E5: Decolonizing Social Work with Cárol Mejía

Decolonize Yourself

In this episode, Cárol Mejía, MSW, helps us to reorient our minds and spirits by evoking the powerful metaphor of water and by reviving our sense of wonder. The work of decolonizing social work not only includes "dream[ing] up new processes alongside communities that we belong to, dream[ing] up new solutions that eliminate social work's ties to the carceral system" but also restoring our powers of self-actualization. Through her evocation of the ocean, Cárol opens up new possibilities, new orientations, as she employs water to disrupt white supremacist capitalist patriarchal understandings of time, power, relationships, and healing. In so doing, she asks us to relinquish the impulse to box people in and impose our interpretations, meanings, and expectations onto others. Be moved by the wise, water-like quality of Cárol's spirit, as you soak in her wisdom and brilliance.
Resources:

• Homecoming: Overcome Fear and Trauma to Reclaim Your Whole, Authentic Self
  by Thema Bryant
• Dr. Britney Cooper: The Racial Politics of Time
• Runaway Slave Syndrome Defined
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by
  Michelle Alexander
• Power, Resistance, and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma: To Have Our Hearts Broken by Taiwo Afuape
• Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique by Roderick A. Ferguson
• A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter by Nikki Giovanni
• A Burst of Light and Other Essays by Audre Lorde (self-care quote)
• "They're looking at me. But I'm looking at them" - quote by Agnès Varda