Counseling Racist Clients

Hey everyone, this blog will focus on my experience with counseling racist clients. First thought that would probably go through your mind is why would a racist client come and see you Coresair, since you’re black? Those reasons I’ll get into later and true those are anecdotal, based on what those clients were willing to tell me.

My first experience with a racist client came during my internship. I was interning in Oregon, Illinois and this individual was one of my first clients there. At the start you can see the shock of the individual, when they first saw that I was black, but they went on with the session. They talked about their anger and frustration about their daughter being influenced by black teens, specifically black male teens. I could tell how hesitant the individual was with their words as the conversation kept going and how uncomfortable the individual got, due to complaining about black male teens, while I was a black therapist. After that session, the individual never saw me again. The whole office felt bad for me because they figured out based on the individuals’ mannerisms as they interacted with the front desk and left as to what happened. Note, this was an office full of white women and one white man, though that was one of the most supportive offices that I have ever worked for in my entire professional career. My internship supervisor at the time and I had a conversation about the experience and processed that experience as well. My supervisor noted the further away from Chicago you get, especially going to Iowa, the whiter the population will be as well as a less progressive mindset. True not everyone has a less progressive mindset when race is present, but in my instance that was the case.

Over time from my internship and up to now in my professional career, I can count on two hands of all the openly racist clients that I have had. Remember racism is more than just saying the N-word, though I have had white clients use the N-word openly in session, it’s about a learned mindset. Those clients ranged from people who you wouldn’t believe held these mindsets all the way to KKK members. There were a wide range of reasons why I was selected. The first and biggest reason, I was the only one that had opening or luck of the placement. When you work either in an inpatient setting or a community mental health facility, you get a lot of people on your caseload and they have little control on who they get placed with. Once they see who I am, they usually ask to transfer to someone else. I usually give them the “It’ll probably be x amount of time before you get transferred so we can work together until then” speech and usually they decided to work with me until transferred. One of the minor reasons for choosing me was to vent about black people to a black person. This usually involves a lot of generalizations and over generalizations like, “Why do all black people….” Or “Hey you make good enough money so remind me how black people are poor, marginalized or etc.…” or “Hey you’re able to do this so why can’t black people do this?” and other comments like that. Another reason was to have me change their mind about black people for them. Usually coming from an ultimatum with a loved one to get counseling for their thought process or mindset, else the loved one will stop talking to them, divorce them/leave them, etc.… The last reason was to be racists against me. Now I know what a lot of you are thinking, coming to see you and being racist against you is a lot of wasted money. Though, when you’re in a place to where you can barely trade someone, if at all, due to everyone having a lot of people on their caseloads you take what you can get. This racism mostly comes in the forms of negative critiquing, belittling, and undermining in sessions. Are those the only ways, no of course not. Was that the main ones that happened to me, yes.

Before I end this lengthy blog, I do want to say that in my internship and at my jobs there are safety structures in place. If a client is mean, negative, disruptive or what have you, you are able to end the session immediately and talk to a supervisor. Though, thanks to the training that I had in my program as well as the reinforced support from my internship, I knew how to navigate these situations and conversations. With that, I was able to come up with techniques to counseling clients who are racist. These techniques aren’t new, they are techniques that generally every counselor knows. Though I apply them in ways to help with clients who are racist. Well, I’ll end there, thank you all for reading. Maybe in the next blog I’ll go over the tips, tricks, and techniques to use when counseling someone who is racist.