Recognizing and Eliminating Social Injustices

Recognizing and Eliminating Social Injustices
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Recognizing and Eliminating Social Injustices
Social workers hold significant roles and responsibilities in society, among them serving all people equally. They are passionate about ensuring that vulnerable communities or underrepresented groups of individuals, such as handicapped, older adults, and children, are treated fairly. In that light, social work is inseparable from social justice. Social justice refers to the perception that all people have equal opportunities and rights. On the contrary, social injustice entails infringing individuals’ rights, unfair treatment, and marginalizing their opportunities. Social workers are responsible for ensuring that all people, regardless of their differences in religion, sex, skin color, race, culture, or ethnic background, are treated equally and fairly. The paper shows some of my experiences in recognizing social injustices, how my graduate degree in social work will help me eliminate these barriers, and how I will improve my grade point average (GPA) and stay focused on entering my master’s program as a licensed social worker.
My experiences in recognizing social injustices in society portray that it is challenging for people to be socially just. Social workers serve all individuals and communities, particularly vulnerable groups of people, and have increasing responsibilities to confront oppression and social injustices (Goode, Cowell, McMillan, Deinse, & Cooper-Lewter, 2021). It seems simple when one says that all individuals should be treated equally and fairly, but ensuring that this happens is difficult. In the United States of America (USA), racial discrimination is a significant problem that has plagued the country for a long period. Minority communities, such as African Americans, are stereotyped and isolated. Such social injustices are challenging to overcome since they involve changing individuals’ beliefs or perceptions about others. For example, it is almost impossible to convince a group of white police officers that a suspected black person is not aggressive. That is why many white cops use excessive force when arresting African American male suspects since they believe that these individuals are harsh and violent. Other experiences of social injustices that one has come across are the inaccessibility to healthcare services, income inequality, child neglect and abuse, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and queer (LGBTQ) oppression, and discrimination against older adults.
A graduate degree in social work is vital in enhancing an individual to eliminate barriers to social justice. Dawn Apgar asserts that obtaining relevant knowledge and skills fosters engagement in social work activities, which remedy social injustices in society (Apgar, 2021). First, a person learns various forms of social injustices, some of which are not easily recognizable. For example, take a scenario where an older adult who is slightly below the retirement age is stopped from working. A company might say that such older people lack th...