Racial and Ethnic Identity - Non-Affinity Group Choose one of the remaining three stories from "Section II: Race and Ethnicity" in the Culture and Identity text. Do not select the story you used in th
Two Julie’s Story So What if I’m a Black Woman?
Race remains one of the most contentious issues in our country. Race and campus climate has become a critical issue on college campuses. And racial inequity and differential treatment in policing and criminal justice have made national headlines and led to activism and social movements. When we are at cocktail parties, race, along with politics and sex, is often a forbidden subject. We are often socialized to pretend that race does not exist, encouraged and rewarded to see people as individuals without color. Yet, for many, particularly ethnic minorities, race is a primary identifier. It provides a sense of pride, a sense of connection and belonging; it becomes an all-encompassing source of identity. One’s racial affiliation can determine lifestyle choices and values, and it influences relationships and behaviors. But race can also lead to a sense of shame, discomfort, embarrassment, and fear as individuals encounter experiences of oppression and racism. Race can lead individuals to engage in stereotypical behaviors or behaviors that serve as attempts to fight against stereotypes. Although our relationship to race is a lifelong fling, our connection to it changes with new experiences and with changes in development.
Julie’s story is one of exploration and the development of her racial identity. Although she has always had an awareness of her status as an African American woman, race had little salience or meaning until she was confronted with racial concerns and episodes of racism in high school and college, which, according to Erikson (1968), is the time when identity development begins. As you read her story, you should think about the influence that racism can have in shaping identity, an individual’s sense of self, and self-esteem. Also, begin to think about how Julie’s level of social class interacts and intersects with race, along with the role of gender in her life.
Julie’s Story
As a 30-year-old African American female, it feels like I have had to deal with my race and its impact on me and how I view the world since the day I was born. I was raised in a single-parent African American household. My maternal grandfather lived with me most of my life and acted as a surrogate father. I saw my father pretty frequently, and he did give me an allowance and took me shopping; however, I always got the feeling he only did it to please my mother. I viewed my father as being very distant and never looked forward to his constant put-downs and negative comments. When I mentioned this behavior to my mother, she usually defended him and made excuses for his behavior: “He just feels if he says that about you, you’ll work harder to prove him wrong” or “He’s just having some problems right now. Just ignore him.” I soon stopped telling her because the excuses were worse than the comments.
As a young girl, I searched for affirmations of my beauty and intellect. On television, I did not see many African Americans, and my earliest dreams of being a career woman were colored by how I thought the “White” people did things. You see, my community was poor and Black. Some of the schoolteachers were White, but for the most part, I didn’t interact with Whites until I went to the store with my family outside of our community. I often dreamed of traveling and seeing all the places White people came from. It’s funny—visiting Africa never entered my mind until high school.
During my search for an identity as a young girl, I remember hating to go get my hair done. We would go to a friend of the family who had a beauty shop in her basement. She was an older woman, and my weekly press and comb was done by her. Here my mother talked and got cooking lessons and life lessons. I always felt I was being tortured and talked about. I have very thick, coily hair, and it was the topic of many discussions. My “bad” hair was difficult and hard to manage, and I was often teased about cutting it off. Although I never said anything, this early experience made me feel I should have been born White. I remember getting mad at my mother on a few occasions and asked her why my daddy couldn’t have been White so my hair could be “good.” My mother, probably unable to understand the full magnitude of what I meant, would tell me my father was chosen because he was the person she loved.
As I began to develop and get noticed by men in a sexual way, I went through a very uncomfortable and difficult time, which still plagues me to some degree to this day. At home, my father constantly told me I was fat and would have to be pushed through the door by the time I was 18. My grandfather would yell at me to take off the shorts or whatever else I happened to be wearing, and my mother would just say, “Your father used to tell me I was fat when I was your size, and I look back now and see I wasn’t.” The only people who seemed to think I was beautiful with coily hair and large hips, thighs, and buttocks were the boys who lived in the area. Because I did not have a great relationship with my father, it’s safe to say I didn’t trust men, so, thankfully, I did not fall prey to any male sexual advances during this time of turmoil. Also, because I was heavily involved in church activities, I believed that sexual activity before marriage was forbidden, and I was determined to not fall prey to it. Lastly, because my father wasn’t around much and my mother was raising me alone, I never wanted a child out of wedlock. I had been called a bastard too many times and never wanted my child to endure such a thing, nor did I want to be the subject of the Supremes’ song “Love Child.”
All of this physical development and turmoil began when I was 12 years old. During this same time, I got the greatest shock of my young world. One day as I sat in the kitchen eating my dinner alone, my father was in the den (located the next room over) watching television. The doorbell rang. Suddenly my mother appeared to tell my father someone wanted him at the door. Well, this was most unusual because my father did not live with us and most definitely did not receive any visitors. As I peeked out of the window, I saw my father’s van double parked and a woman standing near it with her hands on her hips and her head moving from side to side. It was apparent she was yelling from the way her hands would occasionally wave in the air. My mother stood in the darkness on our enclosed porch, listening. I ran back to my seat in the kitchen as my father came past me to get his shoes and prepared to leave. I asked who was at the door, and his only response was, “Who do you think?” After I told him who I thought it was, he said, “Yep,” and walked out the door. We were never to speak of her again, and, in fact, my mother and I never spoke of her until a few days before my wedding, when I told her I had reservations because I was not confident a man could be faithful. Her only response was, “I knew you would have problems with this eventually. I just didn’t know when.”
As a Black woman, this early event had dramatic effects on me. Did only White families have faithful husbands who took care of their families and loving and devoted wives? Was it a Black woman’s fate to raise her children alone and to bear them outside of marriage (there sure were a lot of single female parents at church)? Why was I not considered beautiful, and because of my appearance, would I ever meet someone who would love me and think I was beautiful? It’s funny, but as I continued to struggle with these issues and entered high school, I remember my father telling me he would not walk me down the aisle on my wedding day. Like the glutton for punishment I was, I asked why. He told me that when I got divorced because the man was no good and could not take care of his responsibilities, I couldn’t blame my father for giving me away.
In high school, I attended a magnet school with a very mixed ethnic population. I discovered there were intelligent Blacks and Hispanics as well as intelligent people from other ethnic groups. To me, we got along great. I do not recall having any racial discussions or hearing people put down because of their race. You were considered elite because you were able to get into the school, and if you were able to stay, well, you were destined for greatness, regardless of your race. I never really thought about race during this time.
Granted, my time at school was very different from my time at home. At home, I was surrounded by African Americans who engaged in the use and distribution of drugs, there were gang fights and shootings, and many of the young girls my age were pregnant or soon to be, but somehow I wanted to believe I was better than they were. I was going to make it, and in my mind I would be a credit to my race. How awful to admit such a thought, but nonetheless it is what I thought. I began to imitate my White classmates. I spoke proper English and worked very hard at sounding White. I even worked on my accents: British, California Valley girl, and so on. I see now that I wanted to be anything but Black. As I left my neighborhood for school each day, I dreamed of being a doctor or anything else that would take me around the world and make me important. In some of my daydreams, my hair was a bouncy, wavy texture, and my skin was much lighter. I was considered beautiful, and all of the men—White and Black and everything else—thought I was the most beautiful woman they had ever met. See, I knew I was Black, but I hated everything about being Black. I hated the way Black people spoke, and I hated the way they laughed and drank and looked.
I hated that they all didn’t want to do better, wouldn’t go to school, didn’t find jobs, had unprotected sex, and so on. I didn’t realize it, but I hated me. I didn’t like my full figure, and I definitely found nothing beautiful about my skin or my hair. I wanted to be White, and I identified with the White culture. I felt that Blacks were in the shape they were in because of the decisions they made. I was unable to see anything differently. My grandfather would also make comments about the neighborhood gang-bangers or other members of the community, which helped to reinforce my beliefs.
In high school, we were all required to take an African American history class, which I thought was an awful requirement. After all, I was Black, so therefore I didn’t need the class. Right? Wrong! I remember feeling overwhelmed at the material and somewhat confused. All of my grammar school history books never even mentioned Blacks. We simply were the slaves. Now here was this new information that said we contributed greatly to the world and to the United States. How could this be? The instructor assigned a research paper for us to write, and I still remember part of it and the changes it began to make in me. We were assigned an African country, and we had to write about the land and its people. Additionally, we needed to first start our research at home, in the family encyclopedia. Well, this was great because, for a poor family, we did own a set of encyclopedias, and I thought I would finish this assignment on Egypt in a hurry. Well, I looked up Egypt and found all the pictures of the people to be drawings of White people. I remember feeling hurt and furious. Were Egyptians White or Black? Then I discovered that they never really said Egypt was in Africa (which I found out later during my research). I was floored. How much did I not know about being Black, and why were they (I wasn’t sure who they were) trying to hide this information?
As I entered college, I still had these grand dreams of being accepted into the White world as one of them. I knew I would have to work hard and felt that every word I spoke or wrote was a reflection on how much like them I could become. I did join the African American student union, but this was only because a Black girl I met during orientation introduced me, and I just began hanging out. I also began to discover that making friends with other people (those who were not Black) was much harder than it had been in high school. In fact, most people wouldn’t even talk to me let alone be my friend, but I attributed it to my unattractiveness and not my race.
While walking through the community area one day, I noticed many clubs were attempting to bring in new members. I was looking to move on campus and began to talk to a resident of an off-campus dorm. The dorm had a chef and many other benefits, and they seemed very eager to have me apply. Cool, I thought. I can move in here, and this would be great. I didn’t realize they wanted me because they didn’t have any Blacks living there and thought it would be a good idea to integrate. I also did not know I was in for some trauma that I was not prepared to deal with on an emotional level.
I was accepted and moved in right away. It was the beginning of my sophomore year, and I already had a 3.8 average and wanted to keep up the good work. During the first week of classes, I went to the study area in the dorm and prepared to study. Suddenly, these two humongous White males entered the room and began talking to each other. I didn’t know them, and they never introduced themselves to me. I continued to try to study, but they just got louder and louder. Eventually, I asked them if they would quiet down so I could continue studying, and this is when I began to understand who I was to the outside world. The two men came over to my table and began to taunt me. One said, “Oh, it looks like we’ve made the little nigger mad.” The other said, “Yes, I wonder what the nigger thinks she can do about it.” Well, I was taken off guard, and I definitely didn’t know what to say. I had never been called the “N” word, and I had only heard it used from one Black person to another as a word of affection and familiarity. As these two men continued to call me names, something inside of me began to fall into the pit of my stomach. I wanted to fight, to hit, to scream, to kill them for calling me that horrible name. But instead I said nothing. I picked up my books and left the area, telling myself I couldn’t take them both; they were too big. I hid. I hid in my room and began to look at each person in my classes. I soon discovered that in all of my classes I was the only Black person. I became paranoid. I was depressed and petrified. My mother was not speaking to me because I had moved into the dorm, and everyone else in my family seemed so busy. I didn’t know where to turn. Meanwhile, life at the dorm just got harder.
My roommate was a white Hispanic. This meant she was Hispanic but looked White. She dated a White male and was very confused about who she was. She acted and thought White and began to make racial comments. Her boyfriend was my most incessant source of grief because on some occasions I would wake up with him looking in my face, making a racial comment about me. At a party, he told me he asked everyone to turn the lights on so he could find me. The other women on my floor were just as awful. When I woke up in the morning, they made comments about my hair. When I exited the shower after washing my hair, they made comments about that. The time I blow-dried my hair and it stood out in a huge Afro, they all screamed when I entered my room, where they were waiting to see my hairdo. And let’s not forget the time they kept harassing me because they wanted to touch Black hair. I won’t even mention the times they made comments about how fat I was, although looking back I know I was considered small by all standards; I just had a fuller, rounder figure than they did. I won’t even go into detail about my English composition teacher who, during this same time, wrote on my final paper/presentation that I should consider going into a profession where I could do public speaking, like the entertainment field, because I couldn’t write, and my people were not known for their writing ability anyway.
But with all of this, my breaking point came when an African American male was allowed entry to the dorm, and he proceeded to rob many of the rooms. I was not home at the time, but later that evening the dorm leaders called a family meeting where the robbery was discussed. Many felt I was in on it because I was Black, and others thought he was my friend and wanted me to go get their items back. I sat there in disbelief, fighting back the tears and horror. I found the courage to ask how I could possibly be involved if I was in class at the time. Someone said the man rang the doorbell and was let in. I asked why.
“He wanted to see you.”
“Did he ask for me?”
“No, but he was Black, so I just assumed he wanted you, and I let him enter.”
“Oh, that makes sense. I know all the Black people in the world.”
“Well, why didn’t he take any of your stuff?”
“Because I don’t have anything to take except my underwear.”
It was after these experiences that I began to change my racial identity. I began hanging out with the other Blacks on campus. I joined and attended Black club meetings. I began to take African American studies courses and became friends with some of the instructors. I ran for office in the clubs and soon began running workshops and bringing prominent Blacks to the campus to speak to the student body. Suddenly, I hated those White people, and I wanted them to know it. I started fighting back at the dorm. When they made comments, I became sarcastic. When it was my turn to cook dinner, I made African dishes and made them eat with their fingers. For dessert, I made a chocolate pudding pie with the words “Black is beautiful” written on top. I even invited some of my Black friends over, and, dressed in black, red, and green, we stood in front of the dinner table with our fists held high while the various artists’ versions of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” played in the background. I hated the Whites, and I picked any opportunity to make comments, to scare them, and to do whatever I could to regain my sense of dignity and self-worth. I played on their stereotypes of me, and I loved it.
Soon I saw the dorm as a great place because of the benefits of the chef, unlimited kitchen privileges, the guest rooms, and so on and decided I would take it over and make it a Black dorm. I began a huge crusade to get more Blacks into the dorm, and I was successful. The next year six Blacks moved into the dorm, and with them came their friends. It was great, and many of the Whites began to move out.
One day, one of the senator’s nephews who lived there had to be hospitalized for a mental breakdown. The rumor was that the Blacks had driven him crazy. The truth? He made all kinds of racial comments and was constantly confronted. This particular day he was caught writing “Millie and Vanilli” on the room door of a Black girl who was dating an Iranian man.
She caught him and physically attacked him, knocking him to the ground and pouncing him. I thought it was great. He called his uncle, and some important looking men came to get him and took him away, while he cried and blubbered like a little baby.
Life began to take a turn when one of my instructors pulled me and several other students to the side for a group discussion one day after class. During class time, we had become upset with a White student’s presentation. In it, he showed a home movie where all the people in authority were White and all the villains and down-and-outs were Black. We ate him alive, and he was quite insulted. The instructor wanted us to process what happened and told me and the other Black girl in the group that we would have to apologize to him. I laughed and refused. This began the first of many talks with me on racial identity and how to succeed in a multicultural world.
I would like to say that I left college a changed woman. I would even like to say I got through all the stages, and when I entered the work world I was totally open to a multicultural world and confident in who I was as a Black woman. I can’t say that. I did not leave totally aware but hurt and angry and determined not to allow Whites to get close. I had been discriminated against by my peers and quite a few instructors, and I was not going to stand for it.
If I thought I was being put down because of my race, I was going to scream and shout. I was accepted into the minority internship within the psychology and sociology departments, and I began to assist with research projects on racism and multicultural issues during my last year of school. It was during this time that I began to see the racial tension in the world not just toward Blacks, but toward other ethnic groups. I also began to hear positive overcoming stories from Blacks who were able to navigate life despite being discriminated against.
My first job in my field after college was at a women’s treatment facility. One of my coworkers was a young White woman, who was a little older than me. She constantly wanted to talk to me and offered me rides home from work, and it became apparent she wanted to be my friend. One day, I sat her down and told her quite bluntly that I did not want her friendship and that I didn’t like White people, so she should leave me alone. She replied, “Some White people must have really hurt you bad. I’m going to show you we’re not all that way.” She and I are still friends today, and that incident occurred over 10 years ago. Her friendship and my work with clients and on myself helped me to continue to grow and develop a positive racial identity.
