The Un-Level Playing Field: Addressing Race in Counsellor Training
Mick Cooper, Professor of Counselling Psychology, University of Roehampton
Trainee of Colour: This is a really hard thing to say…
White Trainee: What? We’re really keen to listen.
Trainee of Colour: Well, you know, it is actually quite hard being the only Black trainee on this counselling programme.
White Trainee: Oh, in what way?
Trainee of Colour: Well, I guess I can feel a bit out of it. Feel that sometimes I’m not taken seriously. I feel like I fade into the background.
White Trainee: Yes, I can really feel that too. Sometimes I get so nervous about talking.
Trainee of Colour: I guess- I don’t want to be rude. But there’s something about being Black that’s more than just nerves. It’s about how we’re seen as people.
White Trainee: I suppose we’re all different. That’s what counselling is about: You’re Black, I’m White, You’ve got kids, I haven’t. There’s lots of differences everywhere. We have to respect everyone.
Trainee of Colour: OK, that is true, but being Black means facing a lot of discrimination: personal as well as institutional. I- I just worry it gets minimised.
White Trainee: I guess- The truth is I don’t really think of you are as a Black person. You are just who you are: an individual like the rest of us.
Trainee of Colour: Um…
As in this imaginary dialogue, I do really worry about the kind of attitudes that Black and minority ethnic trainees sometimes have to face from fellow trainees. I’ve seen it again and again: a well-meaning liberalism, aligned to some basic ideas in counselling and psychotherapy—that everyone is equal, that we should value difference—that can end up really silencing the voices of Black trainees. The field of counselling and psychotherapy desperately needs more practitioners from minoritised groups—people who have knowledge and experience of the full range of communities in our country—but training can sometimes be a painful and disparaging experience. So many trainees of colour talk about the racism—often implicit rather than explicit—that they have experienced on their training programmes; and feeling left to either fend against it themselves or leave the course.
There’s a basic reading of counselling ideology that goes something like this: we are all different, everyone is unique, counselling is about focusing on—and bringing out—the true individual. So if you’re Black, or Yellow, or you’ve got red hair, or a nose piercing it’s all the wonderful mix of who you are, and being Black is just one of those individual qualities. I’m sure that reading doesn’t come from a ‘bad’ place: it’s about recognising and respecting the individual, and on the face of it all these qualities can seen relatively similar. But the problem with the ‘we’re all different’ approach is that it can really minimise the experience of Black people and the pain and struggle they’ve been through.
Being Black isn’t just like having a nose piercing. In the UK and across many regions of the world, being Black means that you are less likely to have a job, more likely to have health problems, less likely to be treated with care and respect by a wide range of public and private services. It means facing, on a daily basis, a mountain of discrimination and prejudice. And racism is not just an attitude from one individual towards another but is embedded in our institutions: with White people almost always at the top, and Black people often at the bottom and facing an uphill climb for equality and respect.
The basic problem with the ‘we’re all different’ approach is that it assumes we start with an essentially equal playing field, and then we might have more or less obstacles facing us in our development. But some forms of difference are so massive, so embedded in our culture, that they can’t just be seen on the same plane. We’re talking different landscapes here. Imagine a group of kids with roughly the same number of sweets, exchanging them. Some have a few more, some have a few less. But that’s not what our culture is like. It’s more like a group where some kids come with a truckload of sweets and others come with next to none. And when the kids with no sweets talk about feeling sad and hopeless, the last thing they want to hear is the kids with truckloads of sweets saying they’re struggling too. Rather, they want to be heard, and they want a discussion about how things can get shared out more equally.
Kaia Parris, responding to this blog, suggested an analogy that might be even more appropriate: it’s not that people of colour have less; it’s that what they have has been (a) taken away, and then (b) devalued:
It is, indeed, like some kids having truckloads of sweets, but like others having sugar cane and mangoes. The sweets are made from the sugar cane, but that is dismissed, irrelevant, long forgotten. Those with the mangoes are looked down on because they have mangoes and that is not as good as sweets. The kids with the mangoes may start to dislike the mangoes and wish they had sweets too, because sweets are ‘better’. And, as they go through life, they are always seen as those poor kids who only had mangoes.
Even if it were the case that the challenges White people face were on a level to those of people of colour, responding with ‘Yes, I experience that too’, wouldn’t be appropriate. If a client said that they were really hurting from their divorce, would we say (if we’d had a similar experience) that we were really hurting too? Probably not—at least not in the first instance. The first rule of counselling is to listen, digest, take in the experience of the other and to really sit with it and try and stand in those shoes. So, just at a very basic level, when trainees talk about being Black or the discrimination they have experienced, an important first step is just to listen. To take it in. And particularly if it feels unfamiliar… even more White people need to listen, take time, try and understand what that experience is like for the person describing it.
