BU Today: BUSSW Offers Online Course for Understanding Structural Racism
In an effort to bridge a structural racism gap in social work and public health education, BUSSW’s Equity & Inclusion Committee developed a free online course, “Understanding Structural & Institutional Racism.” BU Today recently interviewed Prof. Dawn Belkin Martinez, dean of equity and inclusion, and PhD candidates Noor Toraif (SSW’23), and Greer Hamilton (SSW’24) on how they created the course and their goals to foster a more antiracist society.
Excerpt from “School of Social Work Offers Free Online Course for Understanding Structural Racism,” by Joel Brown, originally published in BU Today:
Social workers often find themselves on the front lines of the ongoing battle against racism in this country. The lives of their clients are frequently shaped by institutional and structural oppression that can affect their finances, their health, and their futures, and many social workers are trying to better understand how and why that happens and what they can do about it.
A new free online course from the BU School of Social Work aims to fill the gap, digitally.
‘We live in a world where there is systemic oppression, and unless you were raised in a bubble, you’re affected by it,’’ says Dawn Belkin Martinez, a School of Social Work clinical associate professor and associate dean for equity and inclusion.
‘Understanding how that system works is very liberating for people, because you’re able to think about how to change that,’ she says. ‘The whole third part of the module is about activism.’
Belkin Martinez is the driving force behind Understanding Structural & Institutional Racism, a new free online self-paced noncredit course intended to give social workers and other health and human service providers a grounding in the basics of those fundamental factors in the lives of many clients.”