One White Counselor Educator’s Process of Racial Reeducation

One White Counselor Educator's Process of Racial Reeducation A positive racial identity is the ability to appreciate one's own race/ culture without making judgments about its superiority over that of others (Helms, 1984). I have struggled to teach White counselor education students to 1) believe that examining their race/culture is important; 2) think that they need to do more than simply learn about others' cultural/racial communities, religions, and history, to be multiculturally effective; and 3) commit to lifelong social justice efforts. I thought for many years that I was just dealing with a particularly tough group of students when I realized the problem was not my students, but me. The combination of my upbringing in a racist family and community, and a multiculturally-lacking early masters' training program made it very difficult to understand the importance continuing education on the topics of post culture and diversity. My doctoral program was my first exposure to African American professors, diverse clients and courses in multicultural counseling competency and racial/cultural identity theory. I know my early masters' training was not atypical when I read about Arredondo's (1999) concern that counselor training typically required only one course in multicultural counseling. I also find less shame about my early negative attitudes when I read D'Andrea and Daniels (1999, 2001) findings' during their 16 years of White racism research that common reactions of White counselor educators, practitioners, and graduate students included: -anger in having to deal with political correctness -generalized apathy towards the subject of culture and diversity in general) -intellectual detachment from their knowledge about societal oppression by taking no action for positive change. I now know my students were simply reflecting my attitude about cultural and diversity course content by doing the assignments as if they were just completing another assignment. Despite the development of cross-cultural training models that include exploration of counselor as a cultural being (e.g. Johnson, 1987; Carter, 1995), researchers have found most multicultural training approaches emphasize students' focused research on a cultural group different from their own (Carter, 2003; Utsey, Gernat & Bolden, 2002). It makes sense to me now the ways in which I developed and implemented training models that today reflect most multicultural training approaches. I find it interesting that this focus on other cultures runs counter to the first Multicultural Counseling Competency (MCC; Arredondo, et al., 1996) in which students study their own cultural values, biases and worldview, and have committed to adapting my current training model to include more self-examination by my students. Through this process of redefining my goals in multicultural education, I realized I needed more self-exploration about my own racial identity. Through my racial identity exploration I noticed a parallel process my students were experiencing in terms of new discoveries about their racial identity. Together, as we were each discovering our past racial experiences and current identity development, I found it inspiring to watch my students and I struggle with similar challenges. Additionally, I found my honesty about my process developed a level of mutual trust in our discussions about our biases and how these attitudes would permeate the counseling process in negative ways if we did not address our issues. When I had the realization that I needed self-exploration I was not surprised to find as I developed my own racial identity, I became more effective in training my students to be more culturally competent. Discussion I have struggled for years to find the appropriate metaphor for what counselors need to go through to achieve what Janet Helms (1992) calls "reeducation" of how we look at equality and become aware of our own racist tendencies and blind spots. …