Page 284 - Microaggressions in Everyday Live Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation

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how many difficulties encountered by minority clients reside externally to

them and that they should not be faulted for the obstacles they encounter.
To do so is to engage in victim blaming.

Racial Microaggression Number Two: Color Blindness

Very much related to seeing race as problematic is the myth of color blindness:
If color is the problem, let ’ s “ pretend not to see it. ” Studies suggest this is nearly
impossible to do because race and gender, for example, are the most readily and
automatically identifiable and categorized features in the human encounter

(Apfelbaum, Sommers, & Norton, 2008; Banaji, 2001; Dovidio, 2001; Dovidio,

Gaertner, Kawakami, & Hodson, 2002). Thus, it is difficult to overlook the fact
that a client is Black, Asian American, Hispanic, and so forth. To claim color
blindness strains the helping professional ’ s honesty and challenges his/her
credibility. There are many other downsides to a color-blind approach as well.
First, helping professionals may actually be obscuring their understandings
of who their clients really are and prevent therapists from relating to minor-
ity life experiences. Issues of prejudice and discrimination are thus ignored
in the life experiences of marginalized groups. Efforts to “ treat everyone the
same ” mean pretending not to see or respond to differences in client history,
experience, and group-specific qualities. Second, overlooking one ’ s group

membership not only minimizes and negates racial, gender, and sexual-
orientation differences, but it attacks the social group identities of individuals,
and serves to allow Whites, in this case, to avoid guilt associated with White
privilege (Bowser & Hunt, 1996; Neville, Lilly, Duran, Lee, & Browne, 2000;
Wildman & Davis, 2002). Third, recent research suggests that a color - blind
approach in therapy is often associated with increased levels of unconscious
racism, lower empathic understanding of client concerns, increased nonver-
bal signs of anxieties on racial topics, lower levels of cultural competence,
and increased tendency to attribute fault to the client (Constantine, 2007;
Burkard & Knox, 2004; Spanierman, Poteat, Wang, & Oh, 2008; Utsey, Gernat,
& Hammar, 2005).

Racial Microaggression Number Three: Ascription
of Dangerousness (Criminality)

The ascription of dangerousness/criminality and the pathologizing of cultural

communication styles have been identified as two common racial microag-
gressions directed toward Black Americans (Sue, Capodilupo, et al., 2007;

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