Marking its 10th year, this livestreamed conference offers a timely and challenging look at how racism continues to shape practice, policy, and outcomes. Designed for social workers and allied professionals who want to move beyond awareness to action, the program brings together leading voices to move the conversation forward. Participants will leave with sharper critical insight and concrete tools to address race and racism in their work with clients, organizations, and across communities.

Ruha Benjamin, PhD will provide the main keynote DEEEEEP UNLEARNING: From Automated Inequality to Abundant Imagination 

• Dr. Benjamin's keynote will explore how seemingly neutral technologies across social services, healthcare, employment, and law enforcement can reinforce and deepen racial inequities. Participants will learn practical strategies to critically evaluate automated inequity and imagine more just alternatives.
• Dr. Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, and she recently released her fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto. 
• Dr. Benjamin is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and in 2024 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship. 

Debora Ortega, PhD will present the opening address, "Hope, Hopelessness, and Joy: Living into Social Work Values”. 

• The opening talk will explore how dehumanization erodes the moral fabric of helping professions and undermines the wellbeing of marginalized communities. At the heart of the presentation is a call to live the core values of social work with deeper intentionality and joy.
• Dr. Debora Ortega is the founding director of the Latinx Center at the University of Denver. Dr. Ortega’s academic work examines the process by which social power, exclusion and dehumanization create societal inequity and injustice.  Her scholarship addresses the way that everyday white supremacy affects Latinx people in health, education and immigration.   

The event will conclude with a lively panel discussion featuring both keynote speakers and Rutgers professors.

The Annual Challenging Racism Conference is offered in honor of Dr. William Neal Brown, a professor at the School of Social Work who passed away in 2009. Dr. Brown was the first Black professor at Rutgers and had a long distinguished career at the School of Social Work. To learn more about Dr. Brown's life and legacy, read his Oral History Archives interview through the Rutgers-New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences. https://oralhistory.rutgers.edu/explore/alphabetical-index/interviewees/30-interview-html-text/682-brown-william-neal Special thanks to Dr. Brown's longtime partner, Suzanne Zimmer, who made this support possible through her continued advocacy and contributions to the School of Social Work and Rutgers University.