Dear white and white-passing counselors,
As white and white-passing professionals, we dominate the mental health field. According to datausa.io, 61.9% of counselors identify as white as compared to the 19.4% of counselors who identify as Black. As white and white-passing counselors, we directly benefit from our whiteness and the inherent racism in the world of counseling. We drive how counseling is taught in schools and who gets taught, what diagnoses look like and what interventions should work to manage them, which professional trainings are available and who can afford to access them, and which clients we feel comfortable providing services to and who we reject from our counseling rooms. In our profession, counselors of color are scarce because they face large obstacles in getting trained and being supported in their work (which is even worse for queer and trans people of color).
The entire counseling profession is based on a structure of white supremacy that caters most often to white, straight, cisgendered people. As budding counselors, we read through our ethics guides and multicultural counseling competencies and are taught what non-discrimination looks like. We are introduced to the ideas of white privilege, microaggressions, and stereotypes about different cultures. But one class in one semester is not enough to learn how to competently serve our clients (and some programs don’t even offer a diversity class). Even this training centers on cisgendered, straight, whiteness, making these aspects of a person the default and making marginalized communities the “others” to learn about in a chapter of a book.
We cannot competently support our Black colleagues and colleagues of color and ethically serve our Black clients and clients of color while the very system in which we work and train continues to treat whiteness as the default. So, we must educate ourselves and take action to change both our internal beliefs and biases and the system within which we work. I offer resources at the end of this call-to-action for how we can get started on becoming anti-racist, but first I want to further explore why we must do this work.
The Black community has a significantly increased risk of developing mental health challenges (especially anxiety and depression) due to the racist social, political, economic, historical, and educational influences on their lives. Not only do researchers say Black people are more likely to experience mental health challenges than white people, but Black people are also at increased risk of facing systemic barriers to mental health care access. These mental health disparities are compounded by barriers related to economic insecurity, violence, and the criminal justice system. True health for our Black clients and people of color cannot be achieved without addressing these barriers to treatment.
Without doing the work to become anti-racist, we may inadvertently pathologize our Black clients and clients of color. We need to learn to instead acknowledge their experiences within a racist society and the trauma they are experiencing from just living their daily lives. Without doing so, we perpetuate the trauma that for which our clients are seeking therapy in the first place, letting them leave our rooms feeling more traumatized, exploited, frustrated, gaslit, and not wanting to return to therapy in the future. In our case consultations, supervision, and treatment meetings we must learn to acknowledge and create space for our Black clients and clients of color and how their experiences of racism intersect with their mental health challenges.
The onus is on us to move beyond our current ideas of multicultural competency, to do the work to become anti-racist, and to use our power and the platform given to us through our privilege of white and lighter-colored skin. We also have a platform of power through our roles as counselors--both in the room with our clients and outside of it in our communities. We must continue to do the work and educate ourselves about systemic racism. We must do the inner work to unlearn white supremacy from the racist systems we ultimately benefit from by just having white skin. And while we do our inner work, we must also do outward work to combat racism. It is not enough to be non-racist. We must become anti-racist by putting actions to our words in a focused and sustained way. We must become anti-racist through identifying and eliminating racism in our profession and the world at large and by changing organizational structures, policies, practices, and attitudes.
We most work to decolonize the counseling profession by recognizing that for our Black clients and other people of color the trauma from racism, classism, and health inequity plays a large role in how they are served by the counseling world. We must work within communities to determine what is considered a mental health challenge, rather than pathologizing clients with white-centered diagnoses. We must work with communities to enable healing through culturally-appropriate interventions, not necessarily evidence-based interventions tested using a predominately white participant sample. We must acknowledge that our clients bring their intergenerational and historical trauma into the room with them and that it is inseparable from their presenting concerns.
We can broach racial dynamics with our clients in our counseling sessions. We can work to empower our clients to explore their intergenerational trauma and the trauma they experience through systemic racism. We can hire counselors of color in our group practices. We can fund and support research by counselors of color. We can promote trainings led by counselors of color. We can speak both privately and publicly to other white and white-passing counselors about white privilege and racism.
We must also take action outside of the counseling profession in our own communities. Go make calls, write letters, or testify at the city, county, and legislative level on policies that further racial justice. Donate to bail funds or put the privilege of having your white body to use during protests. Support Black-owned businesses. Write columns and articles in magazines and newspapers about the intersection of racism and mental health.
We can do so much more with our white privilege to stand with our Black communities and communities of color. Without doing this work, we cannot hope for our counseling rooms to be safe, nurturing spaces for our clients and colleagues of color. Without doing this work, we are instead yet another white space that they must navigate while on guard for their very wellbeing.
With love,
Beth Cortez-Neavel
Anti-Racism Resources To Get You Started:
5 Action Steps: Anti-Racism Resources for Therapists and Other Helping Professionals
Anti-Racism Resources compiled by Sarah Sophie Flicker, Alyssa Klein
Scaffolding Anti-Racism Resources created by created by: Anna Stamborski, Nikki Zimmermann, & Bailie Gregory.
Start Here, Start Now: A guide for white folx who want to do better
12 Movies to Watch to Educate Yourself About Racism and Protest History, Recommended by Experts
Talking About Race from the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History & Culture
An Invitation to White Therapists by Hayden Dawes, MSW, LCSW, LCAS
Whiteness Matters: Exploring White Privilege, Color Blindness and Racism in Psychotherapy
by Margaret Clausen
Implicit Bias Tests - A project by Harvard researchers interested in implicit social cognition — thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control. The goal of the organization is to educate the public about hidden biases
#noracistsocialworkers syllabus
Personal and Professional Resources For Anti-Racism Work from #bossbabesatx