Social Justice
Our Social Justice Priorities
Five social justice priorities serve as guiding principles for NASW's national office and Chapters:
Learn more about NASW's social justice priorities >>
Social Justice Briefs
The Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project, also known as Project 2025, seeks to fundamentally reshape federal government policies across various sectors, including social safety nets, civil rights, and environmental protection. This initiative poses a substantial threat to social justice, as it also includes measures that would roll back regulatory protections, reduce social welfare programs, and dismantle the federal civil service system. This policy brief examines the potential impacts of Project 2025 and both the far-reaching consequences for vulnerable populations and the broader implications for social equity and justice.
Social workers have long held the value and the importance of collaboration, community-building, unity, and social justice, and the notion that an attack on one community is an attack on all communities. No one – no individual, no family, no community and no society - is safe when discrimination, prejudice, injustice, and hatred towards any group or groups is allowed to flourish. And yet that is the very circumstance in which we find ourselves today.
As with racial gerrymandering, voter intimidation as a tool for disenfranchisement is not new. Like gerrymandering, voter intimidation can be traced directly back to the end of Reconstruction, which ushered in the Jim Crow era. The Compromise of 1877 was an off-the-record deal between southern Democrats and representatives for the Republican presidential candidate (Rutherford Hayes) to settle the disputed 1876 presidential election. The southerners threw their support behind Hayes and, in return, Hayes withdrew federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana—effectively ending Reconstruction in those states and the rest of the South. The end of Reconstruction immediately resulted in southern legislatures passing a series of laws requiring the separation of whites from “persons of color,” soon known as the “Jim Crow laws.”
The political turmoil that has engulfed the country in recent days is unsettling, frightening, and to many, unlike anything experienced in modern times. The closest parallel is perhaps the political atmosphere that existed in the decade leading up to the Civil War. Like the national divide in pre–Civil War America, the tensions today are not simply philosophical differences. We are seeing a deeply felt battle over America’s, existence and the outcome could lead to the end of democracy as we know it.
Policing in America has a long history of preserving the violent legacy of slavery and upholding white supremacy. The tragic and unjust murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Aubrey, Tony McDade, Eric Garner, and so many other Black and Brown Americans by police officers has led our nation to reexamine the systems that we look to for safety and justice.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is exponentially increased among those on the margins of our society. Therefore, it is critical that these families and individuals included in federal and state governments’ efforts to fight the spread of COVID-19, and that they are protected from related social and civic disruptions that will occur as the virus spreads.