What Do White Counselors and Psychotherapists Need to Know About Race? White Racial Socialization in Counseling and Psychotherapy Training Programs

Multicultural training in academic counseling and psychotherapy programs is often designed to address the needs of minority populations, and it rarely places Whiteness in the spotlight. Its structure, in fact, risks mirroring the very dynamics embedded in White privilege. Using the framework of feminist theory, we build on key findings on White racial socialization—which has a profound impact on the quality of communication and interaction within and across racial groups—to outline the skills and awareness needed for White counselors and psychotherapists to promote racial justice in both their individual/counseling and community/advocacy work.     

I Don’t See Color,All People Are the Same: Whiteness and Color-Blindness as Training and Supervisory Issues

This article describes cultural responsiveness training, with a particular emphasis to working with white students. Training methods, which have been effective in examining issues of power and privilege, will be described. Excerpts from previous trainees’ correspondences will be shared to demonstrate how they may have been influenced by such exercises. I will share how reflections of this work have helped to shape who I am. Recommendations for others who wish to pursue cultural sensitivity training will be offered.     

Implementing an Intercultural Psychology Undergraduate Unit: Approach,Strategies, and Outcomes

The relative absence of Indigenous and multicultural perspectives in core undergraduate psychology curriculum is said to hamper the preparation of students for engaging with culturally diverse communities. An intercultural unit that includes perspectives on Australia's history of race relations, Indigenous issues, and migration as the basis from which to research and practise intercultural psychology was introduced into the psychology undergraduate syllabus at Victoria University. This article describes the unit framework, structure, and evaluation of the unit. Content analysis of survey data showed that students appeared to develop greater critical awareness of psychological perspectives on cultural and social diversity. Although many students reported positive learning and an increased awareness of cultural matters, there were also student responses that suggested dissatisfaction or disengagement from what was being taught. These responses are consistent with the dynamics of learning about self and other, and of dominance and subjugation. It is argued that promoting an understanding of psychological phenomena as socially, culturally, and historically embedded is important in preparing students to be culturally safe and respectful mental health practitioners.     

Fanon via Lacan,or: Decolonization by Psychoanalytic Means … ?

ABSTRACT

Lacanian psychoanalysis is often considered antithetical to Frantz Fanon's decolonizing political project. This paper argues, by contrast, that by exploring hitherto under-explored aspects of the Fanon-Lacan relation we are able to re-articulate many of Fanon's most crucial political insights. The paper adopts three routes of enquiry. Firstly, it investigates Fanon's earliest citations of Lacan, noting how Fanon utilizes Lacan's ideas of historically-situated forms of madness, (mis)recognition, paranoia and psychic causality. Secondly, it highlights a series of conceptual affinities that exist between the work of the two theorists including idea of sociogeny, the importance of symbolic (or social) structure, the notion of fantasy and of a social (or transindividual) unconscious. Thirdly, it provides an instructive example of how Fanon's theorizations of colonial oppression might be supplemented by means of Lacanian social theory especially in respect of how the colonized are positioned as "non-subjects" relative to the master-signifier of whiteness.     

Witnessing Whiteness in the Ethics of Hauerwas

Despite constituting one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time, most white Christian ethicists and theologians fail to engage the issue of white supremacy in their work. As one of the most influential and prolific Christian ethicists of the past half‐century, Stanley Hauerwas represents this tendency, and provides specific reasons for his silence. This essay analyzes those reasons, and argues that a commitment to Alasdair MacIntyre’s understandings of tradition and narrative frames his view on race and prevents his engagement of racism. It then highlights the ways this reflects the broader trends of silence, abstraction, and colorblindness among white Christian ethicists when it comes to the issue. Identifying these failures, the essay concludes by suggesting that Hauerwas’s first published essay in 1969, on Black Power, provides resources for theologically engaging the problems of white supremacy today.