Visualizing structural competency: moving beyond cultural competence/ humility toward eliminating racism

Abstract

In this article, the authors argue that in the United States, structural racism set the stage that increased persons of color’s vulnerabilities and risks to COVID-19 compared to Whites, while simultaneously killing Blacks through racialized policing. They draw on structural violence as a theoretical framework to ground their argument and add to the discussion on the need for social work to explicitly build structural competency to effectively respond to structural racism. Most importantly, the authors contend that, structural racism entails a network of interdependent institutions and organizations that interact with individuals in a complex way to affect health and well-being. Therefore, eliminating racism needs to move beyond a single institution and organization to interdependent relationships among institutions and the mechanized paths through which their effects are translated at the community and individual levels. In this regard, instead of simplifying the complexities surrounding structural racism, we should embrace them and build knowledge system and tools that are complexity sensitive toward eliminating racism. The authors extend the emerging discussion on a renewed focus for structural competency in social work education and respond to the Grand Challenge to Eliminate Racism by presenting a “structuragram” as a heuristic to assess, analyze, and intervene at the structural level factors that influence the individual and community’s realities. We conclude with a case example and recommendations for structural competency-based practice.