Representation of ethnic identity in North American social work literature: a dossier of the Chinese people

Abstract

Ethnic and cultural identities of people who are not white in North America are conceived as natural and fixed categories. Such conceptualizations are associated with a tendency to take ethnicity as a client characteristic instead of understanding ethnic and cultural differences as constituted by the engagement between social worker and client. Using Foucault's dossier approach, the author uses the Chinese people as a case example to illustrate the politics of identification and identity assignment in professional social work literature in North America. The literature was selected from the Social Work Abstracts database from 1977 to 1997. The article reveals how Chinese people are "essentialized," "otherized," and negatively positioned as an ethnic construct. Four major arguments are presented together with their implications for cross-cultural social work practice.