Against Credentialism

dare ye to challenge the legislation of a doctor of social work?

The doctor is in.

Corey Jackson is the junior Scott Wiener, a first-termer in the California Assembly who has quickly made a name for himself by successfully fighting against, hold on for a moment while I sigh heavily, the white nationalist far-right and its fascist book bans. Yes, what this actually means is that Assemblyman Jackson is crusading for eight year-olds to get plenty of books at school about hot blowjobs. Here’s Jackson with California Governor Patrick Bateman, celebrating the signing of his “anti-book ban” bill into law, and note that Jackson fumbles the first of the very few sentences he has to read into the camera:

This video makes me feel like a George Grosz painting. Weimar America needs its expressionist depiction of moral and intellectual decay, if anyone has the time. Make the faces really jagged and sallow.

If you doubt the blunt aggressiveness of Jackson’s framing, here he is introducing the bill, in a clip that runs for less than a minute:

“AB 1078 is a bill that intends to combat the national Christian white supremacist movement, which is aimed to ban books.” Behind the awkward phrasing and the casual rhetorical car wreck — Christianity and white supremacy are conjoined twins! — the unexplained presumption is that parents who object to sexually graphic materials are marching around in their Klan hoods, fighting for whiteness. This is such inane framing that only a politician could say it without shame, and I’ve written several times about the Latino-forward demographics of the parental rights movement in California. He’s stupid, but he’s also just straight-up lying. Overwhelming majorities of all Californians, across demographic lines and party lines, favor parental rights over the sexy school libraries and secret gender transition plans for yummy twelve year-olds that make the state’s politicians so aroused.

Jackson, you’ll be shocked to hear, isn’t a parent — like so many other California legislators who spend a lot of time thinking about the sexual behavior of other people’s children. He’s fully a member of the Jacinda Ardern class, an activist and a career member of the “helping professions,” ritually over-celebrated by the media as a savior figure. Here’s how the Riverside Press-Enterprise, a former newspaper, depicted him upon the occasion of his ascent to the legislative throne:

He didn’t quite get the sun-halo over his defiant visionary savior-gaze, because it just slipped away to the side, but he’s comparatively framed by Angela Davis and Saint George Floyd, and appears to be emerging from Shirley Chisholm. It’s, you know, very subtle.

Jackson, a career social worker, is extremely committed to framing his legislative efforts as the product of professional expertise. Here are the top press releases on his website:

He is only referred to as Dr. Jackson. Here, I’ve helpfully marked up the part of his legislative website that explains his personal background:

Here’s Jackson speaking “as a social worker” on the floor of the Assembly in favor of AB 665, a bill — now a law — that allows for the removal of children from their home for residential mental health services (like gender transitioning) without parental consent:

“And when a professional deems that it would be necessary, and certainly if a young person knows that they need additional support than what their family can give them, it is critical that they get the help that they need.” Professionals decide when to take your children away to support them, so shut up.

Dr. Corey Jackson, DSW MSW, is a professional, a highly credentialed expert, so you have to defer to him. Young children need to have adults outside the home give them a lot of graphic books about hot sex, and they need to be taken from their parents and sent to group homes so they can become mentally healthy.

Now, you’re probably extremely impressed to know that someone is a doctor of social work, but hold on a minute. It gets better:

The doctor of social work program at California Baptist, ranked #114 nationwide among schools of social work, is delivered through a flexible online modality:

Academic research is a public service, of course, and so California Baptist puts its DSW dissertations online. You can download Dr. Corey Jackson’s dissertation here. Afrocentric Capacity Building: Building Agency in the African American Community runs to a daunting 80 pages, but non-scholars will be relieved to know that only 56 pages of that is the actual text of the thing. Let’s take a look!

Dr. Jackson created a survey of 19 questions, and got 25 members of local African-American community organizations to complete the survey:

For what? For questions like this, about racial equity and inclusion and Afrocentric community- based participatory research:

Yes, the African-American study participants said, they favor racial equity and feel close to the African-American community. Big conclusion, pg. 56:

That’s powerful stuff. Paradigm-changing. The African-American community lacks the person necessary, but REI development creates capacity-building that builds capacity. And that transforms biopsychosocial outcomes!

Because this is a dissertation in the action-focused field of social work, there are also recommendations, starting with the Maafa:

Interventions are encouraged to build power to build synergy!

And that’s the evidence that Dr. Corey Jackson, MSW DSW, is much more sophisticated than parents in knowing that children need a lot of sexually explicit school materials and healthy time in group homes away from the crippling reality of parental involvement.