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Homework answers / question archive / This Discussion examines institutional racism and bias in cross-cultural service delivery
This Discussion examines institutional racism and bias in cross-cultural service delivery. To prepare, please be sure to read “Case Study 1” in Chapter 4 of your text.
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CASE STUDY 1 The first case is an excerpt from a cultural evaluation of Agency X focusing on staffing patterns. The purpose of the project was to assess the organization's ability to provide culturally sensitive services to its clients and to make recommendations as to how it might become more culturally competent. Although the report does not point directly to instances of institutional racism in staffing practices, they become obvious as one reads through the text and its recommendations. Currently, People of Color are underrepresented on the staff of Agency X. In the units under study, only two workers are of Color: a Latino and an African American male. Neither are supervisors. In the entire office, only seven staff members are of Color: two Latino/as, one African American, and three Asian Americans. Two of the Asian Americans are supervisors. There are no People of Color in higher levels of management. An often-cited problem is the fact that there are few minority candidates on the state list from which hiring is done. To compensate requires special and proactive recruitment efforts to get people of Color on the lists, as well as the creation of special positions and other strategies for circumventing such lists. At a systems level, attention must be given to screening practices that may inadvertently and unfairly reject qualified minority candidates. While parity in numbers of Staff of Color to population demographics should be an important goal, holding to strict quotas misses the point of cultural competence. The idea is to strive for making the entire organization, all management and staff, more culturally competent, that is able to work effectively with those clients who are culturally different. Nor is it reasonable to assume that all staff of Color will be culturally competent. While attempting to add continued 70 CHAPTER 4 CASE STUDY 1 continued more Staff of Color, it is highly useful to fill the vacuum through the use of community resources and professionals hired specifically to provide cultural expertise. In general, the staff interviewed were found to be in need of cultural competence training. This would include awareness of broader issues of culture and cross-cultural communication, history and cultural patterns of specific minority cultures, and impli- cations of cultural differences for the provision of client services. Especially relevant was knowledge of normal vs. dysfunctional family patterns within different cultural groups so that culturally sensitive and accurate assessments might be carried out. In moving toward a family support model within the agency, as was indicated by several staff members during our interviews, it is critical to understand family dynamics of a given family from the perspective of its culture of origin as opposed to a singular, monocultural Euro-American perspective. Also evident was a basic conflict within the organization between treatment and corrections models of providing services. Staff adhering to the latter tended to devalue the importance of cultural differences in working with Clients of Color and tended to see Youth of Color as using racism and cultural differences as an excuse for not taking responsibility for their own behavior. White staff members report the following needs and concerns in regard to work- ing with Children of Color: need help in identifying culturally appropriate resources and placements; discomfort in dealing with issues of race; don't know the right ques- tions to ask; families often unwilling to discuss or acknowledge race as an issue; the need for more and better training: lack of knowledge about biracial children; and the need for a better understanding of the role of culture in the service model they use. Staff of Color did not report any experiences of overt discrimination and felt respected by their colleagues. They believed that Agency X was, in fact, trying to deal with the problem of cultural diversity, but that this interest was of rather recent vin- tage and motivated primarily by political and legal concerns. They also suggested that the liberal climate of the organization did much to justify a pervasive attitude that we treat everyone the same" and "I know good service provision and can deal with any- one. Together, such attitudes often served as an excuse for not dealing directly with cultural differences in clients. They also stated that cultural diversity was experienced by some coworkers as an extra burden, requiring extra work from them. As in most work situations, the staff of Color did experience some distance from coworkers. The onus of keeping up good relations was often felt to be on the Person of Color to put their White coworkers at ease. Staff of Color we interviewed were subject to especially high bumout potential and needed their own resources and support outside the orga- nization. We found both Staff of Color in the units under investigation to be especially strong and competent individuals who were particularly stretched thin between their regular duties and their roles within the organization as cultural experts. The recent hiring of a Latino professional by Agency X, as a means of dealing with a growing Spanish-speaking population, deserves some comment. The need to provide services to this population has been well documented by the demand that has already arisen for his services. We are concerned, however, that the way in which the position was created will eventually lead to bumout and failure and that much more support for the position must