Читать книгу Positive Ethics for Mental Health Professionals - Sharon K. Anderson - Страница 41

We begin this section with a story by Sharon:

I want to share with you some of my journey of coming to see my privilege (for an extended version of this story, see Anderson, 2018), which has been a very important part of my own uncovering and exploring my core and developing my professional ethical identity. I share this story to highlight several features and tripping points of ascending my own spiral staircase: First, becoming aware of one’s point(s) of privilege can be uncomfortable. Second, being willing to have what I call “difficult dialogues” with individuals different from ourselves about points of privilege, discrimination, and oppression is necessary. These dialogues help reveal values and motivations in our core. Third, growing awareness in the area of privilege, oppression, and discrimination is a journey that never ends—it is an ongoing process. Allowing our inner selves to let down the defenses and see privilege, oppression, and discrimination in a subjective way (including ourselves in the mix) is an important first step in the process. Fourth, awareness is only the beginning—action to address issues of discrimination and oppression needs to come next.

Context:

My family of origin is of White European descent, Christian, lower-middle class, and farmers/ranchers. I was raised in a mostly all-White, low- to middle-income, rural community. The country church I attended was all White and the K-12 school I attended was mostly White with only a handful of students and one staff member—the janitor—who identified as Mexican. My worldview was built on what I knew and had experienced as a White, Christian, heterosexual, non-disabled, lower-middle-class female.

My world and experiences expanded greatly through a position with federally funded programs (e.g., Upward Bound) after obtaining my master’s. I experienced disruptions of my socialization during those seven years due to the population we served and my colleagues of color. My doctoral experience brought more opportunities for disruption by way of the literature I read, friendships I forged, and a faculty member of color. However, my blindness to White privilege was deep in my core. Although I don’t recall ever hearing my parents or other adult family members make overt derogatory remarks about people of color, I also don’t recall any discussions about inequality, discrimination, oppression, or privilege. My family’s view on success and hard work was based on the Protestant work ethic and the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” notion. I believed this, too.

White privilege revealed:

Two events occurred that disrupted my blindness to White privilege. The first event, during my doctoral program, planted an important seed for the second event, a defining moment that occurred some years later. Allow me to describe them:

A seed planted: A friend, who identifies as an African-American female and who worked with me in Upward Bound, called me one night and told me about a recent experience she had had at a fast-food restaurant. My friend was in the front of the line, ready to order her food. “I am standing right there ready to order and the employee, a White woman, looked right past me and asked this person who was right behind me and who just happened to be White, ‘May I help you?’ …. She just ignored me—like I wasn’t even there.” My friend was hurt and angry, and clearly believed the act was discriminatory and oppressive.

Although I heard the anger and hurt in my friend’s voice, I remember having a difficult time accepting her explanation of the event. I remembered thinking (but not saying), “I’m sure you’re mistaken. People aren’t that rude. I’ll bet the employee just thought you were still deciding on your order and wanted to keep the line moving.”

Defining moment:

After completing my doctorate and spending a year in the Midwest as a staff psychologist at a university counseling center, I received a faculty appointment at Colorado State University. There I developed a friendship with a colleague who identifies as a Black female. My colleague and I would have what I call “difficult dialogues.” She wanted me to hear her stories and the stories of others who are (un)seen and treated differently because of their skin color. I wanted to deflect the issues of oppression and discrimination by claiming that White people are treated poorly as well. I would argue for what I called then reverse discrimination.

One day while at lunch at a restaurant, we decided to check into the possibility of using that restaurant as a meeting place for future conversations that would include our colleagues. We started to look for an employee of the establishment. The following few seconds disrupted how I understood oppression as an intellectual concept and made it, in my eyes, a reality. A few feet in front of me, my colleague approached the receptionist, a White woman, to inquire about the cost and availability of the facility. The receptionist craned her neck to look around my colleague, as if she wasn’t there, and then asked me, “How can I help you?” As this scene played out before me, so did a flashback of the conversation with my friend, some 10 years earlier, who told me about her experience of being invisible at the fast-food restaurant. For various reasons, my psychological defenses were down enough to see how my white skin made me visible and how my colleague’s black skin made her invisible. This was really a starting point for my awareness about my White privilege and a person of color’s oppression.

Peggy McIntosh, a research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women and a pioneer in the field, coined the term “White privilege” (1990) when she realized that as a White person she had access, opportunities, and advantages that others did not. She described White privilege as that “invisible package of unearned assets” which is like a “weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” that those of us who have white skin “can count on cashing in each day” and to which we “remain oblivious” (p. 31).

Each one of us has our own socialization experience. Sharon’s blindness to White privilege and other privilege statuses originated in her socialization process. As Harro (2013) suggests, socialization within a system of oppression is “pervasive … consistent … circular … self-perpetuating … and invisible” (p. 45). During the socialization process, Minnich states that White people are taught to see their lives “as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal” (cited in McIntosh, 2000, p. 32). Although White people might not have heard their family of origin make overt derogatory remarks about people whose lives are different from theirs, the subtext might have been one of White superiority or “fear of ‘the other’” (Zetzer, 2018, p. 9).

White privilege is just one point of privilege. Other points include gender privilege, able-bodied privilege, economic privilege, Christian privilege, and heterosexual privilege. Because we all have multiple identities, we may experience privilege in some areas (where we are part of a dominant group) while we experience discrimination or oppression in others (Lo, 2011). We can experience a type of “mental whiplash, alternating … between disadvantaged and privileged group memberships” (Liddle, 2011, p. 251). We might even have both experiences at the same time in the same place.