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

Abstract

Essentialist notions of race, such as the characteristically US Black/White racial binary, portray race as something individuals have. An intersectionality approach, on the other hand, views race as a system of inequality and as a vector of privilege and oppression that interacts with other systems and vectors, like those related to gender and class, to advantage or disadvantage groups of people. Essentialist notions of race in supposedly 'multicultural' counseling and psychology paradigms are colonizing; that is, they help perpetuate practices that support inequities and injustices stemming from institutionalized White racism and White supremacy. Intersectionality, on the other hand, can be a decolonizing corrective to essentialist notions of race. In this chapter, I examine the roots of the US's brand of racism, critique the colonizing nature of essentialist notions of race in supposedly 'multicultural' counseling and psychology, point the way toward a more critical, transformative multiculturalism, and present intersectionality as a metadisciplinary framework incorporating a critical perspective on race that can decolonize multicultural approaches to counseling and psychology. Finally, I apply intersectionality in a case example featuring a domestic violence intervention with an economically disadvantaged Black couple. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)