This actually sounds crazy, but my White coworker affirmed my Blackness every day. She loved and kissed the children of our Black clients, she spoke of adopting Black children, she was always braiding her hair and even wearing beads, and she ignored all the comments and stares by other Whites. She thought I was smart and never seemed to mind that I was Black. She came to my home, met my boyfriend, and was just a cool person. I even went to her all-White suburb, met her biased mom, and sat in her outdoor hot tub with my coily hair frizzing into an Afro (by the way, her mother is like an aunt to my kids, today, and our extended families get along great).
Currently, I work in an affluent, predominantly White town where I am now one of only two Black police officers. In this capacity, I have felt a lot of strain and stress from my coworkers, and although they won’t say anything to my face, it is apparent that a lot of them operate on some unspoken racial beliefs about my character, and no matter how hard I work, it just isn’t good enough for them. I became increasingly conscious of my figure and body image, my hair became an issue, and I started to watch every word I spoke. Recently, I cut my hair into a really short style as a sort of liberation. I wanted to swim and engage in other activities in which my hair requires too much effort and time (which I don’t have), and I cut it. I have never felt so free. I also began to allow my coworkers to see me in my street clothes, with my stomach or legs showing, as a way of showing I am proud of my figure and who I am.
As I get older and experience life, I am beginning to love myself for who and what I am. I used to cry and wonder why God would make me Black and then make Black the thing people despised and mistreated. Why make me Black and then make my hair so thick and tangly that I can’t comb it or so coily that it sticks straight out? Why make my nose so large along with my buttocks, hips, and thighs? Wasn’t one of these enough without having all of them? And then why make the other people like me confused and full of self-hatred, self-destruction, and color consciousness? I may not have all the answers, but I am confident that I will find them and am learning to embrace myself more.
Content Themes
Julie’s story, though it is unique in many ways, helps us to understand the process and journey that many undergo in the development of a positive racial identity. Her story suggests that the identity development process can be difficult not only because of stereotypes and experiences of oppression from the mainstream or dominant culture but also because of internalized racism and socialization experiences from family and friends. Her story teaches the difficulties individuals face when oppression and racism are internalized, the impact of stereotypes and racism, the effect of socialization experiences with family and peers, and the importance of self-definition.
Race and Stereotypes
The first issue in Julie’s story is the influence that perceptions of race and stereotypes have on identity development and psychological functioning. Julie was raised in a poor, predominantly African American neighborhood. She had few role models of positive African Americans and developed a sense of shame about being Black. Negative stereotypes played a role in her self-concept. Julie indicates that she was concerned about the speech and levels of intelligence of African Americans. Unfortunately, the negative image of African Americans was reinforced through her education; it was not until high school that she was exposed to African American history and heritage and more positive role models. This is a typical experience for many racial and ethnic minorities, who are more likely to be portrayed in the media as criminals, on drugs, less intelligent than Whites, unemployed or underemployed, and on public welfare. The media also often portray challenges experienced in families of racial minorities, including single-parent families and absent fathers, poverty, and violence. Asian Americans are often presented differently as the model minority, high achieving and successful, but this portrayal can be limiting as well and can cause many Asian Americans to be ignored if they are underachievers (Sue & Sue, 2012). All of Julie’s behaviors, values, and decisions were influenced by her perceptions of race. She imitated Whites in speech to be perceived as more intelligent and to be accepted by Whites. After she experienced racism on campus, she began to associate more with Blacks and to participate in Black activities on campus.
Interpersonal Relationships
Race also influenced Julie’s gender role expectations and views on interpersonal relationships. First, her family experiences caused her to question the role of African American women and men in relationships. This combined with negative stereotypes of African Americans led Julie to believe that African American men were unfaithful and that African American women were destined to be single or single parents. It is important to note that her gender role expectations were colored not only by her racial identity, but also by her family relationships. If both parents had raised Julie, her perceptions might have differed.
Second, Julie’s perception of physical attractiveness was influenced by her race. Julie was faced with images of White women as attractive and was self conscious about her weight, her hair texture and length, and other features. Her level of concern about her appearance was so great that she dreamed of being more White in appearance. Although her self-consciousness might also be exacerbated by her family dynamics, her experience is not unique. Many racial minorities struggle with standards of beauty set by the dominant culture and may internalize a negative self-perception (Greene, White, & Whitten, 2000). Some dye, perm, or relax their hair or use hair extensions to make it straighter, lighter, or longer. At an extreme, some individuals pursue plastic surgery to gain Eurocentric facial features. Julie’s concern with her physical attractiveness certainly influenced her interpersonal relationships and may have placed her in a vulnerable position where men may have taken advantage of her.
Third, racial identity influenced the nature of her friendships and social relationships. During her teenage years, Julie was more interested in being accepted by White people and limited her association with other Blacks. She tried to adopt various speech accents to sound White. The mixed ethnic magnet school allowed her to transcend race, or adopt a raceless persona (Fordham, 1988), an option that is often taken by racial minorities to cope with internalized oppression. Her efforts to change her speech, however, suggest that the raceless stance was not always a successful strategy to use. After significant experiences of racism, she changed her relationships to associate only with other African Americans. Julie’s racial identity influenced her relationships with authority, particularly teachers. She describes an incident in which a professor attempted to lead her to critically examine her behaviors. However, Julie was too hurt and angry at Whites to fully benefit from this experience. Her relationships with coworkers were equally affected because she was initially mistrustful and distant.
Racism
The most striking component of Julie’s story is the experiences with racism that she encountered on her college campus. Although college is often a time of intellectual enlightenment, Julie’s story reminds us that individuals often become more aware of their cultural identity and even more aware of the oppressive and prejudicial opinions of others. Indeed, for many Americans, college is often the first time individuals are exposed to individuals from different races. The pain from the experiences was intense for Julie and led her to change her perceptions of herself. What is striking in the story is the level of threat that she faced, both in terms of concerns for her physical safety and, more important, the threats to her sense of self. Although it is not clear whether Julie ever felt completely accepted by Whites, the sense of security that she did have was completely shaken by her peers’ reactions to her in the dorm. Her concerns about physical differences were constantly stirred, even through small experiences such as exiting the shower. Her problem-solving resources were challenged because she had to overcome negative stereotypes of African Americans and reach out to her peers for support and comfort. It was the accumulation of the experiences, or microaggressions (Feagin & Sikes, 1995; Sue et al., 2007), that influenced the intensity of Julie’s response. Single episodes of racism may not have a devastating influence on individuals, but repeated experiences and assaults of the self can be damaging.
Julie’s college experiences caused her to begin the process of racial identity (Cross & Cross, 2008). This process generally occurs with individuals having neutral attitudes about race, low salience to race, or negative internalized attitudes about their own race. Often, this occurs until the individual has racial encounters, which lead to a shift in attitudes and immersion into his or her racial group. Finally, the individual integrates race and racial identity into self-concept. Julia clearly followed this path as she began to develop her sense of positive racial identity. Julie began her racial identity development as a child with negative attitudes about Blacks and being African American. Entering a magnet school allowed Julie to continue to see herself as different from other Blacks and close to equal with Whites. Julie had two periods in which significant encounter experiences occurred, seeming to propel her into further stages. The first period was when she took an African American history class and was exposed for the first time to positive historical images of Blacks. The second encounter period occurred during her study time in the college dorm, when students called her a racial slur. Julie experienced the typical psychological distress that occurs after significant racial encounters, including paranoia, depression, and fear. These experiences shifted Julie into an immersion phase, in which she joined Afrocentric activities and organizations and changed interpersonal relationships. Julie seems to be continuing to develop her identity and completing tasks in the final stage of integrating her racial identity into her self-concept. She admits that her journey was not complete when she left college, but self-acceptance and pride are increasing as she continues in her adult development.
Self-Definition/Authentic Self
The final theme from Julie’s story is the importance of self-definition. Julie spent most of her childhood and adolescence reacting to negative reactions and stereotypes of African Americans. She defined herself in opposition to her negative perceptions of African Americans. Julie changed her speech to sound like and be accepted by Whites. She worried about her physical attractiveness and body size. After experiences of racism, she changed her self-definition and immersed herself in African American activities. Although this seems positive in many ways, her behaviors and attitudes were defined to combat others’ perceptions. It was not until she was confronted by a professor and a White colleague that Julie began to examine her behaviors more critically. She changed her hair to a style that is more suitable for her lifestyle without being worried about others and is more comfortable with her body image. She has relationships with people from various racial groups and interacts comfortably with them. And she continues to have pride in her race. It is clear that Julie is in the process of defining herself more authentically and that, although she may continue to experience oppression and racism, she is secure in her identity and will continue to thrive.
Clinical Applications
This section explores the clinical implications from Julie’s story for counselors, including assessment of race and racial identity, techniques and interventions to use in treatment, and countertransference concerns.
Assessment
Influence of Race
Race influences identity, behaviors, values, and psychological functioning of individuals. It is important to understand how clients conceptualize group membership and their understanding of the stereotypes and others’ perceptions of their race. Values from racial groups should be explored. Clients often internalize racial stereotypes and prejudices and engage in self-fulfilling behaviors or attempt to act in opposition to them. Clinicians should assess the level of internalized oppression of their clients and the relationship between the clients presenting the problem and his or her experiences with racism. Therapists should also explore how race intersects with other cultural factors. For example, Julie was raised in a poor neighborhood. What would her experiences have been like if she had been raised in a middle- or upper middle-class neighborhood? Social class intersects with race and influences expectations on education and careers, exposure to role models, and access to resources. Julie’s family did not need public aid, but how would her life be different if she had been raised in poverty? Julie’s issues with perceptions of beauty and body image occurred due to the intersection of race and gender. Would Julie’s issues be different had she been male? Finally, therapists need to examine the level of racial identity of their clients. Treatment with Julie over therapeutic issues would have been different if Julie had been in the immersion stage for longer periods of time or if her immersion experience would have occurred during high school instead of college.
The following questions may be used to assess race and racial identity. Clinicians should feel comfortable directly asking questions on race because clients will generally not initiate these discussions, even if the issues are related to the presenting problems.
How important is your racial background to you?
Have you experienced any incidents of racism or oppression?
What messages about race did you receive from your family? From peers? From your school? From your community?
Have you felt negatively about your race?
Has your race served as a source of strength or resource?
How is your racial background related to your presenting problem?
Techniques and Interventions
Critical Consciousness and the Authentic Self
One technique for clients dealing with racism is to help them to develop critical consciousness, the ability to assess their experiences in light of the context, and to separate their personal response from societal expectations (Diemer, Kauffman, Koenig, Trahan, & Hsieh, 2006; Thomas et al., 2014; Watts & Abdul-Adil, 1997). Once individuals have the ability to critically examine their experiences, they can begin to develop their authentic self—self-concept that is self-defined. The development of an authentic sense of self involves the following process: see it, name it, question it, resist it, and transform it (Isom, 2002). The first step is the development of awareness of the pervasiveness of oppression—seeing racism for what it is. For Julie, this beginning awareness came in high school when she was exposed to African American history. Therapists should help clients to understand the reality of racism, understand the history of stereotypes and sociopolitical context, and recognize individual acts of oppression as well as the institutional structures that support and maintain oppression. For example, in Julie’s story one wonders if the residence hall staff were aware of the oppression she experienced and whether any attempts to intervene were made. Julie may not have seen the staff or university administrators as allies in the process, suggesting that the racism she experienced was a part of the institutional climate.
The second step in the development of authentic self is to name it, to define the true nature of oppression as it occurs. It is the process of separating societal influences, thereby allowing correct labeling of the experiences. It was important for Julie to recognize the racism for what it was and to not make personal attributes for her experiences. The third step includes questioning one’s experiences, to allow for the externalization of the problem to occur. Questions to be asked include the following: Am I responsible for this image? Did I cause the person to respond to me in a particular way? Julie began to question why information on African Americans was excluded from her textbooks in high school and why Egyptians were portrayed as Whites. She also began to question who was responsible for the misinformation. The fourth step is to resist it, which includes being assertive and defending the self. Resistance may also mean confronting oppressors, letting people know that their comments or behaviors are hurtful. Once oppression is resisted, individuals are freed from the restrictive context of oppression and are not ruled by the stereotypes and biases of others. The process of self definition can begin, and people are free to behave and react in a way that is authentic.
Racial Heritage
The second recommended technique is to encourage clients to explore their racial history and heritage. Another way to overcome negative stereotypes and perceptions is to replace them with more positive information and images. Julie began to build a more positive self-concept when she began to explore her African heritage. Clients can be encouraged to attend cultural events, to read historical pieces or cultural literature, and to join social activities and organizations that promote racial heritage. Clients also can be encouraged to speak to or interview senior citizens in their racial group about their experiences. The interviews and conversations should focus on problem solving techniques and available resources. Clinicians should be aware of cultural organizations within their communities as well as cultural leaders.
Caution must be used in the timing of this intervention, and clinicians may want to consider the client’s level of readiness to explore his or her cultural heritage. The more oppressed the client, the more risk of self-hatred. Assessing the client’s level of racial identity may be helpful in determining the appropriateness of this intervention (Cross & Cross, 2008). Clients who feel negatively about their own racial group may benefit from exploring racial heritage, but may not be psychologically ready to begin such exploration.
Racial Socialization
Racial socialization is the process of helping racial minority children develop positive self-images within an oppressive community. Research shows that parents give messages in a variety of categories, including the presence and reality of racism, preparation for and overcoming of bias and racism, cultural heritage, racial pride, self-pride, racial equality and humanistic values, mainstream Eurocentric values, and spirituality and coping (Hughes et al., 2006). It is important for clinicians to assess the racial socialization messages received by their clients. For example, Julie’s grandfather often made disparaging comments regarding the poor African Americans in their community. This affected Julie’s perspectives on race and gender roles by perpetuating and reinforcing her internalized negative attitudes. Parents should be especially encouraged to discuss racial issues and the possibility of racism with their children (Stevenson, 2013). Greene (1992) outlines a model for including racial socialization as part of the therapeutic process. The first step includes helping children to correctly label racism and handle accompanying feelings. The second phase includes the parents serving as role models for dealing with racism. The third step is providing emotional support for the emotional reactions to racism, including anger and powerlessness. The final phase includes helping families to adjust by developing coping mechanisms.
Countertransference
Clinicians may experience a variety of reactions to hearing about racial issues in clients. Race is one issue—along with politics and religion—that individuals are often socialized to not discuss, so many therapists may find it awkward to initiate a discussion about racial identity or experiences of oppression. However, because race is so important it is critical for counselors to explore these factors in their clients’ lives and functioning. Clinicians may experience feelings of sadness, anger, frustration, anxiety, and guilt (Comas-Diaz & Jacobsen, 1991).
Reactions to Racism
Julie’s story reflects the racism and oppression that occurs from membership in a particular racial or ethnic group. Although Julie’s experience occurred in the 1990s, it can be easily dismissed as a historical artifact. One reaction that counselors have is to experience sadness over the mistreatment that clients have experienced. Acts of racism and discrimination can have a negative effect on self-esteem, and counselors may become overwhelmed with feelings over these acts. For example, Julie reports mistreatment by other students in her college dormitory. A clinician who feels sadness for her may express sympathy for her pain in an effort to relieve some of the discomfort of the client and the therapist. It is critical to remember, however, the difference between empathy and sympathy. Although comforting comments may be helpful for the client, if the comment is based more on the therapist’s sadness, it may come across as patronizing, which may alienate the client. Sympathy from a counselor in this situation may be experienced by the client as the counselor feeling sorry for the client, leading the client to feel disconnected from the therapist or needing to “help” the counselor by minimizing the pain from the incident. Empathy is the ability to place oneself in the experience of another and to understand it from their perspective. Although counselors may not have experience with racism, they can empathize with the feelings of anxiety, depression, or discomfort that may arise.
