“The City University of New York’s York College’s Master of Social Work program has eliminated the term ‘field’ from its curriculum, citing its potential to cause trauma for black Americans due to the word’s association with slavery,” reports The College Fix:
The decision, detailed in the college’s course catalogue, reflects a broader trend among social work programs to adopt inclusive language.
The York College program chose “to create an anti-racism learning environment by adopting alternative terminology in the place of the word ‘field,’” its catalogue states.
“The decision was made by the MSW Team due to the term’s association with a painful historical era that inflicted significant harm on Black Americans/African Americans during their enslavement in America,” it adds.
“The use of the term ‘field’ has the potential to trigger further multigenerational trauma and colorism.”…
The change is not unique to York College. In 2023, the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work similarly replaced “field” with “practicum,” arguing that the term could be constructed as “anti-black” due to its association with slavery. Smith College’s School of Social Work in 2023 also ended the use of “field” and adopted “practicum” to promote inclusivity.
York College’s program, accredited by the Council on Social Work Education, trains students for social work in an urban healthcare setting, emphasizing diversity and social justice.
Its mission statement states it is “committed to challenging oppression, embracing diversity, respecting the dignity and worth of all human beings, and promoting social and economic justice.”
York College’s decision is part of a larger pattern of progressives seeking to purge terms and symbols that are not racial or racist, merely because they were used a minority of the time in contexts deemed racially retrograde.
Conservative and libertarian think tanks have been known to distribute lapel pins that display the Gadsden flag, reading “Don’t Tread on Me.” The flag has also been used by the U.S. military, in patriotic displays, by Second Amendment supporters, and others. But such free expression is now under siege from Obama’s appointees at the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In its ruling, the EEOC chose to ignore both the First Amendment, and the Supreme Court’s repeated admonition that harassment must be “severe or pervasive” to constitute discrimination forbidden by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The First Amendment forbids baseless, speech-chilling civil-rights investigations, as a federal appeals court made clear in White v. Lee (2000).
York College’s social work department is very into “antiracism.” “Antiracism” often teaches kids to hate the free-market economy and to support discriminatory practices.
“To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” claimed Ibram Kendi’s best-selling book, How to Be An Antiracist. That book was praised as a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” by the leading progressive media organ Slate. The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book was that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book.
