Convergence of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender : The Multiple Identities in Counseling

For courses in Multicultural Counseling and Cross-Cultural Psychology. This text presents diversity from a much broader perspective than just race and ethnicity, exploring a broad spectrum of cultural and diversity issues and their impact upon the client-counselor relationship. The author, herself an African-American, examines the dominant cultural beliefs and values in the United States, and discusses how their nearly wholesale acceptance as "normal" and "better" can perpetuate feelings of inadequacy, shame, confusion, and distrust on both sides of the counseling "couch." Embracing feminist and diversity theories, methods, and techniques, while injecting humor and fascinating stories, she has created a genuinely insightful and thoroughly practical volume.

As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. --Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches In 1989, as a new Assistant Professor, I started talking about convergence. What I meant by convergence was the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and other primary identity constructs within the context of counseling. Each of these constructs is critical to a person's emotional and psychological development and each intersects with other human dimensions. Recently, these intersecting identities have been receiving greater attention in the multicultural counseling literature. Prior to this, much of the literature focused on individual aspects of identity (most often race, culture, or ethnicity) and their subsequent influences on a cross-cultural counseling event in which the client was a person of color and the counselor was not. A consideration of how multiple identities, visible and invisible, converge simultaneously and affect development, behavior, and the counseling event itself was missing. This new paradigm for imaging differences, both visible and invisible, allows each of us to engage in the unrelenting process of increasing self-awareness as gendered, cultural, racial, ethnic, sexual, and cultural beings influenced by class, ability, and disability That differences exist is not refuted nor regarded as problematic. The inequity promoted and perpetuated within a society in which immutable human characteristics hold rank is the problem. Multicultural counseling emphasizes an ecological framework in which person-environment interaction, culture, ethnicity, family, collective society, history, and spirituality are regarded as fundamental to understanding the client in therapy. Multicultural counseling also recognizes the way in which dominant cultural beliefs and values furnish and perpetuate feelings of inadequacy, shame, confusion, and distrust for clients in both the counseling process and the larger society The overall goal of this work is to engage in a dialectical, "both/and" discussion about how identity constructs operate conjointly in people's lives to affect personal development and problem presentation in counseling. The response to the first edition from colleagues and students has been inspiring and humbling. This second edition offers an updated format with new chapters, case studies, and storytellings. New and existing theories and research are discussed, and greater attention is devoted to the application of clinical practice. In a spirit ofUmoja(unity) andUjima(collective work and responsibility), 1 acknowledge and celebrate the good work that elders, colleagues, and students have done and continue to do in multicultural counseling. A MESSAGE TO STUDENTS The material presented in this book can provoke dissonance. Students often feel fatigued, guilty, and put off by their new feelings and the voices of others that they have never truly heard before, both within the book and within the context of the course where this book is used. Once the course is finished and you have your grade, it is easy to retreat to more comfortable pre-cross-cultural class experiences. However, if you are to become a multiculturally competent counselor, your thoughts, actions, behaviors, and beliefs about yourself and others need to "bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it." The process of transformation moves you toward strategies and solutions to change the social structure and become an advocate and change agent for the long haul. I welcome you to this exploration. Please read the storytellings and case studies, and listen to other people's stories, and mine, and your own as well. Although growth cannot happen without disequi