the “seeking out, understanding and appreciation of the experiences of others, their singularity and their differences.”7 Dian Million therefore invites us, “in love and honor,” to “hold in light open embrace” both “difference,” generally, and also “an expansive number of alliances with others whose goal is for generative life and not death.” She asks “how we might hold one another in respect,” and she importantly situates “respect” as necessary to political struggle.8 Each and every one of us, no matter how denigrated, exalted, or inconsistently valorized across sites of identity,

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has a role in struggles for social justice and also a responsibility to contribute to cultivating a world that’s more liveable for everyone. Finally, we would do well to recall what Angela Davis’s mother said to her when she was a little girl, in reference to now-abolished legal racial segregation: “This is not the way things are supposed to be. This might be the way they are now, but they are not supposed to be this way … They will not always be this way.”9

Timeline: Selected Events from the Age of Enlightenment through the Progressive Era

1648 –  The first recorded use of corporal punishment by a Huron-Wendat parent. 1651 –  The Order of the Hospitallers claims ownership of four Caribbean islands and enslaves Carib inhabitants. 1656 –  “Great confinement of the poor” begins in France; many mad and disabled people are confined. 1670 –  Hôtel des Invalides is established to care for disabled ex-soldiers in France. 1720 –  The slave trade of Indigenous people in the United States is largely abandoned by this point. 1740s –  Body of European literature on childrearing emerges. 1746 –  Jacobite Rising in Scotland is defeated. Traditional symbols of Gaelic culture are banned soon after. 1749 –  Governor Cornwallis offers a bounty for Mi’kmaw scalps on behalf of the British Crown. 1750 –  Cornwallis increases the payment for Mi’kmaw scalps. 1755 –  Expulsion of the Acadians. 1756 –  The British Crown’s payment for Mi’kmaw scalps is increased again. 1758 –  The New Jersey Colonial Assembly establishes the first US Indian reservation. 1763 –  The Royal Proclamation claims North America as British, specifies how Indigenous land is to be bought and settled, and frames the relationship with Indigenous groups as nation to nation. 1769 –  Empress Maria Theresa enacts a new Criminal Constitution instrumentalizing torture. 1772 –  Penal torture is legally abolished in the United Kingdom. 1775–1783 –  The American Revolutionary War. 1776 –  Penal torture is legally abolished in Austria.

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1776 –  Declaration of American Independence. 1785 –  Jeremy Bentham writes a manuscript advocating the decriminalization of sodomy (which is not published until 1978). 1785 –  Immanuel Kant introduces his “categorical imperative” for ethical discernment. 1787 –  Benjamin Rush proposes the first penitentiary. 1789 –  France legally abolishes penal torture. 1789–1799 –  The French Revolution. 1790 –  Part of Walnut Street Jail is converted to the first penitentiary. 1790 –  The straitjacket is invented at the Bicêtre Hospital in France. 1791 –  Jeremy Bentham publishes the panopticon model for sites of confinement, factories, and so on. 1791–1804 –  The Haitian Revolution: a slave uprising successfully overthrows colonial rule. 1792 –  First mass emigration of Scottish settlers to Canada and the Carolinas. 1792 –  Charles Grant is the first European to advocate in writing for the mass British education of colonized peoples (South Asians). 1793 –  The “liberation of the mad” and birth of “moral treatment.” 1793 –  Jeremy Bentham calls for the emancipation of European colonies. 1796 –  Samuel Tuke brings “moral treatment” to England. 1799 –  Upper Canada passes the Orphans Act, permitting forced placement of poor children with rich families. 1808 –  Johann Reil coins the word “psychiatry.” 1819 –  The United States implements the Civilization Fund Act, funding the establishment of European-style Indigenous education. 1829 –  The Eastern State Penitentiary is opened in Pennsylvania. 1834 –  The United Kingdom passes the Slavery Abolition Act, abolishing slavery in the United Kingdom, Canada, and other British colonies. 1834 –  The United Kingdom establishes the New Poor Law, introducing the “principle of less eligibility” and specifying exactly whom to consider a “pauper.” 1834 –  The Knights Hospitaller renounce their military role. 1837 –  The Utica State Lunatic Asylum, the first of its kind in the United States, opens in New York. 1839 –  Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana founds physical anthropology. 1840s –  The concept of the “norm” and “normal” is used to describe people and populations for the first time ever. 1842 –  Charles Dickens visits the Eastern State Penitentiary. 1843 –  The Province of Canada (Ontario) commits to support Indian residential schools.

Timeline from the Age of Enlightenment through the Progressive Era  379

1844–1928 –  The convict lease system is active in the United States. 1845 –  The Canadian state changes treaty payments, making them a vehicle of assimilation. 1848 –  The US system for educating people with intellectual disabilities is born. 1850 –  The United States passes the Fugitive Slave Act, allowing for the arrest and return of any escaped slaves anywhere within its borders. 1850 –  The Province of Canada builds its first “lunatic asylum” in Toronto. 1851 –  The Refugee Home Society establishes a Black settlement near Windsor. 1851 –  The first “asylum for idiots” is established in the United States. 1854 –  The first True Band Society, geared towards Black community selfsufficiency without aid from white people, is organized in Amherstburg, Ontario. 1857 –  The Province of Canada passes the Gradual Civilization Act, which includes Indian enfranchisement and other assimilative measures. 1858 –  Chinese people begin forming voluntary mutual aid organizations in British Columbia. 1859 –  Britain passes the Quarantine Act, barring many disabled people from immigrating to Commonwealth countries, including Canada. 1863 –  The US Emancipation Proclamation is decreed, legally freeing millions of slaves in Confederate territory. 1865 –  The US Civil War ends, resulting in the full abolition of slavery except for those convicted of criminal offences. 1865 –  The United States begins mass incarceration of Black people, including through the “Black Codes.” 1865–1895 –  Ida B. Wells-Barnett estimates that 10,000 Black people were lynched during this period in the United States. 1865 –  Sir Francis Galton articulates the concept of eugenics for the first time, without yet coining the term. 1867 –  The British North America Act establishes the Canadian state. 1867 –  San Francisco enacts the first “ugly law.” 1869 –  Westphal medicalizes and pathologizes same-sex desire and gender variance. 1869 –  Northern US Black churches begin establishing missions in the Southern states. 1869 –  The Charity Organization Society (COS) is established in England, originally under the name Society for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendacity.

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1869 –  Canada passes the Gradual Enfranchisement Act, which enables the Canadian state to regulate who is and isn’t an “Indian,” creates the category of status Indian, and revokes Indian status from women when they marry men without status. 1869 –  Canada implements the Immigration Act, which bars entry to “lunatics” and “idiots” deemed by authorities likely to become a permanent public charge. 1873 –  Slavery is abolished in the Spanish colonies, including Puerto Rico. 1874 –  The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) is founded. 1876 –  Canada passes the Indian Act, which consolidates and furthers assimilationist strategies of the Gradual Civilization and Gradual Enfranchisement Acts. 1877 –  The first US chapter of the COS is founded in Buffalo, New York. 1877 –  The first Canadian WCTU chapter is founded in Ontario. 1878 –  Captain Richard Henry Pratt is appointed superintendent of the prototype Indian industrial school by the US government. 1879 –  With the Davin Report, the Canadian government adopts Pratt’s militaristic model for its own Indian residential school system. 1879 –  Associated Charities of Boston initiates the first-ever centralized coordination of information from all local relief-giving agencies in the United States. 1880s –  “Ugly laws” expand due to vigorous COS efforts. 1881 –  Toronto’s equivalent of the COS, Associated Charities, is founded. 1882–1892 –  The number of charity investigators in the United States triples during this decade. 1882 –  The United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevents Chinese people from becoming citizens and restricts Chinese entry. 1882 –  The United States passes the Undesirables Act, which prevents those considered convicts, paupers, insane and/or idiots from entering the country. 1883 –  The “Friends of the Indian” is founded in New York by white people. It influences US assimilationist policies. Over its history, members include three US presidents and Captain Richard Henry Pratt. 1883 –  What is believed to be the first anti-segregation school strike by Black students takes place in the United States. 1883 –  Galton coins the term “eugenics.” 1884 –  Ida B. Wells refuses to move from an all-white train car and goes on to win a settlement against the railroad. 1884 –  Toynbee Hall, ostensibly the first settlement house, is founded in London, England.

Timeline from the Age of Enlightenment through the Progressive Era  381

1885 –  Canada’s Chinese Immigration Act imposes a head tax on Chinese immigrants. 1885 –  Canada amends the Indian Act, banning certain cultural practices and furthering its assimilationist policies. 1885 –  The Indian pass system is instituted in parts of Western Canada, effectively preventing many Indigenous people from leaving their reserve. 1887 –  The United States passes the Dawes Act (also known as the General Allotment Act), which allows division of Indigenous reservation lands and bestows US citizenship onto assimilated Indigenous people. 1888 –  Canada implements the “severalty” policy, which divides Indigenous lands. 1888 –  Oscar McCulloch presents The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation to the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. 1888 –  The Dominion Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Canada’s national WCTU organization, is founded. 1889 –  Germany’s Invalidity and Pension Law bureaucratically groups those experiences now understood as “disabilities,” and only those experiences, together for the first time. 1889 –  Hull-House is established in Chicago. 1890 –  Janie Barrett founds the Locust Street Settlement in Virginia, the first nominal “settlement house” for Black people. 1891 –  Fourteen Hopi people are imprisoned at Alcatraz for trying to prevent their children from being confined to an Indian industrial school. 1891 –  Canada’s first Children’s Aid Society (CAS) is founded in Toronto. 1891 –  US Indian Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan proudly compares Indian industrial schools to “asylums” and “houses of correction.” 1891–1910 –  The number of settlement houses in the United States increases from 6 to over 400. (These numbers don’t reflect the number of Black “missions.”) 1891 –  By this time, Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith are living in companionship with one another. 1892 –  Captain Richard Henry Pratt first articulates that colonial education should aim to “kill the Indian … save the man” at the National Conference on Charities and Corrections. 1892 –  Ida B. Wells publishes Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. 1893 –  Upper Canada creates more CASs through its Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to and Better Protection of Children. 1895 –  The Frances E. Willard Home for Girls, a temporary shelter for young women in Toronto, is founded.

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1895 –  The WCTU passes a resolution against lynching, responding to mounting pressure from Ida B. Wells and other prominent Black social justice organizers. 1895 –  Ida B. Wells hyphenates her name when she marries (becoming Ida B. Wells-Barnett). 1896 –  The National Association of Colored Women brings Black women’s clubs from across the United States into a coalition. 1897 –  New York City’s police chief instructs his officers to work in cooperation with COS officers because of their expertise in identifying troublesome poor people. 1898 –  The United States invades Puerto Rico. 1898 –  The United States annexes Hawaii. 1898 –  The American Anti-imperialist League is founded; its members include Jane Addams and Josephine Shaw Lowell. 1899 –  Rudyard Kipling writes “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands” in support of American imperialism. 1899 –  The United States annexes the Philippines. 1899 –  Ida B. Wells-Barnett publishes “Lynch Law in Georgia.” 1890s –  W.E.B. Du Bois starts publishing sociological studies of Black communities. Early 1900s –  The term “social work” is coined. 1900 –  Nearly all outdoor relief has been abolished by the COS by this time. 1900 –  Reverend Reverdy Ransom and his congregation build a settlement house designed to cater to the needs of the Black community in Chicago. 1902 –  Jane Addams publishes Democracy and Social Ethics. 1902 –  Evangelia Settlement, the first settlement house in Canada, is founded in Toronto. 1902 –  Maryland is the first state to introduce a workers’ compensation program. 1903 –  The Order of St Luke establishes the Penny Saving Bank; Maggie Walker becomes the first woman president of a bank in the United States. 1904 –  The Independent Order of St Luke leads the Richmond streetcar boycott against segregation. 1905 –  Medical social work is first established at the Massachusetts General Hospital. 1907 –  The Vancouver Khalsa Diwan Society, a Sikh community organization, is established. 1907 –  Indiana is the first US state to successfully enact a eugenic sterilization law.

Timeline from the Age of Enlightenment through the Progressive Era  383

1907 –  Dr Peter Bryce conducts a medical inspection of thirty Indian residential schools in Western Canada and finds shockingly high death rates. His report is ignored. 1908 –  The Canadian government imposes the “continuous journey” clause in immigration regulations, designed to prevent immigration from India. 1909 –  Canada’s first workers’ compensation legislation is enacted in Québec. 1909 –  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded in the United States. 1910 –  At least eleven Black communities in the United States have established settlement houses by this time. 1910 –  Canada passes the Immigration Act, barring anyone deemed “unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada” and permitting the federal cabinet to pass further immigration restrictions. 1910–1932 –  The Canadian government increases attendance at Indian residential schools by 110 per cent during this period. 1911 –  The National Association of Societies for Organizing Charity (NASOC) is founded in the United States. 1911 –  George Haynes develops the first Black social work undergraduate program at Fisk University. 1911 –  The Canadian government writes an order barring entry to Black people, but doesn’t implement it. 1912 –  The US Children’s Bureau is established by the federal government as a result of lobbying by settlement movement social workers. 1914 –  Canada’s deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, acknowledges in writing that Indian residential schools have a 50 per cent mortality rate. Canadian government’s efforts to increase enrolment continue unabated. 1914 –  The Canadian government refuses entry to Indian migrants and forces the Komagata Maru boat to turn around. Upon return to India, nineteen passengers are killed, and many more are imprisoned. 1914–1918 –  World War I. 1915 –  Abraham Flexner delivers a speech declaring that social work is not a profession. 1915 –  The “Great Migration” of Black Americans from the South to Northern US states begins around this time. 1915 –  The Criminal Imbecile, a landmark in eugenic criminology, is published. 1915 –  The Birth of a Nation (film) becomes the first American blockbuster film and leads to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

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1917 –  The Halifax Explosion is the world’s largest human-made explosion until Hiroshima. Social workers from major US and Canadian cities lead the relief efforts. 1917 –  Mary Richmond releases Social Diagnosis. 1918 –  Rather than deal with Medical Inspector Peter Bryce’s concerns about Indian residential schools, Duncan Campbell Scott fires him and eliminates his position. 1918 –  Canadian-born white women are granted the right to vote in federal elections. 1919 –  By this time, all Black schools in one Georgia county are closed because all Black children are considered feebleminded. 1920 –  Canada amends the Indian Act, implementing the mandatory removal of all Indigenous children to Indian residential schools and a system of forced enfranchisement. 1920 –  The US government (technically) expands rehabilitation to the civilian population beyond workers’ compensation. 1920 –  White women are granted the right to vote in the United States. 1921 –  The Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children (NSHCC) opens. 1922 –  The first social work graduate program at a Black educational institution is established at Atlanta’s Morehouse College. 1922 –  Peter Bryce publishes The Story of a National Crime, outlining the horrors of Canada’s Indian residential schools, which had already been provided to the government. Indian residential schools are not fundamentally changed and continue to expand for decades.

Notes

Introduction 1 King, Inconvenient Indian, 2. 2 King, Truth about Stories, 2. 3 L, “Remembering the Queer Liberation Movement’s Radical Roots.” 4 Anucha, “Exploring a New Direction,” 231. 5 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe, 50–1. 6 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game. They use this term to describe hegemonic narratives in Canada about Indian residential schools. 7 Foucault, “Nietzsche”; Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 6–13. 8 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 29. 9 Foucault, “Nietzsche,” 83. 10 Ibid., 154. 11 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 8. 12 Foucault, “Questions of Method.” 13 Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” 526. 14 For a forum on the competencies discourse in Canada, please see the following: Aronson and Hemingway, “‘Competence’ in Neoliberal Times”; Birnbaum and Silver, “Social Work Competencies”; Campbell, “Competency-Based Social Work”; Carignan, “Les référentiels de compétences”; Fook, “The Politics of Competency Debates”; Bogo, Mishna, and Regehr, “Competency Frameworks”; Rossiter and Heron, “Neoliberalism, Competencies”; Todd, “Competencies.” 15 Social Work and Social Service Work Act, 1998, S.O. 1998, c. 31, sec. 46. (2), 47 (2). 16 Burstow, Business of Madness. 17 Ibrahim, “Mental Health in Africa.” 18 Rwigema, Udegbe, and Lewis-Peart, “We Are Expected”; Badwall, “Colonial Encounters”; Fairfax, “The Skin I’m In”; Bernard, Lucas-White, and Moore, “Triple Jeopardy”; Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 243.

386  Notes to pages 5–13 19 Chapman et al., “‘A Kind of Collective Freezing-Out.’” 20 Badwall, “Good Social Worker?” 21 Bernard, “Reflections on the Experience of Fighting for Change.” 22 Bernard, Lucas-White, and Moore, cited in Carniol, Case Critical, 78. 23 Fairfax, “The Skin I’m In,” 99. 24 Ibid. 25 Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 243. 26 Peterson and Chatterjee, “Dancing with Complexity,” 155. 27 Badwall, “Critical Reflexivity and Moral Regulation,” 17. 28 Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 29 Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection.” 30 Collins, Black Feminist Thought. 31 Davis, Women, Race and Class. 32 Lorde, Sister Outsider. 33 hooks, Ain’t I a Woman. 34 Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence,” 335. 35 Ibid. 36 Erevelles, Disability and Difference. 37 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy. 38 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 53. 39 Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, 17; these resonances are also noted in Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 6. 40 Chapman, “Possible Lives,” 137–8 n9. 41 Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 42 Black Lives Matter, “Black Lives Matter.” 43 Garza, “Herstory.” 44 Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 45 Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, 189. 46 Ibid. 47 Bannerji, Thinking Through; see also Gorman, “Class Consciousness, Disability, and Social Exclusion.” 48 Frampton et al., “Preface,” 5. 49 Butler, Gender Trouble, 143. 50 Freire, Politics of Education, 122. 51 As discussed in the next section, we use the term “social working” following Anucha, “New Direction,” 231. 52 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 123. 53 Stiker, History of Disability, 150. 54 Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness; Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways; Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.

Notes to pages 13–18  387 55 Semali and Kincheloe, “What Is Indigenous Knowledge”; Battiste and Henderson, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge; Baskin, Strong Helpers’ Teachings; Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways; Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness. 56 Semali and Kincheloe, “What Is Indigenous Knowledge”; see also Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways. 57 Diéreville, cited in Paul, Not the Savages, 13. 58 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe, 49. 59 Paul, Not the Savages, 31. 60 Baskin, Strong Helpers’ Teachings; Hart, Seeking Mino-Pimatisiwin; Waters, “Spirituality and Sexuality”; Linklater, Decolonizing Trauma Work. 61 Million, Therapeutic Nations, 41–2. 62 Waters, “Spirituality and Sexuality.” 63 Alaers, “Two-Spirited People,” citing Lang. 64 Waters, “Spirituality and Sexuality.” 65 Ibid. 66 Davis, “How Does Change Happen?”; Michalko, Difference That Disability Makes. 67 Smith, Conquest, 18. 68 Cited in Paul, Not the Savages, 38. 69 Ibid., 18. 70 Ibid., 23. 71 Poole et al., “Sanism, ‘Mental Health’ and Social Work.” 72 Linklater, Decolonizing Trauma Work, 24. 73 As quoted in ibid., 150. 74 Cited in Samson, Wilson, and Mazower, Canada’s Tibet, 27; Baskin, Strong Helpers’ Teachings; Smith, Conquest. 75 Paul, Not the Savages, 23. 76 Smith, Conquest, 19. 77 Miller, For Your Own Good. 78 Paul, Not the Savages, 20. 79 Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, 94. 80 Paul, Not the Savages, 20. 81 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 81. 82 Baskin, “Social Work in the Lives of Aboriginal Peoples,” 210. 83 Serano, Whipping Girl; Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 174. 84 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe, 50–1. 85 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe. 86 Paul, Not the Savages, 25. 87 LeFrançois, “Psychiatrization of Our Children.” 88 Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Butler, Gender Trouble; Spivak, Critique. 89 See Butler, Gender Trouble.

388  Notes to pages 19–25 90 Bynum, “An Equal Chance”; Carlton-LaNey, “African American Social Work”; Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders”; Jones, “Mary Church Terrell”; Knupfer, “If You Can’t Push, Pull”; Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches”; Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience; Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women”; Schiele, Jackson, and Fairfax, “Maggie Lena Walker”; Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women.” 91 On this “supplementary strategy,” see Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 222. 1  Troubling the Standard Account of Social Work 1 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game. 2 Some examples of work that reiterates a fairly straightforward version of the standard account are as follows: Auslander, “Social Work in Health Care”; Bidelman, “Social Services”; Bisman, Social Work; Blau and Abramovitz, Dynamics of Social Welfare; Bremner, From the Depths; Edwards et al., “Social Work Practice”; Franklin, “Mary Richmond and Jane Addams”; Fook, Social Work; Haynes, “One Hundred–Year Debate”; Healy, International Social Work; Hick, Social Work in Canada, 2010; Holosko, “History of the Working Definition”; Hurlbutt, “Rise of Social Work”; Jennisen and Lundy, One Hundred Years of Social Work; Lundy, Social Work, Social Justice; Morales and Sheafor, Social Work, 1992; 1989; 1983; Ramsay, “Is Social Work a Profession?”; Reisch and Andrews, Road Not Taken; Specht, New Directions for Social Work; Specht and Courtney, Unfaithful Angels; Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State; Wenocur and Reisch, From Charity to Enterprise; and Zastrow, Introduction to Social Work. The following texts rely on the standard account but emphasize only COS approaches: Bessell, Introduction to Social Work; Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe; and Woodroofe, From Charity to Social Work. The following texts rely on the standard account but acknowledge that the story’s more complex: Abramovitz, “Social Work and Social Reform”; Olson, “Social Work’s Professional and Social Justice Projects”; Reid and Edwards, “Purpose of a School”; and Sealander, Private Wealth and Public Life. The following accounts recognize the historic contributions of Black people: Berg-Weger, Social Work and Social Welfare; Herrick and Stuart, Encyclopedia of Social Welfare; Ives, Denov, and Sussman, Introduction to Social Work; Lee, Empowerment Approach; Martin, Introduction to Social Work; the more recent editions of Morales, Sheafor, and Scott, Social Work, 2011; 2007 (which name the COS, settlement movement, Black community organizing, and mental hygiene as the founding influences); and White, Comprehensive Handbook of Social Work. Indigenous social work histories also tend to fall outside of the standard account by focusing more on the cohesive role social work played historically in colonization efforts, for example, Baskin, “Role of Social Work”; Baskin, Strong Helpers; Blackstock, “Evil of Angels.”

