Taxation without Representation: How Being the Only Black Male Social Worker at a Predominately White Agency Constitutes a Hostile Work Environment

I am the only black male social worker at my job. I do not see myself represented within the space I work. This has led me to feeling extremely isolated and alone. I have addressed these feelings by joining online Facebook groups dedicated to black male social workers, researching seminars and workshops that cater to black men in social work and also have sought out meetup groups with other like-minded black male social workers. Sad to say these efforts have not yielded gratifying fruit as many times the interactions are sparse to non-existent. The seminars offered are few and far between and the meetups are tragically outdated due to the rising cases of COVID-19 and also the wilting motivation to maintain such spaces as a result of fatigue and social exhaustion. Such realities leave me feeling shipwrecked and lost at sea. I am still hungry for spaces where people look and sound like me but unfortunately, I have not been able to locate such spaces.

Needless to say I work in a predominately white and female space. This has been the case all throughout my professional career as the field of social work itself is predominately white and female. According to recent demographic research conducted by Zippa Career Experts, 80.5% of all social workers are women and 19.5 percent are men. 66.9 percent of those social workers are white and 15.0 percent are black. It is a safe assumption that of that 15.0% of black social workers, there is a small percentage of black male social workers that occupy that statistic. Such a significant gap in representation can be problematic and can also perpetuate many of the inequities that social work aims to obliterate.

Being a black male social worker working with white women can best be described as an exercise in tongue biting as to really express the truth of how you feel can make it so that you don’t have a job. There have been many times where I wanted to curse my white coworkers out and knock them upside their head because of their tone-deaf ignorance and blatant disrespect for Black culture. Thankfully, I have not done this but instead used my words to effectively articulate how such modes of thinking about Black culture can perpetuate bias and bigotry.

Agency policy manuals and training videos always refer to hostile work environments and in such materials they never discuss the fact that being the only black person at work is a hostile work environment that breeds covert hostility and passive aggressive behaviors. Long gone are the days where white people will burn crosses on your lawn and hang nooses on the outside of your cubicle. Now the racism is covert and psychological. Now microaggressions are the new racism and often times very difficult to prove in the court of law. Racial gaslighting has become the new tactic where your very real experience of dealing with covert bigotry from white coworkers will be denied and you will be shamed for even the thought of such an accusation as their lack of awareness and shoddy claims of “white innocence” is deemed as a valid excuse to continue such covert abuse and white-washed ignorance.

I have learned that as the only Black social worker at my job, the covert bias of my white coworkers is very real as many will express through their posture, gestures, body language, mannerisms and choice of words how they really feel about you. Many are threatened by you if not afraid of you. They will limit interactions with you to just work-related exchanges. More “courageous” white coworkers will take only a superficial interest in you, just enough to feel proud of themselves for not being “like them” you know, those “bad white people”. Little do they know they are those “bad white people” whose unchecked biases continue to increase the level of covert hostility within the workplace. This is especially seen when you become proficient in your role. As professor and scholar Dr. Kecia M. Thomas so deftly put it in her article “Moving from pet to threat: Narratives of professional Black women”, initially white supervisors are eager to provide support to those they deem as novices. However when you become more confident in your role, you are perceived as a threat and therefore denied the support, mentorship, leadership and even information necessary to facilitate your role and can often be the unfortunate beneficiary of hostility and passive aggressive behaviors.

I have coined a term that best characterizes my current place of business. I refer to my place of employment as an egg-shell work environment. As the term suggests, my current work space is a space where we all walk on egg shells around one another, afraid to say what we really feel for fear of coming off as harsh, offensive or inconsiderate. We all pretend as though this is a healthy work space where we all like one another and get along but the truth is, we don’t like one another at all! We can’t even be real with each other. In all my time working at this agency, not one person has reflected to me how difficult it must be to be the only black social worker working within a predominately white space. They do not understand how my food, my music, my culture, how I spend my days off all have been ignored and seen as subpar in comparison with their whiteness. In 2020 when George Floyd was murdered by police, they did not understand the effect this had on me as a black man. I came to work visibly angry and sad and they just went on business as usual. Their smiles bore into my flesh as I choked on unprocessed vomit and bile. I hid at my desk because truth be told it was hard to be around white people at this time however, working on a multidisciplinary team, you can’t hide for long as being able to work in this capacity is a function of your role. As I sat at the table, I counted all the white faces and searched for one that looked like my own. I wanted to know someone got it. Someone understood my woes. But sadly there was no one who did at all. My coworkers did not get how such a horrific event could have affected me so much and truth be told how could they. Whiteness has always provided them an invisible shield of safety from such racial vicissitudes. I know that if I worked at a predominately black agency, we would have taken some time to process how this senseless killing impacted us all and what George Floyds death meant to us as black social workers working with other black clients. But I did not get that opportunity to process my feelings with them and truth be told, I don’t know how safe I would have felt doing so.

Being the only black male social worker working within a predominately white space can be taxing on your mental health. Truth is we all need to work but how much is your mental health worth these days? I ask myself this every day. For me it has not reached a place where it is costing me a significant amount of my peace but that is because I have found other outlets for my rage. The page has become my rage room where I riot with words, the pen being mightier than the sword. Also as a community worker, I have found creative ways to get my work done in other spaces which allows me time away from the office. This has been my saving grace. I feel on some level I should not have to seek out creative escapes just to avoid the place I work. I would love to find a job where I actually like my employees and the work environment is diverse and a reflection of the many clients we serve but in the meantime I will continue to seek representation in other places and on those particular days when it gets to be too taxing, I will journal my pain, update my resume and begin to explore other options as being the only black at work means always having a plan B.