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HN502: History, Multiculturalism, and Diversity in Human Services
Case Study: Walter
Walter is 16-year-old biracial male. His dad is African American and is an executive. His
mom is White and a kindergarten teacher. Walter and his parents relocated from the
Midwest to the South due to his dad accepting a job in a Metropolitan area but
purchased a home in a small rural Southern city. Walter’s parents tried to provide him
as much normalcy as possible. He has a great relationship with both his mom and dad’s
family. Racial issues were not discussed often in his home and he has had no
experience with racism.
After moving to his new city as a teenager, Walter encountered some challenges.
Walter’s previous schools his friends were from different cultural backgrounds. At his
new school, the majority of the students are White and he is having a hard time fitting in.
He had an incident at the school where a White student used a racial epithet when
describing him. This resulted in a physical confrontation and Walter was suspended.
The principal said he was the aggressor and overreacted.
Walter has an interest in science. When he spoke to his guidance counselor about
taking a physics course next year, he was informed that the class was difficult and he
probably would not be able to keep up. Little did the teacher know that Walter has
always been an honor roll student and excelled in his Advanced Placement Math and
Science courses at his previous school. Walter often hears students making insensitive
comments about the racial conflicts happening in the U.S. and some even making racial
remarks towards the first Black president of the United States.
Walter finds himself being followed when he goes into stores. He was pulled over one
day by the local police. Walter felt he was racially profile as the officer could not explain
what he had done wrong, and instead questioned Walter about whose car he was
driving, where he was going, and why he was in the neighborhood.
Walter is experiencing feelings of anger, confusion, and sadness. He refuses to speak
to his parents about what is happening to him. It is starting to impact his academic
performance and his self-worth. His mom tried talking to him but his response was, “you
cannot understand what I’m going through because you are White.”
Preparing for Cross-Cultural Work
To be perfectly honest, no amount of preparation can totally allay the anxiety typical
of providers-in-training when they first contemplate working with culturally diverse
clients. Students regularly ask: “But what do I do when I find myself sitting across the
desk from someone who is culturally different from me? I’m afraid I’ll panic or draw a
blank and not know what to say.” This anxiety and hesitancy reflects a basic discomfort
with cultural differences and the fact that most providers have grown up in a racist
society separated from those who are different from them. They are afraid—because
WORKING WITH CULTURALLY DIVERSE CLIENTS
45
of their ignorance about a client’s culture—that they will make a cultural faux pas or
miss something very obvious. They are, in addition, often anxious and uncomfortable
because of feelings of guilt over the existence of racism or embarrassed because of past
indifference, the racist behavior of family and friends, or feelings of personal privilege
or entitlement. It feels like very dangerous territory, and after you have read chapter
after chapter about the complexity of issues in working with diversity and how easily
cross-cultural communication can break down, the prospect of facing people from
diverse cultures and providing them with useful help can be rather daunting. Recently,
Dillon et al. (2016) found that, on average, clients who generally perceived their
counselors as multiculturally competent reported no improvement to their psycholog-
ical well-being after four sessions. These findings could suggest that cross-cultural work
may take more than four sessions to impact a client’s well-being. Rather than focusing
on doing it right or wrong, counselors should focus on being patient and trusting the
process of cross-cultural work. At moments of doubt, it is important to remember
several things:
First, as a provider, one is already—or is in the process of becoming-a
skilled professional. Becoming culturally competent does not mean starting
from scratch or learning everything anew. Rather, it means honing skills
that one already has, broadening clinical concepts that are too narrow in
their application in the first place, and gaining new cultural knowledge
about clients with whom one will be working. Culturally competent
providers are, in general, more competent professionals because they must
remain more conscious about what they are doing to be vigilant as to the
cultural appropriateness of tasks, methods, and perspectives that others
may routinely overlook. In a certain sense, one might say that every client
carries his or her own unique culture, and it is the professional helper’s
task to discover how to gain entry into that culture respectfully and offer
services that are sensitive to its rules and inner dynamics.
Second, the clients with whom one will be working are, above all, human
beings, and this is the ultimate basis for connection. They are also anxious
about meeting with a new, unfamiliar person, especially if that person is
culturally different. More than likely, they have had experiences that make
them mistrust the kind of system in which the provider works. The initial
task, then, is to set clients at ease in a manner that has meaning for them.
Helping is, above all, a human process; it is bound to fail, however (with
all clients, not just culturally diverse ones), when this awareness is lost.
Third, unfortunately in the process of teaching people about cultural
differences, there is a tendency to objectify and stereotype clients by
seeing them only in terms of their differences; this must always be guarded
46
CHAPTER 3
against. By attending to differences too fully, one can easily lose sight of
the entire person sitting across from the provider.
· Fourth, focusing too heavily on differences and thereby overlooking basic
human similarities (e.g., with Asian Americans, you must do this, be
aware of this, assume this, and so forth) can turn cross-cultural work into
a mechanical process. This is exactly the wrong approach. Cross-cultural
interaction must be based on the shared humanity that exists between
client and provider—it is the one place where both are similar and can
most easily join. Kroeber (1948), an early anthropologist, pointed out
three kinds of human characteristics: those that one shares with all other
human beings, those that one shares with some other human beings, and
those that are unique to each individual. It is in relation to the first kind
that cross-cultural communication and helping are made possible. A
sensitivity to the second and third kinds of characteristics allows for the
defining of human differences and uniqueness once a basic connection has
formed. Again, it is through the very human capacities of caring, having
sympathy and empathy for others, and identifying with the basic joys and
predicaments of being human that differences can be best bridged.
To prepare for cross-cultural work, service providers should be aware of critical
race theory (CRT) and how it can influence their work with diverse clients. According
to Delgado and Stefancic (2017), CRT is a “collection of activists and scholars engaged
in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power” (p. 3).
Critical race theorists believe that racism is ordinary, the usual way society works, and
the common daily experience of most people of color in America. Critical race theorists
also believe that racism serves a purpose for the dominant culture. These beliefs mean
that racism is hard to address because it is not always acknowledged and, because it
serves a purpose for the dominant culture, it is difficult to eradicate. To work from this
theoretical framework, service providers will need to increase their awareness of how
racism influences the daily lives and mental well-being of their clients of color.
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