"Social Introjections"

As the professor in my first class asked something like, "why do social workers care about disparity in the mental health care system?" my first response was that social workers love identity politics. I felt the need to restrain myself throughout the entire class because my views were anathema to the entire process of the class. We were attempting to diagnose whether the inequalities in (mental) health care are due to strictly economic circumstances or due to the prejudices of the providers. No one bothered to ask why this was something social workers or any central planning authority was able to fix, or whether it was their place to do so. How can people who meet monthly, annually, or every ten years possibly meet the demands of a dynamic marketplace of stochastic human actors? How is it possible for social workers to assess the people's needs, and we were doing this off the top of our heads (or out of our asses, depending on your perspective), indefinitely into the future? We can barely get a hold of what people are doing in the here and now! And while I understand that, from the client's point of view, their ethnicity or heritage may be immensely important, there is no reason for a person or group of people's accident of birth to drive macro-level policy. If people are in need, they will create supports to serve them. Strengthen those, and you might have something that approaches government beneficence and efficacy, but impose grand planning schemes (and they are remarkably grand in their assumptions) on a community and you will find nothing but failure--assessed annually by a bureaucratic body who will learn nothing about markets or human action and simply redouble their funding and efforts.