Notes to pages 26–31  389 3 Hick, Social Work in Canada, 2010. 4 Reisch and Andrews, Road Not Taken; Specht and Courtney, Unfaithful Angels; Johnson, “Social Work Is Standing.” 5 Salles, The Motorcycle Diaries. 6 Cañero, “Getting to the Other Side of the River,” para. 32. 7 Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams. 8 Foucault, Madness and Civilization. 9 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. 10 Chapman, “Troubled Consciousness”; Chapman, Hoque, and Utting, “PersonalIs-Political Ethics.” 11 hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” 12 Paul, “Eugenics and the Left”; Withers, “Red Emma, Black Stork.” 13 Davis, “Gandhi.” 14 King, Truth about Stories, 109. 15 Ibid., 109–10; This passage is taken up in a similar way in Chapman, “Possible Lives.” 16 Spivak, Critique, 2. 17 Spivak, “Righting Wrongs.” 18 Spivak, Critique, 1. 19 Spivak, “Righting Wrongs.” 20 Spivak, Critique, 4. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 3–4, sequence modified. 23 Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness” para. 49. 24 Richmond, Friendly Visiting, 8. 25 Mahmood, Politics of Piety. 26 Barker, Social Work Dictionary; Blau and Abramovitz, Dynamics of Social Welfare; Jennisen and Lundy, One Hundred Years of Social Work. 27 Parrott, Social Work and Poverty. 28 King, Women, Welfare, and Local Politics, 9; Whelan and Smedley, Helping the Poor, 10. 29 Barker, Social Work Dictionary. 30 Drover, “Social Work.” 31 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 13. 32 Wenocur and Reisch, From Charity to Enterprise, 58. 33 Charity Organization Society of London, Ontario, Constitution; Jennisen and Lundy, One Hundred Years of Social Work. 34 Richmond, Friendly Visiting, 12. 35 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 18–19. 36 Richmond, Friendly Visiting, 8.

390  Notes to pages 32–6 37 Ibid., 47–8. 38 Ibid., 8. 39 Charity Organization Society of London, Ontario, Constitution, 11. 40 Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, Hand-Book for Friendly Visitors. 41 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 2. 42 Charity Organization Society of London, Ontario, Constitution; Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, Hand-Book for Friendly Visitors. 43 Charity Organization Society of London, Ontario, Constitution, 2. 44 Ibid., 9. 45 Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, Hand-Book for Friendly Visitors, 7. 46 Schweik, Ugly Laws. 47 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 6. 48 Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Prison and Reformatory System of Ontario, “Report,” 9. 49 Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey, Disability Incarcerated; Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms.” 50 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 7–8; Carey, On the Margins; McLaren, Our Own Master Race; Rafter, Creating Born Criminals. 51 Schweik, Ugly Laws. 52 Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Prison and Reformatory System of Ontario, “Report,” 111. 53 Ibid. 54 Schweik, Ugly Laws. 55 Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty. 56 McLaren, Our Own Master Race; Rafter, Creating Born Criminals. 57 Withers, Disability Politics and Theory. 58 McCulloch, Tribe of Ishmael. 59 Weeks, “Oscar C. McCulloch: Leader in Organized Charity,” 213–14; 219. 60 McCulloch, Tribe of Ishmael, 1. 61 Ibid., 2. 62 Ibid., 3. 63 Eccleston, “Reforming the Sexual Menace,” 21. 64 McCulloch, Tribe of Ishmael, 8. 65 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe, 51–3. 66 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe; Hick, Social Work in Canada, 2010. 67 For more on the relationship between child protective services and eugenics, please see Ladd-Taylor, Fixing the Poor. 68 Rafter, Creating Born Criminals.

Notes to pages 36–41  391 69 McLaren, Our Own Master Race. 70 Schweik, Ugly Laws, 39. 71 Schweik, Ugly Laws. 72 Ibid., 110. 73 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 9. 74 Schweik, Ugly Laws, 53. 75 Schweik, Ugly Laws. 76 Ibid. 77 Coco, “Diseased, Maimed, Mutilated”; Palmer and Heroux, “‘Cracking the Stone’”; Schweik, Ugly Laws; Stiker, History of Disability. 78 Schweik, Ugly Laws. 79 See Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey, Disability Incarcerated. 80 Schweik, Ugly Laws. 81 Charity Organization Society of London, Ontario, Constitution, 11. 82 Paul, “Eugenics and the Left; Withers, “Red Emma, Black Stork.” 83 McLaren, Our Own Master Race. 84 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 14–15. 85 Abramovitz, “Social Work and Social Reform”; Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House. 86 Jennisen and Lundy, One Hundred Years of Social Work. 87 Stebner, “More than Maternal Feminists.” 88 Jennisen and Lundy, One Hundred Years of Social Work. 89 Linn, Jane Addams. 90 Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House; Addams, New Conscience and an Ancient Evil; Fischer, Nackenoff, and Chmielewski, “Introduction”; Hamington, “Community Organizing: Addams and Alinsky”; Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams; Linn, Jane Addams. 91 Addams, New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, 55. 92 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “NAACP: 100 Years of History.” 93 Carroll and Fink, “Introduction to the Illinois Edition.” 94 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 19. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid., 18. 97 Ibid., 38. 98 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 6. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 7. 101 Richmond, Friendly Visiting, 9. 102 Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams. 103 Ibid., 289. 104 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 181 n12.

392  Notes to pages 41–9 105 Heron, Desire for Development. 106 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 11. 107 Ibid. 108 Richmond, Friendly Visiting, 12–13. 109 Ibid., 12. 110 Sheafor and Horejsi, Techniques, 3. 111 Ibid. 112 Ramsay, “Is Social Work a Profession?,” para. 24. 113 Fox, “Editor’s Introduction,” xli. 114 Ramsay, “Is Social Work a Profession?,” para. 24. 115 Spivak, Critique. 116 Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Permanent Exhibit; Abramovitz, “Social Work and Social Reform”; Bisman, Social Work; Lundy, Social Work, Social Justice; Reisch and Andrews, The Road Not Taken. 117 Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 118 Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness.” 119 Saleeby, Strengths Perspective, 7; see also Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 69. 120 Razack, Looking White People in the Eye, 36. 121 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 16–17. 122 Razack, Looking White People in the Eye, 50. 123 Addams, “Speech of Jane Addams,” 195. 124 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics. 125 Kowalski, “No Excuses for Our Dirt,” 194. 126 Montesino, “Social Integration,” 94. 127 Kowalski, “No Excuses for Our Dirt,” 194. 128 Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Permanent Exhibit. 129 Berson, Jane Adams, 49. 130 Haynes, “One Hundred–Year Debate.” 131 Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 173. 132 Chapman, “Possible Lives”; Rafter, Creating Born Criminals; Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability; Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 133 Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 174. 134 Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace, 79. 135 Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 173. 136 Ibid., 48. 137 Ibid. 138 Tomko, Dancing Class. 139 Ibid. 140 Lee and Ferrer, “Examining Social Work,” 9. 141 Edmunds, “Potawatomis.”

Notes to pages 50–8  393 142 Baskin, Strong Helpers’ Teachings, 7. 143 Addams, New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, 119. 144 Ibid., 131. 145 Lombardo, “Taking Eugenics Seriously,” 210. 146 McCarthy, New York City’s Suffragist, chap. 4, n.p. 147 As quoted in ibid. 148 Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, 150. 149 Kennedy, “Eugenics, ‘Degenerate Girls’”; Pivar, Purity and Hygiene. 150 Addams, New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, 133. 151 Kennedy, “Eugenics, ‘Degenerate Girls.’” 152 Schweik, Ugly Laws, 90. 153 Kennedy, “Eugenics, ‘Degenerate Girls.’” 154 Bix, “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics.” 155 Richmond, Friendly Visiting, 3. 156 Ibid., 4. 157 Ibid., 10. 158 Ibid., vii. 159 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe, 20–1. 160 Murphy, “Women’s Anti-Imperialism”; Kindle, “Financial Literacy and Social Work,” 21. 161 Waugh, Unsentimental Reformer, 179. 162 Hansan, “Lowell, Josephine Shaw.” 163 Ibid. 164 Franklin, “Mary Richmond and Jane Addams,” 508–9. 165 Richmond, Friendly Visiting, 8. 166 Ibid., 8–9. 167 Mullaly, Challenging Oppression, 7. 168 Corak, Curtis, and Phipps, “Economic Mobility”; Wilkinson, The Age of Unequals. 169 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 4. 170 United Way Worldwide, “Our History.” 171 Levens, “In Search of Relevance,” 185. 172 Downtown Winnipeg BIZ, “A Better Way To Give,” n.p. 173 Change for the Better, “Change for the Better.” 174 Ibid. 175 Downtown Winnipeg BIZ, “Change for the Better Fact Sheet”; Identical language is used by Change for the Better: Alaska, “Overview.” 176 Withers, Disability Politics and Theory. 177 As quoted in Scott and Wood, “Beyond Radical Social Work,” para. 1. 178 Hugman, “But Is It Social Work?”

394  Notes to pages 58–67 179 Baskin, Strong Helpers’ Teachings; Hart, Seeking Mino-Pimatisiwin, 44; see also National Association of Black Social Workers. 180 Barrows, Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction. 181 McCulloch, The Tribe of Ishmael. 182 Barrows, Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction. 183 Wells, Southern Horrors. 184 Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians,” 45. 185 Ibid., 46. 186 Haritaworn, Queer Lovers. 187 Guyatt, “Albert Rose,” 326. 188 James, “From ‘Slum Clearance’ to ‘Revitalisation,’” 70. 189 Samuel, “Race, Representation.” 190 Rose, “The Individual, the Family,” 321. 191 James, “From ‘Slum Clearance’ to ‘Revitalisation.’” 192 Social Policy, Analysis & Research, City of Toronto, “2011 Neighbourhood Demographic Estimates.” 193 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 19. 194 Patrick, “Tale of 2 Hoods,” A1. 195 August and Walks, “From Social Mix to Political Marginalisation?,” 286. 196 James, “From ‘Slum Clearance’ to ‘Revitalisation,’” 75. 197 Patrick, “Tale of 2 Hoods,” A1. 198 James, “From ‘Slum Clearance’ to ‘Revitalisation’”; Samuel, “Race, Representation.” 199 Big Canoe, Criminalization of Indigenous Peoples; Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement”; Haritaworn, Queer Lovers, 131. 200 Bergen, “Teen Moms,” 54. 201 Cited in Clarke, “Challenges of Child Welfare,” 276. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid.; Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 234–7. 204 Clarke, “Challenges of Child Welfare,” 276. 205 Wilkinson, Age of Unequals; Raphael, Poverty and Policy in Canada. 206 August and Walks, “From Social Mix to Political Marginalisation?”; James, “From ‘Slum Clearance’ to ‘Revitalisation.’” 207 August and Walks, “From Social Mix to Political Marginalisation?,” 288. 208 Piff et al., “Having Less, Giving More,” 771. 209 Piff et al., “Having Less, Giving More.” 210 Bergen, “Teen Moms,” 56. 211 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics. 212 August and Walks, “From Social Mix to Political Marginalisation?” 213 Ibid., 276. 214 Backhouse, Colour-Coded, 14.

Notes to pages 67–74  395 215 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe. 216 Jennisen and Lundy, One Hundred Years of Social Work; Nelson, Razing Africville. 217 Davis, “How Does Change Happen?” 218 Ibid. 219 Martin Luther King, Jr., “‘I Have a Dream’ Speech.” 220 Burns, “Mourning and Message.” 221 Terrill, “Protest, Prophecy, and Prudence.” 222 Engstrom, “Civil Rights Act at Fifty.” 223 Africville Museum, “Africville Timeline”; Nelson, Razing Africville. 224 Burns, “Mourning and Message”; Terrill, “Protest, Prophecy, and Prudence.” 225 Turnbull, “Officials Hail Africville Relocation.” 226 Stiker, History of Disability, 16. 227 Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness”; See also Ahmed, Cultural Politics, chap. 2, “The Organization of Hate.” 228 Africville Museum, “The Story”; Mackenzie, Remember Africville. 229 Nelson, Razing Africville. 230 Africville Museum, “The Story”; Nelson, Razing Africville; Mackenzie, Remember Africville. 231 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe. 232 Rose, “Report of a Visit to Halifax,” 4. 233 Ibid., 10. 234 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe; Nelson, Razing Africville. 235 Rose, “Report of a Visit to Halifax,” 4–5. 236 Guyatt, “Albert Rose.” 237 Nelson, Razing Africville, 173. 238 Saunders as quoted in ibid. 239 Mackenzie, Remember Africville. 240 Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians.” 241 Nelson, Razing Africville, 177. 242 Burk, “Think. Re-Think.,” 363. 243 Adler, “Before Rosa Parks”; Thornton, III, “Montgomery, Ala., Bus Boycott”; “Claudette Colvin – Civil Rights Activist.” 244 Ibid. 245 Thornton, III, “Montgomery, Ala., Bus Boycott.” 246 Borden Colley, “Remembering Viola Desmond.” 247 Davis, “How Does Change Happen?” 248 Williams, Williams, and Mink, How to Be like Women of Power; Wells, Crusade for Justice. 249 Schiele, Jackson, and Fairfax, “Maggie Lena Walker.” 250 Davis, “How Does Change Happen?”

396  Notes to pages 76–83 2  White Supremacy and the Erasure of Racialized Social Workers 1 Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 3. 2 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 67. 3 Ibid., 68. 4 Ibid., 68–9. 5 Razack, Casting Out, 148. Thanks to Maryam Khan for reminding us of this passage. See also Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Haritaworn, Queer Lovers; Asad, Formations. 6 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 69. 7 Ibid., 70. 8 Ibid., 199. 9 Franklin, “Mary Richmond and Jane Addams,” 507. 10 Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare,” 560. 11 Ibid. 12 Thobani, Exalted Subjects; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. 13 Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders,” n.p. 14 Wells, Southern Horrors, n.p. 15 Hugman, “But Is It Social Work?,” 1145. 16 Woodson, History of the Negro Church, 278. 17 Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches.” 18 Du Bois, “Editorial.” 19 See, for instance, Blum, W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet; Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro. 20 Terrell, Miller, and Du Bois, “Resolutions,” 291. 21 Hick, Social Work in Canada, 2010. 22 Bynum, “An Equal Chance.” 23 Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches”; Woodson, History of the Negro Church. 24 Bynum, “An Equal Chance.” 25 Ibid. 26 Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches.” 27 Woodson, History of the Negro Church, 277. 28 Este, “Black Church”; Woodson, History of the Negro Church. 29 Bynum, “An Equal Chance”; Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches.” 30 Dagbovie, Carter G. Woodson; McKissack and McKissack, Carter G. Woodson. 31 Rupp and Freeman, Understanding and Teaching, 144. 32 Lessard, “Empire of the Lone Mother”; Morton, “Separate Spheres”; Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled. 33 Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled. 34 Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence.” 35 Morton, “Separate Spheres,” 83.

Notes to pages 83–7  397 36 Harley, “For the Good of Family,” 347. 37 Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence,” 336. 38 Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women,” 62. 39 Ibid., 72. 40 Morton, “Separate Spheres”; hooks, “Plantation Patriarchy”; Trotz, “Behind the Banner of Culture?” 41 Jones, “Mary Church Terrell.” 42 Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders”; Jones, “Mary Church Terrell.” 43 Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders”; Jones, “Mary Church Terrell”; Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women”; Rief, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally.” 44 Ibid. 45 Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders.” 46 Ibid. 47 Knupfer, “If You Can’t Push, Pull.” 48 Cott, “What’s in a Name?,” 814. 49 Knupfer, “If You Can’t Push, Pull,” 223. 50 Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women”; Jones, “Mary Church Terrell”; Knupfer, “If You Can’t Push, Pull”; Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders.” 51 Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 177. 52 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience; Smith, “An Uplifting Negro Cooperative.” 53 Kellor, 1905, in Negro Civic Welfare Committee of the Council of Social Agencies, Cincinnati, “Report of the Negro Civic Welfare Committee”; Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience. 54 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience. 55 Ibid., 3. 56 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience. 57 Ibid., 29. 58 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience. 59 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 88. 60 Ibid. 61 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement”; Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms”; Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 62 Fournier and Crey, Stolen From Our Embrace. 63 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism.” 64 Rafter, Creating Born Criminals; Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability. 65 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement”; Chapman, “Five Centuries’.”

398  Notes to pages 87–93 66 Malcolm X, Autobiography; Roberts, Shattered Bonds. Thanks to Gordon Pon for bringing this to Chris’s attention. 67 “Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” 68 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 69 Wells-Barnett, Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 72. She only later hyphenated her name to Wells-Barnett. 70 Jimenez, “The History of Child Protection.” 71 Metzl, The Protest Psychosis. 72 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 26. 73 Mary Ellen Curtin, cited in Ibid., 29. 74 Rafter, Creating Born Criminals. 75 Chapman, “‘Five Centuries’ Material Reforms,” 37. 76 Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches,” 102. 77 Lock, “The People in the Neighborhood.” 78 Buchanan, American Women’s Rights Movement, 92. 79 Zadov, Private Guided Tour. 80 Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches.” 81 Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women; Parker, “Frances Watkins Harper.” 82 Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women; Parker, “Frances Watkins Harper”; Valverde, The Age of Light. 83 Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women; Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow; Parker, “Frances Watkins Harper.” 84 Parker, “Frances Watkins Harper,” 151. 85 Parker, “Frances Watkins Harper.” 86 Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow; Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women; Willard, Woman and Temperance; Willard, Do Everything. 87 Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women, 71. 88 Willard, Do Everything, 90. 89 Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow, 89. 90 Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years. 91 Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow, 89. 92 Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women; Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow. 93 Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow, 13. 94 Ontario Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Annual Report, 1903, 87. 95 Willard, Do Everything, 97–8. 96 Pardy, United Church Maternity Facilities, 22. 97 Toronto District Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Annual Report: Frances E. Willard Home for Girls of the WCTU, 4. 98 Ontario Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Report of the 26th Convention, 185.

Notes to pages 93–9  399 99 The citations concerning work in Black and Indigenous communities in the following two footnotes are from the Ontario WCTU Annual Reports of 1893 and 1895, as indicated. These reports can be found in the Archives of Ontario, A01-V02-03-014-03-01-02 B252806 MU 8407.4. See Tennant, “Work among the Indians”; Fox, “Work among Colored People”; and Phelps, “Work among Colored People.” 100 Lucas, “Report of the Superintendent,” 1890, 76. 101 Lucas, “Report of the Superintendent,” 1891, 74–5. 102 Linder, “Lynchings: By Year and Race.” 103 Davis, “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights,” 23. 104 As quoted in Negro Civic Welfare Committee of the Council of Social Agencies, Cincinnati, “Report of the Negro Civic Welfare Committee,” 320, 322. 105 Wells-Barnett, Red Record. 106 Negro Civic Welfare Committee of the Council of Social Agencies, Cincinnati, “Report of the Negro Civic Welfare Committee,” 312. 107 James Allen, cited in Tickell, “A Savage Legacy”; see also Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms.” 108 Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, 143. 109 James Allen, cited in Tickell, “A Savage Legacy.” 110 Tickell, “A Savage Legacy”; Please note that this paragraph is very similar to one in Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms,” 37. 111 Williams, Williams, and Mink, How to Be like Women of Power. 112 Ibid.; Wells, Crusade for Justice; Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women,” 93. 113 Wells-Barnett, Red Record, n.p. 114 Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law in Georgia,” 43. 115 Wells, “Lynching and the Excuse for It.” 116 Wells-Barnett, Red Record. 117 Backhouse, Colour-Coded. 118 Smith, Conquest, 27. 119 Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women.” 120 McLean, “Mass Communication, Popular Culture, and Racism.” 121 Griffith, Birth of a Nation. 122 McMahon-Howard, Clay-Warner, and Renzulli, “Criminalizing Spousal Rape.” 123 Tang, “Rape Law Reform in Canada.” 124 Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders,” 318. 125 Smith, Conquest. 126 Wells, Southern Horrors; Wells-Barnett, Red Record; Wells, “Lynching and the Excuse for It”; Wells-Barnett, Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett; WellsBarnett, “Lynch Law in Georgia”; Wells, Crusade for Justice.

400  Notes to pages 99–103 127 Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 128 Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection.” 129 Collins, Black Feminist Thought. 130 Davis, Women, Race and Class. 131 Lorde, Sister Outsider. 132 hooks, Ain’t I a Woman. 133 Quest, “From Mob Rule”; Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women”; Wells, Crusade for Justice. 134 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “NAACP: 100 Years of History.” For important critiques of the NAACP, see Manning Marabel and Walter T. Howard. 135 Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Permanent Exhibit; Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women”; Wells, Crusade for Justice. 136 Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women,” 95. 137 Addams, “Respect for Law,” 29. 138 Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women. 139 As quoted in ibid., 77. 140 As quoted in ibid., 79. 141 As quoted in ibid. 142 As quoted in ibid., 82. 143 Heron, Desire for Development; Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence”; Chapman, Hoque, and Utting, “Personal-Is-Political Ethics.” 144 Chapman, “Becoming Perpetrator”; Chapman, Hoque, and Utting, “PersonalIs-Political Ethics”; Chapman, “Troubled Consciousness”; Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence”; Heron, Desire for Development; Heron, “Self-Reflection”; LeFrançois, “Psychiatrization of Our Children”; Razack, Looking White People in the Eye. 145 Davis, “How Does Change Happen?” 146 Schiele, Jackson, and Fairfax, “Maggie Lena Walker.” 147 Hammond, In the Vanguard, 110–11. 148 Beito, “Mutual Aid for Social Welfare.” 149 Guest, Emergence of Social Security; Hick, Social Work in Canada, 2010. 150 Hammond, In the Vanguard, 112. 151 Schiele, Jackson, and Fairfax, “Maggie Lena Walker.” 152 Ibid. 153 Hoyle, History and Philosophy of Credit Unions; MacPherson, Hands Around the Globe; McKillop and Wilson, “Credit Unions.” 154 As quoted in Schiele, Jackson, and Fairfax, “Maggie Lena Walker,” 27. 155 Schiele, Jackson, and Fairfax, “Maggie Lena Walker.” 156 As quoted in Hammond, In the Vanguard, 116.

Notes to pages 103–6  401 157 As quoted in ibid. 158 Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 87. 159 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience; Wilson, The Segregated Scholars. 160 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience. 161 Ibid. 162 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe. 163 Bynum, “An Equal Chance”; Du Bois, The Negro Church; Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro. 164 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience. 165 Bynum, “An Equal Chance.” 166 Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches”; Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience. 167 Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders”; Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience. 168 Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders.” 169 Wilson, The Segregated Scholars. 170 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience. 171 Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders.” 172 Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women.” 173 Roker, “Association of Black Social Workers.” 174 Winks, Blacks in Canada. 175 Reese, “Canada”; Winks, Blacks in Canada. 176 CBC Radio, “The Underground Railway”; Reese, “Canada”; Winks, Blacks in Canada. 177 Reese, “Canada”; Winks, Blacks in Canada. 178 Este, “The Black Church.” 179 Winks, Blacks in Canada. 180 Mathieu, North of the Color Line; Winks, Blacks in Canada. 181 Taylor, “Reconsidering the ‘Forced’ Exodus”; Woodson, “Negroes of Cincinnati”; Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women.” 182 Gallant, “Perspectives on the Motives for the Migration.” 183 Daniel Hill in CBC Radio’s “Black Refugees in Ontario”; Landon, “Negro Migration”; Winks, Blacks in Canada. 184 Gallant, “Perspectives on the Motives for the Migration.” 185 Ibid. 186 Taylor, “Reconsidering the ‘Forced’ Exodus.” 187 Ibid.; Woodson, “Negroes of Cincinnati.” 188 Woodson, “Negroes of Cincinnati.” 189 Ibid., 16. 190 Taylor, “Reconsidering the ‘Forced’ Exodus.”