Underneath it all, I’d guess that the ‘we’re all different’ response arises, in part, because it can just be really hard for White people to listen to Black experiences of discrimination and racism. It can make us feel guilty, feel blamed, and also, perhaps, feel envious that our own problems aren’t getting the same airtime. And perhaps it can also lead us to feel outside of the discussion: that our own experiences aren’t central or connected to what is being shared. These responses aren’t wrong and it’s really important for us to acknowledge them but, as with all things therapeutic, the important part is about recognising (‘mentalising’) these responses, containing them, and reflecting on them—not acting on them by diminishing the experiences of fellow trainees. Let’s try this dialogue a different way:
Trainee of Colour: This is a really hard thing to say…
White Trainee: What? We’re really keen to listen.
Trainee of Colour: Well, you know, it is actually quite hard being the only Black trainee on this programme.
White Trainee: Oh, in what way?
Trainee of Colour: Well, I guess I can feel a bit out of it. Feel that sometimes I’m not taken seriously. I feel like I fade into the background.
White Trainee: Can you say more about that. That sounds awful.
Trainee of Colour: When I talk in the group, for instance, I feel like others are distracted and not really listening. I feel like others make the same point as me and then everyone really agrees with them.
White Trainee: Wow, I’m really sorry you feel that, and I guess the immediate thing that comes up for me is feeling bad and guilty. And if I’m honest I haven’t seen that happen but it’s something that feels really important to look out for.
Trainee of Colour: Being Black… It is difficult in this White-only group.
White Trainee: Would you be OK to say more about that?…
A couple of additional thoughts, stimulated by responses to my original post. First, as a White person, one response we can have to these kinds of challenges is to shut down: to be so afraid of getting it wrong that we daren’t speak at all. That’s totally understandable, but it also means that we’re not really engaging with the issues or listening or taking it in—and that means that, ultimately, we may be less likely to change. And it can, also, leave us feeling worse about ourselves without any particular gain to anyone or anything. So, perhaps, the most productive approach is one in which people of colour can talk, openly and honestly, about the hurt and anger and other feelings that they have, and White people can listen but also feel that they can, honestly, share their perceptions and experiences. Not to dominate or to take the focus off what people of colour are talking about, but so that there is a genuine engagement and listening. In reality, these issues are hard, complex, nuanced: the fact that the playing field isn’t level doesn’t mean the answers are simple or black-and-white. To really learn what we need to learn about challenging racism in society, I think we do need White people to bring our own realities and experiences into the mix—just not as a response to, excuse for, or means of side-lining the experiences of those who are Black.
Second, it can’t just be the responsibility of trainees of colour to make the challenges here. It’s not easy for anyone in a group to stand up and oppose what’s going on—even less people who have been marginalised throughout their lives. So trainers play a critical role here in creating a space in which everyone feels that they can be heard, and in which issues like racism and prejudice can be fully and deeply addressed. That means ‘broaching’ these issues on training even when they’re not explicitly brought up: recognising that issues like racism and discrimination are as pervasive to how we experience the world as phenomena like attachment or conditions of worth. We don’t wait for trainees to bring up attachment before we discuss it, and likewise it’s essential that topics like racism, discrimination, and prejudice are introduced from the start of a training programme: treated as real issues for counsellors and clients and the training group that are almost certainly going to have an impact in some significant ways. Trainees of colour shouldn’t have to feel that they’re sticking their necks out to raise these issues : it should feel safe and supportive to do so. Trainers can help to make that happen, so that the training journey is an empowering and enabling for all.
Third, following on from this, White trainees can also play an invaluable role in helping to address issues of racism and discrimination on training programmes. We can challenge racism and ‘micro-aggressions’, we can really support Black trainees when they raise these issues, we can find out about issues of racism and different cultures so that the responsibility isn’t on Black people to educate us, and we can raise these issues in the first place if they’re not being raised on the course already. We can be allies—because there’s no ‘neutral’ ground here, and not acting is an act in itself. I’m pretty sure that all trainees come into counselling programmes wanting to feel that everyone’s voice can be heard, but the important point to recognise is that we don’t all start at the same place. So being silent or passive or ‘non-directive’ isn’t necessarily freeing for others—rather, it can reinforce an unequal status quo. To level the playing field, we have to act.
Acknowledgement
Photo by Louis Galvez on Unsplash
