2015 Association for Women in Psychology Conference

Women’s Therapy Center (WTC) is a feminist psychodynamic social justice oriented training clinic. Our faculty wants to talk with people from other training agencies about creating more racial/ethnic diversity among faculty, supervisors and trainees. We have created a diverse training cohort, and hope to learn more about attracting faculty and supervisors. WTC was founded in 1978 as a place for experienced women therapists to train beginning therapists in work with female clients. Although WTC has always had small numbers of women of color affiliated with our training programs, our organization has historically been predominantly White. Our agency has served a diverse client population for many years. We have successfully turned a corner over the past six years, so that people of European descent are no longer the majority of people training with us. This was not an easy thing to achieve. There were many conversations and many mistakes. We made changes to our admissions criteria that expanded access to us, and we changed our curriculum to be more inclusive. We had many diversity trainings aimed at both students and faculty. We have stopped seeing people of color as the only carriers of culture, and begun to recognize the culture of Whiteness that our organization embodied. Having an all-volunteer faculty and supervisory staff added to our challenges for diversifying. In our early years, we were most interested in the way that sexism, within the gender binary, shaped women’s lives. We now include an understanding of the ways that all social location shapes our internal and external lives. Although we continue to be predominantly a women’s organization, our understanding of gender has expanded and we now serve and train transgender/genderqueer people as well as women. We hope our conversation can also include the complexity of this shift.

Media coverage of Michael Brown’s murder and Ferguson protests have brought into the national spotlight issues that have affected communities of color, particularly black communities, for decades. Although various activist organizations have joined in solidarity with this movement (Bosman, 2014), mainstream media attention is waning and the U.S. government has taken a passive approach (Horwitz & Kindy, 2014; Trott, 2014). As students in counseling psychology, we have found ourselves wondering what the role of psychologists (and future psychologists) can and should be in this movement. Within our own graduate program, a discussion group has evolved out of these events, but deciding how to take action beyond discussion has proven more difficult to accomplish. Racial justice is long overdue--over 150 years since the abolition of slavery, and we are still waiting. Considering the conference theme, we seek to explore what restorative justice might look like in in the case of communities like Ferguson. In areas with a long history of institutional power being used to exploit and oppress, where might the community even begin to restore justice? How can psychologists be most helpful to the social movements already in progress to combat these injustices? What about graduate students? Certainly, research on white privilege and racial prejudice has been one major contribution of the field and should not be discounted. For example, Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie and Davies (2004) found that white males processed weapon imagery faster when primed with black male faces compared to the no-prime control and processed these same images slower when primed with white faces compared to the no-prime control. Although published in 2004, the research remains pertinent today and has clear implications for legislation surrounding events like Michael Brown’s murder. But what is our responsibility to more immediate action when innocent people are dying?