I Am
Your Bastard

My teacher John McKnight spent his life arguing that professionalized care is a counterfeit, a manufactured substitute for the real thing that communities make for one another. I loved him, I learned at his table, and on this one word I am going to go further than he did, because I think further is actually closer. A counterfeit is fake. A counterfeit never came from the thing it imitates. But social work is not fake. Social work is genuinely descended from care. It came from the settlement house, from the neighbor who moved in down the block, from mutual aid societies that collected dues to pay the rent and bury the dead, from church basements, from the women who kept the sick lists and the collection envelopes moving before anyone kept case files. Social work is care’s actual child.

It is a child that will not name its parent. And there is a word for that. A bastard is not an imitation of a family member. A bastard is a real family member whose descent the family refuses to acknowledge. The love was real, the birth was real, the resemblance is unmistakable, and the record has been kept blank on purpose. That is the condition of my profession, and I say my profession because it is mine. I hold the MSW. I teach its students. I have spent twenty-five years in its field. This is not a stone through the window. This is a letter from inside the house, and I am signing it with the name the house gave me.

I am your bastard. Here is the paternity test.

The Specimen

On August 12, 2026, the journal Social Work, the flagship publication of the National Association of Social Workers, published an editorial by seventeen authors titled “Reclaiming Social Work’s Value and Voice” (Zerden et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/swag046). It reports on a summit called Beyond Defense: Transforming Social Work During Dangerous Times, convened by Boston University’s Center for Innovation in Social Work and Health on June 17 and 18, 2026. Twenty-two thought leaders and innovators gathered for two days to map social work as a system and to answer the profession’s existential questions, including the one the editorial itself italicizes: what do we do and for whom.

I want to be careful and I want to be fair, so let me say what this document is. It is not a study. It is an editorial, which means it is the profession describing itself, in its own journal, in its own words, with no reviewer forcing its hand. Nobody made these authors describe who was in the room. They chose to. That choice is the data.

So I audited the text. Anyone can replicate this. The article is open access, the method is counting, and the counting takes an afternoon.

The editorial contains four rosters of belonging, four places where it names, by category, who participates in defining social work.

Twenty three named categories of belonging. Zero name the people social work serves.

The lexical audit is just as clean. The word consumer appears zero times. The word client appears zero times. The phrase service user appears zero times. No participant is identified as a patient, a family receiving services, a resident, or a person who has experienced social work from the receiving side of the professional relationship. The editorial does say the participants held a “broad range of lived experience,” and I want to flag how much work that phrase is being asked to do, because everybody who has ever been alive holds lived experience. It is not the same thing as standing. Standing would sound like this: I am in this room specifically because I have been social worked, and that knowledge has authority here. I cannot find one person identified that way, and I am not claiming none existed. I am claiming none was documented, and in a document whose entire purpose is to describe who defines the profession, documentation is the point.

There is a grammar to the absence too. Read the editorial for where the people served actually appear, and you will find them every single time in object position. They are the communities we serve. They are the communities bearing consequences. They are the needs that first called social work into existence. They are served, protected, impacted, and invoked. They are never asked, never quoted, never seated, and never named as a category of knower. They are the occasion for the profession. They are not participants in it.

And then there is the method, which is where the specimen becomes almost unbearable. The summit used community based system dynamics, and the editorial cites Hovmand (2013) to say so. Community based system dynamics is not generic whiteboard mapping. It is a method whose defining commitment, the commitment that puts the word community in its name, is that you build the model with the community affected by the problem. The summit ran a community based method and cast the profession as the community. The people affected became the environment around the map. The mother became the weather.

The Descent

None of this began in Boston in June. The denial has a birthday, and the profession knows it, because the editorial cites it. In 1915 Abraham Flexner stood before the National Conference of Charities and Correction in Baltimore and told social work it was not a real profession, and social work has spent one hundred and eleven years answering him. The answers that won took the same form: acquire what the recognized professions have. Acquire the credential, the license, the journal, the accreditation standard, the reimbursement code, the seat at the clinical table. Each acquisition was real and each one moved the profession’s source of legitimacy further from its parent. The settlement worker sought standing from her neighbors. The licensed clinician seeks standing from the board, the payer, and the accreditor. Somewhere along that century, the neighbor stopped being the person care answered to and became the person care was performed upon.

The editorial knows this history so well that it cites the sharpest indictment of it. It invokes Specht and Courtney’s Unfaithful Angels, the 1994 book charging that social work abandoned its social mission for professional self regard. Then, having cited the charge, the summit reenacts it: a professional class, gathered for two days, deliberating about the profession’s identity, coherence, value proposition, and return on investment, all four of those being the editorial’s own words, in a room where the social was not documented as present. They quote the diagnosis and perform the disease in the same document. You could not design a cleaner specimen.

