Abstract
The clinician’s experiences of race outside of the treatment room contribute to the formation of a racialized self, which influences clinical work with all clients notwithstanding race. Multiracial individuals at times must balance their external physical presentation—and the corresponding race-related categories that others place on them—with their own internally constructed racial identifications. The mechanisms of identification and disidentification can provide safety for the multiracial individual. How can clinicians effectively acknowledge their own identifications and disidentifications as lenses for seeing the multiracial person’s racialized self and selves so as to more effectively work with the multiracial?
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Notes
Our language around the concept of biracial or mixed people is open to much revision. The term multiracial comes to mind, as does multiethnic. Some use the term multicultural or multiethnic to define themselves, going beyond descriptions that are based on physical characteristics, instead focusing on the blending of cultural traditions. In this paper, I use the terms interchangeably.
Male privilege has helped to burn the names of these men into our collective American consciousness, but also important to note are the deaths of many unarmed Black females killed by police authorities, including Aiyana Stanley Jones (7-year-old unarmed child shot by Detroit police in 2010) and Yvette Smith (unarmed 47-year-old woman shot by Texas police officer in 2014), to name only two. It is sad to note that, between the initiation of this article and its arrival in print, many more unarmed African Americans have been killed by the police.
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Thomas, B. Response to “Becoming Visible: The Case of Collette”. Clin Soc Work J 44, 345–350 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-016-0603-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-016-0603-4