anti-Causality


Sunday, September 23, 2012

Personal experiences of ethnic learning in an urban environment

My life experience as a life-long New Yorker has been a continual ethno-cultural learning experience, and not always for edification, but for survival as I lived most of my life on New York City's Manhattan Island.  Cross-cultural interrelation is not an option there, success depends on it; and it is a pretty much limitless number of cultures that are encountered.  (Recently I remember seeing a Chinese-language movie with another Chinese language in the subtitles.) 

Manhattan has unquestionably been a multicultural success story at every socio-economic level with no significant cultural or racial friction in recent memory, the African-American civil rights struggle of the 60s-70s being the last significant event that could be termed a struggle.  (I cannot say this is necessarily true for the other boroughs, such as Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, or the Bronx, or nearby Connecticut or New Jersey--I can only speak for my cohort.)  I think it is a very good question to ask why Manhattan has been uniquely culturally harmonious.  On the surface of it, I think that New York City's feminist (and other gender-related movements such as GLBT rights) have provided guiding influence.  I get this "feeling" from my psychological and counselling feminist reading (Collins & Arthur, 2007), where the writers have shown male-female inequities and disparities, but have faithfully gone on to look at underlying causes, which can then be applied generally to resolve all inequities.  The historical white-male dominance becomes obvious if you try to quickly name a few famous psychologists or psychiatrists.  Only Satir comes instantly to my mind who was not male; though Ruth Benedict who defined Synergy (in terms of First Nations) and mentored Abe Maslow is never far from my mind, she was a sociologist (Young, 2005).

For me personally, a strong influence has been cultural appreciation of culture, such as in art, music, and ways of life through museums.  Museums tend to work hardest at bringing culture to you, albeit as scenes behind glass, and the scientists who brought that culture are the anthropologists, ethnologists, and, to a degree, archeologists--whom I have admired along with other sociologists who have leveraged their material.

Since starting at Yorkville, ethnology has shown itself to be the most useful "other" discipline to apply to counselling in this context.  By definition, ethnologists are psychically nurtured by learning about other cultures.  Just as we are learning to self-monitor internal functions such as transference, ethnologists learn to self-monitor bias and integrate it into their research, and therefore their thinking (Clark, 2000).

I happened to click on an article about a murder of a hip-hop rapper in Toronto on the Sun's website, and looked at the forum discussion.  I found a good number of posts that were anti-ethnic in nature if not racist, and also a number of posts responding in critical but positive ways.  There is no question that therapists are concerned about this in society outside of the privacy of therapy; both Rogers and Beck committed much time to the topic, with Beck's Prisoners of Hate (2000) coming to mind.  Rogers left me with the impression that "we are mostly normal people reacting to abnormal situations," such as cultural and racial inequity (Evens, 2009; Rogers, 1978).  I get hints from the CPA's Code of Ethics (2000) and its supporting documents that we should be activists in influencing how government should enforce policy, for instance, by legally challenging unethical laws and rulings that erode the the rights of the clients and hence their communities.

References

Beck, A. (2000). Prisoners of hate: The cognitive basis of anger, hostility, and violence. New York, NY: Perennial.

Bemister, T. B., & Dobson, K. S. (2011). An updated account of the ethical and legal considerations of record keeping. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 52(4), 296-309. doi:10.1037/a0024052

Canadian Psychological Association. (2000). Canadian code of ethics for psychologists. (3rd Edition). Ottawa, ON: Author. Retrieved fromwww.cpa.ca/cpasite/userfiles/Documents/Canadian%20Code%20of%20Ethics%20for%20Psycho.pdf

Clark, J. (2000) Beyond Empathy: An Ethnographic Approach to Cross-Cultural Social Work Practice. Retrieved from http://www.mun.ca/cassw-ar/papers2/clark.pdf

Collins, S., & Arthur, N. (2007). A Framework for enhancing multicultural counselling competence.

Evens, S. R. (2009). Carl Rogers 1902-1987. Retrieved from personcentered.com/carlrogers1.html

Rave, E. J., & Larsen, C. C. (1995). Ethical decision making in therapy: Feminist perspectives. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Rogers, C. (1978). Carl Rogers on personal power. New York: Dell.

Young, V. (2005). Ruth Benedict: Beyond relativity, beyond pattern. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

No comments:

Post a Comment