I do not believe that my path to Social Work is inherently unique. I fell into my path because of my own lived experience. Baltimore City has always been my beloved and complicated home. I grew up in a deeply segregated food dessert that would later come to be known as being downwind from that shooting at the jazz club. I watched the continued rise of Mass Incarceration in the relentless surveillance, policing, and jailing of young black men at the corner of Greenmount and 33rd. As a queer youth orbiting the narrative of my own city, I learned early and often what injustice looks like.
Today I am lightyears from yesterday and as an instructor I love that I teach in a moment when rising Social Workers are calling whole systems into question and to task with deeply entrenched courage and conviction. I love that there is a fire instilled within our students as they insist upon a real level of accountability and examination of how power is created, hoarded, and shared. We are at an inflection point in which Social Work is being redefined to be the work done on behalf of the people rather than work being done to uphold systems that never served us.
Social Work like Baltimore City is equally complicated. Even with the knowledge of its endemic problematic history, it is a field that I believe has promise. The spirit of this work ignites you; it makes you believe in the power of the one over the power of the many and it catapults you into a persistent space of self-examination within the context of the larger world. Then again, the valuation of my own calling to Social Work and this narrative of reflection has been over 14 years in the making.
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