RACE still matters
 Racism may not be as out in the open as it was prior to the civil rights movement. But make no mistake, it still exists in America, says Ethnic and Women's Studies professor Rita Cameron Wedding.
"Today you may not recognize it," she says. "Racism looks different now because it is far more covert and hard to detect compared to pre-civil rights racism which was irrefutably racist."
Despite pretexts of "color blindness," Cameron Wedding says racism still results in disproportional treatment in all major social institutions including education, corrections and child welfare services. As an example, she says, while 15 percent of America's children in 1999 were African American, they made up 45 percent of the children in foster and group homes, according to Race Matters in Child Welfare.
To tackle such disparities, Cameron Wedding spent her recent sabbatical
developing curricula to help Child Welfare Services agencies address the issue of racial disproportionality. The curriculum, has been adopted by Contra Costa County. She has also asked to design fairness and equity curriculum which will be used to train all new social workers
in California. She is compiling
it into a sourcebook to help practitioners recognize, and intervene against, attitudes and behaviors that might promote
racial bias in their social work practice.
To write the guide, Cameron Wedding compiled the latest California statistics on racial disproportionality
among child welfare services distributed by the Center for Social Services at UC Berkeley and then applied her own critically reviewed theories on race, feminism and ethnic studies.
Cameron Wedding is the first vice chair for the California Commission on the Status of Women. In her role, she and her fellow commissioners review and recommend legislation to the legislature and the governor regarding women’s issues.
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