MANY VOICES INTO ONE

"MANY VOICES INTO ONE" was the theme of APA President Richard M. Suinn's Presidential Miniconvention on Ethnic Minority Issues.

"It's a recognition of uniqueness and diversity and divergences," said Suinn, "but also a call for a joining together of our differences."

In a ceremony during the convention's kickoff, each audience member was asked to repeat, "We may have gone separate ways, but today we come together...so we become many voices into one."

Symbolically, the invitation was for scientists and practitioners, educators and students, seniors and new professionals, to join together, said Suinn.

"Given the many members who stopped me after the meeting, the effect was there--a sense of change was in the air, an optimism for an improved convention, a feeling among many of being welcomed," he said.

Minorities need more support in psychology departments

By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

As long as ethnic and cultural minorities are underrepresent- ed and ignored in academic psychology, the discipline will lack richness and real-world relevance, said panelists at a rousing town hall meeting, part of the Presidential Miniconvention on Ethnic Minorities at APA's 1999 Annual Convention, Aug. 20 - 24, in Boston.

Panelists at the meeting, "Scaling the summit--building a multicultural and multiethnic society," urged their colleagues to advance the field by acknowledging and tackling barriers to multiculturalism, among them white privilege, a dearth of cultural competence--meaning understanding other cultures' experience--and threats to affirmative action.

"We need psychologists to become activists, to stop the redlining of minorities out of higher education and the bleaching of our public universities," said speaker Michelle Fine, PhD. "Minorities still have to scale a summit, while the rest of us have an elevator." Fine is a faculty member in social and personality psychology at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School and University Center. As part of the presidential miniconvention, CUNY's clinical psychology program received the Suinn Award for Excellence in Ethnic Minority Recruitment and Retention, along with the counseling psychology program at Ohio State University and the combined counseling/clinical/ school psychology program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Fine and the other panelists suggested ways that other programs can achieve the same success. They urged majority faculty and students to cultivate and learn from their minority colleagues and to teach one another about minority struggles.

"Many times, people of color speak up and get punished, so we need the help of our white colleagues," said Jessica Henderson-Daniel, PhD, who teaches about race and psychology at Harvard University. "One uneducated white person puts all of us at risk."

The problems

Throughout history, said Henderson-Daniel, cultural and ethnic groups have been taught to fear one another. For minorities to succeed, whites in particular need to reverse that "miseducation," and attune one another to "the racism that's everywhere. Only through awareness and continuous learning about race can whites connect with people not like themselves," she said. Failure to do so demonstrates an unwillingness to admit that minorities are disadvantaged or ignored, said Henderson-Daniel. Many in the majority either aren't aware of minorities, don't believe that minorities have fewer opportunities than whites or don't understand that minorities have alternative views to contribute, agreed Derald Wing Sue, PhD, of the California School of Professional Psychology - Alameda, who researches cultural competence. For the most part, he said, psychology continues training its students using monocultural models and theories.

"There's this notion that the majority is helping us, that things are equal," said Sue. "But white privilege and monoculturalism continue to be invisible."

And as long as that's true, he said, most psychologists won't possess the competencies necessary to work with different cultural groups. Sue noted that the key to learning such competencies is increased exposure to minority students and colleagues.

Yet recent threats to affirmative action in states such as California, Texas and Washington have had the opposite effect--lowering minority access to academe, said Brian Smedley, PhD, senior program officer in the division of health promotion and disease prevention at the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C.

Smedley called on psychologists to counter attacks on affirmative action, claiming that "all of us are its beneficiaries." It brings about diversity that stimulates students intellectually, he said, and it bolsters health and social services to underserved minority communities.

The solutions

However, if psychology is to foster diversity, psychologists need to open up their institutions to different groups and points of view, said Michael D'Andrea, EdD, a professor in the department of counselor education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

"We need to get over this academic imperialism that our way is the right way," he said.

Promoting diversity means advocating change, said D'Andrea, who along with other panelists suggested ways to do that: