In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section African-Centered Social Work

  • Introduction
  • Bibliographies
  • Journals
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Social Work African-Centered Social Work
by
Denise McLane-Davison
  • LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195389678-0345

Introduction

This curated bibliography provides a glimpse of the breadth and depth of scholars invested in African-centeredness. In the spirit of “nommo” (Swahili for naming the essence of a thing), references to Africentric, Africology, Afrocentric, womanism, and Africana womanism tie the diasporic experience of persons of African ancestry to the continent of Africa. To be an African-centered scholar is to have a fundamental understanding of a communal undertaking which emphasizes multiple “ways of knowing” and therefore to resist the dichotomous positivist colonial production of knowledge. African-centered social work is profoundly communal and inclusive of Africanist sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, historians, cultural artists, and the “mother wit” of community stakeholders. African-centered social workers seek wholeness, healing, and restorative justice as liberatory praxis to dignify Black humanity. The cultural integrity of this document is predicated on acknowledging the multidimensional and transdisciplinary collective wisdom of African-centered social work as a product of the US social justice and human rights movements of the 1960s. Although there was commitment to reinforce equity and liberation through federal legislation, the perspective of the community groundswells, especially after the 1968 Kerner Commission Report, was that race unfairly impacted every aspect of life including education, housing, access to social services and public health, employment opportunities, and community police surveillance. Community stakeholders eager to exercise their political voice and power through the newly gained Voting Rights Act of 1965 moved quickly to operationalize the rally-call for Black Power. Ensuring justice and equity included a multi-pronged connection to institutionalizing radical Black thought and the Black Nationalist Movement to inoculate Black people from White supremacy. Black, cultural arts, and women’s studies university programs, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and Black professional organizations like the National Association of Black Social Workers, Inc. emerged as cultural vanguards insisting on the historical accuracy of African heritage, language, land, traditions, values, customs, cosmology, phenotype, and lived experiences as the quintessential human experience.

General Overview

African-centered social work posits that the field of social work has failed to consider the impact of historical dynamics of oppression of people of African ancestry and thus adopted a pathology narrative to explain human behavior and environment. Africentrists insist on a corrective narrative that centers African cultural heritage as a divine strength, strategy, and spiritual path for navigating life. African-centered thought therefore serves as the authentic axiom of ontology, axiology, and epistemology for understanding Black lived experiences.

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