Antiracist Counseling in Schools and Communities

Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy

• Publisher: American Counseling Association
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119814238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Berufliche Weiterbildung

This book builds on social justice and multicultural counseling research and operationalizes what counselors need to know and do to combat systemic racism. Readers will learn how to define an antiracist approach to their work and behavior; proactively address racial incidents in schools; create college and career readiness systems for students of color; and apply antiracist perspectives to K-12 counseling practice, counselor professional development, school-family-community partnerships, counselor training programs, and counseling supervision. Practical appendixes include a professional development tool for critical self-reflection and an antiracist syllabus review protocol.

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CHAPTER 1
The Pathway to Antiracism: Defining Moments in Counseling History

Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy

Racism and white supremacy have a long-standing and tumultuous history in the United States. Ever since 1619, when 20 to 30 enslaved Africans landed in the English colony of Virginia, racism has shaped Americans’ lives and brutally shaped the lives of Black Americans. According to historian Carol Anderson (2016), James Madison called chattel slavery America’s “original sin.” This inhumane sin was documented in Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution, which declared each enslaved African to be three fifths of a person. It was again documented in Article IV, Section 2, the Fugitive Slave Clause. This clause stated that the owner of a slave had the right to seize and repossess that slave in another state, further underscoring the fact that Black Africans were property, not humans with rights. All in all, these facts are evidence that U.S. history is grounded in significant systems of oppression, fueled by the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races. Slavery as well as the colonization of Indigenous American societies upheld this belief, and the results live within us today.

After the Civil War, there was an attempt to redeem the country’s original sin with three Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution (i.e., the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments) and the Freedmen’s Bureau. The amendments were designed to ensure equality for emancipated enslaved persons.

• The 13th Amendment bans slavery and all involuntary servitude, except in the case of punishment for a crime.
• The 14th Amendment defines a citizen as any person born or naturalized in the United States, overturning the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court ruling, which stated that Black people were not eligible for citizenship.

• The 15th Amendment prohibits governments from denying U.S. citizens the right to vote based on race, color, or past servitude.

In addition, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide land, medical facilities, and education to newly freed Black persons transitioning from slavery to freedom. Despite these efforts, the civil rights of Black persons were not sustained, and the courts failed to ensure that Black persons received due process based on the amendments. More important, a refusal to redistribute land to Blacks led to long-standing economic constraints and future racialized practices such as redlining, housing discrimination, and segregation in schools. The Freedmen’s Bureau, which was responsible for founding many historically Black colleges, was terminated in 1872, which led to the mistreatment of Black Americans through state and local statutes that legalized segregation by race and other discriminatory laws and practices. These practices, popularly known as Jim Crow laws, existed for about 100 years, until 1968. Jim Crow laws resulted in Black Americans being denied the right to vote, the right to hold jobs, the right to an education, and the right to a fair criminal justice system. Those who challenged Jim Crow laws faced arrest, fines, violence, and death (e.g., lynching). Sadly, 4,075 Black Americans were lynched in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 (Equal Justice Initiative, 2021). Moreover, the overrepresentation of Black and Brown persons in the prison system has resulted in a new racial caste system (Alexander, 2010).

In addition to mass incarceration, inequality and segregation in schools has led to a long legacy of educational oppression. Black and Brown students continue to be overrepresented in special education (Elder et al., 2019), underrepresented in gifted classes (Ford et al., 2011), tracked to low-level classes (Mickelson, 2001), and criminalized and removed from schools (Morris, 2016). They are also the students who are least likely to attend 4-year colleges and universities (The Education Trust, 2020). According to Horace Mann (1848), education is “the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery” (Massachusetts Board of Education, 1849, p. 59). But Mann went on to state that education doesn’t change the “moral nature” of people (p. 60). Thus, for Black and Brown students, racism within education systems has created the opposite. Education injustice, stoked by racist views and policies, has perpetuated and sustained unshakeable disparities in education.

Given these hundreds of years of oppressive practices, there is no way that any American escapes the impact of racism. Although some might argue that racism is a Black problem, history refutes that notion. The effects of racism touch white persons as much as they touch those who identify as Black or Brown. In a recent report, McKinsey and Company (2019) estimated that if the wealth gap caused by systemic racism were addressed, the U.S. gross national product could be 4% to 6% higher. A higher gross domestic product ultimately means more jobs and higher salaries for all Americans.

Racism also affects the interpersonal relationships of white people. Many may have lost relationships with friends, family members, and coworkers to disagreements, fights, and tension over racism. Racism also distorts white people’s perceptions of what to fear. Many are taught to fear Black and Brown people without considering other human and environmental factors that influence behavior and life outcomes. For instance, Black and Brown people—not the economic opportunity system—are often scapegoated as the problem. So the costs of racism are devastating to white people, especially those without the resources to buffer the effects. They are not the same costs of day-to-day violence, discrimination, and harassment that plague Black people. Nevertheless, they are high costs that most people are trained to ignore, deny, or rationalize away.

A History of Racism in Counseling

Helping professionals, in particular counselors, have also been touched by racism. Over the past 4 decades, social scientists, including counselors, have moved away from defining race in biological terms and toward defining it as a social and political construct that in turn impacts the counseling process as well as counselors’ and clients’ conceptualization of problems. The foundational theories and frameworks of professional counseling emerged from a predominantly white, middle-class context (Gerig, 2014; Ratts & Pedersen, 2014). Therefore, racism within the profession has not necessarily been a focal point. Over the past 30 years, much has been written about clients who do not originate from the dominant society (Butler & Shillingford-Butler, 2014; Wade, 2006). However, less has been written about racism within the profession. D’Andrea (1992) challenged the profession to take on racism and even warned of silence denoting professionals’ complicity in racism in communities where they worked. In a more recent opinion piece in Counseling Today, Arredondo et al. (2020) suggested that there are still unintentional and covert forms of racism and racial injustice within counselor training, research, and practice.

Several iterations of counseling movements have emerged out of the experiences of Black and Brown counselors and clients (e.g., the Black psychology movement). Each movement has addressed racism but without specific attention to antiracism. The remainder of this chapter provides descriptions of these counseling movements: Black/African-centered psychology (e.g., Jones, 1972), cross-cultural counseling and psychology (e.g., Atkinson et al., 1989), multicultural counseling (e.g., Lee, 1991), and social justice counseling and advocacy (Holcomb-McCoy, 2007). Having a common language makes it easier to communicate a commitment to racial equity and creates a platform for coordinated work toward antiracist outcomes. Also, this chapter includes definitions of antiracism and antiracist counseling and introduces an antiracist framework of school counseling.

Black/African-Centered Psychology

More than 40 years ago, White (1972) argued that the lived experiences of persons of African ancestry in the United States demanded a shift in conceptualizing psychology. With the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. came an intense need to lift up the Black community and an affirmation of Blackness. This era heralded the beginning of the Black psychology movement, which solidified when the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi) was established in 1968 at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association. ABPsi emerged out of the American Psychological Association’s lack of responsiveness to the needs of Black psychologists and the communities they served. In the press release announcing its establishment, the need for a community-centered organization committed to ethnocentrism and...