De-colonizing Multicultural Counseling and Psychology: Addressing Race Through Intersectionality

Abstract

Essentialist notions of race in multicultural counseling and psychology, such as the characteristically American Black/White racial binary, portray it as something real within a person: Blacks are those with any African ancestry or blood (the “one-drop rule”), and Whites are those with none. Essentialist notions of race are colonizing: that is, they help perpetuate practices that support inequities and injustices stemming from institutionalized White racism and White supremacy. In this chapter, I critique essentialist notions of race in supposedly “multicultural” counseling and psychology and point the way toward a more critical, transformative multiculturalism. I use the metadisciplinary framework of intersectionality as a de-colonizing corrective to essentialist notions of race. Intersectionality views race as a major system of inequality that interacts with other major systems like gender and class, and thus a vector of privilege and oppression to the advantaged or disadvantaged groups of people. I exemplify the implications for treatment with the issue of domestic violence in lower-class Black communities.