402  Notes to pages 106–11 191 Ibid.; Woodson, “Negroes of Cincinnati.” 192 Taylor, “Reconsidering the ‘Forced’ Exodus.” 193 Landon, “Henry Bibb, a Colonizer.” 194 Ibid. 195 Ibid., 442. 196 Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 197 Mahmood, Politics of Piety. 198 Bibb, Narrative of the Life, 150. 199 McLoughlin, “Red Indians, Black Slavery and White Racism.” 200 McLoughlin, “Red Indians, Black Slavery and White Racism”; Smallwood, “History of Native American and African Relations.” 201 Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide. 202 Gallay, Indian Slave Trade. 203 Smallwood, “History of Native American and African Relations.” 204 Landon, “Henry Bibb, a Colonizer.” 205 CBC Radio, “Black Refugees in Ontario.” 206 Ibid.; Winks, Blacks in Canada; CBC Radio, “The Underground Railway.” 207 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe. 208 Landon, “Negro Migration”; Winks, Blacks in Canada. 209 Landon, “Negro Migration.” 210 Ibid. 211 Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women.” 212 As quoted in Drew, The Refugee, 325. 213 Lee and Ferrer, “Examining Social Work,” 12. 214 Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women.” 215 Roker, “Association of Black Social Workers.” 216 Winks, Blacks in Canada. 217 Ibid. 218 Ibid.; Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women.” 219 Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women.” 220 Winks, Blacks in Canada. 221 Ibid.; Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women.” 222 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement.” 223 Lafferty, “Child Welfare in Halifax.” 224 Cahill, “Autobiography of Chief Justice”; Lafferty, “Child Welfare in Halifax”; Nova Scotia House of Assembly and Colwell, “Resolution No. 1419”; Roker, “Association of Black Social Workers”; Thompson, Born with a Call. 225 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe. 226 Nova Scotia House of Assembly and Colwell, “Resolution No. 1419.” 227 Roker, “Association of Black Social Workers,” 29.

Notes to pages 111–18  403 228 Lafferty, “Child Welfare in Halifax.” 229 Gorman and Macintyre, “‘A Long Journey.’” 230 Government of Ontario, “Apology by Premier.” 231 The Chronicle Herald, “Timeline.” 232 Lafferty, “Child Welfare in Halifax”; The Chronicle Herald, “Timeline.” 233 Lafferty, “Child Welfare in Halifax.” 234 Gorman and Macintyre, “‘A Long Journey.’” 235 Jimenez, “History of Child Protection,” 889. 236 Galloway, “Zanana Akande.” 237 Jimenez, “History of Child Protection,” 895. 238 Ibid., 892. 239 Ibid., 892–3. 240 Carlton-LaNey, “African American Social Work,” 311. 241 Ross, Black Heritage. 242 Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders,” para. 3. 243 Carlton-LaNey, “African American Social Work,” 317–18. 244 Morton, “Separate Spheres,” 66–7. 245 McLaren, Our Own Master Race. 246 Smith, Conquest, 9. 247 Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence.” 248 Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare,” 569. 249 Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare.” 250 Knupfer, “If You Can’t Push, Pull,” 222. 251 Ibid., 229. 252 Carlton-LaNey, “African American Social Work,” 313. 253 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience, 23. 254 As quoted in ibid., 41. 255 Negro Civic Welfare Committee of the Council of Social Agencies, Cincinnati, “Report of the Negro Civic Welfare Committee.” 256 Ibid., 137. 257 Smith, “An Uplifting Negro Cooperative,” 139. 258 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience, 30. 259 Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women,” 92. 260 Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women.” 261 Bynum, “An Equal Chance,” 3. 262 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience, 23. 263 Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence,” 336. 264 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience, 41. 265 Carlton-LaNey, “Standing on Their Shoulders”; Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience; Smith, “An Uplifting Negro Cooperative.”

404  Notes to pages 118–23 266 Negro Civic Welfare Committee of the Council of Social Agencies, Cincinnati, “Report of the Negro Civic Welfare Committee,” 413–14. 267 hooks, “Ending Domination.” 268 Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women.” 269 Walker, “Let Women Choose,” 1. 270 Shadd, “Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Abolitionist.” 271 Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women.” According to the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Wells-Barnett was co-founder of the “Alpha Suffrage Club, thought to be the first, and most important, black women’s suffrage association in the United States.” 272 Schiele, Jackson, and Fairfax, “Maggie Lena Walker.” 273 Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women,” 62. 274 Ibid. 275 Guo, “SUCCESS,” 101–2. 276 Guo, “SUCCESS.” 277 Buchignani, Indra, and Srivastava, Continuous Journey, 20; we know of this from Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 278 Buchignani, Indra, and Srivastava, Continuous Journey, 20. 279 Ibid., 32. 280 Ibid., 21 ff. 281 Ibid., 27. 282 Beavon et al., “Treaties and the Evolution of Canada.” 283 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace; Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game; Churchill, Kill the Indian. 284 See: Beck, Kropf, and Leonard, Social Work and Restorative Justice; Berlinger and Work, “Youth Incarceration”; Braithwaite, “Restorative Justice”; Gumz and Grant, “Restorative Justice”; van Wormer, “The Case for Restorative Justice”; and van Wormer, “Restorative Justice.” 285 Chapman, “Possible Lives,” 147–8. 286 Baskin, Strong Helpers’ Teachings; Hart, Seeking Mino-Pimatisiwin. 287 Davis, “How Does Change Happen?” 288 Abramovitz, “Social Work and Social Reform,” 514. 289 Ibid., 513. 290 Reisch and Andrews, Road Not Taken, 33. 291 Yee, “Gender Ideology and Black Women.” 292 Nova Scotia House of Assembly and Colwell, “Resolution No. 1419.” 293 Cahill, “Autobiography of Chief Justice.” 294 Bynum, “An Equal Chance”; Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches”; PeeblesWilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women”; Knupfer, “If You Can’t Push, Pull.”

Notes to pages 123–31  405 295 Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches”; Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women.” 296 Bynum, “An Equal Chance”; Cash, African American Women and Social Action; Knupfer, “If You Can’t Push, Pull”; Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches”; Peebles-Wilkins and Francis, “Two Outstanding Black Women.” 297 Martin and Martin, Social Work and the Black Experience, 252. 298 Lundblad, “Jane Addams and Social Reform,” 661. 3  Social Work as Displacement, Denigration, Cisheteropatriarchalization 1 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 18–19. 2 Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” 533. 3 Chapman, Hoque, and Utting, “Personal-Is-Political Ethics,” 30; see also Heron, Desire for Development; Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence.” 4 Anucha, “New Direction,” 231. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt, 169. 9 Badwall, “Colonial Encounters”; Bell, “Introducing White Disability Studies.” 10 Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 8. 11 Anucha, “New Direction,” 233. 12 Ibid., 238. 13 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 13. 14 Jimenez, “The History of Child Protection.” 15 Baskin, Strong Helpers’ Teachings; Hart, Seeking Mino-Pimatisiwin. 16 Cited in Smith, Conquest, 169. 17 Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” 533. 18 Ibid., 551. 19 Burk, “Think. Re-Think;” Jenkins, Becoming Ethical. 20 Ibid., 544. 21 Anucha, “New Direction,” 231. 22 McRuer, Crip Theory, 86. 23 Million, Therapeutic Nations, 20. 24 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 34, 62, 144. 25 Million, Therapeutic Nations, 43. 26 Cited in Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 127. 27 Spivak, Critique, 287, 284. 28 Russell, “Joy of Gender.” 29 Alaers, “Two-Spirited People,” citing Roscoe.

406  Notes to pages 131–42 30 Ibid., citing Roscoe, sequence modified. 31 Khaleeli, “Hijra.” 32 Alaers, “Two-Spirited People,” citing Lang. 33 Million, Therapeutic Nations, 41. 34 Ontario Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Annual Report, 1926, 155. 35 Million, Therapeutic Nations, 41. 36 Ibid. 37 San Martín, “Pope Praises Jesuit Missions in New World for Ending Hunger, Oppression.” 38 Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 69. This quotation is taken from a lecture. The editor notes the discrepancy between audio and print records; we follow the audio. 39 Ibid. 40 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 171 n14. 41 D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” 176. 42 Collins, “All in the Family,” 63. 43 Manifesto Group of GLF, Gay Liberation Manifesto, 9, 10. 44 Hale, “How to Have Sex without Women or Men,” 229. 45 McRuer, Crip Theory, 87. 46 D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” 170–2. 47 Stryker, Transgender History, 34. 48 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 181. 49 Ibid., 250. 50 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 55, sequence modified. 51 Spivak, Critique, 13. 52 Landmann, 1896, cited in Miller, For Your Own Good, 30. 53 Screber, 1858, cited in Miller, For Your Own Good, 27. 54 Hick, Social Work in Canada, 2010, 138–9, sequence modified. 55 Foucault, Abnormal, 245. 56 Million, Therapeutic Nations. 57 English translation: Allen, Wages of Sin, 90–1. 58 As quoted in Foucault, Abnormal, 244. 59 Stoler, Race, 147. 60 Ibid., 155. 61 Stoler, Race, 156. 62 As quoted in ibid. 63 Foucault, Abnormal, 250. 64 Ibid., 272. 65 Ibid., 270. 66 Ibid., 272. 67 Eccleston, “Reforming the Sexual Menace,” 5–6, 9.

Notes to pages 142–50  407 68 Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., “‘My Ever Dear’ Social Work’s”; Jane Addams HullHouse Museum, Permanent Exhibit. 69 Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled. 70 Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Permanent Exhibit. 71 Zadov, Private Guided Tour. 72 Manifesto Group of GLF, Gay Liberation Manifesto; Foucault, “Friendship.” 73 Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., “‘My Ever Dear’ Social Work’s.” 74 Ibid., 334. 75 Adams, Trouble with Normal; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct. 76 Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Permanent Exhibit. 77 Ibid.; Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women. 78 Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women. 79 Schiltz and Sinke, “Cornelia Bernarda De Bey.” 80 Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., “‘My Ever Dear’ Social Work’s,” 325. 81 Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, 39. 82 Ibid., 11. 83 Stone, “Posttranssexual Manifesto,” 222. 84 For example, Spivak, Critique, xi. 85 Wicks, “A Very Queer History.” 86 For example, Whittle, “Feminism and Trans Theory,” 202; Hale, “How to Have Sex without Women or Men.” 87 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 66–7; Chen, Animacies. 88 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 36. 89 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 51. 90 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 185, n45. 91 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 35. 92 hooks, Teaching Community, 35. 93 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 64. 94 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 13. 95 hooks, “Ending Domination.” 96 hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, 114; hooks, The Will to Change, 145. 97 Heron, Desire for Development, 93, 112, 148–9. 98 Hick, Social Work in Canada, 2010, 195. 99 Johnstone, cited in Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe, 95. 100 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 32, citing R.E. Thompson. 101 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 174; Serano, Whipping Girl; Whittle, “Feminism and Trans Theory.” 102 Vincent, “Unethical Research in Psychiatry,” 18. 103 hooks, Teaching Community, 32. 104 Stiker, History of Disability, 16.

408  Notes to pages 150–8 105 Burstow, Business of Madness, 38. 106 Ibid. 107 Serano, Whipping Girl. 108 Hick, Social Work in Canada, 2010, 195. 109 Riis, Children of the Poor, 146. 110 Ibid. 111 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 18–19. 112 Ibid., 2. 113 “Burlesque Beauties.” 114 Benjoe, “Thomas Moore Keesick.” These photos are used in the cover images of both Milloy, A National Crime and Churchill, Kill the Indian. 115 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 128, emphasis in the original. 116 Benjoe, “Thomas Moore Keesick.” 117 “Tom Torlino, Navajo, Before and After.” 118 “Cheyenne Woman Named Woxie Haury.” 119 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 69. 120 Ibid., 79. 121 Chen, Animacies, 9. 122 Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 123 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 21, citing Richmond and Rannells. 124 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 56–7. 125 Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, 48. 126 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 124. 127 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 84. 128 Chapman, “Possible Lives,” 137. 129 Flannigan and Mack, “Care Episode,” HugWolf [podcast], forthcoming. 130 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 124. 131 As quoted in Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 21. 132 “Morale,” This usage of the word continued into the twentieth century but is now obsolete. 133 Cited in Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 21. 134 Richmond, Friendly Visiting, 8–9. 135 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 14. 136 Carniol, Case Critical, 43. 137 Guest, Emergence of Social Security, 3. 138 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 21. 139 Stiker, History of Disability, 113. 140 Gerando, cited in Stiker, History of Disability, 113. 141 Mary Richmond as cited in Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 45, sequence modified.

Notes to pages 158–64  409 142 King, Truth about Stories, 57–8. 143 Columbus, cited in Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 1. 144 Mahmood, Politics of Piety; Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject; Spivak, “More on Power/Knowledge.” 145 Haritaworn, Queer Lovers, 52, emphasis in the original. 146 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 152. 147 National Council of Women of Canada, “Women of Canada.” 148 Guest, Emergence of Social Security, 12–133, 15; Stiker, History of Disability, 112; Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 3–4. 149 Cited in “Hospital,” The Oxford English Dictionary. 150 Christ’s Hospital, “History of the School.” 151 Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Carrigan, Crime and Punishment in Canada; Bru, Bicêtre. 152 Cited in “Hospital,” The Oxford English Dictionary. 153 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic; Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement.” 154 “Hospital,” The Oxford English Dictionary. 155 Snook, Hospitals, 4. 156 Riley-Smith, Knights Hospitaller, 17. 157 “St John and the Industrial Revolution.” 158 “Canada Charity.” 159 Drinkwater, “Supported Living”; Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement”; Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms.” 160 Palgrave Macmillan, “About the Author.” 161 Museum of the Order of St John, “History of the Order.” 162 Riley-Smith, Knights Hospitaller, 19. 163 Museum of the Order of St John, “History of the Order.” 164 Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” 533. 165 Ibid., 544. 166 Ibid., 534. 167 Ibid., 534–5. 168 King, Truth about Stories, 57–8. 169 Riley-Smith, Hospitallers, 21. 170 Riley-Smith, Knights Hospitaller, 26. 171 Ibid., 22. 172 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness. 173 Knights Hospitallers of the Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem, “Our History – Origins.” 174 Riley-Smith, Knights Hospitaller, 26. 175 Pope Urban II, “Speech.”

410  Notes to pages 164–9 176 Ibid. 177 Asad, Formations, 168; BBC Four, An Islamic History of Europe. 178 Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 53. 179 Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies; Paul, Not the Savages; Smith, Conquest; Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide. 180 Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 53. 181 Riley-Smith, Hospitallers, 33. 182 Riley-Smith, Knights Hospitaller, 37. 183 Forey, The Military Orders, 1–2. 184 Riley-Smith, Knights Hospitaller, 37. 185 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 197–8. 186 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 15. 187 Sacred Medical Order Church of Hope, “Nevis Mission.” 188 Allen, “The Social and Religious World.” 189 Pichette, “Order of Malta’s Naval Tradition.” 190 Parks Canada, “Introduction and Background.” 191 Allen, “The Social and Religious World.” 192 Ibid. 193 King, Inconvenient Indian, 103. 194 Miquelon and Parrott, “Sillery,” n.p. 195 King, Inconvenient Indian, 105. 196 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic. 197 Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, 94. 198 Miquelon and Parrott, “Sillery,” n.p. 199 King, Inconvenient Indian, 105. 200 Savard, “La ‘réduction’ de Sillery.” 201 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 50. 202 Savard, “La ‘réduction’ de Sillery.” 203 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 51. 204 Cited in ibid. 205 Ibid., 94, 96–101. 206 Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms,” 26. 207 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 41. 208 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 4–5. 209 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 5. 210 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 17. 211 Cited in ibid. 212 Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 777. 213 Chapman, Hoque, and Utting, “Personal-Is-Political Ethics,” 30; see also Heron, Desire for Development; Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence.”

Notes to pages 169–75  411 214 Chapman, Hoque, and Utting, “Personal-Is-Political Ethics,” 27. 215 Chen, Animacies. 216 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness. 217 Steyaert, “1917 Mary Ellen Richmond.” 218 Franklin, “Mary Richmond and Jane Addams,” 520. 219 Hick, Social Work in Canada, 2010, v. 220 Carniol, Case Critical, 40. 221 Thobani, Exalted Subjects; Foucault, Birth of the Clinic; Asad, Formations. 222 Cited in Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 21. 223 Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House. 224 As cited in Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 21. 225 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 44. 226 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 67. 227 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 78. 228 Stiker, History of Disability, 16. 229 King, Truth about Stories, 127. 230 Ibid. 231 Davis, “Inside USA – Part 2.” 232 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 23. 233 Foucault, “Questions of Method,” 76. 234 Davis, “Foreword,” viii. 235 Mahmood, Politics of Piety. 236 Mayseless and Scharf, “Too Close for Comfort.” 237 Some aspects of this discussion of Harper’s apology are articulated in Chapman, “Possible Lives” and Simpson, “Whither Settler Colonialism?” 238 Harper, “Statement of Apology”; Harper, “Residential Schools Apology.” Please note that all statements from Harper are from this short speech, and we will not give specific paragraph numbers. 239 Paul, Not the Savages. 240 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe; Lawrence, “Rewriting Histories of the Land”; Johansen, Forgotten Founders. 241 Paul, Not the Savages. 242 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game; Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms.” 243 King, Inconvenient Indian; Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace. 244 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game, 23. 245 Harper, “Statement of Apology.” 246 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game. 247 Harper, “Statement of Apology.” 248 Ibid.

412  Notes to pages 175–89 249 Ibid. 250 Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness; Blackstock, “Evil of Angels”; King, Inconvenient Indian; Lawrence, “Real” Indians and Others; Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe; Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire”; Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus; Simpson, “Whither Settler Colonialism?” 251 See Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire” for an excellent discussion on this point. 252 Heron, Desire for Development. 253 Stastna, “Clean Running Water.” 254 Hildebrandt, “Half of First Nations Children Live in Poverty.” 255 Office of the Correctional Investigator, “Backgrounder.” 256 Beaucage, “Children First”; Fournier and Crey, Stolen From Our Embrace. 257 Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness.” 258 hooks, “Ending Domination.” 259 Ibid. 260 Clare, “A Dialogue About Cure.” 261 Razack, Dying from Improvement, 109, 105. 262 Dias, “Abolition Now!” 263 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 33. 264 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 22. 265 Rossiter, “Unsettled Social Work.” 266 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 36. 267 Cited in Smith, Conquest, 175. 268 See the origin story summed up by Richard Ramsay, discussed in chapter one on page 43. 4  Knowing Better: Liberalism, Instrumental Violence, and Making New Humans 1 Olson, “Social Work’s Professional,” 60. 2 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 4. 3 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, 43. 4 Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms,” 28–9; Thobani, Exalted Subjects; Asad, Formations; Johansen, Forgotten Founders; Foucault, Birth of the Clinic; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Foucault, Order of Things. 5 Asad, Formations, 61. 6 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xvi. 7 Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, 94. 8 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game. 9 Sulzer, 1748, cited in Miller, For Your Own Good, 12. 10 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe, 50–1. 11 Sulzer, 1748, cited in Miller, For Your Own Good, 11, sequence modified.

Notes to pages 189–97  413 12 Krüger, 1752, cited in ibid. 13 Foucault, “Omnes,” 325. 14 Krüger, 1752, cited in Miller, For Your Own Good, 11, emphasis ours. 15 Augusta-Scott, “Dichotomies in the Power and Control Story.” 16 Miller, For Your Own Good, 21. 17 Salzmann cited in ibid., 23–4. 18 Miller, For Your Own Good, 23. 19 Ibid., 21, emphasis in the original. 20 Ibid., 16. 21 Butler, Precarious Life. 22 Miller, For Your Own Good, 16. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Miller, For Your Own Good, 17. 26 Ibid. 27 Society for Women’s Health Research and U.S. Food and Drug Administration Office of Women’s Health, “Dialogues on Diversifying Clinical Trials.” 28 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 29 Asad, Formations, 108. 30 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 31 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 8. 32 Beales, Joseph II; “Torture by Fire (1769),” 236; Evans, Criminal Prosecution, 207. For examples of the depiction of the constitution as a part of the abolition movement, see Sanford, Different Systems of Penal Codes, 79; Keithly, “Maria Theresa.” 33 Cited in Asad, Formations, 114–115 n21. 34 Glos, “Czechoslovak Civil Code,” 221. 35 “Constitutio,” 343–78. 36 Ibid., 352; 342–4. 37 As illustrated in the opening pages of Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 38 Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law in Georgia”; Wells, Southern Horrors; Wells-Barnett, Red Record; Wells, “Lynching and the Excuse for It”; Smith, Conquest; Asad, Formations; Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights; Slahi, Guantánamo Diary. 39 Winkler, “Maria Theresa and the Moral Crusade.” 40 King, Truth about Stories, 145. 41 Blackstock, “Evil of Angels,” 31. 42 Chen, Animacies. 43 Asad, Formations, 62. 44 Ibid. 45 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 45–6.

414  Notes to pages 197–201 46 Ibid., 46. 47 Blackstock, “Evil of Angels,” 31. 48 Ibid., 28. 49 Heron, “Desire for Development: The Education.” 50 Heron, Desire for Development. 51 Kant, “Metaphysic of Morals,” 2. 52 Spivak, Critique, 22, emphasis in the original. 53 Kant, cited in ibid., 23, emphasis in the original. 54 Kant, Religion Within. 55 Kant, cited in Spivak, Critique, 23. 56 Kant, “Metaphysic of Morals,” 4, italics in the original. 57 Ibid., 7. 58 Ibid., 5. 59 Kant, “Metaphysic of Morals,” 10. 60 Ibid., 4–7. 61 Kant, “Metaphysic of Morals,” 11, 24; Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 26 n44 citing Taylor; Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 136 citing Eichmann. 62 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics; Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem; Chapman, “Becoming Perpetrator”; Razack, Looking White People in the Eye; Mahmood, Politics of Piety; Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject. 63 Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 5. 64 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 136. 65 Ibid., 137. 66 Said, Orientalism, 2003, 204. 67 Samuels, Fantasies, 175. 68 Kleingeld, “Second Thoughts.” 69 Ibid., 577, citing Kant from the 1780s, which is as precise a date as anyone knows of these statements. 70 Kleingeld, “Second Thoughts,” 576. 71 Kleingeld, “Second Thoughts,” 577, citing Kant from the 1780s. 72 Mills cited in ibid., 583. 73 Samuels, Fantasies, 175. 74 Kant, “Metaphysic of Morals,” 29. 75 Kleingeld, “Second Thoughts,” 583, discussing Mills’ analysis. 76 Kleingeld, “Second Thoughts.” 77 Spivak, Critique, 12. 78 Ibid., emphasis Spivak’s. 79 Ibid., 14. 80 Cited in King, Inconvenient Indian, 108. 81 Razack, Looking White People in the Eye, 3.

Notes to pages 201–9  415 82 Heron, “Desire for Development: The Education,” 66. 83 See, for example, Banks and Nøhr, Practising Social Work Ethics; Barsky, Ethics and Values in Social Work; Beckett and Maynard, Values and Ethics in Social Work; Dickens, Social Work, Law and Ethics; Reamer, Social Work Values and Ethics. 84 Kant, 1793, cited in Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 26 n43. 85 Kant, Religion within the Boundaries, 68. 86 Milner, 1882, cited in Asad, Formations, 110, n12. 87 Captain Richard Henry Pratt, 1895; William A. Jones, 1903, cited in Churchill, Kill the Indian, 13–14. 88 Kant, Religion Within, 91. 89 Rapson, “Charles Grant (1746–1823).” 90 SATH, “Act of Proscription.” 91 Rapson, “Charles Grant (1746–1823).” 92 SATH, “Slavery and the Slave Trade”; Rapson, “Charles Grant (1746–1823).” 93 Rapson, “Charles Grant (1746–1823).” 94 SATH, “The Clearances.” 95 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game, 82–3. 96 Grant, Observations. 97 Ibid., 97–9. 98 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 228. 99 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 124. 100 Ibid., 123. 101 Ibid., 128. 102 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism.” 103 Grant, Observations, 85. 104 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 123–4. 105 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 124, emphasis ours. 106 Kipling, “White Man’s Burden.” 107 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 127. 108 Cited in Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 128. 109 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 139–40. 110 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 231. 111 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 112 Ibid., 238–9. 113 Bentham, Panopticon. 114 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 209. 115 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 46. 116 Asad, Formations, 108–9. 117 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 239. 118 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 9.

416  Notes to pages 209–14 119 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 47. 120 Ibid. 121 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 48. 122 See Chapman, “Possible Lives,” 152, for a related discussion on the distinction between later “behaviour modification” and the self-disciplinary practices of those involved in religious movements of self-cultivation. 123 Eastern State Penitentiary: A National Historic Landmark, “General Overview,” para 8. 124 Asad, Formations, 108. 125 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 48. 126 Hansen, “Charles Dickens as Abolitionist.” 127 Cited in Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 48. 128 Heron, Desire for Development, 84; Chapman, Hoque, and Utting, “Personal-IsPolitical Ethics.” 129 Johnson, “We Hold the Rock,” para. 2. 130 Murphy, Alcatraz Military Prison – Guided Tour. 131 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 3. 132 Murphy, Alcatraz Military Prison – Guided Tour. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?. 136 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 42. 137 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 16. 138 Mills, “Global Psychiatrization”; Ibrahim, “Mental Health in Africa.” 139 Cannon, “Film Portrayal of Psychopathology and Its Treatment,” 160. 140 Marneros, “Psychiatry’s 200th Birthday.” 141 Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 120 n34. 142 Fournet as quoted in ibid., 108. 143 Ibid. 144 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 59. 145 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe, 51–2. 146 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 126. 147 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 252; see also Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 108. 148 Woodham, “Eastern State Penitentiary: A Prison with a Past.” 149 As quoted in Burstow, Business of Madness, 35. 150 Burstow, Business of Madness, 34–5. 151 Shorter, History of Psychiatry, 11. 152 King, Inconvenient Indian, 2. 153 Schuster, Hoertel, and Limosin, “Man behind Philippe Pinel.” 154 Deegan, “Historical Roots of Peer Practitioners.”

Notes to pages 215–21  417 155 Burstow, Business of Madness, 21. 156 Schuster, Hoertel, and Limosin, “The Man behind Philippe Pinel”; Deegan, “Historical Roots of Peer Practitioners.” 157 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 268. 158 Bru, Bicêtre, 163. 159 Funck-Brentano and Marindaz, Bicêtre, 26; Bru, Bicêtre, 163. 160 Funck-Brentano and Marindaz, Bicêtre, 26. 161 Bru, Bicêtre, 163. This wording is very close to a direct translation. 162 Bru, Bicêtre, 104. 163 Burstow, Business of Madness, 31; Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms”; Foucault, Madness and Civilization. 164 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 38. 165 “History of the Asylum.” 166 Burstow, Business of Madness, 29. 167 Stone, Disabled State, 45. 168 Carey, On the Margins; Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability. 169 Baker cited in White, “Freaks and Entrepreneurs.” 170 Southworth, cited in Burstow, Business of Madness, 29. 171 Stiker, History of Disability, 99. 172 Ibid., 101. 173 Ibid., 107. 174 Burstow, Business of Madness, 30. 175 Heron, Desire for Development. 176 Burstow, Business of Madness, 33. 177 Cited in Burstow, Business of Madness, 35. 178 Burstow, Business of Madness, 35. 179 Ibid. 180 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 68. 181 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 84. 182 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 148. 183 Samuels, Fantasies, 11. 184 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 37. 185 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 28. 186 Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms,” 34; Kelm, “Diagnosing the Discursive Indian”; Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide; Smith, Conquest. 187 Chen, Animacies. 188 White, “Folk Psychology.” 189 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 43. 190 Chen, Animacies, 26–7. 191 Said, Orientalism, 2003, 239.

418  Notes to pages 221–7 192 Said, Orientalism, 2003, xxi. 193 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 11. 194 Heron, Desire for Development. 195 Ferguson, “Creating the Back Ward”; Rafter, Creating Born Criminals; Foucault, Abnormal; Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms.” 196 Foucault, Abnormal, 58. 197 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 191–2, sequence modified. 198 Ibid., 251. 199 Ibid., 252. 200 Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 56. 201 Foucault, Order of Things. 202 Westphal, “Contrary Sexual Feeling.” 203 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 43. 204 Sullivan, Introduction to Queer Theory, 10. 205 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 43. 206 Westphal, “Contrary Sexual Feeling.” 207 D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” 172. 208 Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 16. 209 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 37–8. 210 Somerville, Queering the Color Line. 211 Rafter, Creating Born Criminals. 212 Rafter, Creating Born Criminals; Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability. 213 Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 27. 214 Spencer, “Aleš Hrdlička, M.D., 1869–1943”; Samuels, Fantasies. 215 Samuels, Fantasies, 177. 216 Barbara Fields, cited in Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 23. 217 Stone, Disabled State, 44. 218 Withers, Disability Politics and Theory. 219 Stiker, History of Disability, 106. 220 Stone, Disabled State. 221 We discuss this topic further in chapter five. 222 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 113. 223 Gorman, “Disablement In and For Itself,” 252. 224 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 23. 225 Stone, Disabled State, 29. 226 Ibid., 36, sequence modified. 227 Ibid., 44. 228 Ibid., 28.

Notes to pages 227–36  419 229 Ibid., 34. 230 Mills, Decolonizing Global Mental Health; Ibrahim, “Mental Health in Africa.” 231 Stiker, History of Disability, 77. 232 Stone, Disabled State, 34. 233 Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms,” 6; Stiker, History of Disability. 234 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 598. 235 Stone, Disabled State, 38. 236 Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams, 289. 237 Stone, Disabled State, 39. 238 Ibid., 40. 239 Ibid., 55. 240 Ibid., 42. 241 Ibid., 56. 242 Ibid., 58, emphasis in original. 243 Michalko, Difference That Disability Makes. 244 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 39. 245 Ibid. 246 See also Gorman, “Disablement In and For Itself.” 247 Withers, “Invisible Austerity”; Withers, Disability Politics and Theory. 248 Mahmood, Politics of Piety. 249 Razack, Dying from Improvement; Callow, “Indian Child Welfare Act”; LeFrançois, “Psychiatrization of Our Children”; Chapman, “Possible Lives”; Million, Therapeutic Nations. 250 Hanson, “Indian Act.” 251 St Germain, Indian Treaty-Making Policy; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Report; Wright, Stolen Continents. 252 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 61. 253 Ibid., 63. 254 Ibid. 255 Innu Nation and Mushuau Innu Band Council, “Social Service,” 87. 256 Fanon, “So-called Dependency Complex,” 79. 257 Chen, Animacies; White, “Folk Psychology.” 258 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 62, citing Great Britain, 1845. 259 Cited in ibid., 63. 260 Hanson, “Indian Act.” 261 Civilization Fund Act, “The Missionary Impulse.” 262 Samuels, Fantasies, 162. 263 Ibid., 145. 264 Ibid., 163. 265 Ibid., 167.

420  Notes to pages 236–43 266 Judd et al., “Ah Hin on Behalf of Man Nun and Ah Yin,” 465. 267 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 92. 268 Samuels, Fantasies, 165–6. 269 Judd et al., “Ah Hin on Behalf of Man Nun and Ah Yin,” 465. 270 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 8. 271 Quoted in Chadha, “‘Mentally Defectives’ Not Welcome,” n.p. 272 Ibid. 273 Mathieu, North of the Color Line. 274 Backhouse, Colour-Coded; Mathieu, North of the Color Line. 275 Mathieu, North of the Color Line. 276 Ibid., 42–3. 5 Rehabilitation/Eugenics 1 “Rehabilitate,” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2 Stiker, History of Disability, 122. 3 Stiker, History of Disability, 121. 4 Thobani, Exalted Subjects; Ahmed, Promise of Happiness. 5 Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms.” 6 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement.” 7 Stiker, History of Disability. 8 Stiker, History of Disability; epstein, “Refrigerator Mothers”; epstein, “Extension”; Withers, “(Re)constructing and (Re)habilitating the Disabled Body.” 9 Amos, “Vocational Rehabilitation.” 10 Ponseti, “History of Orthopaedic Surgery.” 11 Guest, Emergence of Social Security in Canada. 12 Stiker, History of Disability, 125. 13 Guest, Emergence of Social Security in Canada. 14 Fishback and Kantor, “Adoption of Workers Compensation.” 15 Guest, Emergence of Social Security in Canada. 16 Ibid., 40. 17 Amos, “Vocational Rehabilitation.” 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe, 75. 21 Amos, “Vocational Rehabilitation,” 164. 22 McLean, “Extension of Organized Charity,” 165. 23 Agnew, From Charity to Social Work. 24 Richmond, Social Diagnosis, 267. 25 Richmond, Friendly Visiting, 47.

Notes to pages 243–51  421 26 Kidner, “Vocational Work,” 146. 27 Foucault, Madness and Civilization. 28 Campbell, “Co-Ordination of Rehabilitation Services in Canada”; Lamb, “Century and a Half ”; Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness; Schweik, Ugly Laws. 29 Kidner, “Vocational Work”; Lamb, “Century and a Half.” 30 Campbell, “Co-Ordination of Rehabilitation”; Drimmer, “Cripples, Overcomers.” 31 Stiker, History of Disability, 125, 121. 32 Canadian War Museum, “Cost of Canada’s War.” 33 Bourke, Dismembering the Male; Durflinger, Veterans with a Vision; Stiker, History of Disability. 34 Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 37–8. 35 Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies,” 544. 36 Kidner, “Vocational Work,” 143. 37 Serlin, “Other Arms Race,” 54. 38 Todd, “Meaning of Rehabilitation,” 6. 39 Shortley, “Vocational Rehabilitation,” 201. 40 Canada, Returned Soldiers, 88. 41 Serlin, “Other Arms Race”; Stiker, History of Disability. 42 Stiker, History of Disability, 123. 43 Ibid.,124. 44 McMurtrie, “Duty of the Employer,” 330. 45 Canadian War Museum. “Canada and the First World War: Nurses.” 46 Canada, Returned Soldiers, 675. 47 Campbell, “Co-Ordination of Rehabilitation,” 50. 48 Shortley, “Vocational Rehabilitation,” 202. 49 See Christie, Engendering the State; Stephen, Pick One Intelligent Girl. 50 Stephen, Pick One Intelligent Girl, 31. 51 Larson, “Nature and Origins of Workmen’s Compensation.” 52 Struthers, No Fault of Their Own. 53 As quoted in Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe, 95. 54 Ibid., 93. 55 Ibid. 56 Humphries, “War’s Long Shadow,” 508. 57 Durflinger, Veterans with a Vision. 58 See, for instance, Grygier, Long Way from Home; Washington, Medical Apartheid. 59 McMurtrie, “Duty of the Employer,” 330. 60 Canada, Returned Soldiers, 1074. 61 Struthers, No Fault of Their Own. 62 Canada, Returned Soldiers; Neary, On to Civvy Street, 11; Morton and Wright, Winning the Second Battle.

422  Notes to pages 251–5 63 Biggar, “Pensionability of the Disabled Soldier,” 29. 64 Michalko, “The Meaning of Disability.” 65 Guthman and DuPuis, “Embodying Neoliberalism.” 66 Neary, On to Civvy Street, 287. 67 Morton and Wright, Winning the Second Battle. 68 Canada, Returned Soldiers, 419. 69 McMurtrie, “Duty of the Employer,” 331. 70 Ibid., 332. 71 Lakeman, “After-Care of Our Disabled Soldiers,” 114. 72 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe; Carniol, Case Critical; Hick, Social Work in Canada; Richmond, Friendly Visiting. 73 Lakeman, “After-Care of Our Disabled Soldiers,” 129. 74 Kidner, “Vocational Work,” 148. 75 Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies,” 546. 76 Todd, “Meaning of Rehabilitation,” 6. 77 As quoted in Canada, Returned Soldiers, 7. 78 Testimony of John S. MacLennan, Ibid., 84. 79 Kidner, “Vocational Work”; Lakeman, “After-Care of Our Disabled Soldiers”; Myerson, “Psychiatric Social Worker.” 80 Myerson, “Psychiatric Social Worker,” 227–8. 81 Gorman, “Mad Nation?”; Clare, Brilliant Imperfection; Million, Therapeutic Nations; Burstow, “Radical Understanding of Trauma.” 82 Roc et al., “U.S. Army Combat Psychiatry.” 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Jones, “Traditional Warfare Combat Stress,” 59. 86 Jarvis, ‘“If He Comes Home Nervous,’” 99. 87 Chapman, “Becoming Perpetrator,” citing Strowger. On distress as potentially transformative, see Chapman, “Cultivating a Troubled Consciousness.” 88 Todd, “Meaning of Rehabilitation,” 1. 89 Special Committee of the Ontario Legislature on Industrial Rehabilitation, “Report of the Special Committee,” 8. 90 Clare, Exile and Pride, 8. 91 Withers, Disability Politics and Theory. 92 Kidner, “Vocational Work,” 141. 93 Todd, “Meaning of Rehabilitation,” 2. 94 Baldwin, “Function of Psychology,” 285. 95 McMurtrie, “Duty of the Employer,” 330. 96 Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies,” 546. 97 Lakeman, “After-Care of Our Disabled Soldiers,” 117.

Notes to pages 256–62  423 98 Ibid, 116. 99 Morton and Wright, Winning the Second Battle, 134. 100 Canada, Returned Soldiers, 44. 101 Testimony of Colonel Alfred T. Thompson, ibid., 44. 102 As quoted in Morton and Wright, Winning the Second Battle, 17. 103 Lakeman, “After-Care of Our Disabled Soldiers,” 116. 104 Hines, “Human Side of Demobilization,” 2. 105 Michalko, “The Meaning of Disability.” 106 Stiker, History of Disability, 150, emphasis in original. 107 As quoted in Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies,” 548. 108 As quoted in ibid. 109 Canada, Returned Soldiers, 786. 110 Stiker, History of Disability, 122. 111 Ibid., 124. 112 McMurtrie, “Duty of the Employer.” 113 For example, Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey, Disability Incarcerated; Carey, On the Margins; McRuer, Crip Theory; Michalko, The Difference That Disability Makes; Samuels, Fantasies; Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability; Titchkosky, Disability, Self, and Society; Withers, Disability Politics and Theory. 114 Sonn, Sex, Violence and the Avant-Garde. 115 Stiker, History of Disability, 122. 116 Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies”; Todd, “Meaning of Rehabilitation.” 117 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 122–3. 118 Ibid. 119 Sonn, Sex, Violence and the Avant-Garde; Kirk, “Population Trends in Postwar Europe.” 120 Shortley, “Vocational Rehabilitation,” 203. 121 As quoted in Cahn, “Civilian Vocational Rehabilitation,” 672. 122 Devine, Social Work. 123 Ibid., 163. 124 Cahn, “Civilian Vocational Rehabilitation.” 125 Drimmer, “Cripples, Overcomers,” 1364. 126 Drimmer, “Cripples, Overcomers”; Social Security Administration, “Report of the Committee on Economic Security”; Shortley, “Vocational Rehabilitation”; Macdonald, “Social Service.” 127 Social Security Administration, “Report of the Committee on Economic Security.” 128 DiMichale and Dabelstein, “Psychologist in Vocational Rehabilitation”; Shortley, “Vocational Rehabilitation.” 129 Shortley, “Vocational Rehabilitation.” 130 DiMichale and Dabelstein, “Psychologist in Vocational Rehabilitation.”

424  Notes to pages 262–7 131 Shortley, “Vocational Rehabilitation.” 132 U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical National Population Estimates.” 133 Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability; McLaren, Our Own Master Race. 134 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 112. 135 Ibid., 137. 136 Lakeman, “After-Care of Our Disabled Soldiers.” 137 Campbell, “Co-Ordination of Rehabilitation,” 47. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid.; Drimmer, “Cripples, Overcomers.” 140 Drimmer, “Cripples, Overcomers”; Kidner, “Vocational Work”; Todd, “Meaning of Rehabilitation”; Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies.” 141 Campbell, “Co-Ordination of Rehabilitation”; Drimmer, “Cripples, Overcomers.” 142 Drimmer, “Cripples, Overcomers.” 143 Campbell, “Co-Ordination of Rehabilitation.” 144 Addams, Peace and Bread. 145 As quoted in Loveland, “Smith College School for Social Work,” 472. 146 Rosanoff et al., Manual of Psychiatry, 154. 147 Myerson, Nervous Housewife, 175. 148 Arrington and Grossmann, “Potential Functions”; Baldwin, “Function of Psychology”; Lakeman, “After-Care of Our Disabled Soldiers”; Loveland, “Smith College School for Social Work”; Myerson, “Psychiatric Social Worker”; Richmond, Social Diagnosis; Rosanoff et al., Manual of Psychiatry. 149 Rosanoff et al., Manual of Psychiatry, 154. 150 Jennisen and Lundy, One Hundred Years of Social Work. 151 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe; Jennisen and Lundy, One Hundred Years of Social Work. 152 Myerson, “Psychiatric Social Worker,” 229, 227. 153 Devine, Social Work, 169. 154 Ibid., 165. 155 Ibid., 166–7. 156 Rosanoff et al., Manual of Psychiatry. 157 Myerson, “The Psychiatric Social Worker,” 228. 158 Ibid., 228–9. 159 Grob, “Origins of DSM-I.” 160 Ibid. 161 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual; Grob, “Origins of DSM-I.” 162 Grob, “Origins of DSM-I,” 427.

Notes to pages 267–74  425 163 Stiker, History of Disability: 128. 164 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual; Withers, “Disabling Trans.” 165 Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed. 166 Mackenzie, Transgender Nation; Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed. 167 Mackenzie, Transgender Nation. 168 Montreuil v. Canada (Canadian Forces), [2009] C.H.R.D. No. 28: para. 914, 915, 1175. 169 Kavanagh v. Canada (Attorney General) [2001] C.H.R.D. No. 21: para. 101. 170 Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 171 epstein, “Refrigerator Mothers,” para. 18 172 Ibid., para. 18, citing Boyarin. 173 As quoted in epstein, “Refrigerator Mothers,” para 38. 174 epstein, “Refrigerator Mothers,” para. 38. 175 Ibid., para. 35. 176 Ibid., para. 36. 177 Ibid., para. 42. 178 Ibid., para. 43. 179 Ibid., para. 39. 180 Ibid. 181 Ibid., para. 39–41. 182 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 29. 183 Howell and Voronka, “Introduction,” 4. 184 Ibid., 6. 185 Stiker, History of Disability, 152. 186 Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence,” 336. 187 Ferguson, “Creating the Back Ward”; Rafter, Creating Born Criminals; Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms”; Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement.” 188 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 15. 189 Chapman, “Becoming Perpetrator.” 190 Withers, Disability Politics and Theory. 191 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe. 192 Ibid., 99, 101. 193 Samuels, Fantasies, 172. 194 Ibid., 169. 195 Stiker, History of Disability, 11. 196 Ibid., 12. 197 Lorde, Cancer Journals, 68. 198 Stiker, History of Disability, 12.

426  Notes to pages 275–81 6 Assimilation/Genocide 1 Stiker, History of Disability. 2 Quoted in Cherrington, “Oh, Canada!” 3 William A. Jones, cited in Churchill, Kill the Indian, 14. 4 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 102. 5 Valverde, Age of Light, 115. 6 Callow, “Indigenous Children.” 7 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 100. 8 Razack, Dying from Improvement, 27. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 5. 12 King, Inconvenient Indian, 107. 13 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 53. 14 Woolford and Thomas, “Genocide of Canadian First Nations.” 15 Hunter et al., “Aboriginal Healing”; Lavallee and Poole, “Beyond Recovery,” 8. 16 CBC News, “Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Statement.” 17 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game, 83. 18 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 1:257. 19 Said, Orientalism, 2003, 207. 20 Ibid. 21 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game. 22 Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, De la législation (1789), cited in Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 16. 23 Churchill, Kill the Indian. 24 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game; Churchill, Kill the Indian; Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace; Kelm, “Diagnosing the Discursive Indian”; Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide. 25 United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; see also Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game. 26 Churchill, Kill the Indian, 8–9. 27 Lee and Ferrer, “Examining Social Work,” 9 n2. 28 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, What We Have Learned, 5. 29 Churchill, Little Matter of Genocide; Kill the Indian; Smith, Conquest. 30 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 398. 31 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 48. 32 Goffman, Asylums. 33 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game. 34 Callow, “Indigenous Children”; Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms”; Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement.”

Notes to pages 282–7  427 35 Churchill, Kill the Indian, 92 n28. 36 Churchill, Kill the Indian, 13. 37 Ibid., 14. 38 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 55. 39 Churchill, Kill the Indian, 14. 40 Legacy of Hope Foundation, “Arthur Fourstar.” 41 Asad, Formations, 148. 42 Said, Orientalism, 2003, 207. 43 Smith, Conquest; Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism”; Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide. 44 Paul, Not the Savages. 45 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism”; Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms.” 46 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xxix. 47 For example, Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game; Churchill, Kill the Indian; Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace; Legacy of Hope Foundation, “Where Are the Children?”; Million, Therapeutic Nations; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Looking Forward, Looking Back; Smith, Conquest. 48 Smith, Conquest. 49 Legacy of Hope Foundation, “Brenda Bignell Arnault.” 50 Legacy of Hope Foundation, “Percy Ballantyne.” 51 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game. 52 Davis, “How Does Change Happen?” 53 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game. 54 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 121. 55 Blackstock, “Evil of Angels,” 32. 56 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 36. 57 Heron, Desire for Development; Chapman, Hoque, and Utting, “Personal-IsPolitical Ethics”; Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence.” 58 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xviii. 59 Zaviršek, “Surviving Violent Structures of Singular Identities.” 60 Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms,” 34–5. 61 Quoted in Cherrington, “Oh, Canada!” 62 See Chapman, “Possible Lives”; Chapman, “Becoming Perpetrator”; Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms.” 63 Legacy of Hope Foundation, “Carol Dawson.” 64 Blackstock, “Evil of Angels,” 34–5. 65 Legacy of Hope Foundation, “Brenda Bignell Arnault.” 66 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xviii. 67 Legacy of Hope Foundation, “Percy Ballantyne.”

428  Notes to pages 287–93 68 Churchill, Kill the Indian, 61. 69 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 57. 70 Stiker, History of Disability, 16. 71 Blackstock, “Evil of Angels,” 32. 72 Hébert Boyd, Enriched by Catastrophe, 106; cited to make the same point in Chapman, “Possible Lives,” 137. 73 Dominion of Canada, “Annual Report of the Department,” lxxix. 74 Churchill, Kill the Indian, 55. 75 Ibid. 76 Kelm, Margaret Butcher, 71. 77 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xviii. 78 Quoted in Kleingeld, “Second Thoughts,” 582. 79 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 85. 80 Ibid., 85–6. 81 Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms,” 25–44; Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Ferguson, “Creating the Back Ward,” 45–62; Rafter, Creating Born Criminals. 82 Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms,” 36. 83 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 105. 84 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 61. 85 Churchill, Kill the Indian, 34. 86 Ibid. 87 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xviii. 88 Churchill, Kill the Indian, 34. 89 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 62. 90 Ibid., 49. 91 Churchill, Kill the Indian, 39–44; Kelm, “Diagnosing the Discursive Indian,” 375–6; Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 104–5. 92 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 105–6. 93 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game, 96. 94 Legacy of Hope Foundation, “Brenda Bignell Arnault.” 95 Sinclair, “Bridging the Past and the Future,” 20. 96 Blackstock, “Evil of Angels,” 29. 97 Blackstock, “Evil of Angels,” 29–30. 98 Lee and Ferrer, “Examining Social Work,” 10. Readers may also refer to Craig Fortier and Edward Wong’s “The Settler Colonialism of Social Work and the Social Work of Settler Colonialism,” which came out too late in our writing process to incorporate into our text. 99 Canadian Association of Social Workers, Code of Ethics. 100 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game, 145 n79.

Notes to pages 293–300  429 101 McLaren, Our Own Master Race, 30, 50, 71. 102 Ibid., 55–60. 103 Scott, “Indian Affairs.” 104 King, Truth about Stories; Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide. 105 King, Inconvenient Indian, 71. 106 Scott, “Indian Affairs,” 619. 107 “Oppressive,” The Oxford English Dictionary. 108 Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies,” 548. 109 King, Inconvenient Indian, 69. 110 As quoted in Moss and Gardner-O’Toole, “Aboriginal People.” 111 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” 112 Holmes, Bill C-31, Equality or Disparity? 113 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xvi. 114 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide. 115 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xvi. 116 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism.” 117 Dead Prez, Let’s Get Free. 118 Rage Against The Machine, Rage Against The Machine. 119 Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, 27. 120 As cited in Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 24. 121 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 55. 122 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe, 69. 123 Flanagan, First Nations? Second Thoughts, 231. 124 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe, 69. 125 Scott, “Indian Affairs,” 593. 126 As cited in Asad, Formations, 240, n79. 127 King, Truth about Stories, 57–8. 128 King, Inconvenient Indian, 108. 129 Ibid., 87. 130 Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts, 11. 131 Stephen as cited in Asad, Formations, 240 n79. 132 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe, 4–5. 133 Stiker, History of Disability, 150. 134 As quoted in Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 114. 135 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game, 94. 136 Merivale, Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization, 180–1. 137 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide. 138 As cited in Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 24. 139 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 18. 140 Razack, Dying from Improvement, 23.

430  Notes to pages 300–8 141 King, Inconvenient Indian, 103. 142 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xvi. 143 As cited in King, Truth about Stories, 131. 144 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 6. 145 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xv. 146 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace, 61. 147 As quoted in Churchill, Kill the Indian, 50. 148 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 123, 128. 149 King, Truth about Stories, 130. 150 Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; see also Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms”; Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement.” 151 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game, 122. 152 Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 199. 153 Asad, Formations, 110 n12. 154 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 124 ff; Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xiii ff; Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 129–30. 155 Macaulay, “Minute on Education,” para. 10. 156 Ibid., para. 32. 157 Ibid., para. 34. 158 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism.” 159 Asad, Formations, 110, n12. 160 Kelm, Margaret Butcher, 41. 161 Ibid., 44. 162 Stephen as cited in Asad, Formations, 240 n79. 163 As quoted in Asad, Formations, 111. 164 Asad, Formations, 111. 165 Ibid., 113. 166 Ibid. 167 Kelm, Margaret Butcher, 26. 168 Ibid., 76. 169 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 26. 170 Chapman, “Becoming Perpetrator,” 20. 171 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide. 172 Jesus Tecu Osorio as quoted in al Nakba, “Guatemala”; see also Chapman, “Becoming Perpetrator”; Chapman, Hoque, and Utting, “Personal-Is-Political Ethics.” 173 Brock, “Margaret Butcher,” 333. 174 Asad, Formations, 110, n12. 175 Ibid., 62. 176 Ibid.

Notes to pages 308–15  431 177 Carol Gill, in Mitchell and Snyder, Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back. 178 King, Truth about Stories, 145. 179 Brock, “Margaret Butcher,” 333; Asad, Formations, 110, n12. 180 Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game. 181 Boutilier, “Native Teen’s Slaying a ‘Crime.’” 182 Rossiter, “Innocence Lost,” para. 13. 183 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 127. 184 Miller, For Your Own Good, 21. 185 Johnston, “Native Children and the Child Welfare System,” 23. 186 Kant, Religion within the Boundaries, 68. 187 Churchill, Kill the Indian, 21. 188 Ibid., 19. 189 Legacy of Hope Foundation, “Percy Ballantyne.” 190 Brant, “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women”; Tasker, “Confusion Reigns.” 191 Ibid. 192 Kubik, Bourassa, and Hampton, “Stolen Sisters.” 193 Million, Therapeutic Nations, 177. 194 Smith, Conquest, 10. 195 Razack, Dying from Improvement. 196 Chapman, “Possible Lives.” 197 Callow, “Indian Child Welfare Act,” 501. 198 Ibid., 504. 199 Kielland and Simeone, “Current Issues in Mental Health”; Reading, “Crisis of Chronic Disease.” 200 Callow, “Indian Child Welfare Act,” 506. 201 Patrick, “Aboriginal Homelessness in Canada.” 202 Neegan Burnside Ltd., “National Assessment of First Nations Water.” 203 Kielland and Simeone, “Current Issues in Mental Health”; Reading, “Crisis of Chronic Disease.” 204 Puar, Right to Maim. 205 Ladner and Orsini, “Persistence of Paradigm Paralysis.” 206 Government of Canada, “Statement of the Government of Canada,” 4. 207 Ibid., 16. 208 Ibid., 19. 209 Ladner and Orsini, “Persistence of Paradigm Paralysis,” 198. 210 Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe, 17. 211 Ladner and Orsini, “Persistence of Paradigm Paralysis,” 198. 212 Ladner and Orsini, “Persistence of Paradigm Paralysis.” 213 Trudeau, “Address to the 72nd Session.” 214 Barrera, “Ottawa to Increase Funding”; Barrera, “Trudeau Liberals Take Human Rights.”

432  Notes to pages 315–19 215 Nation to Nation, “Trudeau Government Won’t Rule Out.” 216 Tinker, “Contour of Colonialism,” xvii. 217 Kesler, “Aboriginal Identity & Terminology,” para. 12. 218 Lewis, “Measuring Blood.” 219 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 22. 220 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 99. 221 King, Truth about Stories, 143–4. 222 Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide, 102. 223 Ibid., 99. 224 Lewis, “Measuring Blood.” 225 Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness; Chrisjohn and Young, Circle Game; Churchill, Kill the Indian; Neu and Therrien, Accounting for Genocide. 226 Razack, Dying from Improvement, 8. 227 Stanley, “Louis Riel.” 228 Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide. 229 Wright, Stolen Continents. 230 Nielson, “Guest Lecture.” 231 Paul, Not the Savages. 232 Marcouiller, Indianland – Guided Tour; Murphy, Alcatraz Military Prison – Guided Tour. 233 Wright, Stolen Continents. 234 Obomsawin, Is the Crown at War with Us? 235 Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte, “CN Construction Destructive”; Porter, “‘Longest Running’ First Nations Blockade.” 236 “Idle No More.” 237 Looking Horse, “Standing Rock Is Everywhere.” 238 Million, Therapeutic Nations. 239 Baskin, Strong Helpers’ Teachings; Battiste and Henderson, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge. 240 Drinkwater, “Supported Living”; Pollack, “Labelling Clients ‘Risky.’” 241 LeFrançois, “Psychiatrization of Our Children,” 116. 242 Chapman, “Becoming Perpetrator,” 143–4. 243 LeFrançois, “The Psychiatrization of Our Children,” 117. 244 King, Truth about Stories, 29. 245 Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 246–7. 246 Schweik, Ugly Laws. 247 Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies.” 248 Butler, Undoing Gender; Foucault, “Friendship”; Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries”; McRuer, Crip Theory; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Puar, “Cyborg than a Goddess.”

Notes to pages 320–7  433 249 Clare, Brilliant Imperfection; Finkelstein, “‘We’ Are Not Disabled, ‘You’ Are”; Oliver, Understanding Disability; McRuer, Crip Theory; Michalko, Difference That Disability Makes; Withers, Disability Politics and Theory. 250 Clare, Exile and Pride; Fleischer and Zames, Disability Rights Movement; Michalko, The Difference That Disability Makes; Titchkosky, Disability, Self, and Society; Withers, Disability Politics and Theory. 251 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 252 See, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act; Montreuil v. Canada (Canadian Forces). 253 Berne, “Disability Justice”; Mingus, “About”; Mingus, “Changing the Framework”; Hils, “Interview with Leroy Moore”; Lamm, “This Is Disability Justice.” 254 Bassichis and Spade, “Queer Politics and Anti-Blackness”; Haritaworn, Queer Lovers; Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco, Queer Necropolitics; Spade, Normal Life. 255 Campbell, “Anti-Racist Is a Code Word for Love.” 256 King, Truth about Stories, 57–8. 7  What If It Isn’t Getting Better? What Do We Do Then? 1 Thobani, Exalted Subjects; epstein, “Extension.” 2 Steger and Roy, Neoliberalism. 3 Withers, “Invisible Austerity.” 4 Ibid. 5 Piven, “The Fallacy of ‘Reform.’” 6 Ibid.; Shragge, Workfare. 7 Credit Suisse AG Research Institute, Global Wealth Report 2015. 8 Ibid. 9 Collins and Hoxie, “Billionaire Bonanza Report.” 10 Puar, Right to Maim; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Spade, Normal Life. 11 It Gets Better Project, “What Is the It Gets Better Project?” 12 Bassichis and Spade, “Queer Politics and Anti-Blackness,” 196. 13 It Gets Better Project, “What Is the It Gets Better Project?” 14 It Gets Better Project, “Timeline.” 15 Against Equality, “Marriage.” 16 Spade, Normal Life; Nichols, “Toward a Critical Trans Politics.” 17 Brenkert, “Google, Human Rights”; Hanlon, Corporate Social Responsibility; Yee, “Regulation Failing to Keep”; U.S. Department of Justice, “Eli Lilly and Company”; U.S. Department of Justice, “United States Announces $5.5 Million”; U.S. Department of Justice, “GlaxoSmithKline to Plead Guilty”; Garside, “Child Labour”; China Labor Watch, “Tragedies of Globalization”; Schrempf, “Nokia Siemens Networks.”

434  Notes to pages 327–32 18 Fellows and Razack, “Race to Innocence.” 19 Minton et al., “Census of Jails”; Statistics Canada, “Data Table for Chart 1.” 20 Klein, No Logo. 21 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. 22 Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco, Queer Necropolitics, 8. 23 Malcolm X, Autobiography; Roberts, Shattered Bonds. Thanks to Gordon Pon for bringing this to Chris’s attention. 24 Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 241. 25 Clarke, “Challenges of Child Welfare,” 278. 26 Ibid., 279. 27 Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 242. 28 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 29 “Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” 30 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? 31 Mapping Police Violence, “National Police Violence Map”; Swaine, “The Counted.” 32 Ibid. 33 Millar and Owusu-Bempah, “Whitewashing Criminal Justice in Canada.” 34 Maynard, Policing Black Lives. 35 Statistics Canada, “Immigration and Ethnocultural Diversity.” 36 Gillis, “How Many Black Men.” 37 Williams and Sternthal, “Understanding Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Health.” 38 Harris, Racial Disproportionality in Child Welfare. 39 Contenta, Monsebraaten, and Rankin, “Why Are So Many Black Children.” 40 Baskin, “Role of Social Work”; Blackstock, “Evil of Angels”; Callow, “Indian Child Welfare Act”; Clarke, “Challenges of Child Welfare”; Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection”; Dumbrill and Lo, “What Parents Say”; Krane and Carlton, “Oppressing Mothers”; Maiter, “Race Matters”; Parada, “Regional Perspectives.” 41 Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey, Disability Incarcerated; Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement”; Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?; Smith, Conquest; Ware, Ruzsa, and Dias, “It Can’t Be Fixed Because It’s Not Broken”; Withers, “Institutions And/As Prisons.” 42 Marinkovic and Backovic, as cited in Chapman, “Possible Lives,” 149. Another study with similar findings (also cited in Chapman, “Possible Lives”) is authored by Mech, Ludy-Dobson, and Hulseman. 43 Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey, Disability Incarcerated; Chapman, “Possible Lives”; Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability. 44 Clarke, “Challenges of Child Welfare,” 275. 45 Ibid., 279; Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 235. 46 Dumbrill and Lo, “What Parents Say,” 136.

Notes to pages 332–8  435 47 Ibid., 137. 48 See, for example, Children’s Aid Society of Hamilton, “Mission, Vision, and Values”; Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, “Vision, Mission, Values.” 49 Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms,” 37–8; Stiker, History of Disability; Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe. 50 Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 10. 51 Davis, “How Does Change Happen?” 52 Fournier and Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace. 53 Ibid., 84. 54 Ibid., 85. 55 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 124. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Chapman, “Five Centuries’ Material Reforms”; Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement”; Callow, “Indigenous Children.” 59 APTN National News, “Nearly Half of Children”; Pecora et al., The Child Welfare Challenge; Churchill makes a similar argument, drawing on Fournier and Crey, in Kill the Indian, 111, n481. 60 Hartney and Vuong, Created Equal; Office of the Correctional Investigator, “Backgrounder.” 61 Patrick, Aboriginal Homelessness in Canada; U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, “Expert Panel on Homelessness.” 62 APTN National News, “Nearly Half of Children.” 63 Annable, “October Census Finds.” 64 LaLiberte et al., “Child Protection Services and Parents”; McConnell et al., Child Welfare Process and Outcomes. 65 Selinger, “Full Text: Apology.” 66 Houlden, “Manitoba Can Do Better for Kids in Care.” 67 Puxley, “CFS Seizes a Manitoba Newborn a Day”; Puxley, “Renewed Pain as Newborn Seized.” 68 Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 226. 69 Ibid. 70 Legacy of Hope Foundation, “Percy Ballantyne.” 71 Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 236. 72 Ibid., 240–1. 73 Clarke, “Challenges of Child Welfare,” 279. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 280. 76 Ibid. 77 Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 237.

436  Notes to pages 338–45 78 Clarke, “Challenges of Child Welfare”; Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection”; Dumbrill and Lo, “What Parents Say”; Roberts, Shattered Bonds; Malcolm X, Autobiography. 79 Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 237. 80 Abdillahi, Meerai, and Poole, “When the Suffering Is Compounded.” There is an exploration of this interlocking, following Abdillahi, Meerai, and Poole, in Chapman et al., “‘A Kind of Collective Freezing-Out.’” 81 Davis, “How Does Change Happen?” 82 Blackstock, “Evil of Angels,” 28–9. 83 Ibid. 84 Riley-Smith, Hospitallers, 27–9. 85 Krane and Carlton, “Oppressing Mothers,” 194. 86 Clarke, “Challenges of Child Welfare”; Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection”; Roberts, Shattered Bonds. 87 Doyle, “Child Protection and Child Outcomes”; Doyle, “Child Protection and Adult Crime”; Doyle, “Causal Effects of Foster Care.” 88 Clarke, “The Challenges of Child Welfare,” 279. 89 Freud and Burlingham, War and Children. 90 Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness, 4. 91 Ibid., 118. 92 McMurtry and Curling, Review of the Roots of Youth Violence. 93 Aubrecht, “Rereading the Ontario Review,” 59. 94 Ibid. 95 Government of Ontario, Ministry of Children and Youth Services, “Ontario’s Enhanced Youth Action Plan,” n.p. 96 Razack, Dying from Improvement, 19. 97 Government of Ontario, Ministry of Children and Youth Services, “Ontario at a Crossroads.” 98 Razack, Dying from Improvement. 99 Million, “In Loco Parentis.” 100 Million, Therapeutic Nations, 6. 101 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 32. 102 Million, Therapeutic Nations, 67. 103 Ibid., 81. 104 Worthington, “Theresa Spence Hunger Strike.” 105 Blatchford, “Inevitable Puffery.” 106 Barrera, “Idle No More Movement.” 107 Patel, “Racing Madness”; Davis, “Foreword”; Metzl, The Protest Psychosis. 108 Chandler and Lalonde, “Cultural Continuity as a Hedge,” 16. 109 Chandler and Lalonde, “Cultural Continuity as a Hedge.”

Notes to pages 345–53  437 110 Blackstock, “Evil of Angels,” 31. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 Weinberg, “Case for an Expanded Framework,” 329. 115 Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 225. 116 Maynard, Policing Black Lives, 129. 117 Clarke, “Challenges of Child Welfare,” 279. 118 In addition to those works cited earlier, see Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement”; Ware, Ruzsa, and Dias, “It Can’t Be Fixed Because It’s Not Broken”; Callow, “Indian Child Welfare Act”; Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?; Smith, Conquest; Chen, Dulani, and Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Revolution Starts at Home. 119 Devaney, My Leaky Body. 120 Ibid., 306–7. Thanks to Christine Kelly for alerting Chris to Devaney’s work and particularly to this aspect of it. Christine references this work in the conclusion of an article she and Chris co-authored, making much the same observation as A.J. and Chris are now making. Kelly and Chapman, “Adversarial Allies,” 63. 121 Devaney, My Leaky Body, 313–14. 122 Slahi, Guantánamo Diary. 123 Ibid., 251. 124 Ibid., 234. 125 Ibid., 370. 126 Ibid., 229. 127 This question is considered in Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, “Reconsidering Confinement,” 14–15; see also Chapman, “Becoming Perpetrator.” 128 Slahi, Guantánamo Diary, 221. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid., 368, emphasis added. 131 Ibid., 369. 132 For a longer discussion of this concern in the context of closed residential treatment, where children are often sent upon being apprehended, see Chapman, “Possible Lives,” 151–3. 133 Clarke, “Beyond Child Protection,” 246. 134 Dumbrill and Lo, “What Parents Say,” 135. 135 Ibid., 133. 136 Parada, “Reconstructing Neglect and Emotional Maltreatment,” 181. 137 Krane and Carlton, “Oppressing Mothers,” 200. 138 Foucault, “Friendship.” 139 Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 174.

438  Notes to pages 353–62 140 Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 163. 141 Icarus Project, Friends Make the Best Medicine; See also Chen, Dulani, and Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Revolution Starts at Home. 142 Smith, “The Problem with ‘Privilege.’” 143 Erickson, “Unbreaking Our Hearts,” 16. 144 Thompson, A Promise and A Way of Life. 145 Maeckelbergh, “Doing Is Believing,” 4. 146 Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, 11. 147 Chen, Dulani, and Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Revolution Starts at Home; Blackstock, “Evil of Angels”; Baskin, Strong Helpers’ Teachings; Baskin, “The Role of Social Work”; Jimenez, “The History of Child Protection.” 148 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics. 149 Spivak, “Righting Wrongs.” 150 Chen, Dulani, and Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Revolution Starts at Home; INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Color of Violence; Kelly, “Philly Stands Up”; Kershnar et al., “Toward Transformative Justice”; “Transformative Justice Toronto.” 151 Kershnar et al., “Toward Transformative Justice”; Lamble, “Transforming Carceral Logics”; Withers, Transformative Justice; Morris, Stories of Transformative Justice; Morris, Penal Abolition, the Practical Choice. 152 For accounts concerning this tactic of inviting resonance in this way, see Chapman, Hoque, and Utting, “Personal-Is-Political Ethics”; Chapman, “Possible Lives.” 153 Chapman, “Becoming Perpetrator”; Chapman, “Possible Lives.” 154 Chapman, “Dilemmas about ‘Taking Responsibility.’” 155 Withers, Transformative Justice, 24. 156 Oparah, “Afterword,” 135. 157 Lamble, “Transforming Carceral Logics.” 158 Berne, “Disability Justice”; Lamm, “This Is Disability Justice”; Mingus, “About”; Mingus, “Changing the Framework”; Hils, “Interview with Leroy Moore.” 159 Padamsee, “Communities of Care.” 160 Ibid. 161 Withers, Disability Politics and Theory. 162 Mingus, “Interdependency.” 163 As quoted in Thompson, A Promise and A Way of Life, 82. 164 Withers, “How Disablist Western Ideas.” 165 hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, 114; hooks, Will to Change, 145. 166 hooks, “Ending Domination.” 167 Hemmer, “The Brutality President.” 168 Mukherjee, “Trump Wants to Make.”

Notes to pages 362–76  439 169 I.K., “Courts Slap Down”; Kopan, Jarrett, and Moghe, “Judge Blasts HHS Official’s Warning.” 170 Frothingham and Phadke, “100 Days, 100 Ways.” 171 Gessen, “How Trump Uses ‘Religious Liberty.’” 172 Independent, “Trump Administration Reverses Obama-Era Prison”; Gessen, “How Trump Uses ‘Religious Liberty’”; Helmore, “Rights Groups Vow to Fight.’” 173 Sisemore and Itaoui, “Trump’s Travel Ban.” 174 Black Lives Matter Canada, “Black Lives Matter and Olando Brown’s Family”; Crawley, “Ontario Cancels Curriculum Rewrite.” 175 Benzie, “Ford Government Is Ending Co-Operation.” 176 Lenti, “A Sex-Ed Program That Erases.” 177 Arendt, cited in Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 68; see also Spade, Normal Life; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco, Queer Necropolitics; Bassichis and Spade, “Queer Politics and Anti-Blackness”; Puar, Right to Maim. 178 Bergen, “Teen Moms,” 24. 179 Smith, Conquest. 180 Adams and Chandler, “Responsive Regulation”; Darlington et al., “Parents’ Perceptions”; McCrae and Fusco, “A Racial Comparison.” Thanks to Heather Bergen for bringing this critical literature to our attention. Conclusion 1 Macaulay, “The Task of the Modern Historian,” 11. 2 Spivak, Critique, 287. 3 Cited in Joseph, Deportation and the Confluence, 81. 4 Joseph, Deportation and the Confluence, 82. 5 hooks, “Ending Domination.” 6 Razack, Looking White People in the Eye, 50. 7 Jenkins, Becoming Ethical, 24. 8 Million, Therapeutic Nations, 27. 9 Davis, “How Does Change Happen?”

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Index

ableism, 7, 448. See also disablism Aboriginal. See Indigenous/Indigeneity abuse/assault: child abuse, 17, 20, 64–5, 88, 111, 113, 121, 137, 140, 157, 186–7, 189–94, 278, 284–8, 292, 309, 318, 332, 336–7, 339, 343, 348, 357, 363; corporal punishment, 168, 187, 195–6, 207, 377; emotional abuse, 191, 349–50; humiliation, 187, 192–3, 214–15, 219, 285; interpersonal violence, 282, 285–6, 311, 356; intimate partner violence, 53, 91–2, 99, 177, 286, 347, 353, 357, 374; neglect, 64, 113, 194, 248, 278, 292, 336–7, 339, 348, 359, 363; perpetrator, 16, 29, 45, 67, 127, 148, 174–8, 181, 187, 189, 191–2, 194, 199–200, 204, 211, 238, 254, 281, 283–9, 299, 305, 307–9, 311–12, 323, 350, 358, 364, 400; physical abuse, 177, 187, 214, 302, 339, 349–51; rape and sexual violence, 64, 92, 97–9, 107–8, 111, 137, 140, 283, 286–7, 311–12, 336, 339–40, 358; survivors, 111, 358, 374 (see also Indian residential schools/ Indian industrial schools) accountability, 54, 170, 175, 177, 179, 198–9, 206, 214, 286, 305, 356–9, 367, 374–5

activism, 4, 12, 23, 30, 34, 39–40, 45–6, 50, 54, 61, 69, 75, 77–8, 85, 88, 92, 100, 117, 144, 157, 214, 240, 330, 334, 354, 357–61, 366, 376; community organizing, 26, 39, 53, 58, 73, 78, 81, 99, 101, 116, 122, 179, 365. See also social movements Addams, Jane, 9, 18, 20, 25–8, 30, 39–55, 66–7, 75, 79–80, 85, 89–90, 97, 99–101, 121–4, 129, 142–6, 151, 161, 168–71, 185, 206, 213, 264, 324, 340, 357, 365, 371, 374, 381–2 advice, 31, 110, 118, 136–7, 141, 149, 157, 162, 168, 187, 189, 192, 256, 272, 340 Africa, 5, 13, 84, 127–8, 159, 200, 204, 212, 232; West Africa, 83, 113 African American. See Black Africville, 18, 27, 333, 373; Halifax Explosion, 66, 249, 271–2; relocation, 60–1, 158; and social work, 18, 27, 69–70; standard account, 67–73 ageism, 7–8, 73, 187 Ahmed, Sara, 30, 69, 130, 136, 147, 177–9, 206, 218, 284, 342–3 Akande, Zanana, 113

500 Index Alcatraz, 211–12, 280–1, 317. See also prison/imprisonment alcohol, 31–2, 37, 57, 92–4; alcoholism, 313; drinking, 55–6, 93, 175, 314; intoxicants, 93 (see also drugs) Alfred, Taiaiake, 175, 296 al-Ghazali, Zaynab, 76–7 allies, 48, 52, 91, 99, 101, 355, 360–1, 375. See also solidarity Alphonse, Paul, 102, 342 animacy, 153, 156, 169, 197 Anucha, Uzo, 3, 127–30, 180 apology, 20, 70, 111, 173–7, 217, 278, 281, 315, 335–6, 342, 364, 373. See also child apprehension/ protection/welfare; Indian residential schools/Indian industrial schools Arendt, Hannah, 199, 306 Arnault, Brenda Bignell, 283, 286, 426–7, 472 Asad, Talal, 171, 186, 194, 197, 200, 207, 282, 302, 304–5, 307–8 Ashini, Daniel, 15–16 assimilation, 20–2, 49, 63, 76, 102, 201, 204–6, 258, 268, 274, 283, 368, 370, 374, 376; of Black people, 48, 72, 86, 101, 118; in colonial India, 200, 205, 366; disability, 225, 240, 257, 341; hetero-/ homonormativity, 134, 319, 327; of Indigenous people, 20, 59, 62, 72, 108, 120, 167, 174–6, 158, 233–5, 276, 278, 280, 283, 288, 290, 294–7, 299–300, 304–5, 312, 314–15, 317–18, 321, 336, 367–8, 379–80; of Jewish people, 269–70, 366. See also colonialism/ colonization; Indian residential schools/Indian industrial schools Associated Charities, 31, 34, 380. See also Charity Organization Societies (COS) Aubrecht, Katie, 340, 343

Badwall, Harjeet, xii, 5–7, 78 Baldwin, James, 28 Ballantyne, Percy, 283, 287–8, 311, 337 Bannerji, Himani, 11 Barrett, Janie, 89–90, 381 Baskin, Cyndy, 17, 49, 129, 163 benevolence clubs, 109–10 Benjamin, Akua, 49–50 Ben-Moshe, Liat, xii, 281, 303, 331 Bentham, Jeremy, 195, 197, 200, 205, 207–10, 212, 378 Bergen, Heather, 64, 66, 339 Bernard, Wanda Thomas, 5–6 best interests, 71, 193, 211, 299, 305, 310, 368 Bettelheim, Bruno, 268–70 Bhabha, Homi, 18, 152, 205, 301 Bibb, Henry, 107–110, 119 Birth of a Nation, 40, 97, 383, 398. See also Ku Klux Klan; white supremacy Black: Black Codes, 88–9, 105–6, 237, 365; Black feminism, 7–8, 99, 247; Black Lives Matter/don’t matter, 9, 71, 330, 343; churches, 80–2; civil rights and Black power movements, 28, 47, 67–70, 72, 73–5, 88, 101, 114, 324, 333, 340; class/classism, 114–18, 373; eugenics, 86; gender roles, 118–19, 371; Great Migration, 85–7, 116; imprisonment/institutionalization, 86–9, 293, 329, 331–2, 362; informal “child protection,” 112–14, 123, 125, 129, 263, 372; interference by professional social work, 72, 88, 190, 329–33, 363–4; missionaries/ settlements, 39, 48, 85–7, 89–90, 109, 122–4, 363, 372; police violence, 9, 330, 346–7; racial wage gap, 325; radical social work, white framings of, 19, 47–8, 79–80, 122–4; resistance to professional social work, 319, 352,

Index 501 372; settlement houses, 82, 89–90, 109, 122–4, 363, 372; social workers/ working, 6–7, 19, 25, 39, 60, 65, 73–5, 78–124, 337–9; unacknowledged contributions, 9, 39, 48, 85–7, 109, 122–4, 363, 372; women’s clubs, 84–6. See also Africville; child apprehension/protection/welfare; lynching; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Nigeria; Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children; prison/ imprisonment; racism; slavery Blackburn, Carole, 17, 167, 187, 386 Blackstock, Cindy, 175, 197, 284, 286–7, 292, 338, 345 boycott, 68, 73–5, 101–2, 382 Brackett, Jeffery, 43 Bryce, Dr Peter, 291, 293, 383, 384 Buchignani, Norman, 120 bureaucracy, 20, 196, 219–21, 224–5, 227–8, 232–3, 236, 240, 242, 247, 277, 284, 294–5, 316, 381 Burstow, Bonnie, 5, 150, 177, 214, 217, 219, 253 Burt-Markowitz, Dottye, 354–5 Butcher, Margaret, 289, 305–8, 374 Butler, Judith, 12, 18 call of the other, 126, 162–3, 198, 215, 367 Callow, Ella, 281, 313 Canadian Association of Social Workers (CASW), 61, 292 capitalism, 31–2, 36, 46–8, 55, 66, 81–3, 103, 117–18, 129–30, 132–3, 135, 141, 157–8, 161, 209, 226–31, 234–5, 241–3, 245–50, 255, 257–8, 264, 271–3, 300–1, 330, 367–8, 370 Carden-Coyne, Ana, 245, 253 caregiving, 112–13, 126, 159, 161–5, 180, 248, 275, 311, 334

Carey, Allison C., xii, 281, 303, 331 Carlton-LaNey, Iris, 80, 98, 114–15 Cary, Mary Ann Shadd, 78, 111, 119 casework and caseworkers, 18, 25–7, 31, 38, 43, 45, 48, 53, 58, 65, 71, 75, 242–3, 324, 356, 358 caseworkers, 31, 48, 71 Chapman, Chris, 10–11, 45, 121, 177, 271, 281, 292, 303, 306–7, 331, 346–7, 350, 353, 358–9 Charity Organization Societies (COS), 18, 25–7, 43–4, 48, 75, 319, 365, 372; Addams’s critique of, 40–1, 169; Denver, 55; eugenics, 34–8, 50, 51, 52, 60, 371; friendly/charity visitors, 25, 31–2, 37, 38, 40, 45, 48, 53, 54, 61, 65, 66, 116, 118, 367; legacy, 18, 44–5, 53–7; New York City, 36–7, 52; origins, 30–1, 158, 160, 228, 237, 324, 370; rehabilitation, 241–3, 250; restriction of relief, surveillance, and confinement, 32–4, 36–8, 54, 56–7, 250, 252, 369, 371; “ugly laws,” 36–8, 272; white social work, 39, 49, 77, 122, 128–9, 324, 371 Chatterjee, Partha, 300 Chen, Mel, 153, 169, 197 child apprehension/protection/welfare, 22, 64, 93, 121, 147, 212, 317, 336, 349, 367–8; anti-Black racism, 6, 87, 112, 176, 178, 288, 293, 329, 330–3, 336, 347–8, 362–3; colonialism, 121, 153, 176, 178, 288, 291–3, 310, 313, 318–9, 333–8, 347–8, 362–3, 368; disablism, 313, 331, 335, 347–8, 363; eugenic rationale, 35–7; exalted freedom from child apprehension, 331, 335, 346, 363; “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group,” 330–9; historical absence of involuntary apprehension,

502 Index 17, 112–4, 123, 125, 127, 129, 263, 338–9, 372; impact on children, 153, 282, 339; justifications, 35, 153, 189–90, 248, 288, 310, 313, 339, 346–8, 367–8; orphanage, 17, 85, 111–12, 160, 372; orphans, 31, 91, 128, 136–7, 157, 161, 288, 378; poverty, 64–5, 153, 346–8, 363; refugee families, 332; resistance to, 123, 153, 288, 291, 295, 317–19, 352–3. See also Indian residential schools/Indian industrial schools; Sixties Scoop; stolen generation childcare/daycare, 65, 80, 82, 85, 90, 194, 338, 347 Chinese people, 120, 236–7, 263, 361, 365, 379–80. See also immigration Chrisjohn, Roland, 9, 25, 173–5, 187, 204, 278, 280–1, 284, 293, 299–300, 302, 309 Christianity, 19, 76, 81, 90–1, 94, 126, 131–2, 158–62, 164–8, 170–1, 173, 187, 191, 198–9, 203, 205–6, 213, 227–8, 300, 367, 380–1; Catholicism, 35, 38, 166–7; Christianization, 126, 165, 204, 289, 306; Jesuits, 133–4, 165–8, 186, 273; missionaries, 93, 130–4, 151, 156, 166–7, 187, 196, 211, 213, 217–18, 233, 235, 289; monasteries, 207, 210, 218; Pope Francis, 133; Pope Urban II, 164–5, 410, 482; priests, 156, 227, 286; Protestantism, 35, 81, 269; Spanish Inquisition, 158, 165 Churchill, Ward, 282, 287, 289–90, 311 civil rights, 28, 48, 67–9, 73, 88, 101, 114, 324, 328, 333, 373 Clare, Eli, 178, 253, 255, 259 Clarke, Jennifer, 5–6, 65, 319, 329, 332, 336–8, 346–7, 352, 355 Clarke, John, xiii, 58

class: class divisions, 48, 114; classism, 8, 26, 32, 45, 48, 51–2, 61, 63–5, 70, 75, 101, 115–16, 125, 134, 136–7, 147, 152, 159, 172, 187, 190, 249, 272, 335, 337, 343, 348; lower class, 47, 65, 114; middle class, 25, 62, 65, 83–4, 86, 114–18; ruling class, 5, 28, 31–2, 34, 38, 40–3, 46–50, 54–6, 61, 63–6, 82–3, 115, 125–7, 130–1, 136–7, 140–2, 146–51, 153, 156–7, 169–70, 192–4, 196–8, 200–3, 219, 221–2, 238–41, 278–9, 295; underclass, 36, 47, 104; upper class, 66, 84, 153, 269, 335, 347; upward mobility, 115, 117, 303, 327–8, 361, 368; working class, 10, 61, 102, 118, 136–7, 140–1, 146–8, 209, 324, 373 Collins, Patricia Hill, 7, 99, 134 colonialism/colonization: anti-colonial, 50, 159, 175, 300, 317, 333, 343, 356; Black settlers, 105–9; colonizers, 28, 107–8, 123, 140, 186, 201, 204–5, 234, 298, 300, 307; Dawes Act/General Allotment Act, 232, 235–7; decolonial, 12–13, 15, 121, 146, 296, 343, 345, 356, 359; Friends of the Indians, 300–1, 314; imposed gender/sexual norms/violence, 14–17, 130–3, 153, 156–7, 186–7, 283–4, 369–70; imposed legal status/status Indian, 232–3, 235–7, 278, 294–5, 301, 314–17, 371; Indian Act, 13, 132, 232, 235, 237–8, 276, 278, 294–5, 316, 380–1, 384, 419, 465–6; Indian Affairs Department, 276, 218, 294, 299, 301, 314; Indian Child Welfare Act, 313; Indian commissioner, 282, 287, 315; Indian Department, 289, 293–4, 316; Indian problem, 174, 277, 296–8, 316; “kill the Indian,” 59–61, 152, 175, 201,

Index 503 282, 299; social work complicity in, 49–50, 284, 292–3; treaties, 17, 233–4, 298, 314; White Paper, 314–5, 317; white settler ethics and practices, 14, 16, 196, 200, 204, 276, 298. See also assimilation/assimilationist; Indian residential schools/Indian industrial schools; Indigenous/Indigeneity Columbus, Christopher, 108, 158–9 Colvin, Claudette, 73–5 Combahee River Collective, 7–8, 99 common lot, 42, 46–7, 52. See also Addams, Jane confinement: beneficial, 8, 33–4, 37, 162, 207, 212, 214, 216, 220, 228, 270, 303, 331; cisheteropatriarchal, 196, 223, 361, 371; deterrent to accessing charity, 31, 33–4, 37, 229; disablist/ sanist, 33–4, 37, 157, 172, 214–17, 217–8, 244, 265–6, 270, 318, 333, 335, 361; eugenically motivated, 33–4, 86, 87, 244, 266, 270, 371; racist/colonial, 87, 202, 212, 216, 279–80, 306, 313, 318, 331, 334, 337; undifferentiated, 160–1, 211, 216–17, 228; voting rights, 361. See also group homes; hospitals; Indian residential schools/ Indian industrial schools; prison/ imprisonment conservative, 53, 325, 373; (Progressive) Conservative Party, 315, 342 cooperatives, 39, 110, 116–17, 356, 372 Cornwallis, Gov. Edward, 283, 377 Coulthard, Glen, 175 credit unions, 102–3. See also cooperatives Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 7, 99 Crey, Ernie, 17, 156, 168, 287, 291 crime/criminal justice system: carceral logics, 359; colonial

cisheteropatriarchalization, 131, 143, 312, 344; community responses, 73, 357, 367; criminalization of sexual violence, 92, 98; delinquent/ offender, invention of, 222–4, 226, 279; eugenics, 33–4, 51, 89, 96, 221, 224, 226, 236, 266; politicization of, 64, 279, 309, 344, 347–8, 362; queer assimilation, 327; racism/ classism, 61–4, 88–9, 95–6, 99–100, 195, 272, 309, 329, 332, 347–8, 362; shift to imprisonment, discipline, and surveillance, 195, 197, 207, 210–1, 240; voting rights, 361. See also confinement; genocide; police; prison/ imprisonment; torture Criminal Imbecile, The, 96, 383 Davis, Angela, 7, 74, 88, 95, 99, 101, 172, 174, 197, 209–10, 212, 284, 333, 338, 376 Davis, Katherine Bement, 34, 51 Dawson, Carol, 286 de Bey, Cornelia, 143–5 DeFelice, Robert, 259 delinquent, 20, 92, 191, 196, 223–4, 226, 231, 279 D’Emilio, John, 134–5, 223 democracy, 9, 15, 40–2, 44, 46, 48, 67, 117, 145–6, 295, 359 Desmond, Viola, 74 Devaney, Julie, 348–9, 354–5 Devine, Edward, 261, 265–6 Dias, Giselle, 178, 351 Dickens, Charles, 210–11 direct action, 18, 27, 58, 92 disability, 7–11, 20–1, 28, 33–8, 47, 62, 78, 96, 111, 142, 152, 157, 172, 217–18, 220–1, 224–7, 229–32, 236–7, 240, 239–66, 268–78, 290,

504 Index 294, 301–2, 306, 308, 313–14, 319–21, 324, 328, 331, 335, 343, 348, 359–69, 375, 379, 381; abnormal, 11, 222, 240–1, 253, 258, 266, 274, 314, 320; arthritis, 237, 313; autism, 222, 269; blindness, 229, 236, 243, 249, 257; cerebral palsy, 269; crippled, 51, 241, 246, 257, 259; dependence, 248, 250, 252–3, 259–60, 372; disability category, 226–7, 230, 257; disability justice, 320, 359–60, 363; disability pride, 314, 319–20; disability studies, 78, 247, 258; disablement, 8, 260, 281; disabling, 320; Down syndrome, 236; dumb, 229, 236; German Invalidity and Pension Law, 230, 236; handicap, 62, 248, 254–8, 294, 314; hearing voices/ things, 14–15, 321; idiot, 236–7; invalid, 20, 196, 225–32; liberation of the mad, 212–20, 368; madness/ mental illness, 11, 15–16, 50, 60, 87, 150, 178, 187, 191, 209, 212–7, 219, 222, 224–5, 228, 236–7, 253, 266–9, 271, 279, 309, 313, 338, 344, 353, 361, 363, 368; prosthetics, 246–7; psychopathy, 50; psychosis, 15, 269; schizophrenia, 88; sciatic pain, 351; sickness, 11, 15, 102, 110, 160–1, 220, 225, 228–9, 242, 253, 266, 338; straitjackets, 215–6, 219, 238; tuberculosis, 243, 306 disablism, 7–9, 11, 51, 96, 121, 125, 147, 217, 232, 236–7, 313, 324, 335, 343, 348, 351; sanism, 15, 187, 217, 319, 338, 343, 387, 440, 482 Douglass, Frederick, 28 drugs, 56–7, 59, 64, 92, 194, 271, 300, 362; cigarettes, 55, 57–8, 92, 94; war on drugs, 361

Du Bois, W.E.B., 28, 47–8, 76, 81, 99, 104, 122, 124, 128, 172, 382 education, 14, 17, 20, 29, 33, 39, 40, 47, 52, 60, 75, 85, 91, 103–4, 114–15, 128, 136, 143, 158, 174–5, 187, 188–9, 196, 199–205, 218, 222, 224–5, 249, 256, 263, 275, 290, 292, 296, 301, 303–6, 309, 324, 332, 338–9, 341, 345, 366, 378, 381, 384; educator, 86, 124, 148, 196, 211, 282; social work education, 128, 324; special education, 33, 222 (see also disability). See also colonialism/colonization; incorrigibility; Indian residential schools/Indian industrial schools Egypt, 76–7, 80, 100, 127, 133, 146, 202–3, 302, 305, 365 Enlightenment, 20, 185–6, 195–8, 201–4, 206, 210–11, 213, 219–20, 222, 227, 305, 308, 311, 367, 369–70, 377, 379, 381, 383; ideals, 196, 210; innovations, 196; sensibilities, 20, 195, 202 epstein, griffin, xii, 268–9 Erevelles, Nirmala, 331, 343 Erickson, Loree, xii–xiii, 354 eugenics, 8, 21, 34–6, 38–9, 44, 50–3, 75, 86–7, 89, 94, 96, 115, 142, 156, 172, 225–6, 230–1, 236, 240, 243–5, 257–63, 275–6, 279, 281–2, 285, 293, 310, 363, 366, 371, 373, 379–80, 382–3; defect, 35, 37–8, 50, 92, 94, 222, 225–6, 228, 231, 237, 293, 366; degeneracy, 51, 94, 226, 236, 240, 252, 279; disease, 34, 50, 69, 88, 220, 265, 278, 285, 290, 313, 361; eugenicists, 28, 36, 47, 50, 60, 94, 261–2, 365; feeblemindedness, 8, 50–1, 60, 86, 224, 226, 266, 273, 293, 384; heredity, 35–6, 50, 94, 293; hygiene, 47, 94, 115, 218; sterilization,

Index 505 35–6, 47, 244, 366; survival of the fittest/social Darwinism, 52, 117, 231, 362; unfitness, 21, 34–5, 51, 156, 215, 226, 230–1, 236, 241, 244–5, 253–6, 261, 266, 268, 366, 371 Fairfax, Lois, 5–6 fallen women, 91, 93 family, 8, 12, 36, 83–5, 148, 174, 214, 244, 333, 335; extended family, 113, 130, 132–3, 135, 147, 263, 313; nuclear family, 62, 72, 125, 132–6, 140, 370. See also marriage; child apprehension/ protection/welfare; marriage: companionate marriage; monogamy Fanon, Frantz, 234 Feinberg, Leslie, 143–4 femininity/feminized. See sexual and gender diversity feminism/feminists, 12, 17, 19, 28, 38, 76–7, 96, 119, 136, 143, 147, 149, 165–6, 180, 190, 264, 369; Black/of colour, 7, 8, 98, 99, 179, 247; Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), 77; first wave/ domestic, 77, 85, 142; second wave, 98, 333; transfeminism, 148; white/ secular/“progress narrative,” 8, 77, 92, 99, 126, 141, 144, 149–50, 165–6, 304, 334, 369–71, 374 Ferrer, Ilyan, 49, 110, 292 First World War. See war Flannigan, Keri, 157 Fontaine, Tina, 309. See also Indigenous/ Indigeneity Ford, Doug, 362 Foucault, Michel, 4, 87, 133–4, 136–7, 140–1, 160, 166, 171–2, 185, 188, 190, 193–5, 207, 209, 213–14, 217, 220, 222–3, 279, 331, 344, 353, 369 Fournier, Suzanne, 17, 156, 168, 287, 291

Fourstar, Arthur, 282 Francis, E. Aracelis, 99, 117 Freire, Paulo, 12 Freud, Sigmund, 193 friendly visiting, 25, 30–2, 37–8, 40–1, 45, 48, 53–4, 61, 65–6, 118, 367 Gandhi, Mahatma Mohandras, 28, 389 Garza, Alicia, 9 gay. See sexual and gender diversity gender. See sexual and gender diversity genealogy: definition/importance of, 4, 173 genocide: assimilation and rehabilitation/ eugenics, 276, 282, 373; implicit, 77, 299, 304, 305–11, 363; of Indigenous peoples, 9, 20–1, 49, 50, 98, 147, 174, 178, 280–3, 288, 290–2, 299, 302, 304, 305–11, 336, 367; Indigenous resistance to, 317–9; International Criminal Court, 281, 290–1; Nazi war criminals, 281; ratification of Genocide Convention, 280–1; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 281; United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 174, 280–1, 290–1, 336. See also colonialism/colonization; Holocaust; Indian residential schools/Indian industrial schools Global North, 77, 166, 206, 254, 327, 369 Global South, 119, 206 Goffman, Erving, 9, 281 Goldman, Emma, 28, 96, 119 good intentions, 179, 192, 194, 228, 284, 299, 310 Gordon, Linda, 79, 115 Gorman, Rachel, xiv, 11, 225, 253 Grant, Charles, 13, 43, 164, 203–5, 207, 212, 217, 315, 338, 374, 378

506 Index group homes, 167, 202, 332, 334 Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, 350–2, 355 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 27–8 Hale, C. Jacob, 134, 148 Halifax Explosion, 67, 157, 242, 249–50, 265, 272, 288, 384; Africville, 68, 251, 273–4 Haritaworn, Jin, 61, 67, 159, 309, 328 Harper, Francis, 85, 92 Harper, Stephen, 21, 174–9, 218, 279, 282, 298, 310, 316, 336, 375 Hart, Michael, 129 Haury, Woxie, 153, 155 Haynes, George, 87, 105, 125 healing power (of domination and imagined moral superiority, of class, of whiteness, etc.), 13, 18–21, 31, 63, 126–7, 151–3, 158–9, 163, 169, 180–1, 183, 185, 192, 197, 209–10, 247, 256, 260, 270, 319, 332, 353–4, 364, 366–7, 372–4 healthcare, 80, 82, 90, 326, 354 Hébert Boyd, Michelle, 53, 243, 250, 273 helping imperative, 41, 201 Heron, Barbara, 42, 148, 198, 202 heteropatriarchy, 7, 146–7, 150 Highland Clearances, 203–4 Holocaust: concentration camps, 269–70, 282, 291; T4 program, 231. See also Jewish people hooks, bell, 7, 28, 99, 118, 146–9, 177, 190, 360 hospitals: asylums, mental health facilities, and mental hospitals, 9, 16, 32, 34, 38, 87–8, 97, 112, 213, 215–17, 219, 224, 244, 318; Bethlehem (Bedlam), 218; Bicêtre, 213, 215–6, 218, 220, 379; historical

meaning and purpose, 160–2; Hôtel des Invalides, 219; Hôtel-Dieu, 214; Ontario Hospital, Orillia, 33; panopticon/medical gaze within, 210, 221–2, 225; professional social workers in modern, 265–6; St John of Jerusalem, 160–2, 164, 167–8, 263–4, 274; women employees prior to 1870, 151, 216 Hospitallers, 126, 158–9, 161–8, 180, 188, 208, 273, 338, 367, 377–8; homelessness, 54, 248, 368; housing, 58, 62, 72, 141, 161, 209, 314, 324; slum, 62, 64, 69–70, 169. See also hospitals Howard, John, 197 Idle No More, 318, 344 immigration, 60, 70, 105, 119, 172, 236–7, 293, 365, 380, 383; British Quarantine Act, 236; Chinese Exclusion Act, 236–7, 365, 380; Chinese Immigration Act, 236–7, 381; continuous journey requirement, 237, 365; deport, 47, 120, 196; head tax, 236, 380; immigrants, 9, 47–9, 52, 70, 102, 105, 107, 109–10, 147, 158, 170, 236, 262–3, 270, 324, 372, 380; Immigration Act, 236–7, 380, 383; migrants, 85–6, 109, 116, 119, 362, 373, 383; migration, 85–7, 105, 119, 268, 383 imperialism, 131–3, 159, 163, 171, 180, 203–4, 206, 212, 302, 324, 350, 367, 369–70, 373, 382; anti-imperialism, 53, 207, 334, 383; Anti-Imperialist League, 53, 207, 383; Philippines, 167, 382 incarceration, 34, 36–8, 50, 85–7, 89, 96, 172, 174, 178, 212, 216, 266, 293, 317, 331, 362, 379

Index 507 incorrigibility, 41, 197, 222, 255, 308 Independent Order of St Luke, 74, 102, 382 India, 131, 159, 200, 203–6, 214, 297, 303, 366, 383 Indian residential schools/Indian industrial schools, 8–9, 20–1, 25, 59–61, 72, 87, 111, 121, 123, 147, 152–7, 167–8, 172–7, 187, 212, 217, 224, 263, 276, 278–93, 295, 297, 299, 301, 304–13, 315–18, 333, 335–7, 342–4, 365, 368, 378, 380–4; Alberni Indian Residential School, 286, 290; Birtle Indian Residential School, 312, 338; Coqualeetza (Institute), 305, 307; Davin Report, 283, 290, 381; Kitamaat Residential School, 289; Mohawk Institute, 287; Rupert’s Land Industrial School, 287; Spanish Indian Boys School, 289; survivors, 173, 176–7, 281, 283–4, 286–7, 311 Indigenous/Indigeneity, 6, 8, 9, 13, 20–1, 49, 58, 60–1, 64, 72, 79, 93, 107, 115, 120–1, 127, 131, 148, 156, 158, 166–8, 173–8, 181, 195, 196, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206, 211, 212, 213, 216, 217–18, 221, 224, 225, 232–6, 240, 250, 253, 263, 268, 270, 273, 275–322, 324, 333, 361, 365, 366, 370; blood quantum, 235–6, 315, 317, 472; children and youth, 59–61, 87, 126, 130, 154–7, 174–5, 186, 190, 194, 202, 212, 216, 224, 271, 278, 280, 282–93, 299, 300–1, 304, 306–11, 313, 317–19, 331, 333–6, 338, 345, 347, 362–3, 365, 368; elders, 17, 188, 317; enfranchisement, 235, 277, 279, 294–5, 299, 316–7, 380, 384; Esgenoopetitj (Burnt Church), 317; eugenics, 36, 88; Grassy Narrows, 317; identity, 13, 235, 294, 311, 315;

legal/status Indian, 232–3, 235–7, 278, 294–5, 301, 314–7, 371; missing and murdered women, girls, and TwoSpirit, 309, 312, 315; Nunavut, 296; Red Power, 333; Red River Resistance, 317; Royal Proclamation, 233, 377; slavery, 108–9; treaties, 17, 234, 298, 379; Turtle Island, 12, 58, 367; women, 309, 312, 315, 342–3; “vulnerable,” 341–5. See also colonialism/ colonization; Indian residential schools/Indian industrial schools; Indigenous lands; Indigenous nations/ peoples; Indigenous sovereignty/ self-governance/self-determination; Indigenous worldviews, lifeworlds, and social workings; reserves/ reservations Indigenous lands, 12, 49, 107, 108, 131, 166, 171, 173, 178–9, 211, 233–6, 276–7, 283, 284, 294–5, 296, 297, 301, 310, 314, 315, 316, 317, 343, 344, 345. See also Indigenous/ Indigeneity; Indigenous nations/ peoples; Indigenous sovereignty/ self-governance/self-determination; Indigenous worldviews, lifeworlds, and social workings Indigenous nations/peoples: Algonquin, 166–8, 186, 367; Anishinabek, 12; Blackfoot, 294; Cherokee, 108; Cheyenne, 153, 155; Cree, 14, 162, 204; Crow, 131, 330; Guarani, 136; Haisla, 306; Haudenosaunee, 12, 17, 162, 188; Hidatsa, 131; Hopi, 212, 280, 317, 381; Huron-Wendat, 17, 186–7, 377; Innu, 14, 162, 234; Inuit, 296; Kalinago, 158–9, 166; Kanesatake, 317; Lakota, 14; Métis, 317; Mi’kmaw, 13, 15, 17, 162, 167, 283, 317, 378;

508 Index Mohawk/Kahniakenhaka, 287, 292, 317, 344; Muscowpetung Saulteaux, 152, 154; Navajo, 152, 155; Ohlone, 211; Potawatomi, 49, 393; Pueblo, 29; Secwepemc, 342; Seminole, 108; Taino, 158–9; Tuscarora, 108. See also Indigenous/Indigeneity; Indigenous lands; Indigenous sovereignty/ self-governance/self-determination; Indigenous worldviews, lifeworlds, and social workings Indigenous sovereignty/self-governance/ self-determination, 29, 80, 107, 129, 174–5, 203, 233, 235, 255, 296–8, 310, 344, 345. See also Indigenous/ Indigeneity; Indigenous lands; Indigenous nations/peoples; Indigenous worldviews, lifeworlds, and social workings Indigenous worldviews, lifeworlds, and social workings, 7, 12–18, 29, 38, 94, 120–1, 123, 129, 162–3, 174, 186, 205, 211, 222, 235, 237, 276–7, 295–6, 298, 300, 301–4, 309, 314–15, 320–38, 356–7, 365, 372; family/ relational structures, 16, 18, 131–3, 154, 187, 195, 372; Great Law of Peace, 17; Two-Row Wampum, 17, 298. See also Indigenous/Indigeneity; Indigenous lands; Indigenous nations/ peoples; Indigenous sovereignty/selfgovernance/self-determination indiscriminate relief, 33, 35, 54, 109, 252 individualism/liberal individualism, 18, 20–1, 31, 38, 41–3, 46–7, 54, 61, 68, 75, 86, 117, 173, 242, 257, 303, 315, 324–5, 368; individuation, 173–4 innocence, 18, 20, 26, 28–9, 75, 99, 101, 127, 168–72, 175, 177–9, 181, 186–7, 194, 197, 201, 203, 211, 219, 277, 281,

284, 307, 323, 328, 330, 342, 347, 358, 361, 374–5 institution, 9, 33–4, 36–7, 111–12, 121, 160–1, 207, 218–24, 270, 273, 279, 301, 303, 309, 313, 332, 348, 354, 361, 364; deinstitutionalization, 162; institutional relationships, 349, 352–5; institutional/carceral archipelago, 331; institutionalization, 34, 36, 51, 86–8, 94, 112, 160, 162, 217–20, 244, 266, 318, 332, 363, 366, 369, 371; involuntary commitment, 318; Orthogenic School, 268–9; total institution, 9, 281. See also confinement; group homes; hospitals; Indian residential schools/ Indian industrial schools; prison/ imprisonment interdependence, 62, 66, 72, 220, 359–60 interlocking oppression, definition of, 7–8 Irish people, 204, 270, 324 Jerusalem, 161–2, 164, 167, 367 Jewish people, 158, 164–5, 268–70, 306, 324; anti-Semitism, 166, 269–71. See also assimilation/assimilationist; Holocaust Jimenez, Jillian, 112–13, 129, 190 Johnston, James R., 111, 123 Jones, William A., 202–3 Jorgensen, Christine, 267 Joseph, Ameil, 373 Kant, Immanuel, 196, 198–204, 207, 212, 224, 289, 305, 311, 378 Kavanagh, Synthia, 268 Keesick, Thomas Moore, 152, 154 Kelm, Mary Ellen, 307 Kesler, Linc, 315

Index 509 Kidner, Thomas, 245, 253 kindergarten, 39, 80, 85, 91 King, Martin Luther Jr, 29, 48, 69–70, 102 King, Thomas, 3, 30, 159, 164, 167–8, 173, 176, 197, 279, 295, 299, 301–2, 309, 317, 320 Kinsman, Gary, 3, 11 Kleingeld, Pauline, 202 knowing better, 20, 174, 176, 185, 277, 335, 370 Knupfer, Anne Meis, 85, 115 Koleszar-Green, Ruth, xi–xii, 292 Krüger, Johann, 190–1 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 69, 98, 321, 383 Landon, Fred, 105, 107 language: pronouns, 38, 146, 266; suppression/eradication/displacement of, 63, 205, 279, 299, 304–5, 334; use of, 78, 146, 169, 202, 206, 227, 233, 238, 293, 295 Lawrence, Bonita, 175, 289 Lee, Edward, 49, 110, 292 legislation, 41, 91, 207, 230, 237, 242, 276–7, 295, 301, 303, 316, 383 Le Jeune, Paul, 166–7 Lewis, Orrin, 316–7 liberal: liberal discourse, 5, 201, 256, 308, 325; liberalism, 20, 39, 110, 166, 185, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197, 199, 201–3, 205, 207, 209, 211, 213, 215, 217–19, 221, 223, 225, 227, 229, 231, 233, 235, 237, 362, 373; liberals, 38, 43–4, 68, 201, 284, 303, 325, 373; liberal sensibility, 203–4. See also individualism; white supremacy Liberal government, 314, 325 life-skills, 65, 121, 162

lifeworlds, 77, 166, 205, 235, 237, 276, 278, 280, 295, 298, 300–5, 307, 309–10, 314–15, 320–1 Linklater, Renee, 15 Lorde, Audre, 7, 99, 247, 274 Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 34, 50–2, 382 Lundblad, Karen, 124 lynching, 40, 60, 78, 87, 89, 94–102, 114, 195, 329–30, 365, 379, 381–2; anti-lynching, 60, 78, 94–6, 98–9, 102, 330, 365 Macaulay, Lord Thomas B., 303–4, 365–6 MacFarlane, Marian, 276, 285, 287 Mack, Daniel, 156 madness. See disability/disabled Mahmood, Saba, 30, 76–7, 107, 133, 146, 149, 159, 165–6, 173, 302, 304 Malcolm X, 28, 47, 68, 72, 87, 112, 329 male supremacy, 136 Margolin, Leslie, 31–2, 41, 46, 54, 63, 126, 146, 148, 151–3, 156–8, 169, 171, 185–6, 221, 340 marriage, 51, 130–5, 142, 153, 277, 326, 371; Boston marriages, 83, 143, 145–7, 249–50, 372 (see also Addams, Jane; monogamy; sexual and gender diversity); companionate marriage, 132, 134–6 Martin, Elmer, 28, 47, 68, 86, 101, 116–18, 124, 166, 286, 352, 374 Martin, Joanne, 28, 47, 68, 86, 101, 116–18, 124, 166, 286, 352, 374 masculine/masculinist/masculinity/ masculinize. See sexual and gender diversity masturbation, 137–8, 140, 192 matrilineal, 15, 213 Maynard, Robyn, 330, 346

510 Index McCulloch, Oscar, 35, 60 McLaren, Angus, 293 McLean, Francis, 242–3 McMurtrie, Douglas C., 246, 250, 252, 255 McRuer, Robert, 131, 136 medical professionals: dentists, 285–6; physicians, 5, 7, 27, 65, 136–7, 141, 143, 160, 213–14, 221, 227, 249–50, 259, 266, 267, 293, 348–9, 355; medical and allied health professionals, 308; nurses, 15, 27, 247, 348–9, 354; psychiatrists, 213–14, 249–50, 266; St John’s Ambulance, origin, 161–2; women healers, 5, 150. See also hospitals; Hospitallers medical social work, 264–5, 382 medicine: advances in, 214–15; class/ poverty, 27, 65, 114, 137, 160; and disability/madness, 220, 227, 353, 363; early profession, 5, 150, 160–1, 213–14; eugenics/racism, 221, 293; exclusion of women, 5, 150, 370–1; individual interventions, 348–9, 354–5; legitimization of practice by, 217; medical care, 160, 213, 253, 255; medicalization, 11, 215, 220, 227, 232, 343, 379; medical profession, 149, 224, 249, 264; professionalization of, 5, 150–1, 370; and race, 220–1; sex re/assignment, 7, 267; welfare policy, 227, 230, 250 Michalko, Rod, 251 middle ground, 30, 54, 57, 348 militarism, 60, 282, 380 military. See war Mill, James, 131, 200–1, 205–6, 214, 301 Miller, Alice, 189–95, 311 Million, Dian, 14, 130, 132, 253, 312, 342–3, 375, 379

Mills, Charles, 201–2 Milner, Lord Alfred, 203–4, 303, 305 mingling, 59–66, 72, 75, 282, 336, 368, 372 Mingus, Mia, 360 Mitchell, David, 86, 156, 221–2, 224–6, 228, 231, 259–60, 343 monogamy, 125, 130, 134–6, 145, 361, 370 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 68, 73–4, 101 Montmagny, Charles de, 166 moral certainty, 160, 201, 289 moral economy: definition of, 10; moral capital, 117, 217 moral imperative, 61, 135, 157, 222, 224, 255, 289, 322 moral panic, 63–4, 83, 137, 237 moral treatment, 212–15, 218–19, 222, 243, 275, 279, 353, 378. See also psychiatry Morgan, Thomas J., 282, 381 mortality, 50, 65, 88, 290–1, 293–4, 383 Morton, Samuel, 225, 379 Morton, Suzanne, 84 multiculturalism, 14, 175, 320, 333 Muslim people, 77, 120, 159–60, 164–5, 309, 328, 365, 367; Islam, 68, 77, 125, 302, 304; Islamophobia, 164–5; Society of Muslim Ladies, 76, 78, 365 mutual aid, 65, 69, 71, 84, 109, 120, 365, 369, 379; mutual aid societies, 83. See also cooperatives Myerson, Abraham, 253, 265–6 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 40, 48, 73–4, 81, 99, 383 National Association of Black Social Workers, 79 National Association of Colored Women (NACW), 84, 97, 119

Index 511 National Conference of Social Work, 35, 60. See also National Conference on Charities and Corrections National Conference on Charities and Corrections, 60, 381. See also National Conference of Social Work National Urban League (NUL), 86, 104 nation-state, 102, 175, 262, 267, 277, 285, 304, 322, 337 Native people. See Indigenous/ Indigeneity Nazi Germany, 200, 231, 261, 263, 265, 269, 278, 282, 291, 307, 351. See also eugenics; Holocaust Negro Civic Welfare Committee, 118 Negro Cooperative Society, 115 neighbour-to-neighbour, 40, 69, 104, 129 Nelson, Jennifer, 66, 69–70 neoliberalism, 20, 228, 231, 325, 328, 341, 362, 367–9. See also capitalism Neu, Dean, 233–4, 276, 289–91, 306, 316 new man, 198, 202–5, 302, 304 Newton, Huey, 28 Nigeria, 19, 127–30, 160, 180, 367; indigenous knowledges/practices, 127–9, 180. See also Black; Indigenous/ Indigeneity; worldview nonviolence, 166, 181, 196, 209, 215, 219, 260, 302, 309, 328 Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, 110 Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children, 111–12, 123 Obama, Barack, 108, 327 objectification, 16, 169–71, 186, 220–1, 231, 328, 369, 373 O’Connell, Anne, 303

Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), 18, 27, 58, 66–7. See also activism/activists Oparah, Julia, 358 optimism, 20, 34, 41, 197, 201–2, 219, 222, 240, 273, 308, 367 Padamsee, Yashna, 359 pain, 11, 52, 153, 195, 197, 202, 206, 214, 251, 305, 308, 351 panopticon, 207–9, 212, 378 parents: father, 33, 96, 137, 188, 214, 219, 270, 329; mother, 51, 64–6, 74, 85, 87, 90–1, 93, 108, 112, 136, 138, 156, 158, 162, 169–70, 226, 243, 247, 269–70, 289, 313, 318–19, 329, 334, 336–8, 345–7, 352, 376; mother-blaming, 337; parenting, 17, 80, 93, 126, 130, 136, 140, 190, 338, 340 (see also parents: child apprehension/protection/welfare) Parks, Rosa, 68, 73–5 Patel, Shaista, 310 paternalism, 18, 22, 55, 118, 125–6, 158, 169–70, 185, 196, 233, 236, 242, 256, 275, 289 patriarchy, 28, 46, 83–4, 97–8, 109, 119, 132, 147, 180, 190, 213, 248, 283, 309, 312, 364 Patten, Simon, 43–5, 47–8, 49 Paul, Daniel, 13, 15–17, 65, 161, 177, 215, 222, 342 peasants, 168, 305 pedagogy, 17, 298, 353 Peebles-Wilkins, Wilma, 99, 117 people of the book, 164. See also Christianity; Jewish people; Muslim people personal-is-political, 28–9 pessimism, 197, 202, 219, 308 Phyllis Wheatley Club, 115

512 Index pity, 253, 344–5 police, 36, 56, 72, 282, 300, 312–3, 329, 332, 382; police brutality/violence, 9, 286, 320, 330, 341–2, 345–6, 362, political dream, 168, 239, 275–6, 280, 302, 304, 310–11, 316, 356 political power, 7, 15, 46, 117, 335, 343, 355 political transformation, 42–3, 74, 168, 172, 340, 359 politicization, 4, 12, 18, 45, 94, 99, 129, 195, 310, 319, 341, 367; depoliticization, 26, 32–3, 44–5, 55, 147, 194, 227, 249, 314, 338–9, 341–2, 344–5, 356, 364 Poole, Jennifer, 338 poor people/communities, 9, 27–8, 31–42, 46–9, 52, 54–7, 61–7, 76, 81–7, 96, 102, 109–10, 114–18, 125–30, 137, 140–1, 147–8, 151, 156–63, 165, 169–72, 179–80, 194, 201, 227–9, 248, 279, 319–20, 324–5, 334–5, 337, 341, 345–8, 362, 367–8, 370–1, 373, 377–8, 382; deserving/undeserving, 32–3, 36, 57, 219, 230, 234, 250, 257; homeless, 10, 39, 55–6, 67, 80, 82, 93, 158, 161–2, 230, 309–10, 334, 368 Posocco, Silvia, 328 post-emancipation, 83, 88–9, 96 poverty; anti-poverty, 326, 334; begging and panhandling, 36–7, 55–6, 112, 228–9, 250, 252, 273; Change for the Better, 56, 58–9; economic dependence, 63, 71–2, 93, 335; fraud, 30, 33, 35, 492; impoverished, 34, 229, 369; indoor relief, 36, 87, 243; mendacity, 30, 33, 379; minimum wage, 63, 264, 325; outdoor relief, 31, 33–4, 36, 87, 243, 382; pauper/ pauperism, 32–3, 35–6, 52, 61, 224–5,

