Consequently the profession is adversely impacted because (a) knowledge and understanding of people from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds is tightly restricted; (b) our ability to work effectively in cross-cultural situations is severely hindered; (c) the value and usefulness of the healing practices of Indigenous people is deprecated; (d) clients/students are less informed of how racism precipitates their presenting concerns, which makes them less likely to engage in social action that promotes macrosystemic social change; and (e) counselors are less likely to draw connections between clients’/students’ presenting concerns and the larger context in which they live or to engage in social justice advocacy with and on behalf of clients/students (Bulhan, 1990; Guthrie, 1970; Katz, 1985; Naidoo, 1996; Prilleltensky, 1994; Sue et al., 1992; Williams et al., 2013).
A Political Critical Standpoint Lens to the Counseling Canon: In Practice and Research
Here we detail how developing this critical standpoint represents a critical first step toward the ambitious goal of achieving a decolonized and antiracist approach to counselor pedagogy and praxis (Prilleltensky, 1994). We believe that teaching is a political act (Freire, 1972). Teaching counseling students how to see, name, and challenge racial injustice and sharing knowledge and ideas is inherently political.
Over the arcs of our respective careers, we the authors have all lamented the following: How effective are my interventions in cultivating students’ critical consciousness (i.e., the ability to recognize and analyze systems of anti-Blackness and the commitment to take action against these systems) if those interventions still conform to the dictates inherent to the traditional European counseling canon (Henfield et al., 2017)? For example, to teach theories is to engage in an exercise of promoting and endorsing theories that are supposedly universal when they are in fact a set of language, stories, and theories reflecting the traditions of economically secure, traditionally educated, socially privileged white men and white women. Symbolically, this advances the idea that within the profession there is a body of scholarship that warrants our attention and respect that is juxtaposed against emergent theories from marginalized thinkers that can be engaged only obliquely. The exclusion of Black scholars (and other nondominant perspectives and forms of texts) within the counseling canon communicates to counseling students, in subtle and profound ways, that a decolonial or antiracist perspective is not central to the counseling profession or one’s professional identity (Goodman et al., 2015). The literary counseling canon permeates our profession on many levels and undoubtedly shapes counseling’s professional values. Disrupting the counseling canon and moving toward antiracist teaching requires a willingness to examine the underlying cultural (i.e., white) values and social, political, and moral assumptions that serve as the foundation for counseling (Wrenn, 1962).
Case Study
Naomi is a Black American assistant professor in a counselor education program in a Mid-Atlantic university. Her counseling students are primarily white, middle-class, heterosexual, and often cisgender women. Naomi desires to equip her students with the critical knowledge and skills necessary to interrogate and transform their beliefs and attitudes about race and develop an antiracist identity as counselors. However, when determining what to assign students to read, she experiences a double consciousness that threatens her efforts to remain congruent with an antiracist positionality. The feeling of twoness often comes when she must choose between teaching (Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs and state-level) content that will likely appear on standard certification and licensing exams or scholarship that infuses a critical lens. In taking a political critical standpoint, Naomi uses critical race theory as an interpretive lens to help students analyze the underlying cultural (i.e., white) values and social, political, and moral assumptions that serve as the foundation for the counseling canon—including the content knowledge required for certification and licensure. Naomi also integrates Black perspectives into her counseling courses to help students develop a framework that informs antiracist practice. By integrating Black perspectives throughout her courses, Naomi helps students recognize the history and cultures of Black people, value differences and strengths in Black communities, reject white norms in counseling, and adopt a political ideology from which to fight racism.
Naomi understands that developing a political critical standpoint represents ongoing professional development and does not end with incorporating racial content and frameworks into her courses. It requires that she apply the critical standpoint into her various spheres of influence (e.g., her counseling program; colleagues; and service to her department, college, university, and the counseling profession) and needs to be valued as much as publication and scholarship. Naomi struggles with holding her counselor education program accountable for inadequately preparing their counseling graduates to work with racially/ethnically diverse students/clients while at the same time being collegial and not appearing confrontational. Unfortunately, taking a political critical standpoint has subjected Naomi to hypervisibility (e.g., being overly criticized, policed, targeted for retaliation) by colleagues and students who feel threatened by a challenge to the status quo. Naomi’s political critical standpoint is often perceived as aggressive, anachronistic, or too political or described condescendingly by her colleagues with adjectives like “interesting,” a word not typically associated with objective or rigorous perspectives or methodological approaches. Navigating her counseling program and university as a consciously critical Black woman comes with uncertainties that manifest as Naomi’s constant internal and external struggles. These struggles become an additional burden she must traverse when doing the ongoing self-work necessary to honor what it means to be antiracist.
Conclusion
Counselor educators must challenge the traditional counseling canon to create the more inclusive, representative, and equitable curriculum that students deserve— one that stimulates students to doubt, challenge, and reject preconceived notions of objective knowledge claims derived from Western episteme. The following strategies can be used to help counselors develop a political critical standpoint:
1 Acknowledge that the counseling profession is neither sociopolitically neutral nor immune to the influence of Western racial ideologies that support a racist status quo.
2 Acknowledge that your own knowledge is (to a certain degree) situated in dominant perspectives and social and political experiences that shape how you see and understand the world and determine which behaviors, values, worldviews, paradigms, sets of beliefs, and practices of others are considered healthy, credible, and relevant.
3 Familiarize yourself with components of counseling theories that (a) consider the social determinants of mental health and need to modify environmental conditions conducive to pathology; (b) question the capacity of the present social system to enhance the well-being of Blacks, Indigenous people, and people of color; and (c) critique socially structured inequalities and their psychological effects (Prilleltensky, 1994).
4 Use critical race theory as an interpretive lens to analyze and critique the Western hegemony embedded within the counseling canon, such as (a) whiteness as normative and nonracial; (b) the silence of marginalized narratives; (c) liberal principles of neutrality, fairness, and meritocracy; (d) color blindness; and (e) the inextricability of race, power, and privilege (e.g., Crenshaw et al., 1995).
5 Seek insights from Black feminism and Black feminist epistemologies/counseling practices to (a) develop a critical lens and language with which to scrutinize the ideological repercussions of psychology, (b) examine previously ignored issues, (c) formulate and test new (and old) hypotheses, and (d) develop alternative theoretical paradigms that are sensitive to the realities and contextualized lives of oppressed groups (e.g., Thomas, 2004).
6 Plan for and engage in racial justice action that goes beyond merely developing a political critical standpoint.
References