Developing Anti-Racist Cultural Competence (eBook)

|xiii|Foreword

If working in the area of diversity training and research for 20 years has taught me something, it’s that teaching anyone anything about race, ethnicity, and culture is a hazardous minefield of hidden dangers. People tend to be very embedded in their own worldview and perspectives, and simply providing the facts is rarely enough to bring about a meaningful shift in thinking. The issue of race is perhaps one of the thorniest areas to navigate, as White people in Western cultures are socialized from birth to not see the advantages they gain from Whiteness. Likewise, people of color learn that pointing out racial inequities often engenders social punishment, and so they learn to keep quiet when not with trusted others. And when you assemble a group of people of different races, ethnicities, and cultures in one classroom, talking about these issues can be volatile. I have known many colleagues who endured classroom discussions that quickly devolved into chaos and became unmanageable – to the point where even the professor was left in tears (Faber & Williams, 2023). Teaching this material can be especially perilous for untenured faculty, as noted by Boatright-Horowitz and Soeung, whose 2009 paper on the matter is tellingly titled “Teaching White Privilege to White Students Can Mean Saying Good-bye to Positive Student Evaluations.”

Fortunately, my own courses on diversity usually go quite well – which I attribute in part to learning from my prior disastrous attempts (yes, attempts plural) at teaching multicultural psychology at the undergraduate level. Consistent work in this area has resulted in classrooms where my students are respectful of me and each other, and they genuinely appreciate their learning experience. Nonetheless, there are few good resources for teaching clinicians how to be culturally competent. In the process of teaching this subject at the graduate level, I eventually realized that I would need to produce the course materials myself if I was going to deliver the class in the way I wanted. This led to me writing two books, one on eliminating race-based mental health disparities across settings (M. T. Williams et al., 2019) and a second to teach clinicians about how to manage microaggressions in therapy (M. T. Williams, 2020). I was able to make good use of both of these resources until moving to Canada in the summer of 2019 from the United States. Although my Canadian students still appreciated the book on microaggressions, the one addressing mental health disparities did not translate as well into a new national health care context. And it wasn’t long before students were asking for materials that were Canadian grown, as anything from the US was too easy to dismiss as not relevant in a country that tends to view itself as a multicultural utopia.

This request was a symptom of an even more pernicious problem. Too many Canadians drank the multicolored Kool-Aid and adopted the belief that only the US has problems with racial prejudice. As such, the problem of |xiv|cultural incompetence may even be worse in Canada than the US, because many Canadians look with disdain at their neighbors to the south and believe that they do not need to learn anything more. But in reality, research shows that Canadians are every bit as racist as Americans (Gran-Ruaz et al., 2022). In my work for the Canadian government, I saw this first-hand when I led a team of psychologists that interviewed federal employees of color across six different agencies. Every person we spoke to had disturbing stories to share about racism, hate, and loss of opportunity (OAG, 2023; Williams et al., 2023). So as a result of biases and huge educational oversights, most people are inept at interacting across race, ethnicity, and culture. And I’ll go ahead and add religion to this list too, since religious traditions are largely shaped by culture.

But rest assured, in the US, training and education on how to navigate cultural differences is deficient as well. During my journey as a clinical psychology graduate student at the University of Virginia, there was a gaping hole in our educational treasure map – the absence of any formal course to help us learn to engage with clients from different ethnic groups. My department did not offer any diversity courses at all, and graduate students were shooed away from venturing into the school of education, the only place where a graduate course on multicultural issues might be lurking. Our clinical psychology faculty, in their infinite wisdom, believed they had all the knowledge necessary to mold us into superior clinicians and researchers. Yet you cannot pass on the wisdom you never had. These professors, who had never been schooled in the art of addressing diversity, were simply unable to equip us with the tools we needed to launch into this next crucial part of our careers. We were only trained to treat White Americans.

Fast forward to 2023. We are post–George Floyd, which sparked a global racial reckoning. Racism is real. People of color are suffering. Most of us are now waking up to the fact that we are clueless and only pretending to have multicultural skills where we actually have none. In my experience doing diversity training in the US, Canada, and internationally, I find that even seasoned, mature, and otherwise well-trained psychologists struggle to operate in a culturally informed manner. Thus far I have yet to give a talk where I did not have to spend the first half of my presentation giving definitions to common cultural terms so that we could all be having the same conversation.

This brings to me this excellent book written by eminent diversity psychologist, Dr. Rehman Abdulrehman, Developing Anti-Racist Cultural Competence, which I wish I had had as a resource years ago. Cultural competence in simple terms is the capacity to interact effectively, inclusively, and fairly with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. Although the definition seems straightforward, its execution and realization are intricate and challenging. Cultural competence must be understood as an aspirational goal. While we cannot ever reach it as a final destination, the journey is necessary, as it enables us to make progress toward having more effective, inclusive, and equitable interactions across differences.

In this context, we should consider cultural competence an ongoing voyage rather than a fixed endpoint. We are constantly evolving in our cultural |xv|competence instead of ever truly attaining it, because cultural competence is a dynamic, shifting, and constantly demanding lifelong endeavor. And as Dr. Abdulrehman points out in this book, over time, culture evolves, and when two different cultures come in contact, they both are changed. As such, we cannot simply decide to stop learning, which underscores the need for cultural humility. One of the things I most appreciate about this book is the emphasis on learning about our own biases to ultimately promote trust, openness, and understanding among the diverse people in our world. And the bonus is that as we learn about ourselves and how to interact with people who are different, we improve all our relationships. We become more kind, empathetic, and sensitive. We become better citizens of the world – the first step in healing the mental health of a society that sadly continues to inflict harm upon itself. As such, I plan to make this book required reading for all of my students.

As such, I am truly honored to have been asked to write the Foreword for this enlightening book on cultural competence. Even though I have written over 200 academic papers and now serve as the Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Disparities at the University of Ottawa, I never cease to be impressed by my esteemed and accomplished colleague. I have seen Dr. Abdulrehman on major media outlets with national leaders, cogently commenting on the most critical social issues facing Canada. He has also worked overseas to bring mental health care to developing nations, and he presented a compelling TEDx Talk about the struggle to teach his son his cultural values in the face of a Western society that does not always embrace different cultural perspectives.

Having witnessed firsthand the transformative power of embracing diversity and fostering an inclusive environment, I am proud to endorse this book. Dr. Abdulrehman’s dedication to promoting cultural competence and his insightful approach to addressing the challenges we face in...