Multicultural counseling and therapy (MCT) means understanding the worldviews and life experiences of diverse groups in our nation.
To be culturally competent means to understand the history of oppression experienced by marginalized groups in our society. The stories of discrimination and pain of the oppressed are often
minimized and neglected. Many, for example, contend that the reality of racism, sexism, and homophobia is relatively unknown or ignored by those in power because of the discomfort that pervades such topics among people of every political persuasion. Ignoring or dismissing
Whiteness, according to author and social critic Ta‐Nehisi Coates, has one primary motivation.
The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country's political life.
(Coates, 2017, para. 14)
Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., an African American attorney and former confidant of President Bill Clinton, spoke about racism's continuing impact in startling terms. In making an analogy between the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the racism directed at African Americans, Jordan stated that
None of this is new to Black people. War, hunger, disease, unemployment, deprivation, dehumanization, and terrorism define our existence. They are not new to us. Slavery was terrorism, segregation was terrorism, and the bombing of the four little girls in Sunday school in Birmingham was terrorism.
The violent deaths of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm, Vernon Dahmer, Chaney, Shwerner, and Goodman were terrorism. And the
difference between September 11 and the terror visited upon Black people is that on September 11, the terrorists were foreigners.
When we were terrorized, it was by our neighbors. The terrorists were Americans.
(Excerpted from a speech by Vernon E. Jordan, June 2002)
Such experiences have been represented more recently by Black Lives Matter, a grassroots movement that was initiated in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and that went on to represent the perspectives of many Black Americans (and others) regarding the deaths of their community members at the hands of law enforcement (Hargons et al., 2017).
Likewise, in speaking about the history of psychological research conducted on ethnic minority communities by White social scientists, the late Charles W. Thomas, a respected African American
psychologist, voiced his concerns strongly.
White psychologists have raped Black communities all over the country. Yes, raped. They have used Black people as the human equivalent of rats run through Ph.D. experiments and as helpless clients for programs that serve middle‐class White administrators better than they do the poor. They have used research on Black people as green stamps to trade for research grants. They have been vultures.
(Thomas, 1970, p. 52)
To many people of color, the “Tuskegee experiment” represents a prime example of the allegation by Thomas. The Tuskegee experiment was carried out from 1932 to 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service;
more than 600 Alabama Black men were used as guinea pigs in the study of what damage would occur to the body if syphilis were left untreated. Approximately 399 were allowed to go untreated, even when medication was available. Records indicate that 7 died as a
result of syphilis, and an additional 154 died of heart disease that may have been caused by the untreated syphilis! In a moving ceremony in 1997, President Clinton officially expressed regret for the experiment to the few survivors and apologized to Black America.
Likewise, in August 2011, a White House bioethics panel heard about American‐run venereal disease experiments conducted on
Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers, and mental patients from 1946 to 1948: the United States paid for syphilis‐infected Guatemalan prostitutes to have sex with prisoners. Approximately 5,500
Guatemalans were enrolled, 1,300 were deliberately infected, and 83 died (McNeil, 2011). The aim of the study was to see whether
penicillin could prevent infection after exposure. When these
experiments came to light, President Obama apologized to President Alvaro Colom of Guatemala. Dr. Amy Gutman, the chairwoman of the bioethics panel and president of the University of Pennsylvania,
described the incident as a dark chapter in the history of medical research. Experiments of this type are ghastly and give rise to
suspicions that people of color are being used as guinea pigs in other medical and social experiments as well.
REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Are these beliefs by people of color accurate?
2. Might they simply be exaggerations from overly mistrustful individuals?
3. Aren't people of color making a mountain out of a molehill?
4. As indicated in Chapter 1, what emotional roadblocks might you (or other readers) now be feeling? What meaning do you impute to them?
5. What has all this to do with counseling and psychotherapy?
Because the worldviews of culturally diverse clients are often linked to the historical and current experiences of oppression in the United States (American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Preventing Discrimination and Promoting Diversity 2012;
Ponterotto, Utsey, & Pedersen, 2006), it is necessary to understand the worldview of culturally diverse clients from both a cultural and a political perspective (Owens, Queener, & Stewart, 2016; Ridley,
2005). Clients of color, for example, are likely to approach counseling and therapy with a great deal of healthy skepticism regarding the institutions from which therapists work and even the conscious and unconscious motives of the helping professional.
The main thesis of this book is that counseling and psychotherapy do not take place in a vacuum, isolated from the larger sociopolitical influences of our societal climate (Constantine, 2006; Katz, 1985; Liu, Hernandez, Mahmood, & Stinson, 2006; Prilleltensky, 1989).
Multicultural counseling often mirrors the nature of race relations in the wider society, as well as the dominant–subordinate relationships of other marginalized groups (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer [LGBTQ] people, women, and the physically challenged). As explained in the American Psychological Association's Multicultural Guidelines (2017), multicultural counseling is fluid, multilayered, and complex; it requires comprehension of the interwoven, intersectional nature of these group memberships, in that both privileged and
subordinated individuals always embody more than one identity simultaneously (Moradi & Grzanka, 2017). It serves as a microcosm, reflecting Black–White, Asian–White, Hispanic–White, and
American Indian–White relations. As we saw in Chapter 3, it also mirrors the wide variety of interethnic/interracial relations as well.