be consciously and systematically provided. We perceive an expecta- tion from within and from outside the organization that this individual will be able to "do it all"-help organize an advisory board and provide services to it, do outreach to the Latino/a community, be an in-house cultural expert, be an advocate with other agencies and a referral source for all Latino/a members of the community, and carry a full case- load of Latino/a and non-Latino/a families. The work demands are already cutting into personal time, and as he deals with other agencies and realizes the lack of culturally relevant services available elsewhere, he becomes even further burdened. UNDERSTANDING RACISM, PREJUDICE, AND WHITE PRIVILEGE 71 Providing culturally competent services to the Latino/a community, as Agency X is now trying to do, will merely open the floodgates of additional demands for services. The current position holder suggested: "The agency doesn't realize that this is only the tip of the iceberg." It is likely that Agency X will soon be faced with adding bicultural, bilingual staff to meet the growing need. In this regard, two caveats should be offered. First, culturally sensitive workers and those assigned caseloads of individuals from non-Euro-American cultures tend to work most effectively and creatively when they are allowed maximum flexibility, leeway, and discretion in how they carry out their duties, Rules and policies established in the context of serving Euro-American cli- ents may be of little help and possibly obstructive to working with culturally different groups. Second, the existence of a defined cultural expert in an organization should not be viewed in any way as a justification for not actively pursuing the cultural com petence of the agency in general and its staff SUMMARY Racism is “the systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power... by members of the agent racial group who have rel- atively more social power" (Wijeyesinghe, Griffin, and Love, 1997). Prejudice is a neg- ative, inaccurate, rigid, and unfair way of thinking about members of another group. Racism equals prejudice plus power and exists on three levels: individual, institutional, and cultural. In general, people deny, rationalize, and avoid discussing feelings and beliefs about race and ethnicity. Individual racism emerges out of the normal and natural tendencies of how people think, feel, and process information. In-group and out-group behavior, categorical thinking and stereotyping, avoidance, and selective perception set the stage for the emergence of racism. There are a variety of theories about the psychological motivation behind racist behavior. The frustration-aggression-displacement hypothesis and the authoritarian or global personality type are two of the most popular. The impact of microaggression and implicit bias is also discussed. Institutional racism involves the manipulation of societal institutions to give preferences and advantages to white people and at the same time restrict the choices, rights, mobility, and access of people of color. One method of identifying institutional racism involves comparing the frequency or incidence of a characteristic within a group to the group's general frequency within the population. Lack of intent or consciousness should never be regarded as justification for institutional racism. Although denial is typically at work in all forms of racism, it is especially difficult for individuals to take responsibility for institutional racism. Three cases of institutional racism are presented. Cultural racism is the belief that the cultural ways of one group are superior to those of another. In most institutions in the United States, white Northern European culture has been adopted and dominates. Behavior outside its parameters is judged as bad or inappropriate. To succeed, people of color must give up their own ways—and, thus, a part of themselves—and take on the ways of majority culture or remain perpet- ual outsiders. 92 CHAPTER 4 White privilege refers to the benefits that are accrued automatically to European Amer- icans merely on the basis of skin color. What is most insidious and surprising about such privilege is that it is largely invisible to the people who hold it. Most whites tend to see themselves not as racial beings or members of a racial grouping, but as individuals. As such, they tend to deny or play down the import of race and ethnicity as social forces. One reason may be that it is difficult to acknowledge “unearned power" in a society that gives such pow- erful lip service to equality and equal access to resources. A second reason is that acknowl- edging the import of race and the obvious racial inequity in our society would lead to strong feelings of guilt and responsibility and a need to make amends. It is also easy for many Euro- pean Americans to experience themselves as powerless in relation to class, gender, age, and so on, thereby downplaying the power that they have accrued in relation to their whiteness. Rowe, Behrens, and Leach (1995) offer a model of racial attitude types to describe the ways that European Americans think about and relate to race and racial differences. Helms (1995) offers a model of white racial-identity development that assumes the existence of five stages of a white individual's progress toward self-aware- ness and the abandonment of privilege. Based on teaching diversity in the college classroom, Ponterotto (1988) identified a progression of four stages that most stu- dents pass through as they become more culturally sensitive and competent. White individuals interested in supporting people of color and reducing racism and pro- moting greater social justice might consider becoming a cultural ally. The chapter ends with Swan Keyes' firsthand account of her personal journey of exploration into the meaning of her own whiteness.
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