First They Came for Critical Race Theory …

Abstract

The year 2022 came to a close with the sudden and swift removal of Professor Alan Dettlaff, a respected child welfare scholar and leader in the growing abolitionist movement, from his position as Dean of the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work (Flaherty, 2023). While this was one of the more prominent dismissals in academic social work, it put in stark human terms the impact of a renewed and effective onslaught of political repression in education. An academic social work community quickly gathered over the holidays to support Dr. Dettlaff and forge a public response and call to action. Dr. Terri Friedline and Dean Beth Angell of the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work (2023) hosted a national forum in early January 2023 called Social Work and Abolition in the New Year to add transparency to the University of Houston’s dismissal of Dr. Dettlaff from his leadership position. The panelists, including two members of Affilia’s editorial leadership team, stood in support of Dr. Dettlaff, denouncing alarming efforts to silence and root out critical frameworks and those who speak out against racism and other systems of oppression. Dr. Dettlaff’s censure demonstrates that while lukewarm anti-racism might be tolerated or applauded, bold challenges to the institutions that uphold racism including policing, prisons, and the child welfare system—increasingly identified as the pillars of carceral social work—are not. Alan Dettlaff’s removal, of course, is just one result of the ongoing evisceration of racial and gender justice advances that have been made since the civil right era. In the summer of 2020, the global protests against police murders of Black and Brown people raised widespread public demands to “defund the police” that, for some, extended to calls to abolish policing, prisons, and the punishing systems represented, in part, by social work. The backlash has been swift. Today, the daily postings of new state legislation and school board policies quashing even the mention of race or gender beyond the binary—followed by silencing, admonishments, dismissals, and even threats to life—have become shockingly commonplace. We are aware that many of us as writers and readers of Affilia have been directly impacted by these frightening trends. We write this editorial as a tribute to Alan Dettlaff and the many of us who continue to champion critical thinking, scholarship, teaching, policies, and practice—even in the face of such threats—and to those of us who may do so with increasing wariness and even retreat. This piece further serves as an acknowledgment of the soberness of these times and as a call for solidarity. As we use these pages to document the terror of this moment of backlash and attack, we echo the recent Social Welfare History Group bibliography, “Red Scares, Political Repression, and Social Work: Why Now?” (Abramovitz et al., 2023) by asking if these current trends constitute a modern-day red scare. This timely bibliography traces the evolution of red scares in the United States from the first red scare during the period following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Great Depression (notably the period that saw the birth of the U.S. social welfare system, such as it is), to the second red scare during the period of McCarthyism (notably the period of civil rights organizing and early stirrings of second-wave feminism). The bibliography goes on to document how “panics over progressive political ideas and critiques of the status quo continue to generate backlash and repression in the United States,” to ask if the “past is prologue,” and to encourage us to see today’s events as a continuation of the same forces that fueled the red scares of the past (p. 2). We turn to the outspoken and Editorial