Beyond the Grounds of Compliance: The NASW, the NABSW, and the Pursuit of Ethical Sovereignty

Every recognizable profession anchors its ethical authority on grounds it does not fully own. In doing so, each surrenders a meaningful portion of its behavioral sovereignty to the institutions that legitimize it; and social work is no different. This essay argues that while these constraints are widely accepted as inherent to professionalization, the federal DEI restrictions of 2025 revealed their ability to impinge on social work’s moral expressions in ways we, as its intellectual stewards, cannot afford to ignore. In turn, this essay argues that for social work to safeguard its ethical integrity and the undampened expression of its core values, it must reimagine and restructure the foundations of its authority across professionalized and non-professionalized domains, rather than leaving them nested within any single governing landscape. To this end, the National Association of Black Social Workers and the Black radical tradition are engaged not as superior or inferior counterweights, but as examples of what an alternative structuring might entail. With this in mind, the following essay does not ask whether social work should abandon the structures through which it has secured professional legitimacy, or whether another tradition offers a less complicated alternative. Rather, it asks: On what kinds of grounds must social work’s ethical commitments rest if they are to remain meaningfully stable when political, institutional, or material conditions shift?