A second common reaction to racism and acts of oppression may be a rationalization of the event, in which the clinician suggests to clients that perpetrators may have other motives for their behavior. This is especially easy to do when clients are discussing microaggressions, acts, experiences, or behaviors that seem more ambiguous. Providing a rationale for perpetrators, however valid an alternative explanation may seem, minimizes the issue for the client and may lead the client to feel invalidated. For clients who are wrestling to define or confirm a microaggression, minimizing the experience may cause a disservice to clients. The end result of an explanation is that it often trivializes the problem and may prevent the client from feeling comfortable in disclosing painful experiences. Underlying this response may be some anger at the client for assuming the victim role or for personalizing the experiences of oppression. The therapist may feel that the client is paranoid or too sensitive to issues. This reaction also may hamper the therapeutic relationship.
Therapists may experience a sense of frustration or hopelessness about the likelihood of racism or oppression ending. One common response is a sense of incredulity about the prevalence of oppression in today’s society. When racism is brought up, some White people typically respond that racism is a part of history and that ethnic minorities should move on and not be so sensitive to racial issues. Public and violent acts of oppression, such as the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin killings, remind us all of the continued presence of bigotry and prejudice. While ethnic minorities may be reminded of the importance of being prepared for racism, some Whites may perceive the experiences as isolated events that do not represent the majority’s feelings. In many instances, the stories presented by clients stir up feelings of frustration that racism will never end. Some clinicians feel some level of powerlessness and helplessness while listening to the clients’ experiences. Powerlessness often serves as a parallel process for the clients who may also be experiencing depression, anxiety, and feelings of hopelessness. Clinicians who experience these feelings may help clients in reflecting on their feelings of helplessness, which validates the experience of the clients and possibly opens the door for further dialogue on personal responsibility and the development of coping mechanisms for oppression.
Race of the Therapist
Some reactions may occur based on the racial background of the client–counselor dyad. White counselors may feel some guilt over being a member of an oppressive group. This sense of guilt may lead to feelings of sadness for the client and attempts to overcompensate for the actions of others. The therapists may feel that clients will blame them for oppression and that the clients may harbor feelings of anger and resentment toward them. This may be a reality for nonvoluntary clients who view the therapist as part of the court and social services systems. This may lead therapists to treat clients in a gingerly fashion, and therapists may avoid confronting clients over tough issues that need to be addressed in treatment. At an extreme, clinicians may engage in unethical treatment of clients by allowing problematic behaviors to go unreported to maintain rapport with clients.
Counselors who are the same race but at a different stage of identity development from the client may experience anger over the client’s stories and may suggest problem-solving skills that promote assertiveness or sometimes aggression as a reaction to acts of oppression. Although endorsing active problem solving may be helpful to some clients, if the client is experiencing depression, he or she may need to resolve those feelings before moving to problem solving. Same-race therapists may also feel powerlessness and helplessness and may be unable to provide solutions as they experience memories of their own experiences of oppression. Same-race clinicians may also experience overidentification with their clients and project their feelings onto the clients’ experiences. When therapists begin to overidentify with their clients, they lose the ability to feel and express empathy as they work to attempt to take care of their own emotions. Clinicians at this point often become frustrated when clients deny the emotional reactions that the client is experiencing. Clinicians of the same race or ethnicity may have difficulty distinguishing between behaviors within the cultural norms and those that are pathological. Finally, same-race counselors may ignore pathological behaviors in an attempt to foster solidarity within the race. The example of the reactions to the Anita Hill trials exemplified this notion: Some African Americans were angry that Anita Hill decided to come forward with her accusations against Clarence Thomas, believing that it should have been kept private to protect an African American man. Many counselors, for example, may ignore signs of abuse to prevent another member of their race from entering social service systems.
Toolbox Activity—Julie
Three Butch’s Story Who Am I?
Developing racial identity can be complicated for individuals because they must balance self-perceptions, stereotypes and biases, and socialization processes. Racial identity development is more difficult for people with multiple or mixed racial backgrounds. Biracial individuals are the offspring of individuals with differing racial heritage. Interracial is the term given to describe the marital process, and multiracial, a newer term, describes individuals from two or more heritages (Kerwin & Ponterotto, 1995). The idea of the existence of mixed racial heritage has been troublesome. The prevailing notion was—and still is today—that individuals from mixed racial heritages, particularly Whites and Blacks, would have difficulty functioning. It was also believed that mixing the races would “dilute” Whiteness, leading to an inferior race or group of people. In the early 1800s, interracial marriages began to be outlawed, and it was not until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled these laws as unconstitutional (Kerwin & Ponterotto, 1995). Complicating the identity process were laws that defined the notion of race, which varied from state to state, including the one-drop rule for individuals with African heritage, which stated that a person with any African ancestry was categorized as African or African American (Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2003). The consequences of the negative reactions to racial mixing included the development of a social status classification system, leading to intragroup differences and judgmental attitudes. Biracial individuals were often forced to choose a racial group, but some biracial people attempted to “pass” and be accepted as Whites. The tragic mulatto syndrome, personified in the movie Imitation of Life, was a by-product of the attitudes toward biracial individuals; it includes the dilemma of having to choose a racial identity, often as a result of denying a part of one’s racial heritage (Kerwin & Ponterotto, 1995). It should be noted that this process included not only the denial of part of one’s own heritage, but also a denial of family members or associates.
The 2010 U.S. Census data show that 9 million individuals (2.9% of total population) reported two or more races in their background, an increase of 6.8 million reported in 2000 (Jones & Bullock, 2012). Although historically more attention has been given to White–Black intermarriages, the 2010 census categorized 57 groupings for multiracial individuals. The multiracial category is expanding, and clinicians may be confronted with more biracial and multiracial clients. It is more acceptable today to claim multiracial heritage; however, individuals still need to engage in the complex task of identity development. Butch’s story describes this complex process that occurs with people of mixed racial heritage. The reader should pay close attention to the negotiation process that must occur with each component of Butch’s racial background, including acceptance from various racial groups, pressures to accommodate to particular racial groups, and intragroup oppression from racial groups.
Butch’s Story
Who am I? What race am I? What nationality am I? Where do I fit into American society? Where can I find total acceptance? For most of my 47 years, I have struggled to find answers to these questions. I am an American of multiracial descent and culture. In this aspect, I am not very different from many Americans. The difference for me is that I have always felt an urge to feel and live the intermingling of blood that runs through my veins. American society has a way of forcing multiracial and biracial people to choose one race over the other. I personally feel this pressure every time I have to complete an application form with instructions to check just one box for race category. My own racial and cultural background consists of American Indian from two nations, Lahkota and Creek; African American; Italian American; and Puerto Rican. I am Spanish speaking with some knowledge of the Lahkota language. Possessing such a diverse background has often placed me in a position to hear many insensitive and racist remarks from one group to another; obviously, I have often been the target. In the eyes of White Italian people, I am viewed as a Black person. Blacks often view me as a weak and tainted half-breed. Indians have cautiously accepted or rejected me. The Puerto Rican community has offered the most acceptance.
A family tree would be next to impossible in our family, largely due to secrets (skeletons), question marks, and taboo subjects. The matriarch of our family was my maternal grandmother, Anna, who was half Black and half Creek Indian. My paternal grandfather was Ogalla Lahkota from the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. He was called Jimbo, which was short for Jim Bull. I am told that my mother’s father was an Italian immigrant who lived in a “little Italy” neighborhood. My father’s mother was Black. Her husband, Jimbo, called her Pipe because she always smoked a pipe. So when all of this was finally sorted out, it looked like this: My mother, Laura, is one fourth Black, one fourth Creek, and half Italian. My father is half Black and half Ogalla Lahkota.
The Italian side of our family was—and to a large extent remains—a mystery seldom discussed in our family. My mother and her siblings were born and raised in a “little Italy” neighborhood. At about the age of 12 or 13 years, I learned of our Italian ancestry. I received this information through one of our family historians, or storytellers, our Aunt June. Aunt June was one of my mother’s younger sisters. Aunt June was very fair skinned with dark eyes and hair. She never had children of her own, and she also had a drinking problem, which I realized after I was grown. While I don’t believe she told us everything about the family, she did let us in on many family secrets. Probably because she never had children of her own, it seemed like she really enjoyed spending time with my siblings and me. We have fond memories of Aunt June babysitting for us on the weekends. She loved to watch horror flicks with us, which we thought was very cool since no other adult that we knew did. We would all lie down on the floor together, eating popcorn, enjoying all the old original Frankenstein, Wolfman, Dracula, and Mummy flicks. After the movie, Aunt June would tell us old family stories of when she and her brothers and sisters were young children. Sometimes after drinking a few beers, Aunt June would cross the forbidden line and tell us things that my mother and her other sisters had secretly kept hidden in the closet. I can remember my mother and her other two sisters pulling Aunt June in the bedroom, closing the door, and scolding her about talking too much. (Of course, as many children do, we eavesdropped.)
Well, one day, Aunt June pulled out this old wallet-size photo of a darkhaired White man with a Hitler-style moustache. She said to me, “This is your grandfather, my father. You can keep this picture, but don’t let my sisters know.” Aunt June later went on to tell me that my grandfather was an Italian immigrant from Calabria, Italy. Aunt June didn’t seem to know much more about him. With a very sad face and with tears welling in her eyes, she told me that she never knew her father. Even though I never asked her, I always wondered why she chose me to keep the picture instead of my brothers and sisters. In some ways, learning about my grandfather helped me to make sense of some things. Between the ages of 5 and 7 years, I began to perceive and question the differences in skin colors, which were quite evident in our family. My mother and Aunt June were very fair skinned, while Candace, my mother’s oldest sister, and Lily were brown and olive. Their brother, Tony, had black skin. So after learning about my Italian grandfather, it took me back to a question I asked my mother about the age of 7 years. I was gazing at a picture of my mother’s brother, Tony, when I thought to myself, “If Tony is my mother’s brother, then why are they virtually opposite colors?” So, as a child, I popped this question to my mother: “If Uncle Tony is your brother, then why is he so dark, and you are so white?” My mother responded with a quick sharp slap to my face and told me, “It’s not your business, and Tony is my brother, and that’s that.” As I was to learn later in life, this was just the beginning of hard questions to come with no easy answers.
When I was about 11 years old, our family moved to an extension of the “little Italy” neighborhood. While the Italian community didn’t exactly throw a welcoming party for us when we first moved there, all in all we were not harassed. We had some Italian childhood friends, although I don’t remember being invited into many homes. Our family would go on living here for the next 6 years—years that would challenge our multiracial status like never before.
Ironically, the very neighborhood my mother had been raised in, “little Italy,” claimed me as a beating victim. One day, possessing an urge to visit my mother’s old neighborhood, I was approached by two grown Italian men who had been standing on their front porch stairs. One of the men appeared to be in his 50s, the other in his mid-20s, probably father and son. The younger man had a metal pipe in his hand. They asked me what the hell I was doing around here. At the time, I was 18 years old and had this feeling of invincibility. So, as they approached me, I stood my ground in defiance and proceeded to ultimately receive a beating that cost me 10 stitches on my head, along with numerous bumps and bruises, mostly on my arms, which I had used to ward off some of the blows aimed at my head. I was to learn later from the “Gents,” a Puerto Rican street gang that they had been warring with some of the Italians. This of course answered why they had called me a dirty Puerto Rico Gent as I was being beaten. Somehow, after what seemed like an eternity, I was able to escape, where I later was picked up, bleeding and dazed, by two plainclothes detectives. After showing the detectives the house where my assailants entered after the beating, I was driven to the emergency room. Shortly before leaving the hospital, I was told by the returning detectives that they couldn’t locate the perpetrators. It was apparent that I was the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was this incident that created a deep hatred on my part toward Italians. In a sense, it was also the beginning of self-hatred for the Italian side of myself. Afterward, whenever anyone asked what my ethnicity was, I would not mention the Italian blood, which ran through my veins.
I also had trouble with my African American heritage. As the neighborhoods in which we lived continued to become more Black, it became increasingly difficult to cope. My oldest brother, Landon, was forever getting beaten up. The Black girls thought he was gorgeous, which didn’t help to ease the hatred that the Black males had toward my brother. Landon was a star athlete in track, basketball, and baseball. Since Landon didn’t hang out in the neighborhood in which we lived, I was put in the uneasy position of trying to protect my younger brother, Paul. We were always getting socked on because we weren’t quite the same as our friends, according to them. I was, quite frankly, afraid to fight Blacks. The blacker they were, the more afraid I was to fight. I remember being told on numerous occasions that my family was physically weak because we were mixed.
There was one kid in our neighborhood that happened to be our friend, sometimes. But whenever he felt like beating up on two little light-skinned curly-haired boys, there my younger brother and I were, ready to be someone’s doormat. One day, like so many others, he felt like taking his rage out on us, so he began beating me up. Paul ran home to get our mother. During the beating, I saw my mother coming, so I knew I had to find some courage to fight back, even though at the same time I was glad that my rescue was on the way. When my mother arrived, she shouted out to me, “Don’t you stand there and let him beat you up. Fight back!” Well, I suddenly got this renewed energy and courage and began to try to turn the tide. Unfortunately, it was not to be. I was afraid. I was totally lacking in confidence. I was a victim, buying into the belief that, because of my mixed blood, I was not Black enough; I could not and would not overcome my adversary. It would be years before I would grow to understand and confront my fears.
Another incident that occurred when I was about 12 or 13 years old would leave another deep wound in my already shaken and mixed-up mind. My siblings and I had made friends with the new Black kids who had moved into the neighborhood. At first it seemed that they were very eager to make friends with us. We all seemed to get along well, and we hung out and played together often. One day I got into a fight, for reasons I don’t recall, with this kid that everyone else called a nerd. Franky, as he was called, certainly wasn’t very popular; he wasn’t even part of our little group that regularly hung out together. As I was pinning him down to the ground in a straddle position, I couldn’t actually believe it, but it appeared I was winning the fight. Franky meanwhile was swearing at me, telling me that as soon as he got up he was going to kill me. Suddenly, my friends (or so I thought), who had been standing in a circle around us watching, began shouting, “Get up, Franky! You can beat this little light-skinned nigger’s ass any day!” At that point, the little confidence and courage I had gained was quickly destroyed. As they continued urging Franky on, I began to panic, and Franky started to sense my panic. He began struggling even harder, even though my growing fear was the only thing that gave me strength to keep Franky subdued.
When I looked up at what had turned into a mob, all I could see was hateful faces, salivating for my ridicule and defeat. In desperation, I scanned the crowd for a sympathetic, helping face. And then, bingo! There it was—the face that seemed to say, “Pity you! What can I do?” Speaking low, hoping that the mob wouldn’t hear, I asked this person if he could go and bring my mother back. The person nodded slightly indicating that he would. At the same time, some of the other kids had heard my request and began to tease me and laugh at me. Unfortunately, my would-be messenger was physically threatened and ordered to stay put. About that time, my mother stepped out on the terrace and saw the incident. She rushed down to get me. My ordeal was over, though the fear, pain, and humiliation was for me very real. I was in shock—I really thought they were my friends. After the incident, I stayed inside for about 2 weeks. I was very hurt and embarrassed. But eventually I would go back out and try to be part of the group. I knew I needed to try to fit in some way. It would be difficult because I certainly couldn’t change my looks. Why did I go back to these kids, who I knew hated me for who I was? Simply put, I had no choice. It was either adapt or stay locked up at home. I wanted and needed to be accepted. It was at this point in my life that I really wondered why I couldn’t have been born Black—Black meaning black in skin color, hair texture, facial features, everything.
