What is the importance of confronting biases in social work practice?

This question is ambiguous.  I do not know if you are asking about the biases of the social worker or biases that the social worker encounters in his or her clientele.  Since I am not sure, I am going to address both. 

A social worker is meant to help people with their social problems.  A social worker who is biased is, simply put, an ineffective and potentially harmful social worker.  It is imperative to confront...

This question is ambiguous.  I do not know if you are asking about the biases of the social worker or biases that the social worker encounters in his or her clientele.  Since I am not sure, I am going to address both. 

A social worker is meant to help people with their social problems.  A social worker who is biased is, simply put, an ineffective and potentially harmful social worker.  It is imperative to confront one's biases and eliminate them.  It really does not matter whether they are negative or positive biases.  All biases are potentially damaging to the client. At the very least, biases cause us to judge people, and no client is well-served by being judged.  Beyond that, biases lead us to circumscribe our actions for a client. If I have a bias against Latinos, I might offer a Latino client a more narrow range of services than I would another client. Those services might very well be inferior to what I would offer another.  Another instance might be a male who has experienced domestic violence. I might harbor a bias against males that causes me to be less helpful than I am ethically and professionally obligated to be.  A social worker needs to search deeply with him or herself, to confront these biases and eliminate them, or that social worker can never function fully and properly to help people.

On the client side, if a social worker finds bias in a client, I believe it is up to the social worker to confront that and challenge it as well.  If the mission of the social worker is to help people function effectively in society, a subsidiary of that mission is to help the client eradicate biases that are getting in the client's way of doing so.  A client who needs a job, one who is biased against African-Americans, for instance, needs some counseling to understand that he or she will not succeed in most work environments today if that bias is reflected in behavior on the job and that this bias is actually limiting the client's options.  As a teacher, I feel obligated to help my students with this, and if I were a social worker, there is no question in my mind that I would consider this to be part of my responsibility, too.  

Either way this inquiry is meant to be interpreted, bias should be confronted.  A social worker who is biased is not a good social worker. A client who is biased is not a good client.  Confrontation is a worthy endeavor.