Читать книгу Antiracist Counseling in Schools and Communities - Группа авторов - Страница 40

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.