Canada's “multicultural heritage” is written into the Constitution of 1982 yet, in actuality, this nation is not multicultural (Roberts & Doob, 1997). This law has been in effect for more than 40 years. Racialized people have lived under conditions of racism that have been unchanged since post-World War II and have intensified from the 1990s to present (Roberts & Doob, 1997; Walcott, 2019).
Try to practise active listening by listening to understand rather than listening to respond. When you choose to engage, do not assume you know or understand the experiences of marginalized communities, especially those you do not identify with. If people share their experiences with you, be sure to affirm and validate their experiences while being cautious of the space you are occupying.
Examples include:
Challenge yourself to engage in respectful conversation with people close to you when they make problematic comments by:
Although race is a social construct, it has material consequences that continue to reproduce and maintain material and structural consequences. The social realities of race dictate who gets what kind of health, when, and how much, and on what terms. Racialization itself is a cycle of expansion and reproduction. The process of racialization changes and transforms over time, and there is a specific continuity. When looking macroscopically, a network of forces and barriers is hierarchically entangled with how health happens to intentionally immobilize and reduce racialized people.
The chattel enslavement of Africans continues to serve as a source of traumatic stress for Black people today. Additionally, historical trauma inflicted on First Nations, Inuit and Métis people, including boarding schools, massacres and forced violent removal from their tribal lands, represents a severe communal loss and source of traumatic stress.
What are the intersections of my own power and privilege with the locations of my disadvantage? How am I accountable for unearned privileges? How do I resist positioning myself in my locations of disadvantage when serving suffering others? From the power position of therapist, how do I resist positioning myself as the oppressed person in the relationship due to some other site of disadvantage? How do I get my own sites of disadvantage out of the way if they are not useful?
Who is in solidarity to shoulder me/us/our organizations up in making space for discomfort, accountability and repair of power relations? What ideas, practices and lived experience helps me/us in doing this?
How I hold myself as a professional, as well as hold my team, organization and profession to account for transgressions of power? How do I invite clients in safe and trustworthy enough ways to name transgressions? What structures and practices are in place to make this naming possible and useful consistently and predictably across time?
How am I responding to power both moment to moment and contextually in this interaction? How am I resisting righteousness, posturing and the double comfort of naming privilege righteously, but doing nothing to mitigate it—such as naming white privilege and then dominating the space? How can I invite, embrace and hold the discomfort required to accountably address my access to power?
Continuously adopt culturally responsive skills when completing case conceptualizations, implementing interventions, creating treatment plans and determining appropriate healing practices.
Locate organizations that are working within communities to enhance the lives of those disproportionately affected by racism.