From this point, it was pretty much open season on my family and me. At times, things seemed to go well with my friends. Friends? We would play basketball, softball, and follow the leader, and sometimes we would just hang out on each other’s front porches. But when things got boring or the right situation presented itself, my family would become a target again. I remember one day we were all sitting out on the front porch, and my mother was walking down the street. As she was going up the stairs to our apartment, one of the guys asked, “Hey Butchie! Ain’t your mother White?” Knowing that I needed to fit in, I answered back, “No!” They all laughed in response to my answer and said I was lying. Being very sensitive, I lowered my head and went home.
In the fall of 1963, I began my freshman year at a high school that had a Black student population of about 95%. There were 6 or 7 White students, about 5 Asian students, and approximately 15 to 20 Puerto Rican students. Academics aside, the school was primarily known for its top athletics teams. It was also known for its violence. With my shy, sensitive, introverted personality, I felt even less than a number. During my entire 4 years of high school, I was never able to fit in. My freshman year I decided to take Spanish. I was already partly fluent due to our family’s early experience with the Puerto Rican culture. I began learning Spanish at the age of 6 from my mother’s fiancé, who had moved to the states from Puerto Rico. I did so well the first year that I was immediately placed in honors Spanish for my remaining 3 years of high school. I struck up a friendship with another student in Spanish class, Sue. Sue was racially mixed, part Dominicano, part Santee Sioux, and part Black. We were the most fluent speakers in honors Spanish and often shared our experiences of trying to fit in. Needless to say, our experiences mirrored each other.
By my junior year, I was able to make friends with a Puerto Rican student, Rosa. Rosa in turn introduced me to the Puerto Rican connection or body of students. I was received very graciously, with open arms. Like myself, the other Puerto Ricans had been beaten up and harassed to and from school. They told me to walk with them to school and invited me to sit at the two lunch tables they had assigned themselves to. Sometimes, I would go out for lunch. There was a small family-owned restaurant that served Puerto Rican food, Mexican food, and the traditional student’s fare: hotdogs and hamburgers. The owner’s stepdaughter, Cristina, a student from my school, also helped out part-time. I began eating there frequently. Cristina and I seemed to be attracted to each other, began dating, and moved in together. We would later become common-law husband and wife, living together for 16 years. By the time I began dating Cristina, I was totally immersed in the Puerto Rican culture but still tried to relate to the African American side of me.
In my second year of living with Cristina, I began looking for something to connect to. This was a time of soul searching for me. Politically there was a lot going on. The late 1960s and early 1970s was an era of civil strife and unrest. There was the Black Power movement, SDS, the Weatherman, the second battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, and the assassinations of King and Kennedy. The list goes on and on. The drug culture was also in full bloom. I had started to affiliate myself with the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican revolutionary group. I would sometimes go to their meetings and help pass out revolutionary literature. It was also a time of the Back to Africa movement. Afros and Dashikis were commonplace. We were all sporting huge Afros. In the 1970s, the African movement struck me as very exciting. I actually felt more of a closeness or kinship with Africans than I did with American Blacks. To me, African Americans were a lost and deculturalized people, segregated from everyone else for so long that anyone different was deserving of being set upon. At any rate, the African thing was very exciting to me. Cristina and I began wearing African clothes and sporting big Afros. I went out and bought a bunch of African records. Later on, I purchased two congas and would go out and beat them with a group of drummers that would congregate in the summer at various beaches. I even wound up giving some of my children African names.
Sometimes, we would visit some of my cousin Roy’s closest friends to smoke weed and listen to African music. At first, everything would seem fine. But after a while we would get little side cracks thrown our way, things like “You guys aren’t Black enough! If you moved to Africa you wouldn’t be accepted.” One of Roy’s friends, Tim, had a girlfriend named Kenya who saw herself as the African spokesperson (whatever that’s supposed to mean). Kenya was very black, with a very short natural hairdo, and she actually looked like she was Nigerian. She would always make some negative comments about Cristina. Kenya would ask Cristina why she was wearing an Afro since Cristina was Puerto Rican. Cristina’s shyness exceeded my own, so I usually had to talk up for her. I explained that Cristina’s father was dark-skinned Puerto Rican. I also told how African slaves had been taken to Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. Afterward, Kenya, along with other members of the group would tell us not to speak Spanish. (Cristina and I would speak Spanish to each other at times.) Eventually, the negative comments escalated. One day, Kenya told Roy to tell me not to bring Cristina to the group since she wasn’t Black. When I angrily called Kenya up to question her about the comment, she added, “You and your cousin Roy are lucky we let you half-breeds in.” When I told Roy what Kenya said, he passed it off by saying I was too sensitive, saying Kenya was just joking. Well, that was the last time Cristina and I set foot in their house. But apparently I hadn’t learned my lesson.
There was a new revolutionary group of Blacks who were conducting educational and revolutionary seminars. My cousin Roy had attended a few of these meetings and was very excited. One day he asked me to go with him. It sounded very appealing, so I brought a friend of my mine named Ricardo. Ricardo was from Puerto Rico and had been in the United States about a year. Ricardo spoke very little English, although he understood more than he could speak. As we entered the building and were waiting in line to be searched, I was explaining to Ricardo in Spanish what the meeting was about. Just then, one of the security guys pointed to Ricardo and said to me, “This guy can’t come in!” When I asked why, he told me “This is only for Blacks.” I then tried to explain that Ricardo was Puerto Rican with some African heritage. The security guard responded by saying, “You have to be all Black to come in here!” I responded by saying that I wasn’t all Black, so I wouldn’t go in either. Roy and a couple of his friends went inside, while Ricardo and I waited in the front lobby. Since we all had all ridden in the same car, we had no choice. Not long after, Roy’s older brother, Randy, showed up. Randy was concerned about our interest in these revolutionary groups and had decided to follow us. When we explained why we were sitting outside, Randy immediately went into the meeting, interrupting the speaker by calling them Black racists who were no better than White racists for refusing Ricardo admittance. Roy, of course, disagreed with his older brother and told Randy that he was off base. Randy thought Roy was completely wrong to have entered the place when Ricardo, our friend, was not allowed in. Randy then told his brother that he was a sucker for punishment, that he was nothing but a mixed-breed high-yellow chump who would never be accepted by Blacks. I agreed in heart.
It was about this time that I began to minimize my social contact with Blacks. I was bewildered, rejected, and abused. On top of all of this, I was quite simply tired of the mistreatment. I began to take a close look in the mirror. Here I was telling Blacks that I was the same as they were with no takers. They saw me as different. I thought to myself, “If they see me as different, then maybe I am different.” It hit me right in the face. The coffee was there for me to smell. From that point on, I was never to refer to myself as a Black person. If someone were to ask if I was Black, I would answer by saying, “No. I’m brown. I’m a person of color” or “I’m multiracial.” I was comfortable with this. I knew at that point I would no longer allow someone else to tell me who I was. As a human being, I felt it was my God-given right to say who I was. Unfortunately, what I knew right then was that I certainly didn’t feel Black anymore. The negative experiences I suffered had pushed the Black side of me to the farthest recesses of my mind, body, and soul, and at the time I wasn’t sorry for it.
My very first Indian contact began with my maternal grandmother. We always referred to her as simply “Mama.” On the other hand, we called our mother, Laura, by her name. Because our grandmother lived with us from a very young age, we more or less copied our mother and her sisters when referring to our grandmother. Grandmother Jenna was half Black and half Musgogee Creek. Mama’s physical appearance pretty much typified a Black woman, although her demeanor was very Indian. Mama often talked of her father, who was of the Eastern Band of the Creek Nation. The Creeks were originally from the southeastern portion of the United States, particularly Georgia. Somehow my grandmother’s father settled for a time in Kentucky, although he later went to live with his disconnected relatives in Oklahoma. I can vividly remember the various American Indian foods my grandmother would make, food that today is commonly referred to as soul food. Corn pones, hominy soup, succotash, grits, okra, sassafras tea, Indian sumac lemonade, and wild mustard greens are just a few of the dishes my grandmother made that originally came from the southern Indian nations. I am often surprised that many African Americans who to this day still eat many of these foods are unaware that they are gifts borrowed from Indian America.
While my grandmother viewed herself as Indian and Black, neither my mother nor her three sisters did. I think to this very day they have more or less seen themselves as Black, which in my opinion complicated their lives in regard to the racial prejudice and harassment they endured. In contrast, my mother’s lone brother, Tony, also viewed himself as Indian and Black. Uncle Tony was the first male figure in my life who inspired me to dance. Because Tony was always traveling across the country, we rarely got to see him. But when he visited, he always performed powwow Indian dances for us. There was one dance he would perform called the stomp dance, which, according to him, originated from the intermarriage of Creeks and Black runaway slaves. This was my first inspiration to dance. Uncle Tony was my second inspiration and influence in regard to the Indian side of our family. The other person who was very influential in instilling Indian culture in my life was my paternal grandfather, Jim Bull, otherwise known as Jimbo. Jimbo was a member of the Oglala band of Teton Lahkota, otherwise known as Sioux. Jimbo was born on the Pine Ridge Oglala reservation around the turn of the century. I was told by a cousin that his tribal name was Short Bull, although the name Short was taken out somewhere along the way. My grandfather’s agency name was Johnson. An agency name for Indians is like a plantation name was for African American slaves. My grandfather actually lived between three homes: Pine Ridge, South Dakota; Wisconsin; and Chicago. Jimbo in stature was a short man, with olive skin and black wavy hair, which, on the few occasions I saw him, he usually wore in a single ponytail. Because of family infighting, I can count my visits with him on two hands. Even still, the impression he left on me was obviously very strong.
Once when my mother was in the hospital, I remember my grandfather taking me up by Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I can remember us going to a lake, where he baited some fishing lines, and after throwing them in, began to walk through the fields gathering plants, which I was to later learn were for medicinal purposes. Before gathering, he always prayed in his language and left some tobacco. Many tribes use tobacco as an offering to God. I didn’t know what I was gathering (I was only 8 or 9 years old at the time). I simply gathered the plants he pointed out. What was amazing was what occurred years later as a young adult. I had always enjoyed the outdoors. When I was about 19 years old, I got this incredible interest and urge to gather and use medicinal plants. Once my own children were old enough, whenever we would go to the woods, I would have them help me gather as well. I continued through the years to follow my urge for medicinal knowledge by studying tribal medicinal lore. To this very day, at the age of 47, I continue to forage for wild plants. For each of the four seasons, there are different plants to gather. And just like my grandfather and grandmother, I carry on the tradition of always leaving an offering of tobacco. Foraging for wild plants is cathartic; for me it is equal to worshipping at a church. There is an inner feeling of peace connecting me to a closer understanding of the creator of life. The physical act of gathering brings on a sense of spiritual and physical healing. When I was about 35 years old, it suddenly occurred to me that I was continuing this tradition of gathering left from my grandparents because I had received a calling. Of all my brothers, sisters, and cousins, why me? In fact, neither of my grandfathers told me that I was the one to carry the torch, and yet now when I gather, it’s as if I can sense their approving presence. I would soon learn that this was just the beginning of reconnecting with the disconnected Indian side of our family.
Because my cousin Randy was older than me by about 3 years, he got an opportunity to spend more time with our grandfather. In this way Randy was able to pass a lot of the wisdom and knowledge from our grandparents to me. Randy was very aware of his position as an older grandson. Strangely enough, Randy and I, of the grandchildren, were the only ones who tried to stay connected to our Indian family. We saw ourselves as Indian. The rest of our brothers, sisters, and cousins were very aware that we were part Indian, but they simply thought of themselves as Black. Randy in a sense inspired me to stay connected. During our teen years at summer camp in Indiana, Randy and I performed dances for the campers at night around a fire. We put on our homemade dance regalia and even painted our horses, which we rode into camp bareback. After our camp days, I started to drift away from the things Indian; of course there were lots of distractions. I graduated from high school, started working, and was busy raising a family.
I was also experimenting with drugs while at the same time involving myself with the antigovernment, civil unrest scene, which occupied me into the late 1970s. I’ll never forget the date: November 1979. That was the year I reconnected with my Indian self. It was a Friday afternoon. I was at home with my children when my cousin Randy stopped by. My children were 5, 7, and 8 years of age. Randy said, “Come with me and bring the kids. I want to show you something.” We got in the car and drove to the National Armory. When we entered the armory, I was completely awestruck. I had never seen so many Indians in one place in my life.
Randy had taken me to the American Indian Center Powwow. My children and I stood for a long time and watched the various dancers dance around the arena. As I watched, it seemed as if I were dreaming. I immediately thought of my grandparents. I suddenly felt their presence. It felt as though I had been lost for many years and had finally found home. I had arrived at the circle. Randy and I looked at each other. He had brought me here because it was his duty to do so. We didn’t need to say anything to each other. We knew that our grandparents had entrusted in us the responsibility of not allowing our Indian family to wither away and die. By the enthusiasm I saw in the faces of my children, I sensed that they, too, felt a strong relationship to the dancers, the sacred drummer, and the circle.
When we left the armory that night, I knew right then that the cultural and spiritual aspects of my life would be greatly affected. Through my cousin Randy, I found out about the American Indian Center (AIC). The AIC was created to address the needs of American Indians who were relocating from reservations. At the monthly fundraiser powwows held at the AIC, there was also a potluck dinner where various participants brought dishes from home. For about 2 years, I brought food for the potlucks. The meals were usually eaten before the dancing. Afterward, someone from the powwow committee publicly thanked all the people who brought food or helped to serve. It wasn’t long before I noticed my name was never mentioned. At first, I thought maybe I was accidentally overlooked. But after about 6 or 7 months of attending the fundraiser, it became apparent that the snub was intentional. At that point I began to feel a familiar sense of rejection very similar to the rejection Blacks had tossed my way—except there was one difference in the style of the rejection. The Blacks had rejected and harassed me openly and directly. They were vocal in their feelings toward me and right to the point. In contrast, many of the Indian people at AIC rejected me silently. Usually nothing was ever said directly to my children or me. This in itself was not surprising or new to me. It was the type of stony silence and penetrating looks I can remember from my grandparents. They didn’t need to physically discipline us when we stepped out of line. We knew what the look and silence symbolized. But I quickly realized how naive I had been to enter into the Indian community as a mixed-blood, thinking that they would be waiting to accept me with open arms. It was indeed another painful eye-opener for me.
As in the past, instead of confronting the resistance, I slowly began to retreat. There were some people who never spoke to us—some of the elders included—although I remember other elders who didn’t have too much to say but would occasionally give me an approving nod when my children would dance. One of the AIC employees, Ron, a Vietnam veteran and a member of the Mesqualic (Sac & Fox) tribe of Tama, Iowa, turned out to be one of my biggest supporters.
Ron began telling me more about the tribal conflicts that had been going on for years at the center. The vast majority of the people who frequent the center are from the Midwest—generally Ojibwa, Winnebagos, Menominees, Potawatomies, and Ottawas. At any given time, other tribes come from farther locations, such as Lahkotas, Mesquakie, Choctaw, Iroquois, and Navajos. But according to Ron, it had always been the Ho-Chunks, or Winnebagos, who controlled the center, to the disdain of the other tribes. In fact, he said that the Ho-Chunks, as far as he could remember, always had this aura that they were better than other Indians. According to Ron, the Ho-Chunks way of thinking was “We’re more Indian than you, and we have a monopoly on everything that’s Indian. Our ways and customs are more sacred than yours.” After receiving this information, I began to notice that many of the people from the center who had given my family a cold shoulder indeed were Ho-Chunks. Ron told me as he ended our conversation, “Don’t think the Ho-Chunks dislike you and your family because you’re of mixed blood. Those people are prejudiced against anyone who isn’t Ho-Chunk.”