228–9, 232, 236, 270, 302, 378, 380; poor laws, 31, 226–30, 252, 303, 378; public charge, 236, 380 (see also social welfare policy); unemployment, 54, 251, 368; vagrancy, 34, 37, 226 Pratt, Richard Henry, 59–62, 72, 152, 155, 201, 203, 282, 373–4, 380–1 prefiguration, 146, 252, 356–7, 360, 363 prison/imprisonment, 4, 22, 33–4, 47, 86–9, 91, 96, 106, 172, 194, 197, 207, 209–12, 282, 305, 327, 331, 344, 349–55, 358–62, 367, 381, 383; abolition, 209, 357; anti-prison, 329; Bedford Hills Reformatory, 51; carceral logics, 359; convict lease, 88, 195, 379; detainees, 351, 353, 356; jail, 31, 36–7, 64, 74, 106, 160, 207, 209, 378; penitence, 207, 209–10, 222; penitentiaries, 196, 207–10, 212, 214, 218, 221, 259, 275, 279, 301, 368, 378; prisoners/convicts, 88–9, 191, 194–5, 197, 207, 209, 211, 214–16, 222, 226, 236, 268, 282, 290, 302, 311, 327, 344, 354–5, 360, 380; Thirteenth Amendment, 88, 329; Walnut Street Jail, 207, 209, 378. See also panopticon productivity, 70, 116, 118, 197, 218, 231, 240, 242, 246, 248, 250–3, 255, 257–8, 260–1, 264, 268 professionalization, 5, 19, 126, 150–1, 156, 169, 180, 215, 370 professional social work, 3–5, 12–13, 15, 17, 19–22, 26, 54, 57, 60–1, 73, 109, 120–1, 125–30, 141, 150–1, 153, 156–61, 163, 169–71, 180, 185–6, 197, 203, 221, 232, 237–8, 249, 264, 272, 275, 279, 284–6, 288, 292–3, 322, 333–4, 338, 346–7, 360, 363, 365–8, 372

Index 513 professions, 81, 84, 103, 122, 124, 136, 147–9, 179, 254, 334, 370 progress, 11, 28, 68, 83, 109, 132, 180, 190, 283, 309, 312; prejudice of progress, 22, 69, 150, 172, 179, 214, 216, 287, 324–6, 328, 333, 335, 361, 369, 373 progressive era, 41, 47, 76, 89, 103–4, 123, 142, 186, 285, 311, 366–7, 377, 379, 381, 383 Prout, Mary, 102 psychiatry, 5, 11, 15, 20, 56, 72, 88, 112, 143, 162, 178, 180, 196, 206, 212–7, 223–4, 243, 253–4, 265–7, 271, 313, 318, 333, 347, 361, 366, 378; anti-psychiatry, 334; psychiatrists, 213, 267, 338, 353; psychiatrization/ psychiatrized, 11, 111, 143, 162, 206, 249, 254, 265, 343, 367. See also moral treatment psychoanalysis, 192–3 psychology, 64, 173, 187, 193, 214, 223, 224, 267, 268, 277, 282–3, 309, 318, 338, 341, 367 Puar, Jasbir, 370 Puerto Rico, 380, 382 punishment, 16, 20, 88, 93, 95, 99, 141, 168, 174, 186–7, 189, 191, 195–6, 202, 207, 209–11, 223, 280, 289, 305, 308, 329, 346–7, 350, 359, 377 queer/queerness. See sexual and gender diversity race/racial/racialized, 8, 9, 10, 11, 19, 20, 47, 107, 119–20, 140, 146, 156, 162, 164–5, 200–1, 205, 220–1, 225, 236–7, 248, 250, 263, 303, 309, 320, 321, 324, 326, 329–32, 336–7, 340, 341, 346–8, 354, 369; colonialism,

61, 130–2, 224, 235, 276, 283, 289, 297, 300, 302–4, 369–70; different lines drawn historically, 35, 168, 268–70, 324; legal discrimination, 68, 73–5, 88, 103, 110–3, 120, 125, 172, 333, 376; institutionalization and imprisonment, 59, 86, 111–12, 209, 333, 350; lynching, 94, 98; “mingling,” 59–73, 75, 159; racialization of poverty, 54; racialized social workers, 5–7, 76–124, 263, 372; rehabilitation/eugenics, 35, 50, 87, 96, 224, 226, 263, 268–70; “uplift,” 80, 84–5, 98, 117; Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 91, 94, 100. See also Black; Chinese people; colonialism/colonization; immigration; Indigenous/ Indigeneity; racism; South Asian people; white social work racism, 5–7, 11, 28, 30, 40, 44–5, 48–50, 61, 63–4, 67–71, 73–75, 78–80, 82, 86–9, 98–107, 111–15, 119–20, 122, 129, 172, 175, 178, 190, 224–5, 250, 269, 282–3, 302–3, 306–8, 319, 329–5, 362, 365–6; anti-Black racism, 6–7, 68, 73, 80, 87–9, 129, 172, 212, 295, 319, 328–9, 335, 338, 343, 348, 362 (see also Black); anti-Black sanism, 338 (see also Black; disablism); anti-racism, 19, 45–6, 68–9, 72–3, 79, 87, 98–9, 112, 123, 190, 302, 309, 321, 333; racists, 69, 225, 303. See also child apprehension/protection/ welfare; colonialism/colonization; white supremacy radical: complicity, 38–9; politics, 26, 45, 75, 146, 169, 341; radicalization, 26–7; radical social work, 18–19, 26, 38–9, 43, 46, 50–3, 62, 79–80, 122–3, 128,

514 Index 169, 324; vs. conservative, 47–8, 50–3, 58, 75, 122–3, 372 Rafter, Nicole, 34, 50–1, 96, 156 Ransom, Rev. Reverdy C., 78, 81–2, 101, 382 rationalization of violence and oppression, 37, 69, 71, 86, 95–6, 152, 174, 186, 189–90, 192–3, 195, 203, 207, 214, 216, 220, 284, 288, 298–300, 313, 321, 336 Razack, Sherene, 8, 46, 52, 77, 83, 115, 118, 178, 201, 204, 277, 300, 313, 317, 341–3 Reaume, Geoffrey, 11 reciprocity, 48, 123 reconciliation, 277, 281 record-keeping, 221–2, 228–9, 233 redistribution, 55, 71, 228, 338, 359 reflexivity, 18, 30, 53, 101, 115 reform, 20–2, 33, 43, 51, 53–4, 79, 84–5, 88, 91–2, 104, 117, 123, 146, 151, 165–6, 170, 194, 197, 205, 209–10, 228, 244, 257, 302, 305, 324–5, 334, 368; reformers, 83, 115, 124, 142, 194, 197, 211, 216, 229, 311, 333, 366 refugee home society, 107, 110, 379 Regent Park, 18, 27, 61–6, 159 rehabilitation, 219, 239–73, 175–6, 278–9, 282, 299–300, 319–20, 373, 384; orthopaedic surgery, 241; rehabilitatable, 266; rehabilitative, 21, 33, 52, 93, 209, 218, 239, 241, 243, 245, 246, 248–50, 253–4, 257–9, 262–6, 267–73, 275, 290, 319, 347; reintegrate, 247–8, 267; vocational, 91, 245, 256, 261, 266; Vocational Rehabilitational Act (VRA), 261–2; wound/wounded, 64, 124, 162, 178, 241, 251, 329, 342, 344. See also disability/disabled; education; First World War; incorrigibility; war

relative innocence, 21, 27, 128, 169–73, 178, 180, 182, 187–8, 204, 212, 331, 343, 376 relief, 30–2, 33–6, 39–41, 51, 66, 77, 80, 85–6, 108–9, 156, 228, 230, 241–2, 248–51, 264, 271, 322–3, 368, 379–80, 382–4 religion, 77, 80–1, 89, 92, 94, 120, 156, 159, 163–7, 171, 173, 181, 197, 200, 205, 267–9, 278, 298, 304, 350 relocation, 18, 27, 58, 61–2, 65, 67–8, 70–3, 159 reserves/reservations: Jesuit “Reductions”/Sillery, 133–4, 166–8, 186–7, 217, 263, 275, 365, 370; municipalization, 314–15; staterun system, 166, 217, 221, 278, 292, 310, 314–5, 318, 365, 375. See also colonialism/colonization; Indian residential schools/Indian industrial schools; Indigenous/Indigeneity; Indigenous lands; Indigenous nations/ peoples; Indigenous sovereignty/ self-governance/self-determination; Indigenous worldviews, lifeworlds, and social workings resilience, 9, 271 resistance, 56, 68, 70, 74, 108, 111, 146, 179, 214, 232, 282, 314, 317–19, 344, 352 resource distribution, 12, 72, 227, 354, 357 respectability, 83, 108, 118–19, 145, 153, 197, 271, 273, 327–8 restorative justice, 121, 222, 297, 320, 357. See also transformative justice Richmond, Mary: dichotomization from Addams, 19, 26–7, 42–5, 48, 53–4, 76, 122, 124, 169–72, 186, 325, 341, 366; friendly visiting, 26, 32–3, 46;

Index 515 liberalism, 33, 39, 42, 374; lovebased companionship, 143–6, 158–9, 372; Social Diagnosis, 159, 171, 244, 384. See also Charity Organization Societies (COS) right wing, 5, 17, 26, 38, 40, 56, 74, 242, 308, 311, 324, 361–2, 365, 384 Riis, Jacob, 151, 154, 169 Riley-Smith, Jonathan, 163, 165–6 Roberts, Dorothy, 64–5, 112 Roker, Candice, 111 Rose, Albert, 61–2, 64–5, 69–71 Rossiter, Amy, 310 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 136, 199 Rustin, Bayard, 28 Ruzsa, Joan, 351 Rwigema, Marie-Jolie, 5 safe middle ground, 30, 54, 57 Said, Edward, 17, 205–6, 222, 280, 283 Samuels, Ellen, 220, 224, 235–6, 273 Schweik, Susan, 36 science, 50, 90, 94, 103–4, 164, 170–1, 214, 220, 224, 235, 303 Scotland, 160, 203–4, 377 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 277, 291–2, 294–6, 298, 307–8, 317–18, 384 Second World War. See war secularism, 76–7, 80–1, 90, 92, 120, 166, 168, 171, 173, 181, 186, 206, 301, 308 Sedgwick, Eve, 11 segregation, 34, 36, 38, 47, 59, 62, 68, 70–4, 77–80, 82–3, 86, 88–91, 102–3, 110–14, 122, 125, 172, 209–10, 264, 266, 269–70, 329–30, 333, 376, 380, 382; Black Codes, 89–90, 106–7, 238, 366, 380; Brown vs. Board of Education, 270; colour line, 77–8, 97, 111; desegregation, 72–3, 270, 293, 331, 334, 369, 374. See also civil rights;

race/racial/racialized; racism; white supremacy self-reflection/interrogation, 30, 53, 170, 192, 197, 199–200 Selinger, Greg, 335–6 separate spheres, 82–5, 107, 118–19, 247–8 Serano, Julia, 148 settlement houses, 18, 25–7, 38–9, 43–4, 48, 52, 62, 77, 80, 82, 85, 89–90, 112, 122, 128–9, 237, 371–2, 380–3; Black settlement houses, 90; Evangelia Settlement, 39, 382; Hull-House, 39, 41, 48–9, 51–3, 78, 90–1, 129, 142–4, 161, 171, 381; Locust Street Settlement, 89–90, 381; settlement movement, 18, 26, 39, 44–5, 49–51, 75, 110, 365, 371, 383; Toynbee Hall, 89–90, 380 sex, 62, 125, 132–5, 140–7, 180, 223–4, 226, 321, 370–1; outside of marriage, 73, 134. See also monogamy; sexual and gender diversity sexism, 7–8, 10, 98, 115, 134, 136, 152, 179, 249, 268, 337, 361–2 sexual and gender diversity – identities and experiences: cis/cisgender, 7, 10, 134, 143–5, 255, 268, 279, 321, 328, 361, 367; femininity/feminized/ traditionally feminine, 11, 17, 119, 126, 137, 148–50, 223, 266, 269; gay people, 11, 14, 134–6, 144, 320, 326–9, 361; gender affirming surgery, 137, 267–8; gender binary/identity/nonconformity/transgressions, 14, 16, 21, 124, 131, 133–4, 143–4, 163, 267–8, 321, 370–1; heterosexuality/oppositesex love and desire/straightness, 10, 63, 124–5, 130, 132–5, 142–4, 145, 147, 239, 255, 279, 311, 320–1, 367,

516 Index 369–70; homosexuality/same-sex love and desire, 131, 134–5, 143–4, 223, 366, 370, 379; hormones, 136, 268; intersex, 144, 267, 320; invert, 20, 144, 196, 223–4, 226, 366; lesbian, 134–6, 142–5, 224, 247, 320, 328, 361; masculinity/masculinize/masculinist/ traditionally masculine, 17, 92, 143, 148–50, 215, 221, 223, 241, 249–50, 266, 270; passing, 12, 136–7, 268; queer/queerness, 8, 10–11, 14, 16, 19, 21, 61, 67, 73, 126, 130, 134–5, 142–5, 148, 159, 179–80, 218, 226, 240, 255, 259, 267, 270, 319–20, 324, 326, 328, 333, 369–71; trans/transgender, 7, 10–11, 14, 38, 135–6, 143–5, 148, 223, 255, 267–8, 312, 320–1, 327, 375; transvestitism, 267; Two-Spirit, 14–15, 131, 144, 153, 312, 320, 328; 2SLGBTQIA, 144, 320, 326, 328, 369–70 sexual and gender diversity – oppressions relating to: cisheteronormativity/ cisheteropatriarchy/cisheterosexism, 4, 14, 62, 72, 101, 130–1, 134–6, 141–3, 145–8, 151, 180, 214, 240, 247–50, 266–8, 272, 324, 359, 368, 370 (see also marriage; monogamy); cisheteropatriarchalization, 19, 125–53, 180, 213–5, 240, 247–8, 255, 368, 370–1; cisism, 7–8, 11, 145, 180, 320, 362; gay liberation, 134; gender role/gender appropriate, 14, 33, 82–5, 118–19, 134; heteronormativity/ heterosexism/compulsory heterosexuality, 8, 11, 33, 72, 131, 134, 143, 145, 147, 180, 243, 269, 320, 328, 362, 369 (see also marriage; monogamy); homonormativity, 134, 144–5, 327–8, 361; homophobia, 14,

134, 179, 327–8, 361, 369; It Gets Better Project (IGBP), 326–8, 373; transphobia, 14, 312 sex work, 50, 226, 328 Shreve, Elizabeth Jackson Shadd, 110 Simpson, Audra, 173, 175, 317–8 Sinclair, Raven, 292 Sixties Scoop, 310, 333–5. See also child apprehension/protection/welfare; Indigenous/Indigeneity Slahi, Mohamedou Ould, 48, 349–55 slavery, 105, 107–9, 113, 172, 200–1, 329–30, 379–80; abolition, 86, 88–7, 172–1, 204, 210, 329–30, 379–80; antislavery societies, 109, 123; continuities today, 87–9; emancipation, 83, 88–9, 94, 96, 117, 172, 288, 378–9; enslavement, 88, 107–8, 166, 377; Fugitive Slave Act, 105, 107, 379; Maroons, 105; sexual violence, 97, 100, 107–8. See also Black; prison/ imprisonment; white supremacy Smith, Andrea, 15–16, 97–8, 173, 283, 312, 316 Smith, Mary Rozet, 142–3, 381 Snyder, Sharon, 86, 156, 221–2, 224–6, 228, 231, 259–60, 343 social control, 26, 30, 52, 75, 87, 101, 185, 265 social death, 96, 290 social gospel, 80–2, 104. See also Christianity socialism, 28, 82, 133 social movements, 50, 74, 122, 356, 362 social welfare policy: less eligibility, principle of, 229, 378; means testing, 40, 272; pensions, 218, 229–30, 236, 245, 249–52, 254, 369, 381; pensioners, 250, 252–3; poorhouse, 30–1, 33, 35–7, 86, 160, 208–9, 243,

Index 517 227, 367; social assistance, 10, 58, 63, 226, 229, 234, 250–2, 325, 334, 354; social safety net, 102, 262, 362, 368; welfare fraud, 33, 36; welfare policy, 35, 225, 228, 230, 236, 257; workers’ compensation, 102, 241–3, 250, 261, 382–4; unemployment benefits, 54, 249, 264 soldier. See war solidarity, 27, 65, 79, 115, 179. See also allies Sophie (female child in Rousseau’s Emile), 136 South Asian people, 120, 131, 200, 204–5, 237, 263, 303, 309, 361, 365, 378; hijras, 131; Hindu people, 120, 131, 205; Khalsa Diwan Society, 120, 382; Sikh people, 120, 382. See also immigration Spade, Dean, 326–7 Spivak, Gayatri, 4, 18, 29, 45, 126, 129, 131, 145, 162–3, 198, 201, 344, 369, standard account: Africville, 67–73; civil rights movement, 73; credit union, 102–3; definition/origin of term, 25; feminism, 99; Indian residential schools, 25, 175, 284; psychiatry, 213; social work, 4, 18–19, 25–124, 128, 143–6, 170, 180, 185, 323–4, 365, 366, 368, 371–2 Starr, Ellen Gates, 89 status quo, 37, 57, 121, 148, 178, 199, 299, 373 Stephen, James, 297–8, 304 Stiker, Henri-Jacques, 69, 157, 172, 218, 225, 227, 239, 242, 244, 246, 257–8, 260, 267, 271, 273–5, 299–300 St John’s Ambulance, 161 stolen generation, 284, 308 Stone, Deborah, 217, 225–31

Stone, Sandy, 145 Stryker, Susan, 135 suffrage, 91, 102, 119, 151 suicide, 312, 315, 344–5, 353 Sulzer, Johann, 187–9 surveillance, 6, 32, 51, 71, 84, 148, 150, 163, 185, 197, 209, 213, 219–20, 228–9, 233, 243, 275; of Black people, 101, 113, 329, 332, 346–7, 352; of poor people, 32, 137, 141 Terrell, Mary Church, 78, 84, 99, 117–19 terrorism, 344, 370; war on terrorism, 328, 362. See also Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp Therrien, Richard, 233–4, 276, 289–91, 306, 316 Thobani, Sunera, 9–10, 70, 107, 156–7, 159, 171, 178, 237, 262, 268, 284, 297, 300, 310, 334 Tinker, George, 186, 283, 287, 289–90, 295, 301, 304 Todd, John, 246, 253–4 tolerance, 14–15, 95, 159, 320, 328, 375 Torlino, Tom, 152, 155 torture, 87, 95–6, 107, 159, 194–6, 207, 210, 283, 287, 302, 349–51, 354, 377–8; abolition of, 193–5, 206; Theresian Criminal Constitution, 186, 193–6, 208–9, 377 trans/transgender. See sexual and gender diversity transformative justice, 15, 357–9, 363. See also restorative justice trauma, 137, 177, 189, 233–4, 249–50, 253–4, 259, 265, 283, 314–15, 339, 342, 344, 379 True Bands, 110, 379 Trump, Donald, 327, 362 Tubman, Harriet, 84

518 Index Turner, Dale, 3, 13, 17, 175, 213, 246, 297–8, 385, 387 Two-Spirit. See Indigenous/Indigeneity; sexual and gender diversity 2SLGBTQIA. See sexual and gender diversity ugly laws, 36–8, 379–80 Undesirables Act, 236, 380 uneducable, 86, 136, 187, 196, 200 United Way, 18, 55–7, 341, 393 upward mobility, 117, 303, 327–8, 361, 368 urbanization, 39, 82–3, 130, 135 victim, 53, 92, 118, 179, 271, 283, 328, 342–3. See also abuse/assault Vincent, Jacqueline, 149 Voronka, Jijian, 11, 271 vote, 117, 119, 235, 361, 384 wage labour, 226–7, 230, 251, 264 Walia, Harsha, 10, 356 Walker, Maggie L., 65, 74, 78, 112–13, 119, 122–4, 257, 382 war: anti-war, 39, 333; American Civil War, 95, 97, 108, 244, 379; Crusades, 19, 126–7, 159, 164–5, 170, 172, 197, 367; Indian Wars, 87, 195, 212, 283, 302, 305, 317; military, 9, 15, 44, 133, 164–6, 196, 211–12, 218, 245, 253, 265–6, 278, 280, 282–3, 295, 327–8, 349, 378; as religious conversion/devotion, 159, 165–6 (see also Christianity); shell shock, 253; soldiers, 21, 211, 218, 241, 243–7, 249–57, 261, 265–6, 319, 350, 377; warfare, 156, 163–4, 180, 195; War of 1812, 105, 109; World War, First, 67, 157, 241, 243–7, 249–50,

252–3, 255, 260–1, 266–7, 383; World War, Second, 243, 245–6, 248, 262, 266, 281. See also terrorism: war on terrorism Ware, Syrus Marcus, 144, 351 Washington, Booker T., 47–8, 50, 116–17, 122 Washington, Jesse, 96. See also lynching wealth, 36, 65, 325, 368, 373 Weinberg, Merlinda, 345–6 welfare state, 102, 156–7, 225, 229, 252, 262, 268, 324–5. See also social welfare policy Wells(-Barnett), Ida B., 48, 60, 74, 78, 80, 84, 88, 95–101, 119, 122–4, 379–82. See also lynching West, the, 77, 105, 127, 129, 166 Westphal, Carl, 223, 379 white social work, 6, 19, 72, 74–6, 78–9, 85, 87, 99, 104, 110, 112, 114, 116, 121–4, 128, 156, 324, 329, 355, 372–3 white supremacy, 5–6, 10, 18, 21, 25, 28, 45, 68–9, 72, 74, 78, 83, 86–91, 95, 97–101, 106, 114–15, 119, 124, 128, 131, 147, 149, 168, 172, 175, 178, 186, 190, 234, 236–8, 248, 262, 278, 302, 305–7, 309–10, 313, 317, 320, 324, 328, 330, 335–6, 340–1, 348, 350, 354, 359, 362, 366, 369, 373; conservative/biological determinism vs. liberal/cultural determinism, 36, 50, 200–3, 218, 224, 279, 282, 302–4, 373; definition of, 5. See also racism Wilberforce, 106 Willard, Frances E., 91–3, 100–1, 374, 381. See also Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

Index 519 Withers, A.J., 7, 10–11, 45, 58, 70, 267, 272, 358–60 Wolfe, Patrick, 281 Wolff, Annie, 151, 154, 169 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 90–4, 100–1, 132, 380–2 women’s clubs, 80, 82, 84–5, 97, 112 Woodson, Carter G., 81–2, 106

work ethic, 34, 117, 226, 257 workforce, 19, 141, 146, 148–9, 218, 243, 246, 248, 257, 337, 370 workhouse. See social welfare policy worldview, 13, 15–16, 29, 38, 174, 298, 314–15 Yee, Shirley, 84, 119