I just got out of my social work values and ethics class about three hours ago, and I’m still hyped up about what we were discussing. My professor begun last Tuesday to introduce us to the reality that everyone is true in their own context. She prompted this notion with an in-class group exercise. She said, “Hurricane Katrina has reeked havoc in Mississippi and Louisiana. At this point, everyone needs money right now, but who should receive the monetary aid first?”
Immediately, our group began discussing who should get what. There was this white woman named Ruthie, who felt that people with businesses should get help first, because they are the one’s who provide jobs”, but a black woman next to her named Joyce completely disagreed, and believed that the people who should get the money should be the poorest of the poor. Now, another woman in the class, who looked somewhat Hispanic to me (but I do not know for sure what her ethnicity was) said that it should be the people in life or death situations in hospitals, that should get the money first.
My professor, after trying to get the classes attention, noticed that our group was the loudest, most conflicted group, and used us as an example of how all three people are factual in their own theories of who should receive monetary aid, but that facts and reality are two different things. She was about to continue, but she knew that another student in our class had been waiting to be called upon. She gave her permission to speak, and then she explained her take on the whole situation. She said that during tropical storm Allison, a storm that had hit Houston a couple years back, she was a relief worker (I do not recall the non-profit she was working for), and that the people who needed the money the most were actually the black folks and other minorities who were in poverty, but that ironically, it was the richer middle class to upper middle class whites who received the most aid, and that by the time that these people soaked up the money in aid relief, there was not enough left to help the one’s who needed it the most: the poor blacks in Houston.
After class, Joyce mentioned to me that she worked with the woman who was discussing about the lack of aid relief during tropical storm Allison for the poor, and that is why she said that it is the poor who need the help the most, because she saw it first hand.
This entire conversation, according to our teacher, was about social justice, and who should get social justice the most. That as social workers, we need to remember our code of ethics, which is that we must empower those who are powerless in a nation, where historically, has imbedded discrimination from the beginning with our constitution… such as how we at one time believed that black men were 3/5ths of a human being. I could go on and on, but I must say my adieu, because I need to hit the sack. I need to wake up tomorrow to give my friend John a ride in the morning. Until then.
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