Like Whites who romanticize Indian people, in a sense I too learned that I was also guilty of romanticizing the Indian side of our family, wondering why I couldn’t have been born a full-blood, naively thinking maybe Indian people were perfect, without blemish or flavors. My yearning for Indianess was not one of nostalgia, but very much like a homeless person searching for a niche in society. It was what I felt the strongest. Likewise, when the door was slammed in my face, the hurt and pain ran deep. Reality, however, boldly revealed that Indians, like all people, are indeed not perfect. Nor were Indian people perfect before the coming of the White man to these shores. That Whites conquered, and Indians became conquered, is proof enough of imperfections on both sides. On the other hand, it would be safe to say that Indian peoples had fewer imperfections before the White man’s arrival. The broken treaties (lies), theft of ancestral lands, the rape and plunder of villages, the implementation of the reservation system, genocide, and the deculturalization process of Indian peoples certainly adds up to just one word—colonialism. The results of colonialism produced things that had never before been recorded, seen, or heard: alcoholism, tuberculosis, fetal alcohol syndrome, unemployment, incest, domestic abuse, child abuse, tribal infighting, fatherless children, reservation and street gangs, and the list goes on. So, with all this in mind, the AIC—indeed, the Indian community—is heir to the results of colonialism from its inception. As I began to learn more about the history of my Indian and African American ancestors, I became less bitter but not less hurt.
Content Themes
Butch’s journey demonstrates several important components of racial identity development. There are moments that are quite painful in his story, suggesting that identity development is difficult for biracial individuals. The first component is the importance of examining the multiple contexts in which identity development occurs. The second component is the role of the family, particularly the role of socialization and the family role in confronting and dealing with oppression. The most important component of Butch’s story is the nature of intragroup differences. This includes the importance of the sense of acceptance from individuals and cultural groups on identity development and psychological functioning.
Contextual Dimensions
Butch’s story illustrates the importance of examining the context of development. The ecosystem framework developed by Bronfenbrenner (1977) is a useful model for understanding the multiple influences. Multiracial individual’s identity often shifts according to the situation or context (Renn, 2008). Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Butch’s experiences with the microsystem were prominent. He and his siblings were consistently teased by neighborhood children and were the victims of physical violence, allegedly due to race. Like many multiracial youth, Butch experienced rejection from both majority (Italian, White) and minority (African American, Ho-Chunk) groups (Shih, Bonam, Sanchez, & Peck, 2007). Butch was accused of not being “Black enough” by both neighborhood children as a child and then by members of an organization as a young adult. These experiences contributed to feelings of shame and doubt about his racial identity. His family seemed to have a more tacit influence on his racial identity. Although his mother was aware of the teasing and violence against him, her response seems to have been more related to his self-defense and protection rather than to messages about his race. The family, according to Butch, did not have overt discussions about race and culture. In fact, his Italian heritage was cloaked in secrecy. It is also not clear whether his mother helped to intervene with his sense of isolation in high school. The active components within the microsystem seemed to contribute to Butch’s difficulties in identity development.
The school system, particularly the high school, reinforced mainstream values, and Butch continued to struggle with experiences of oppression within the school, along with feelings of isolation and rejection from his peers. Community organizations including AIC had more of an influence on Butch’s adult identity though, again, in a negative fashion. It is also important to understand Butch’s development in light of the current events of his time and the cultural ideology within society, the exosystem, and the chronosystem. Butch experienced adolescence and young adult development during the era of the civil rights movement. Butch was able to experience the sense of liberation and racial pride and made attempts to take pride in his Black heritage. Ironically, during the time that he was attempting to be empowered, he experienced within-group oppression and was accused of not being truly Black and therefore not worthy of participating in the movement or empowerment. His story reminds us of how important it is to consider the context in identity development and psychological functioning of individuals.
Family Socialization Patterns
The role of the family is an important consideration in examining the role of race in lives and is often critical in understanding identity functioning of biracial individuals. Butch’s story provides an example of the complications that can occur when families have not only different racial backgrounds, but also differing values. Butch made attempts to be reconciled with and integrate each of the components of his background into his identity. His family did not have overt discussions about racial heritage. Butch learned about his Italian side from an aunt who secretly told him about his grandfather. For Butch, this answered several questions, particularly the variation in skin colors. When he tried to follow up with questions, however, his mother slapped him, ending his questioning. Butch felt that he could not continue to pursue further questions on this topic. It also seems as if the family did not have overt conversations on his Native American heritage. His cousin introduced him to the Native American culture and encouraged him with his dancing. Yet it seems as if he and his cousin were the only ones interested in learning about the heritage and the culture.
What is interesting about Butch’s story is that acts of physical violence occurred due to racial differences. Yet although his mother was aware of the fights, there was no indication that overt discussions about racial issues took place. Butch experienced some very real threats and a sense of social isolation. Neither the nuclear nor the extended family engaged in a socialization process that might have served as a buffer to some of the discrimination. One wonders whether Butch would have been so vulnerable if he had been shielded from some of the oppression or given coping mechanisms or resources to deal with them.
Intragroup Differences
Due to historical factors around multiracial heritage, a caste system has developed involving race and racial group membership. Biracial or multiracial individuals often have to choose a racial identity or affiliation, sometimes at the expense of neglecting or denying another. Because outward appearances are often our first connection to racial group membership, many multiracial individuals are identified based on skin color; hair color, texture, and length; or facial features (Renn, 2008), and this choice is often reinforced in families through favoritism. When Butch began to recognize and understand his multiracial heritage as a child, it seemed linked to the physical differences within the family. It is not clear whether siblings were more favored in Butch’s family because of physical appearance, but Butch’s skin color led to some of the neighborhood fights. Because of the physical differences between Butch and other family members, he became an easy target for intragroup oppression. African American children teased him because his mother appeared White and because he was not “Black enough.”
The caste system and forced racial group affiliation led to intragroup differences. For example, during slavery, the mulatto children, by-products of slave owners and slaves, experienced preferential treatment and did not have to labor as hard in the fields (Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2003). Issues of superiority were established as people who were closer to White in terms of racial mixing and skin color and features were given more status and clout. The intragroup difference affected identity for people because both physical and psychological characteristics were used to determine group membership. One example of this consequence is the brown paper bag test African American civic organizations used to determine membership. Even today, there are notions of what constitutes membership within certain groups and the concept that people have to meet criteria to belong to a race. Butch was certainly caught up in this phenomenon. When he was a child, his and his mother’s skin color became the benchmark for group membership as African Americans. Because his mother appeared to be White, and Butch was biracial, this precluded his true membership. Butch theoretically could have compensated for the skin color issues through his behaviors, but he was also judged as not behaving Black enough. He did not receive socialization and encouragement from his family to learn to connect to his African American heritage and connect with his peers. Butch continued to be judged harshly when joining Black groups as an adult. When Butch joined the AIC and attempted to reconnect with his American Indian heritage, he experienced similar rejection based on his multiracial heritage. Only the Puerto Ricans in his high school accepted him openly, which may have led to his marriage to a Puerto Rican woman.
Self-Image
The development of identity is complex but more so for multiracial individuals. Kerwin and Ponterotto (1995) developed a model of identity development for multiracial individuals based on research. The first stage, preschool, includes low salience to racial heritage as a component of the self. Although Butch was confused about skin color as a child, he did not base his sense of self solely on racial group membership. Children in this stage are aware of physical differences in parents. The second stage, school age, occurs as individuals feel compelled to select a racial group for membership. Children in the school-age stage are often asked to identify their heritage and select a response usually based on parental messages. Butch’s journey through identity development reflects this stage as he, one by one, almost in a sequential fashion, attempts to explore his heritage and integrate it into his self-concept. Preadolescence and adolescence, the third stage, is characterized by the growing awareness of the social connotations of race and is usually triggered by specific environmental circumstances. Butch experienced rejection by Italians, African Americans, and American Indians. This rejection led him at some points in his life to deny his Italian and Black heritage and to feel angry with members of these groups. What complicated this process for Butch was his exposure to the negative stereotypes and biases against certain groups. Butch appears to have internalized the stereotypes, sometimes leading him to be more vulnerable to assault. For example, regarding fights with neighborhood children, he reports he did not have the confidence to fight them because he thought Blacks were stronger. This of course denies a part of his own heritage. The internalized oppression may have made it easier to reject parts of himself.
The fourth stage in the model occurs in college and young adulthood, as individuals continue with immersion in one culture due to rejection of another. Butch continued the exploration of his identity after high school and into early adulthood. Adulthood, the final stage, is characterized by the continuing integration of identity and an appreciation of a variety of cultural groups. Butch seems to have moved in this direction as he proudly proclaims his multiracial status and acknowledges all of his parts.
Cultural Homelessness
Butch experienced quite a bit of rejection from cultural groups represented in his family’s heritage. There was secrecy regarding his Italian heritage, and rejection from having mixed racial heritage from both African Americans and Native Americans. Butch’s identity process included attempts to integrate multiple components of his identity in a somewhat single-file fashion. Many multiracial individuals learn from their experiences that race is socially constructed as a result of their identity development process (Shih et al., 2007). Children who experience multiple cultural frameworks during identity development are at risk for cultural homelessness, the process of lacking cultural/ethnic group membership, including identification and emotional attachment (Hoersting & Jenkins, 2011; Vivero & Jenkins, 1999). When Butch first connected with his Native heritage, he reported that he felt as if he found something that ended his homelessness and that his sense of hurt was great when he felt rejected. Research suggests that cultural homelessness is associated with lower self-esteem and emotional detachment, particularly as the number of cross-cultural experiences increased.
Clinical Applications
This section explores the clinical applications from Butch’s story for counselors, including assessment, techniques and interventions to use in treatment, and countertransference concerns.
Assessment
The assessment of racial issues for multiracial individuals is similar to the concerns for individuals with a single racial heritage. Therapists should examine racial identity stages and understand how race intersects with other cultural variables, including social class and gender. More specific information should be assessed to determine how each racial group heritage influences identity development. The following questions are suggested:
What messages did you receive about each of your racial heritages?
Did you experience pressure to accept or deny any of your racial heritages from family members or peers?
Did you feel more accepted by one or more particular groups?
What historical information did you receive about your racial heritage?
What were the societal messages you received about your racial heritage?
Techniques and Interventions
Myths About Multiracial Individuals
There are three myths associated with being multiracial that should inform treatment and therapy (Kerwin & Ponterotto, 1995). The first myth is that of the tragic mulatto, the notion that multiracial individuals live marginalized lives because they are not fully accepted by any cultural or racial group. Butch’s story is a good example of this perspective because at each developmental time period in his life he attempts to reconcile his racial identity and is denied by each racial group. He reports feeling isolated and marginalized in his childhood neighborhood, in his high school, and by community organizations. Many biracial and multiracial individuals, however, are able to find acceptance and understanding from family and friends and are able to integrate each dimension of their heritage into their identity. Therapists should facilitate the integration of identities into self-concept as a goal with clients. The goal of clinicians should be to help clients acknowledge and honor each racial heritage (Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2003). Although therapists may not be able to foster acceptance by others, they can be instrumental in helping clients find appropriate support groups and resources. For example, when Butch felt rejected by members of the AIC, one of the leaders took him aside and explained the reactions of some of the members, thus depersonalizing the issue. Counselors may also be able to help clients find support groups for individuals of multiracial descent.
The second myth is that biracial individuals must choose one racial group. Historically, many were forced to choose one racial group by passing and denying their non-White racial heritage or by choosing a minority race and being rejected by Whites. Dominant society encouraged individuals to associate race in a dichotomous fashion (Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2003). Until the 2000 U.S. Census count, individuals were asked to check only one race. Today, the option of identifying with and associating with various groups exists, and more individuals are choosing this option (Jones & Bullock, 2012). Clinicians can help clients to research and understand the cultural heritage of both groups, working as cultural brokers (McGoldrick & Giordano, 1996). Clients can be encouraged to participate in and share rituals from one heritage with family members of the differing racial groups (Renn, 2008).
The third myth is the notion that multiracial individuals do not want to discuss their cultural heritage. Butch’s story highlights why the opposite view is so important. Many multiracial children have questions about their heritage, particularly because values, beliefs, and lifestyles of each racial group differ. This was not evident in Butch’s story, but often child-rearing difficulties arise based on different cultural values. While courting, a couple may agree to certain principles, child-rearing techniques, and values, but the actual birth of the children may change the priorities and focus. Families often experience more pressure from extended family members to maintain traditional cultural and racial activities (McGoldrick & Preto, 1984). Children often find themselves caught between the cultural struggles, which may influence identity development. Many multiracial children look for opportunities to discuss their racial heritage in an attempt to solidify their development. Rockquemore and Laszloffy (2003) recommend a relational-narrative approach to therapy to allow clients to be able to process and tell their stories.
Family and Racial Socialization Processes
Racial socialization is the process of helping racial minority children to develop positive self-images within an oppressive community. The racial socialization process is even more critical for people of multiracial descent. Therapists should be encouraged to discuss and dialogue with their clients about their racial heritage. The process is more complicated with multiple racial backgrounds because individuals need to be socialized to each of the cultural groups to which they belong. Individuals also need to understand the historical influences on and societal messages about interracial marriages. Finally, clients need to be socialized on intragroup oppression.
Countertransference
There are two areas in which countertransference may occur when working with multiracial clients: myths of multiracial persons, and client self-hatred. As with any other area, it is important for clinicians to monitor the personal reactions that arise when working with clients. Therapists should consider their own perspectives on interracial relationships before working with multiracial clients.
Myths and Misperceptions
One area of countertransference for clinicians working with multiracial clients is to become caught up by the complexity of identity development. It is important for therapists not to make the assumptions that their clients are experiencing the tragic mulatto syndrome, that clients live marginalized lives, and that they are not accepted by any group. It is true that multiracial clients may face rejection from racial groups. One reaction to Butch’s story is to be moved and feel pain from the rejection that he faced and to be anxious about the violence he experienced. Therapists may want to alleviate the pain clients experience from the rejection. This can lead to minimizing the rejection or attempting to make excuses for the other behaviors. Therapists may also be concerned that clients are forced to choose one group over another. Therapists may inadvertently encourage clients to choose one racial group to protect clients from the pain of rejection from another racial group. Although it may be a temporary solution to encourage clients to choose a nonrejecting group and to cut themselves off from groups that are rejecting, this has the long-term effect of clients denying a part of themselves. Clinicians must monitor the sadness they feel for their client so that they engage in empathy and not sympathy.
It is often believed that multiracial individuals do not want to discuss issues. In fact, multiracial individuals often have the experience of strangers asking, “What are you?” and having to explain their background. It is critical for multiracial clients to talk about their background because it influences their identity and functioning. Similar to individuals with single racial backgrounds, multiracial individuals may not discuss racial issues unless this is initiated by therapists. Avoiding racial discussions may be one way that therapists protect themselves from the secondary pain and discomfort of their clients. These conversations are even more important for therapists who are part of a rejecting racial group and for therapists with multiracial or multiethnic backgrounds.
Issues of Self-Hatred
Finally, therapists may be concerned with levels of self-hatred that their clients possess. When clients enter with depressive symptoms, including low self-esteem, issues of self-hatred may be easy to introduce as a treatment goal. However, there may be times in which the clients are not able to acknowledge their feelings. For example, when Butch is rejected by the African American group, he decides to reject that part of his heritage. If he were to enter treatment at that point, he might not recognize his rejection as being linked to internalized oppression or self-hatred. The therapist would then be caught in the dilemma of identifying a potential treatment goal that the client might not be willing to accept. Clinicians have to reconcile the ethical requirement of not imposing their own values and standards on clients with the need of promoting optimal functioning for their clients.
