Proceedings Of The National Conference Of Social Work Selected Papers Annual Conference

"Social work equivocated. While it did not fully endorse mass removal and incarceration, neither did it protest, oppose, or explicitly critique government actions. The past should not be judged by today's standards; the actions and motivations described here occurred in a period rife with fear and propaganda. Undergoing a major shift from its private charity roots into its public sector future, social work bounded with the rest of society into "a patriotic fervor" (Specht & Courtney, 1994, p.ix). The history presented here is all the more disturbing, however, because it is that of social workers doing what seemed to them to be more or less right and good. While policies of a government at war, intractable bureaucratic structures, tangled political alliances, and complex professional obligations, all may have mandated compliance, it is, nevertheless, difficult to deny that social work and social workers were also willing participants in the events, informed about and aware of the implications of that compliance. In social work's unwillingness to take a resolute stand against the removal and incarceration, the well-intentioned profession, doing its conscious best to do good, enforced the existing social order and did its level best to keep the Nikkei from disrupting it. What might social work in the camps have looked like, had it, instead of urging caution to deflect attention to its work, instead of denying that its work was coddling the Nikkei, have attempted, at the very least, to challenge the very logic that made--and continues to make-- assisting the needy and caring for the vulnerable, actions to be mistrusted, defended, and justified? What lessons can today's social work glean from this history?"--