Early in her career, Janet Helmsopens in new window, PhD, decided to take on the elephant she saw in the room—the fact that all of us have a racial identity that has a big effect on our lives. Perhaps best known for her contributions to our understanding of racial identity as a process we all undergo, Helms, Augustus Long professor in the department of counseling, developmental, and educational psychology at Boston College in Massachusetts, helped forge the language we use today to talk about race, and has also studied how we relate to one another in this country across our racial differences.
Forty-odd years ago, when she was starting out, “Aside from 'You're a racist' or 'You're not a racist,' people really didn't have the language for being more expansive than that,” she says.
The founding director of Boston College's Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture, Helms is an expert on Whiteness, a concept that has come to the fore recently with the ascendancy of Black Lives Matter.
“Finally, some White people are recognizing that they have a race,” says Helms, a fellow in APA Divs .17 (Counseling Psychology), 35 (Psychology of Women), and 45 (Ethnic Diversity). Part of the reason racism is so intractable in our society, she says, is that “White people don't think about being White; they just act White.”
That is to say, they assume the privilege that being White conveys. “White privilege . . . is the foundation of racism,” Helms wrote in her slim 2020 book, "A Race is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Personopens in new window", or "Understanding the White Persons in Your Life". Her other books include “Using Race and Culture in Counseling and Psychotherapy: Theory and Processopens in new window” , which she co-authored, and “Black and White Racial Identityopens in new window”, which she edited. In 2019, she received the American Psychological Foundation's Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in psychology in the public interest.
Helms's approach to discussing Whiteness is not positive or negative as much as it is unvarnished. To evolve away from racism, she says, White people must not only embrace their Whiteness, but they also have to accept that being anti-racist could entail some loss.
“I ask my students, ‘What are you willing to give up to end racism?'” The answer that comes back, she says, is usually, “Nothing.” Some White people want to be helpful, but virtually none want to miss out on work opportunities, or send their children to inferior schools, or risk not living in a pleasant neighborhood, she says. Plenty of White people do live, work, and go to school in modest or even wretched circumstances, but often, “they hope to become one of the privileged eventually, and if that doesn't happen, they blame people of color,” Helms says.
“All people should be treated equitably,” Helms says, but that is not what happens, and she has spent her careeropens in new window exploring the mechanics of how and why that is.
“Race is a power system,” a means of classifying people and “determining who has the power, and who doesn't,” she says.
Take academic testingopens in new window, which Helms also studies. “A lot of my work has been focused on looking at what's wrong with the tests,” and with making them faireropens in new window, she says. High scores on standardized tests can open doors for people to better schools, financial aid, and good jobs. Helms says, “The general belief is that Black people are inferior, but we know that there are some Black people who have higher skills than some White people.” Helms believes developers fortuitously tailoropens in new window tests that assure that White people will score higher than Blacks. “That is my argument,” she says.
She has also studiedopens in new window how race affects Asian and Latinx people, and how it plays out in the therapy processopens in new window.
Whites can evolve from “obliviousness” about race to develop healthier and fairer strategies for living in a multicultural world, and to see and treat Blacks as humans with the same needs and aspirations they have.
“Only White people can end racism,” Helms says.
She grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, the second of seven children. Her father wanted her to be a mathematician, which had been his dream, and she did take a number of statistics classes, but Helms had been planning to be a psychologist since she was seven. In college at the University of Missouri at Kansas City (she also got a master's degree there), she filled out a postcard to get information about graduate school, and checked a box for counseling psychology.
“It sounded like something I might want to do,” she says.
As the first Black woman doctoral candidate in her program at Iowa State University in Ames, Helms found that, on the one hand, people tended to act as if racial differences didn't exist; on the other hand, when race did enter the conversation, all eyes turned to her. Didn't White people realize they too had a race? she wondered.
ISU was also the first place Helms says she encountered microaggressions, subtle acts of discrimination, mostly coming from faculty members.
“It made me feel invisible, in a way, but you can't go through life being mad. The experience taught me a whole lot about White racial identity, as an observer, and I was able to use it later in my work,” she says.
She discovered the work of William Crossopens in new window, PhD, who in 1971 described “Nigrescence,” stages he theorized Blacks pass through to develop an integrated racial identity. Helms began to build on Cross's work by viewing racial identity as dynamic and interactive and as influencing our understanding of who we are racially as coming to some extent from how people treat us.
Early response to her research in this area, Helms says, came in the form of questions about why she thought Blacks' and Whites' experiences would be different. That set her on the path of exploring White racial identity.
Helms has been at Boston College for 20 years, where she has enjoyed the freedom to study race and culture, she says. She relishes convening the annual Diversity Challenge, celebrating 20 years with this year's virtual conferenceopens in new window October 23 and 24.
Protests organized by Black Lives Matter in response to police brutality captured on video over the past few years, and culminating with the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others this year, have brought discussion of race to many gatherings—including virtual ones—in America in 2020.
“I am pleased to hear that people are having conversations about race,” Helms says. “I would encourage people to stay with the discomfort, because if you're uncomfortable about race, there is liable to be growth there.”