Toolbox Activity—Butch
Four Betsie’s Story I Am 100% Jewish
Less visible than race, ethnicity affects lifestyle, values, and identity, regardless of the individual’s awareness of its influence. People vary greatly in the way they experience their own ethnicity, from ignoring it to feeling pride or ambivalence or expressing rejection. In a clinical situation, ethnicity is often ignored as a variable (McGoldrick & Giordano, 1996) because it may be less visible or because it creates conflicts between family members or between the clinician and the client that may be difficult to address (Hays, 2001). In this chapter, Betsie tells us about her pride in her Jewish ethnic background, the pressures to conform to her ethnicity, and some of her struggles, including her job-related concerns, her experiences with substance abuse, and her romantic relationships. The reader is encouraged to continue reading in spite of the struggles to follow the complex web of Betsie’s family tree. It is important to pay attention to her descriptions of the flavors and noises during her childhood years. Following the story, a wide range of issues related to ethnicity are addressed in the content themes, clinical interventions, and countertransference sections, the perception of ethnicity of oppressed groups, the relationship between ethnicity and religion, and the reaction of clinicians of similar or different ethnicity than that of the client.
Betsie’s Story
I am 100% Jewish, having been born to two Jewish parents, both of them born to Jewish parents. I personally remember my two paternal great-grandmothers and have heard stories about their families and those of my two maternal great-grandmothers, whom I am named after, and their families. My family was seldom dull. I have always felt this way about my family history, which includes my life and the stories of my ancestors’ lives that have been passed down to me through my parents and grandparents. First, I only have three sides of family because my mother’s parents were uncle and niece. My grandfather, Bert, married his oldest sister’s daughter, Fran, my grandmother. This was in 1926, and they had to get married in Illinois because it was illegal in Indiana. One of the many reasons I do not consider myself a truly White person from European decent is because all of my family (the Frieds from Rumania, the Staks from Poland, and the Nobles from Russia) came to the United States because none of their home countries allowed Jews to become citizens. All three families came over between 1900 and 1905. They came both out of fear of the pogroms and for the economic opportunities, which were very limited for Jews in the aforementioned countries at that time. My maternal grandfather’s (Bert’s) mother died on the crossing from Rumania when my grandfather was only 3 months old, so he was raised by his oldest sister, Ellen, and her husband, Yeshiva, a butcher. It is a Jewish custom to name your children after dead relatives whom you were close to, and my middle name is Ethel, after Ellen, whom my mother knew as her grandmother. My maternal grandmother’s (Fran’s) parents were my grandfather’s next oldest sister, Bluma, and her husband, Abraham, who owned a jewelry and watch repair shop. My first name, Betsie, comes from Bluma. My mother considered naming me Bluma but could not see sticking her head out a window and calling “Bluma, come in for dinner!” So she Americanized Bluma to Betsie.
Bert was always in love with Fran (they were 6 years apart in age), and he used to write love letters to her. The mail in Bloomington used to get delivered twice a day, and Bert would write Fran a love letter in the morning on the streetcar on his way to school, where he got his master’s degree in education, and mail it from campus, and Fran would have it in the afternoon mail. She used to show my siblings and me the letters. My mother still has them, and I will eventually inherit them. One quote of my grandfather’s I will always remember is “I will always be your knight in shining armor, protecting you and our future family forever.” They were very much in love with each other, happily married for 63 years until their deaths, and I think it gave my mother a much romanticized notion of love; I know it did for me. They were both in very good physical shape. Fran wore midriff tops until she died at 83—and looked good. Until the end of their lives, when they took their afternoon 3-mile walk, they did it holding hands. They were both teachers. Bert started out as a mechanical drawing teacher at a vocational school, then got his master’s degree and doctorate and ended his career as a professor at Indiana Institute of Technology. He was brilliant, and I know that I got my brains from him. Fran was no slouch either. She was also a teacher at two schools, got two master’s degrees, one in reading and one in administration, and ended her career as the assistant principal in charge of discipline. It is from this side of my family that I got the most pressure to do well in school.
I was always the smart one of my siblings, and as far back as I can remember my parents always took it for granted that I would get top marks in grammar school and high grades in junior high, high school, and college. Fran began working in 1928, retiring after 40 years in 1968. She always worked under her maiden name, Miss Brooks. If I ever have a daughter, I will name her Brooke (to honor both of my grandmothers, Brooks and Betsie). Bert and Fran lived right behind Bluma and Abraham. Because Fran worked, Bluma cooked dinner for both families. My mother, Millie, remembers that Bluma often cooked three or four different dishes because she loved to cook what each person enjoyed. Millie and her brother Joshua were both very picky eaters. At one time in their lives, Millie would only eat chicken, and Joshua would only eat lamb chops.
Both sides of my family followed many Jewish ideals, but closeness of family is probably the strongest one on both sides. As I mentioned, my grandparents lived right behind their parents; my father’s (Jacob’s) mother’s (Betsie’s) family was even closer. Betsie’s parents came over from Kiev, Russia, before she was born in 1903. My great-grandmother’s (Martha’s) sister had died, leaving Isaac and six children, so Martha married him, as was tradition. I have a million stories about this side of my family, the side I have always been closest to. Martha and Isaac lived in Philadelphia and had six children together. After Isaac died, his brother Abe’s wife also died, leaving him with four children, so Martha married him. Betsie always said she had 15 brothers and sisters, even though 9 were first cousins. She was the oldest girl of the second set of six. When Isaac was alive, he was a cantor and a Torah scholar, and Martha ran a restaurant to earn enough money for their family. All of the children lived around their parents. The oldest two girls, Carol and Eve, were opera singers who toured throughout Europe with an international opera company, always sending one half of their money home to the family. With 11 children, the money wasn’t enough, so during the 1920s Martha added a speakeasy menu to the restaurant. Betsie was forced to quit school after eighth grade to go to work in a department store to earn money. She looked older and was able to get a job as a clerk. She always had a great love of learning and was a voracious reader until she died at 85 years of age. Meeting her, one would never guess her lack of education because she was self-taught. Betsie’s older brothers, Sam and Charley, started a clothing business, which became such a success that they sent Martha and the youngest 11 children to Chicago to own an apartment building and restaurant in the late 1920s. So Martha, Abe, and the 11 youngest children, including Betsie, moved to Chicago. Leah and Hyman and their four children—Samuel, my grandfather Jack, Victor, and Silvia—were tenants in the building that Martha and Abe owned. Hyman was a tailor. Sam fell in love with Betsie, who was engaged to a man, named Samson Cowen, who was going to medical school out East. Sam made a deal with Samson. Sam asked Samson to give him 1 year to woo Betsie while he was away at school; if Sam could not convince Betsie to leave Samson in 1 year, Sam would back off forever. Samson stupidly agreed and left for school, cutting off all contact with Betsie, without telling her anything. She thought he had left her, was heartbroken, and started dating Sam on the rebound.
Sam was a good-looking, smooth-talking dreamer. He was a bellboy at a prestigious hotel, with lots of connections for free tickets to concerts and shows and passes to all the fine restaurants, so he wined and dined Betsie and soothed her broken heart. By the time Samson came back from school, Sam had already asked Betsie to marry him. Samson finally told Betsie the truth. She was so angry with Samson for playing games with her emotions that she married Sam out of anger and spite. Although they did remain married for more than 50 years, until Sam’s death, they fought often. I got two things from Grandfather Sam. One was his love of partying and having a good time; the other was his quick temper and big mouth. He yelled, and yelled loudly, a great deal of the time. I can get very angry, sometimes very quickly, but like him, after I let it out (I do it in a more appropriate manner than he did) it is over. I rarely hold a grudge.
Although my mother’s family was close, Betsie’s family took family closeness to a new art form. When Betsie married Sam, her sister, Sarah, married Sam’s brother, Jack. All of Betsie’s siblings who moved to Chicago lived near each other as adults, and the two brother-sister couples were no exception: They always lived next door to each other until 1948, when they bought a three flat with another of Betsie and Sarah’s sisters and her husband. This was known as “the building.” Martha lived with Betsie and Sam for the last 15 years of her life. I get my great love of family from the many weekends spent at the building. Betsie was the most loving, caring, giving person you could ever meet. She loved and accepted everyone, just like her mother Martha had done. Martha’s youngest son, my Uncle Maurice, fell in love with a Las Vegas showgirl, an Egyptian woman, my Aunt Jessica. Martha welcomed Jessica into the family. After Maurice’s death, Jessica and her new husband Sam, came to all of our family events and continued to do so for almost 20 years. When my Uncle Jack’s son, Chuck, married Sandra, an African American woman, we all welcomed her as well.
If I had to pick one person who influenced my life the most, it was my “Nonny” Betsie. I was her oldest granddaughter, and that made me the luckiest person on earth. She was my best friend and my greatest advocate. She died about 5 years ago, and I miss her terribly. I am crying now as I write these words. I consider myself a third-generation party animal because, with such a large, close family, there was always one event or another happening, and everyone was invited. Every other Friday (Shabbat) night we went to “the building” for dinner, and then my siblings and I slept there overnight. My father’s sister’s family did the same on the other weeks. At 4 p.m. every afternoon, cocktail and snack time was held. Betsie and her sisters met in one of the kitchens for one glass each of vodka, filled to the top. Each floor was filled with cousins; many were my second or third cousins, but that never mattered. Before they bought “the building,” my father, Jacob, grew up very poor. Because Sam worked for tips, money was tight and did not come in on a consistent basis, which had a big impact on Jacob—and hence on me. Sam finished high school but did not go on to college. His brothers, Jack and Victor, went to college and became accountants. Jacob became a certified public accountant (CPA). As a class project, he volunteered to be the accountant for the theater department. He took the elevator to the top floor of the school, which housed all the sets and the dressing and rehearsal rooms. As Jacob got off the elevator, he saw a man carrying my mother, Millie, over his shoulder. The man said to Jacob, “Wanna pinch something nice?” Of course Jacob said yes and pinched Millie’s behind, and that is how they met (Millie was a theater major). My smooth-talking father romanced my naive mother, and they were married 2 years later, after my father graduated. Their marriage lasted 15 years. When I look back, I see what they had in common at ages 20 and 21: They both were (are) Jewish, they both were (are) close to their families, they both have a great love of literature and the arts, and in the 1950s, they both wanted to do what their parents wanted them to do—raise a family of their own to continue the Jewish traditions.
So you have now read much of my family history, and finally I am born. But just like in the movie Avalon, I grew up hearing all of the stories I have just shared, and they have been an important influence on my life. These stories grounded me and gave me my great love and appreciation of history in general, especially my family history and traditions. In 1954, when they were 21 and 20 years old, Millie and Jacob got married. Millie quit school and went to work as a secretary, while Jacob sat for the CPA exam and started working with Victor and Jack in their accounting firm. I was born in 1958. Victor died suddenly in 1959, and Jacob became a partner in the firm. At age 26, he was giving advice to men twice his age about how they should run their businesses. My brother was born in 1960, and my sister in 1961. As I mentioned, Jacob grew up poor, which inspired him to do better for himself and his family. For example, in both the apartment we lived in until I was 4 years old and the house we moved to in the suburbs, we always had air conditioning. Jacob would not buy a house unless it had central air. His dream was to have an office on Market Street and to live downtown. He has accomplished both. He worked extremely hard throughout my entire childhood.
Until I was 7 or 8 years old, he worked 6.5 days a week part of the year and 7 days a week from January to April, tax season. To this day I hate math, and I believe it is because I used to fall asleep to the sound of the adding machine. Whereas the Frieds are very conservative, the Staks are very liberal. When my parents looked to buy a house, my father purposely moved us to a mixed suburban community so that we would live in what today you would call a multicultural neighborhood and attend a multicultural school. My four best friends on my block were Dana (Jewish), Laurie (Japanese), Annie (Chinese), and Betty (Polish). I have always been proud to grow up there. Education is another Jewish value I identified greatly with. Because I was the smart one of my parents’ children, it was always expected of me that I would do well in school, and I did. Schoolwork always came very easy for me. My brother was the athlete, so it was okay that he did not have top grades, and although my sister did well in school, she had to work very hard to do so. I have to admit that I was actually rather lazy, but because I caught on to things quickly (I have an almost photographic memory and am able to relax when taking a test), it was very easy for me to get high grades. I was also tested for my music and dance abilities and received high marks. When I was 7 years old, my parents bought a piano. The store that we bought it from had music testing. My parents were told that I had the musical ability of a 16-year-old. I took ballet classes at the Jewish Community Center (JCC) near my house. My class was taught by a prima ballerina who, after escaping from Russia, was helped by the Chicago Jewish community and was giving back to our community by teaching dance. She told my mother that I should be taking lessons at a higher level. We could not afford better ballet lessons, and I got lazy about practicing piano, so I did not go much further with either one. I am still a frustrated artist. First, I am always drawn to artists. I got involved in theater in high school and was in the National Thespian Society. Most of my friends from college were theater and music majors. I love to take pictures. I am the one on vacations and at parties who brings out the camera; it is my muse.
Another important aspect of my childhood is that I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. I lived through and was greatly influenced by the civil rights movement, the hippies, the Vietnam War, and the women’s movement. I understand that everyone has some prejudice, but I have always felt that because I am Jewish I know that there are plenty of people in this world who hate me because of my ethnicity. I hate this fact. It scares me, makes me very angry, and bothers me, so I feel like that I can’t do that to anyone else. This may sound corny, but I truly believe this. My family was always very politically active, and the historic events of my youth made me even more aware of how important it is to be involved in the political process.
The women’s movement really messed things up for me. Even though Fran worked, she still got married at 18 and had two children. Most of the other adult women in my life were homemakers and mothers, some with part-time jobs. Millie did not work until my sister started first grade and was in school all day. Millie got a job as a secretary in the school district’s central office so that she would always have the same days off as we did. All of a sudden, everything changed. Now I was expected to find a career and fight for women to have the right to be trained and work in fields dominated by men—and to earn as much as men—and to have the right to a legal abortion. All of a sudden men and women were supposed to be equal. I remember starting junior high school in the fall of 1969. At that time, girls had to wear dresses or skirts, no slacks or shorts. One day in October, the word went around that all the girls were walking out at 10 a.m. to protest the dress code. We wanted the right to wear pants! At the appointed time, virtually every girl walked out of school. We marched around the school chanting for about 2 hours, and then we went home. The rule was changed, and we could wear pants. This felt so powerful, to have a voice and have it heard.
Another aspect of Jewish women is the notion of Jewish women as nurturers (to the point of worriers), always taking care of their families. Being the oldest, and a girl, I took on this role as soon as my siblings were born. One of the first messages I received as a child was “Take care of your brother and your sister!” And I did. Whenever anyone offered me candy, perhaps at a store or at the doctor’s office, I would always ask, “Can I have one for my brother and sister?” My mother loved to tell people about this. Somehow I was able to understand when my sister talked baby talk. When I was 11 years old, I began baby-sitting my siblings when my parents went out. They would pay me a quarter per hour. Kids used to pick on my sister because she was so small. I took care of that. Being 3 years older, I was always bigger than her peers, at least through grammar school. Even once we were all in college, my mother would still call me and ask, “Where is your brother?” The funny thing is, often I would know. We were very close growing up and still are to this day. I talk to my sister almost every day, and I talk to my sister-in-law often also. I would talk to my brother more often, but he is a psychologist and is with clients all day.
The most traumatic event of my life was my parents’ divorce. They got divorced when I was 11 years old, in 1970. They seem to have started the trend. When it happened, I only knew one other family with divorced parents. I was devastated. Sometimes I think that I still have not completely gotten over it and wonder if I ever will. I know it is part of the reason that I did not get married until I was 44 years old. My siblings were 29 and 34 years old when they got married. We all say that we will never get divorced. It was very ugly. Jacob was cheating on Millie. They told us about it in December of 1969, and the divorce was finalized in March of 1970. Jacob was married again on April 15th of that year. Fran was cruel. She would always badmouth Jacob. The only good thing to come out of it was that we got to spend more quality time with Jacob. Instead of him coming home late every night, tired and crabby, and doing chores around the house on his days off, he was now responsible for us every Sunday and had to spend time with us, and we still went to Betsie and Sam’s every other Friday night and slept over.
Jacob’s second wife, Avis, was a wonderful person. She had two daughters, Barbara (5 years older than me) and Lynn (2 years older than me). Lynn and I became very close. Jacob and Avis were married for 5 years. Avis and Lynn were major influences in my life. Lynn was thin and beautiful, and Avis was a former model, so she was beautiful, too. My mother is very good looking, but she is short. Avis was tall and glamorous. Avis had helped her daughter Barbara with her weight problem, and she urged me to deal with mine. At age 13, I was 5 foot 3 inches tall and weighed 179 pounds. I looked 8 months pregnant. My weight brings me to another aspect of what I believe is part of the Jewish culture: food. All the Jewish women in my family were avid cooks who loved to feed us and urged us all to eat, eat, eat. And I loved food, so I did. Also, after years of therapy, I have realized that this was the way that I got love from my mother: She fed me. Because Jacob worked so much, Millie was left alone to raise three little children. I was always a good girl. My brother was always mischievous: He would get lost in the grocery store or hide our toys. My sister was a big crybaby and demanded my mother’s attention, so I did not get enough attention from Millie. I know that she loves me very much, but as a child what I got most from her was her excellent cooking. Avis gently talked to me about how Barbara had lost weight on diet pills (after all, it was 1971, and pills cured everything), took me to my pediatrician, and started me on amphetamines, and I have been conscious of my weight ever since. My metabolism is such that I was on the verge of needing thyroid medication, so the pills just curbed my appetite; I did not get jumpy or lose sleep.
One negative aspect of my family and the era I grew up in was substance use and abuse. As I mentioned, the three sisters always had their cocktail hour. When my father finally did come home from work, he always had a drink almost immediately after walking in the door. Alcohol was never a big deal for us as kids. We always had wine at Passover and could always try our parents’ or grandparents’ drinks if we asked. Although drinking was no big deal, smoking pot was much more exotic. I tried pot for the first time at age 12 after being influenced by Lynn. I only smoked once or twice a month for the 5 years I knew her, and though I stopped in high school, I started up again in college. I believe it was the pressure of trying to do my best and be successful at the University of Chicago. I was a lazy student in high school. If I even put my hand over a book, I would get an “A.” I was number 98 out of 647 in my class, I got a 29 on the ACT and an 1150 on the SAT, and I had a great interview, so I was accepted to college. Sometimes I think that maybe I was also filling their Jewish quota. Whatever the reason, there I was surrounded by class valedictorians, feeling like I did not belong. My first 2 years were a disaster. I loved going to class and listening to lectures and participating in discussions. I read the books, but it took me 2 years to really learn how to study and write papers. In the meantime, I got “Cs” and “Ds,” something I had never gotten before. In high school, I got a “C” in typing and one in biology and then finished my last 2 years with straight “As,” so my grades at University of Chicago were ego shattering. I hid them from my parents and had many sleepless nights.
Another message I always got from Millie was “Don’t worry, don’t get upset!” Pot smoking was the perfect solution for my worry and anxiety. I began smoking every night. At least, I never went to class or tried to study while high; I just smoked instead of studying. I finally developed good study habits my junior year after I was put on probation. I am very proud to have a diploma from the University of Chicago and that I did it in 4 years despite my partying, but I am humiliated about my grades. Once I was out of college, I continued to smoke pot virtually every night for 10 more years. I was still using it as a crutch, this time to ease the pressure of not being successful at a career and my lack of an ability to find a husband. These relate to issues in the Jewish culture, the push for success, which for a woman from my generation means success both in a career and in a relationship.
I always loved history (my major), but in 1980, my senior year, schools were closing, and teachers were not paid nearly as well as they are now. I definitely had the desire to be successful, especially monetarily. I worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a summer job when I was in college. My uncle was the head of the computer department and got me the summer job. I did not have a clue what he was talking about when he offered me the job, only that it paid much more than minimum wage and that the hours were 7:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. I loved being out in the sun during the summer, so having a summer job that ended at 2:00 p.m. was heavenly. I carpooled with two girls from school whose fathers were commodity traders. I remember them telling me on my first day, “Forget every rule of life you know. You are about to enter the trading floor!” And they were right. It was a trip: a room full of thousands of people—most men, most young, and most without a college education—all excited and shouting. I thought, “Hey, I’m a University of Chicago student. I am smart, so I should do really well here!” The object of the game is very easy—buy low, sell high—but playing the game is hard: Having the guts to know when to stay in as your money is ticking away or when to get out and cut your losses.
I kept moving up the ladder of jobs, and I helped many people make literally millions of dollars. Many promised me a share, but it never materialized. I had eight different jobs in 10 years. For example, my third to last job was as a personal clerk for an options trader. Commodity options were new, and it actually took some brains, not simply luck, to trade them successfully, so I took the job to learn how to trade options. Rick paid me almost no money (I had to work a second job at a video store to pay my bills), but he promised me he would lease me a seat to trade with him in 1 year if I helped him make money and learned enough about options. In one year with my help he went from earning $100,000 to earning $300,000. He gave me a $200 Christmas bonus and promptly went into the florist business with his brother and left the trading floor. I could go on, but needless to say, commodities and options was never a career for me: It was just a fun and exciting job. I met a lot of fun, interesting people, and to get through the nights of feeling like a failure I smoked pot. After performing well and still losing three jobs, I decided that God was trying to tell me something. Millie offered to let me live back at home while I got my master’s in education to become a teacher. I did not completely stop smoking pot until 4 years later, but from the time I started in my career in education, I only smoked occasionally on the weekends, until I finally stopped for good when I got my first teaching job.
I also felt like I was failing in my attempts to form a marriage relationship. I have a large number of friends, a couple since high school and many since college, but I had difficulty in bonding with a man for a lifelong relationship. Part of the problem I alluded to earlier: I think I had romanticized a relationship with a man after seeing the love letters Bert wrote to Fran. Another part was my lack of confidence in my looks. I grew up with the commercials on television touting “blondes have more fun,” and I was never going to be a blonde. I was a tomboy growing up before it was popular for girls to play sports. Sometimes I think my parents fought a great deal after my birth because I subconsciously thought a relationship with a man meant fighting, unhappiness, and divorce, and I sent out negative relationship vibes. I did not wear makeup until I was 26 years old. Until that time, I wore blue jeans and T-shirts most of the time when I was not at work. I was always busy with family and friends, so it was not like I sat home doing nothing. I think that the way I dealt with the pressure from my family was to smoke pot and avoid dealing with it. Since I was not getting an “A” in relationships, I was not going to even try to be in one.
Another aspect in my life that kept me away from relationships was my family experiences with my father. He has been married three times and has had two long-term relationships since his last divorce. His third wife, who was 11 years younger than him, was a jerk. After a 10-year relationship, including 2 years of counseling, they finally came to the same conclusion that I realized the moment I met her: that they had nothing in common. His next relationship was with a woman only 3 years older than me. She looked much older because she was a heavy smoker. Betsie made my father promise that he would not get married again because she got attached to his wives, and all of his divorces hurt her a great deal. She died 5 years ago, and I think he has finally realized that she was right. His most recent relationship has lasted 10 years and will probably last the rest of his life because she is only 51 years old and he is 70. All of the women he has had relationships with were skinny and gorgeous. Maybe part of my problem was that I felt I could never live up to my father’s image of a woman.
Finally, at 26 years old I met a man, Tim, on the trading floor. He was 4 years younger than me. He seemed nice and very giving, and he really liked me, so we started dating. He was not Jewish, but he said that he would never ask me to convert and that even though he was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school he did not really believe in religion. I was so relieved to finally have a boyfriend that at first I did not realize that he was taking over my life. It was also nice that he came from a very wealthy family. His uncle owned a large company and was a multimillionaire. They were in the vending machine leasing business. We all went to a convention in Atlantic City, and we stayed in a luxurious hotel and were driven around in limousines. His uncle really liked me and asked us to join him in his limo for the weekend. I felt like I had hit the jackpot: a man who loved me and who would be able to take care of me in style. So what if he had cut me off from most of my family and friends? So what if he was telling me what to wear and how to wear my hair? I had been too much of a tomboy anyway, and I was looking much better. My mother was not thrilled, but I think that she liked the physical change in me. She had always tried to get me to dress up more, and I always fought her. I used to hate shopping, which was unusual for a Jewish girl in my new neighborhood.
Maybe part of why I did not mind Tim taking over my life was because I was used to not having important things my way. So many things had already happened to me that I had no control over. We started living together after 1 year and lived together for 4 years. I was so happy that the pressure was off of me to get married. I finally felt like I fit in. Thank God that one of my college friends married a woman, Tina, who is a therapist who works with battered women. She saw what was going on and talked to me about how unhealthy my relationship was. She began to predict how Tim was going to behave. He started breaking my things, and she insisted that it was only a matter of time before he started to hit me. The turning point came when Tim’s father won a trip to Cancun and gave it to us. She had warned me that batterers often begin battering in a place outside the United States because the woman is so distant from her family and friends. She warned me that I better have a credit card with me because Tim would start a fight, and if I tried to call the police they would just laugh at me because I was a “rich, White American girl” and do nothing, so I would have to jump on a plane myself. Sure enough, as we were having dinner one night, Tim started up with me. He had asked me to marry him a few weeks before, and I had said that I would think about it. The only thing he could not get me to change my mind about was raising my children as Jews, which I was determined to do. He agreed to this as long as they could celebrate Christmas and Easter, which I had no problem with. So at dinner he said to me, “How can you think I would ever agree to raise my children Jewish after I went to Catholic school all of my life?” I said, “Because you said you would when we first talked about it.” He started yelling at me right there in public, and all of a sudden the lightbulb went off in my head. I realized that this was the fight Tina had alluded to, and I knew right there and then that I had to end the relationship. I did not want a scene. Six months before, when I had talked about ending things with him, he broke a glass table of mine. I did not want more violence to happen. I stopped the argument by agreeing to think about it and started planning how I would leave.
The trip had been in late November. I had very early work hours; Tim worked from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Just before Christmas, I pretended to go to work, waited at Jacob’s apartment until I knew Tim was gone, and then arranged with a few of my friends to pack up all of my things and move out. I went to stay with Tina. I attended her battered women’s group and learned a lot about myself. I got into group and then individual therapy as soon as I got back home. I still struggle with my self-image and self-esteem, but through therapy I have gained enough insight to have a healthy career and a healthy marriage.
When I look back at my life so far, I vacillate between two feelings. On the one hand I feel angry because I have wasted so much time being scared to live a full, adult life. I partied away 10 years of my life in commodities and have only had my real career for the past 10 years. So now I am working my behind off catching up. On the other hand, I look back at all the great experiences I have had and know that I would never have been able to have them if I had begun teaching right after college or had gotten married right away. My family’s history, experiences, and lessons will continue to help me in my future.
Content Themes
In this story, Betsie tells us about her pride in her ethnic background, the values transmitted through her family to her, her challenges in upholding some of those values, and her struggles with employment, substance use and abuse, and romantic relationships. In looking at the themes of this story, we also learn how the implicit family norms affected and shaped her identity.
Pride About Ethnic Background
As many individuals do, Betsie speaks proudly about her ethnicity: “I am 100% Jewish.” She also exhibits pride in her family history and in the fact that she was named after several of her ancestors. She spends a considerable amount of time writing about how her grandparents met and courted, what she considers was passed on to her from them (“he was brilliant, and I know that I got my brains from him”), and who influenced her the most (“it was my ‘Nonny’ Betsie”). She does not introduce herself until much later in her narrative and spends the first several pages retelling the stories that grounded her and gave her an appreciation of her family history. Ethnicity is a powerful force that influences identity formation, and how an individual feels about his or her ethnicity, whether pride or contempt, has an enormous impact on the individual’s views about his or her sense of belonging and sense of inclusion in a community, and that in turn influences a sense of self. Unlike the racial categories, ethnicity can be less visible. Whether people are conscious of their ethnic identity varies greatly within groups and from one ethnic group to another. Not everyone feels like Betsie about his or her ethnic background.
In general, the more pride an individual has in his or her ethnic identity, the easier the acquisition of self-identity becomes. The more people reject their ethnicity, the harder it is for them to negotiate and deal with the rejected or denied parts of themselves. This is particularly true for oppressed ethnic groups (McGoldrick, Giordano, & Pierce, 1996).
Individual awareness of ethnic background differs according to the status of the ethnic group in a given society. The oppressed, marginalized, and less powerful individuals may shift and increase awareness of their ethnic identity as they interact with members of the mainstream, more dominant groups. Often the shifts in awareness depend on whether the minority/majority groups interact within oppressor/oppressed models or within more egalitarian models of interaction. For example, before Hitler’s rise to power, the German Jews were assimilated into the German culture and considered themselves more German than Jewish, in part because, in spite of biases against Jews, they tended to be more accepted by the mainstream German society than the Polish or Russian Jews were in theirs (Elon, 2003). Similarly, in the United States, the rate of assimilation of the U.S. Jews appears to be staggering, with intermarriage the highest and rates of synagogue affiliation the lowest in the history of the Jewish people (Ashemberg Straussner, 2001). This is not surprising, considering that Jewish university quotas, employment quotas, and other discriminatory acts had begun to disappear from American mainstream society since the 1960s.
Similar phenomena occurred at certain historical times with other ethnic groups. In general, the easier the group’s immersion into the White cultural and ethnic values, the quicker the group seems to lose its ethnic identity in the following generations. The more the group experiences oppression, discrimination, and stereotyping, the more its members cling to and try to retain their ethnic identity (Iglehart & Becerra, 1995).
The Connection Between Ethnicity and Family Values
It is difficult to separate the ethnic identity of the family from the cultural norms the family transmits. The culture of the family is in part the ethnic identity of the family and has deep ties with it (McGoldrick et al., 1996). Implicit family norms tied to the ethnic identity of the family shape an individual’s identity. This has an impact on how people live and the values they hold dear, or reject. The typical Jewish family is a good example of the difficulties that arise in trying to tease out the culture of the family from its ethnic background. Because Jews are not only a nationality and not only a religion, some of the general values can be observed regardless of the national origin or the religiously observant or nonobservant status of its members. That is harder to perceive in White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and has traditionally been easier to observe in other ethnic groups (Irish, Italian, Jewish). But that is because the Anglo-Saxon Protestant is the supposedly regular background against which all the other ethnicities are compared, not because the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant does not have a culture (McGoldrick et al., 1996). No Jewish mother would consider herself a competent mother, for example, if she did not worry about her children and share her suffering openly with the rest of the family (Rosen, 1995). Obviously non-Jewish mothers worry about their children, too, but they might do so differently; they might not share the worrying with the rest of the family, for example, so as to not worry the others. The offspring of these two different mothers encode worrying differently and react accordingly to their own children. Of course, neither one is right or wrong. They just become the ethnic cultural norms for the individual.
In Betsie we see the transmission of several family values that she interprets as Jewish family values (e.g., the centrality of the family), which includes the expectation that women will marry, have children, and take care of them; the expectation of financial success and intellectual achievement; the love of food; and, of course, the notion that mothers worry and share that worry with other siblings: “Where is your brother?” Whether or not these are really exclusively Jewish family values is not as important as the fact that Betsie thinks they are. Ethnic identity development is often enriched by the experience of narratives (Syed, 2015), and Betsie’s family recounted stories to youth, which she also recounts as a way to reinforce the internalization of ethnic values.
Pressure to Conform to Ethnic Values
We have just seen how Betsie identifies some core Jewish values and traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation. She feels influenced by them and expresses a desire to abide by and continue in the next generation: “He could not get me to change my mind about raising my children as Jews, which I was determined to do.” As Betsie continues telling her story, she begins to describe the pressures those values exerted and how unsuccessful she was at keeping up with them. In the age of the feminist movement, the ancestral push for success meant that now she had to succeed in a career as well as a relationship. This is consistent with the findings in the literature about Jewish families who describe that despite the impact of feminist ideas, the pressure on Jewish women to find the most appropriate mate is still high. At the same time, the expectations of intellectual achievement and professional success once exerted only on sons now seem to pertain to daughters also. Consequently, Jewish daughters are now expected to be not only a good wife but also a successful professional (Rosen & Weltman, 1996).
Betsie tells us about difficulties that led to years of pot addiction as a way of dealing with the anxiety and worry of not getting the expected good grades, the unfulfilled expectations of marriage, and the unanticipated financial frustrations in the male-dominated world of commodities trading, in which she was not successful. We know little about the pressure her parents actually exerted on Betsie, but we do know from her story that she feels she has not been able to abide by what she considers to be her family expectations. She felt like she failed to uphold the family prescriptions of success. The cost of her perceived pressure and, as she understands it, her failure to conform to her Jewish values was high.
Sometimes the fluidity of identity does necessitate breaking the family ethnic prescriptions of what constitutes a good life to figure out one’s self-identity. Many family conflicts are played out in the form of stricter or less strict adherence to family ethnic rules and expectations, most often in the areas of intermarriage, mate selection, parenting, and education. Often, when the offspring do not adhere to strict ethnic family rules, violent cutoffs and hurtful rejections take place. Because this is a country that continues to absorb many immigrants, there are large numbers of second- and third-generation immigrants dealing with the issue of loyalty to, or separation from, the ethnic origin of the family. These immigrants, while struggling with whether to conform or not conform to the ethnic prescriptions of their ancestors, are making the fluidity of the shifting self-identity a hallmark of our immigrant society.
Relationship Between Ethnicity and Religion
Ethnicity has many points of contact with religious observance, but the two are not the same. The Irish Catholics can be different from the Mexican Catholics, and the German Lutherans can be different from the Slovak Lutherans. Their ethnicity may be intersected with their religion, but not totally. The differences in levels of Jewish observance exemplify this. Families can follow secular Jewish traditions that allow for a strong ethnic identification and at the same time be nonobservant. In contrast, there are many Jews who are religiously observant. Betsie thinks of herself as ethnically rather than religiously Jewish. Also, people may have ambivalent reactions to their ethnicity but tend to cling to their reservoir of ethnic traditions in times of crisis, illness, death, marriages, births, and any other markers of the life cycle. Many of these traditions tend to be grounded in religion so that even people who in everyday life do not appear to lead a life where religion plays a role might suddenly resort to religious customs and rituals because of a renewed need to connect with previous generations, heal losses, make a transition to the future, or repeat a familiar family rite (Imber-Black, Roberts, & Whiting, 1988).
Relationship Between Sociohistorical Contexts and Identity
For Betsie, the historical and social contexts in which she grew up included the feminist movement, her parents’ divorce, and the societal expectation of women’s attractiveness. These historical and social contexts, and the values that can be derived from them, appear to be in contradiction with the values generated by her ethnic heritage (e.g., expectations of togetherness, marriage and children, emphasis on eating and food). She felt that her life was out of her control, and she understands her choices of an abusive mate and her addiction to pot in light of these contradictions. With intense regret she attributes what she considers to be her personal failures to abide by the prescriptions of her ethnic heritage to the new social movement of her time, the civil rights and the feminist movement. She also talks about being negatively influenced by her father, his numerous wives, and other family members. Because of the way she ends the writing of her story, we do not have a clear sense of how she defines herself today, which aspects of her cultural and ethnic background she continues to embrace, and which ones she has decided to discard. Has her self-identity shifted or does it remain the same?
Clinical Applications
This section starts with assessment questions related to the content themes and continues with interventions useful when working with people who present with stereotypes about ethnicity, either their own or someone else’s. This section ends with an extensive discussion about possible countertertransference reactions when working with people of similar or different ethnic affiliations.
Assessment
Counselors can be instrumental in helping increase their clients’ awareness of their ethnic identity, including awareness of the factors that shape their current values, motivations, and actions. Also, it is important to help clients understand that their self-definition and identity may change over time or remain the same. If people receive negative images of their ethnicity, either in the societal or family context in which they develop, or if they begin to have negative views of their ethnicity as they grow and mature, self-hate and rejections of parts of their self may result. Self-hate can be detrimental to their sense of self, their identity, and their relationships. At the other extreme, people may develop distorted, self-aggrandizing, and ethnocentric views of their own ethnicity and feel superior to people they deem inferior because these people do (or do not) possess a certain ethnic identity. Another possibility is that individuals do not recognize that how they think about themselves, their values, their motivations, and their behavior is based on their ethnicity.
It is important to assess the meanings and expectations associated with clients’ ethnicity and its relation to other areas of their lives to get a sense of where they are in their identity development and help them move forward, if they so desire. Also, it is important to assess clients’ constraints in relation to their own ethnic identity or the way they understand the ethnic identity of others with whom they interact (e.g., spouses, coworkers, neighbors, in-laws, employees). These therapeutic conversations are important because clients’ sense of self and their relationships with others are deeply tied to issues about ethnicity.
Pride About Ethnic Background
How important is your ethnicity in your life?
How do you understand your ethnic background?
Has that view changed over the years or remained the same?
Do other people you interact with share your positive/negative view?
Ethnicity, Family Values, and Pressures to Conform
Have any of your decisions been affected by your ethnic background, in terms of choice of spouse, child rearing, home location, your religious affiliation, and so on?
How difficult were those decisions for you? For your family?
Has your ethnicity constrained or made it easier for you to live your life?
If you identify constraints about how you live your life, how have you dealt with those constraints?
Relationship Between Ethnicity, Religion, Sociohistorical Contexts, and Other Variables
Are you aware of any religious, historical, or social class issues that have affected the way you think about your ethnicity?
Are you aware of how your ethnic background has affected the way you think about other peoples’ ethnicity (e.g., your spouse, coworkers, in-laws)?
Are there any constraints in your relationship with your spouse, coworkers, subordinates, or in-laws that you attribute to ethnic differences?
Have you changed the way you deal with those constraints or have your methods remained the same over the years?
Techniques and Interventions
Sometimes people attribute their problems in life to the difference between theirs and their parents’, spouses’, or in-laws’ ethnicity: “He drinks like an Irishman,” “She worries like a Jewish mother,” “He cheats like a Latin lover,” “She is uptight like a German.” It is not unusual to hear people speak these ready-made stereotypes to justify and explain, to themselves or their significant others, their disputes, family struggles, or profound differences. When people speak this way, they are using what is known as cultural camouflage: the attribution of ethnicity to problems in a relationship (Falicov, 1995). This way of understanding people’s characteristics tends to perpetuate struggles, decrease empathy, and polarize family members, coworkers, subordinates, and in-laws because they tend to present people with paralyzing, one-perspective narratives that do not include empathy for themselves or others. Counselors often do not know how to deal with clients who use explanations based on ethnicity to explain their problems with significant others in their lives.
One useful intervention is the internalized-other interviewing technique developed by Epston (1993) and Tomm (1989) to increase empathy, reduce polarizations, and help people see things from multiple perspectives. In internalized-other interviewing, the therapist asks the client to put himself or herself in the shoes of the significant other and allow the client to be interviewed as if he or she were the other person. In internalized-other interviewing, clients answer questions about the subjective experience of other members of the family being interviewed through the client. This brings awareness to the client of the feelings and needs of the other person, and, therefore, increases the client’s empathy for the other person (Ziegler & Hiller, 2001). It can be helpful for clients who are struggling with their in-laws, coworkers, superiors, or subordinates, or with the mate selection of their children in terms of their or the other’s ethnicity. One of us (Sara) used this technique with Jan, who attributed her difficulties with her mother-in-law, Ellen, to Ellen’s ethnic background. According to Jan, Ellen’s ethnicity was the reason they did not get along, why she raised her son (Jan’s husband) the way she did, and why she was not a good grandmother to Jan’s and her husband’s baby. Sara asked Jan to answer questions as if she were Ellen and asked, “Speaking as Ellen, what do you attribute your struggles with Jan to? When was the first time you noticed a difference in the way Jan talked to you? What kind of relationship would you like to have with your grandson? What stops you from having this relationship with your grandson? What do you suppose Jan thinks of you? What would be the first thing you would notice in Jan that would give you a clue that the relationship with her will change? What do you think Jan will notice about you, Ellen, that will give Jan the clue that things are going to be different and better?” At the end of the dialogue, Jan was surprised by her increased level of empathy toward Ellen, her mother-in-law.
Similar techniques are circular questions, reflexive questions, relationship questions, outside perspective questions, and role reversal questions (Tomm, 1988; Ziegler & Hiller, 2001), which can help clients become actively reflective about a particular experience, event, or course of action from a variety of perspectives. Because one of the most valuable tools a clinician has is the art of questioning to elicit self-generating solutions, the reader is invited to explore the wide availability of experience-generating questions that can move clients toward other preferred realities and ways of relating to significant people in their lives (Freedman & Combs, 1995).
Countertransference
When clients present with strong ethnic affiliations, countertransference reactions may depend on whether the clinician is of the same or a different ethnicity than that of the client and how much information about or exposure to the ethnicity of the client the clinician has. Therapists must be aware of their own cultural, religious, or ethnic countertransference (Crohn, 1998).
Similar Ethnicity
If the counselor’s ethnicity is similar to that of the client, there is a danger that the clinician will overidentify with the client and miss intragroup differences (Comas-Diaz & Jacobsen, 1991). Sara was supervising an intern who completely missed assessing a severe alcohol abuse issue in one of her clients because she and the client were both Jewish. The stereotype of the Jewish female client is that substance abuse may be less of a problem than it would be if the client were of another ethnic group or a man (Ashemberg Straussner, 2001). Because this coincided with the circumstances of the lack of substance abuse in the intern’s family, it did not occur to her that this client might be presenting with an alcohol-related problem. The attractiveness of having a client to whom the counselor can attribute similar backgrounds can mask the ability of the clinician to make accurate assessments, seduced by the idea that the clinician and the client have so much in common. The seduction of the apparent knowledge of the ethnic background of the client is no small advantage. Clients, too, feel more attracted to clinicians with whom they think they have more in common. Another possible countertransference reaction of similar background in the counselor–client dyad is annoyance, disappointment, or impatience if the client is not advancing in the way the clinician thinks the client ought to be progressing. This is quite common when the therapist is of the same ethnic background but of a different social class than the client (Comas-Diaz & Jacobsen, 1991). Having become more educated and more assertive, or having been able to overcome poverty, the therapist may have the expectation that the clients can do it too and overlook the clients’ differing expectations of themselves, different contexts, or different personalities.
Sara noticed that as a Latina and immigrant therapist, the clients she has the strongest countertransference reactions with are, paradoxically, those who have a very similar background in terms of cultural context but not in terms of class. For several years, as a single mother with three children, teaching four classes a semester at a university and taking two classes a semester in a doctoral program, Sara used to write her own papers at night and grade students’ papers during soccer games, at the doctor’s and dentist’s office, and while her kids were getting haircuts. Several years after that, Sara worked with a very depressed Latina single mother who continuously and bitterly complained about how her (only) child interfered with her ability to study for one English as a second language class she was taking. It was not until Sara was able to become aware of her annoyance, impatience, and arrogant thoughts (e.g., “If I could do it, why can’t she?”) and overcome them that she was able to be more helpful to her client.
Different Ethnicity
If the client–counselor dyad is culturally very different, there can be ambivalent discomfort on the clinician’s part (Comas-Diaz & Jacobsen, 1991). On the one hand, the clinician is eager to help and demonstrate that he or she is not racist or discriminatory and tries hard to show this to the client by being overly friendly or accommodating. On the other hand, the clinician may be puzzled by some characteristic of the client that the clinician attributes to the client’s ethnicity and tends to view these attributes negatively. Often the clinician fails to inquire about these characteristics for fear of being labeled insensitive, racist, or both, by a supervisor, the clinician’s peers, or the client. This is not uncommon in client–counselor dyads that correspond to traditional polarizing ethnic pairs—for example, Puerto Rican and Mexican, Irish and Polish, Arab and Israeli—but it is worse when the clinician belongs to the dominant group and the client is a member of a traditionally oppressed ethnic minority, such as between a White therapist and a Hawaiian, Native American, Latino, or Asian client (Gorkin, 1996). The ambivalent discomfort of the clinician may be more prevalent currently than it was in years past because the expectation of political correctness may push the ambivalent discomfort underground.
Another reason the discomfort may exist with dominant group counselors is because many feel disassociated from their own ethnicity. The original European immigrant settlers shaped basic political and civic life in such a broad way that the Anglo-Saxon culture became associated with the ideal by which all subsequent ethnic groups were judged (Giordano & McGoldrick, 1996). When ethnic minorities begin to consider issues of race and ethnicity seriously, many of European descent often express surprise. Lack of acknowledgment, rejection, or denial of the ethnic background is more possible for Whites than for other ethnic groups precisely because they are seen by all groups as the norm in the United States. This is due to several historical and sociopolitical reasons. First, White Americans do not generally perceive themselves as anything other than regular Americans, perhaps in part because they fought the English for the right to be Americans and not English (McGill & Pierce, 1996). Second, to be an American has been initially equated to being White, and although the United States was very diverse from its inception, in general, acculturation meant (and often still means) acquiring White Protestant values and personal characteristics (Giordano & McGoldrick, 1996). Third, having been traditionally the ethnic group with the most dominance in the colonized world, ethnic Whites of different backgrounds have considered themselves to be superior to other peoples viewed as less civilized (Hays, 2001).
As the traditional ethnic group with the privilege and luxuries that power and dominance afford, White Americans have, therefore, been able to deny, reject, or not acknowledge their ethnic affiliation. As a concept, ethnicity is often understood by Whites as something that other ethnic minority people have. It is not often a word a White American would apply to describe himself or herself.
This is obviously an illusion shared by minorities and Whites alike. When we teach a multicultural counseling course, the White students tend to be the ones who have the hardest time figuring out how to answer the questions related to their cultural identity. Interestingly, by the end of the course, they may be the ones with the biggest shift. They may realize that the denial of their ethnic affiliation is a luxury and a privilege they have been able to afford since the day they were born, a luxury that individuals in other ethnic groups may not share (McIntosh, 1998).
The lack of awareness of ethnicity is more possible for Whites who have had limited exposure to ethnic minorities during their childhood and adolescence. The invisibility of ethnic minorities for Whites is not uncommon. Contact with ethnic minorities may not have been present in the historical past and in the awareness of most Whites. In spite of continued racial hostility and residentially segregated neighborhoods, for example, racial issues are still not present in the awareness of many Whites, who can continue to be complacent about such important issues (Giordano & McGoldrick, 1996). During the multicultural counseling course, it is not unusual for White students to be the last to acknowledge that racism, bigotry, and discrimination still exist, in part because these are experiences they tend not to have, due to their privileged position in society.
The ethnic identity of Whites might remain weak or not be relevant for most of the person’s life. It might take a significant event to change that, such as intermarriage, a move to a less homogeneous part of the country, or exposure to workplace or classroom diversity. These events sometimes force White individuals to examine their identity as they confront the issue of difference, sometimes for the first time in their lives. Confronted with difference, they may begin to understand, for the first time, that the characteristics of their personality are related to their own White cultural socialization. Clinicians need to be aware of their ambivalent discomfort, if or when it surfaces, as they work with their ethnic minority clients and are encouraged to explore the influence of their ethnicity and ethnic socialization on their own identity development and functioning.
Toolbox Activity—Betsie
