Diversity and social work practice : eco-social justice; cultural racism; cross-cultural communication

Social workers today operate in an increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse society, yet many of the theories and models available to them fail to reflect or respond appropriately to that diversity. Social workers need to understand and counteract the impact of discrimination and demonstrate an awareness of ways to combat both individual and institutional racism through anti-racist practice. As mainstream social work policies and practices are fundamentally Eurocentric, social work needs to get rid of its Eurocentrism in order to become anti-racist. The paper focuses on cross-cultural communication. It has a very important role to play in addressing eco-social justice issues in a globalised world. An understanding of minority communication styles and patterns is indispensable for social workers working with culturally diverse groups. One of the major problems confronting the analysis of communicative behaviours among people is the Eurocentric manner in which all behaviour is assessed. We need to recognize that the Eurocentric view is only one way of looking at the world. In their attempt to explain what they considered to be universal human phenomena, European social scientists implicitly and explicitly began to establish a normative standard of behaviour against which all other cultural groups would be measured. What emerged as normal or abnormal was always in comparison with how closely a particular thought or behaviour paralleled that of white people. Hence, normality is established on a model of the middle class Caucasian male of European descent. The major problem with such normative assumptions for non-European people is the inevitable categorization of anyone unlike the model as deviant .The paper explores the impact of cultural racism and the deficit/deficiency model on cross-cultural communication. A cultural framework will enable us to understand cross-cultural communication. The paper examines the culture bound values that are especially relevant for cross-cultural communication.