Racism in Counseling and Psychotherapy: How It Continues

This research asks how clients’ racial/ethnic status affects their counseling. A review of 172 cases from the journal Clinical Case Studies (86 from minority groups and 86 from members of a White comparison group) produced two kinds of answers. The first is that color-blindness dominates: counselors treated clients’ race and ethnicity as relevant in only 38% of the cases involving clients of color, and in only 2% of cases involving White clients. The second answer is that when counselors treated clients’ race/ethnicity as relevant, they routinely imposed their prior understandings of race and ethnicity onto clients of color. White clients’ behavior, by contrast, was never explained as a function of Whiteness. Their behavior was attributed to individual/family dynamics.