Look at what the profession’s value became in that room. The editorial argues, urgently and repeatedly, that social work must learn to demonstrate its worth in terms that the public, organizations, policymakers, and funders recognize and reward. Read that roster again. It is the list of people the profession must be legible to, and the people served are not on it. Their outcomes appear as evidence in the ROI case, but they themselves are not an audience whose recognition counts. In the doctrine I have been building at Joy Repair I put it this way: pride is the affect of having taken the deal, and joy is the affect of having refused it. An ROI case addressed to funders and policymakers is the profession’s pride talking, and pride talks loudest in rooms where nobody present can contradict the family story.

The Tests

Joy Repair reads institutions through four tests, and the first is Authorship: who authored this account, and who lives inside it as material. Run the test here and it returns in one pass. The map of social work was authored by social work, about social work, for social work, with the people social work touches rendered as terrain. The summit asked what do we do and for whom, and the documented roster of the room contained no category of whom to answer it. When a system maps itself and places the people it acts upon outside the boundary of the map, it has not described its environment. It has described its self concept.

The second reading comes through what I call the Institutional Shame Buffer, and here I want to give the authors real credit, because the editorial is genuinely candid. It confesses fragmentation. It confesses incoherence. It confesses moral injury, burnout, a failing pipeline, a profession struggling to speak with one voice. This is not a defensive document. But watch which confessions the buffer permits. An institution may confess its weaknesses all day long, because weakness is sympathetic and weakness invites investment. What the buffer never permits is confessing the deal, the founding exchange in which the profession traded its parentage for its standing. Twenty three categories of belonging and zero for the served is not a weakness the profession forgot to mention. It is the deal, sitting in plain sight, unconfessable.

The Confession

So let me confess it, since I am family and somebody should. I took the deal too. I hold the degree the deal confers. I teach in a school that prepares people for the license the deal requires. I have written the grant reports in which my neighbors appeared as outcomes. I know exactly how warm that room in Boston must have felt, because I have been in that room, and the people in it are not villains. Many of them have spent their careers fighting for the communities the document cannot seat. The bastardization of care is not a crime committed by social workers. It is a condition inherited by social workers, transmitted through curriculum and accreditation and reimbursement, and like most inherited conditions it is invisible to the people carrying it precisely because it feels like normal life.

You cannot repair what you diagnose as counterfeit, because a counterfeit has no relationship to restore. You destroy counterfeits. But a bastard is kin.

That is why the word matters. You cannot repair what you diagnose as counterfeit, because a counterfeit has no relationship to restore. You destroy counterfeits. But a bastard is kin. A denied child and a denying family are still a family, and family estrangement has a known remedy, which is acknowledgment. Say the name. Amend the record. Seat the parent at the table, not as a guest and not as a story about origins, but as a member with standing.

The Restoration

I know acknowledgment is possible because I have watched it work, and not in theory. At Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, with Mike Mather and De’Amon Harges, we built the Zawadi Exchange on the premise that the neighborhood is not a container of needs but a treasury of gifts, and that the first act of care is to ask people what they know rather than what they lack. Nobody in that work was the environment. Everybody was an author. The profession’s own neighbors run economies of care every day that pass the Authorship test without trying, because the test was never hard. It only requires believing that the people care comes from are the people care belongs to.

And the fields around social work have already amended their records, which removes the last excuse. Medicine, the very profession whose template Flexner used to measure us, now funds research through the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, where patients sit on merit review panels and score the science. Mental health systems credential and pay peer specialists, a workforce hired specifically because its members have been on the receiving side. In the United Kingdom, social work education has been required since 2003 to involve service users and carers in designing and delivering the degree itself. The standard I am naming is not utopian. It is regulatory reality elsewhere in this profession’s own family, which means the American roster of twenty three and zero is not a resource problem. It is a choice.

The conveners of the Boston summit wrote that their gathering was a beginning, and that the work will expand to a broader cadre. I believe them, and I am taking them at their word, so here is my response to the invitation, offered as a member of the family. The next roster must contain a category that does not currently exist in the document: people who have received social work services, present with standing, named as knowers, counted among the authors of the map. Not consulted. Not surveyed. Not represented by advocates who speak in their key. Seated. The day that category appears on the roster, the profession will have done something it has not done since Flexner asked his question, which is answer to its parent instead of its judges. On that day the word I have used in this title stops being true, and I will retire it with more relief than anyone.

Until then the record stands as written, twenty-three and zero, and I stand where the record puts me. Care had a child. The child did well for itself. The child goes to conferences now, and speaks of its value, and wonders aloud why the public cannot see its worth, and the answer is sitting where it has always sat, in church basements and on front porches, keeping its own roster, a roster of gifts rather than needs, with every parent named on it.

I am your bastard. I would rather be your son.