Culturally Competent HelpingChapter Nine©2017 Ceng

Culturally Competent Helping
Chapter Nine
©2017 Cengage Learning22
Meeting with Diversity and Different
Cultures in Our Day-to-Day Lives
races, and religions
does not mean we understand their culture.
not equal
understanding a different culture.
The Changing Face of America
e than one-third of Americans are now racial and ethnic
minorities, and this increase is expected to continue (see Figure
9.3).

composition of
the country.
sex role identities, sexual
minorities, those who are HIV-positive, the homeless and poor,
older
people, individuals with mental disorders, those with physical
challenges, and other indices of diversity.
The Need for Cultural Competence
helper

Sources of Helper Incompetence
1. The melting pot myth
2. Incongruent expectations about the helping relationship
3. De-emphasizing social forces
4. Ethnocentric worldview
5. Ignorance of one’s own racist attitudes and prejudices
6. Inability to understanding cultural differences in the
expression of
symptomatology
7. Unreliability of assessment and research procedures
8. Institutional racism
Defining Culturally Competent Helping
of clients’ lives and a
subsequent integration of cultures into counseling work”

(McAuliffe, 2013b, p. 6).
experiences and
cultural values of clients
-specific helping strategies and
roles
Recognizes client identities to include individual, group, and
universal
dimensions
assessment, diagnosis,
and treatment.
ines if the client has an individualistic perspective or
a collective
perspective
Developing Cultural Competence
1. Having appropriate attitudes and beliefs—being aware of
one’s own assumptions, values, and biases (See Reflection
Exercise 9.1)

2. Knowledge about clients’ culture is needed to better
understand them
• Being aware of one’s own cultural heritage and how it
affects their relationship with clients
• See Reflection Exercise 9.2
3. A repertoire of skills or tools that can be effectively applied
to
clients of diverse backgrounds (See Reflection Exercise 9.3)
Advocacy Competencies and
Social Justice Work
Purpose of Social Justice Work
range of activities that affect the client’s broader system. This
ultimately creates a better life for the client.
ient, community, and public

Tripartite Model of Personal Identity
(Sue and Sue, 2013)
people (e.g., race, gender, age, culture)
The Universal Level
-awareness
RESPECTFUL Model (D’Andrea and Daniels, 2005)

hallenges
-being
Becoming Culturally Sensitive:
Knowledge and Words (slide 1 of 4)
— expressed through common values, habits, norms
of
behavior, symbols, artifacts, language, and customs
— judging a person or a group based on
preconceived
notions about the group
— rigidly held beliefs that most or all members
of a
group share certain characteristics, behaviors, or beliefs
— a specific belief that one race is superior to
another
— an active behavior that results in
differential
treatment of individuals within specific ethnic or cultural
groups
— a subtle type of discrimination that is
conscious or unconscious and includes brief, subtle, and
common

putdowns or indignities directed toward individuals from
diverse
cultures
— a group of people who share a common
ancestry, which may
include specific cultural and social patterns such as a similar
language, values,
religion, foods, and artistic expressions (not based on genetic
heritage)
— any person or group of
people who are
being singled out due to their cultural or physical
characteristics and are being
systematically oppressed by those individuals who are in a
position of power
— real or perceived power disparities
between people
— traditionally defined as permanent physical
differences as perceived
by an external authority. Used to be based on genetics; now
issue is clouded
and unclear, so better to avoid this term (see Reflection
Exercise 9.4)
— an organized or unified set of practices and

beliefs that have
moral underpinnings and define a group’s way of understanding
the world
— residing in a person, not a group. Defines the
person’s
understanding of self, self in relationship to others, and self in
relationship to a
self-defined higher power or lack thereof.
— discrimination or stigmatization of another due to
his or her gender
— (formerly known as homophobia)
discrimination, denigration,
or stigmatization of a person for nonheterosexual behaviors
— a blanket term for negative attitudes
targeted toward
homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, or transgender individuals
— the predominant gender for which a
person has
consistent attachments, longings, and sexual fantasies
(Szymanski, 2013).

the
amount of power an individual wields
Based on factors such as education, income, and wealth
ethnicity, or
race, they may have little in common with one another due to
differences in social class.
—the identification of a universally
nonoffensive
group label is difficult.
Ethical, Professional, and Legal
Issues/Effective Human Service Professional
thus it is
important to actively work on our knowledge and skills.
in

Appendix B.
service professional realizes that
becoming
culturally competent is a process with many stages.
Summary
competent helping?
professional
Slide 1Slide 2The Changing Face of AmericaThe Need for
Cultural CompetenceSources of Helper IncompetenceDefining
Culturally Competent HelpingDeveloping Cultural
CompetenceAdvocacy Competencies and Social Justice
WorkTripartite Model of Personal Identity (Sue and Sue,
2013)RESPECTFUL Model (D’Andrea and Daniels, 2005)Slide
11Slide 12Slide 13Slide 14Slide 15Summary

LECTURE NOTES: CHAPTER 9
Culturally Competent Helping
Chapter Outline
I. Cultural Diversity in the United States and Globally
II. The Changing Face of America
III. The Need for Cultural Competence
IV. Defining Culturally Competent Helping
V. Developing Cultural Competence
a. Multicultural Counseling Competencies Model
i. Attitudes and Beliefs
ii. Knowledge
iii. Skills
b. Advocacy Competencies and Social Justice
i. Acting with the Client, Community, and Public
ii. Acting on Behalf of the Client, Community, and Public
c. Tripartite Model of Personal Identity
d. The RESPECTFUL Model
VI. Becoming Culturally Sensitive: Knowledge and Words
a. Culture
b. Prejudice, Stereotypes, and Racism
c. Discrimination and Microaggression
d. Ethnicity
e. Minority and Nondominant Group
f. Power Differentials
g. Race
h. Religion and Spirituality

i. Sexism, Heterosexism, and Sexual Prejudice
j. Sexual Orientation
k. Social Class (“Class”)
l. Political Correctness, or, “Oh My god, What Do I Call Him or
Her?”
VII. Ethical, Professional, and Legal Issues: The Client’s Right
to Culturally Competent
Counseling
VIII. The Effective Human Service Professional: Open to the
Continual Development of a
Multicultural Perspective
SUMMARY: This chapter begins by showing the wide-range of
diversity that exists in the
United States and the world. The need for cultural competence
in human service work is
explained presenting eight viewpoints that some human service
professionals hold that prevent
them from working effectively with clients from nondominant
groups. These include: the
melting pot myth, incongruent expectations about the helping
relationship, lack of understanding
of social forces, ethnocentric worldview, ignorance of one’s
own racist attitudes and prejudices,
1
inability to understand cultural differences in the expression of
symptomatology, unreliability of
assessment and research instruments, and institutional racism.
Two definitions of culturally competent helping including one

that suggests it is “a consistent
readiness to identify the cultural dimensions of clients’ lives
and a subsequent integration of
culture into counseling work” and a second that states it is
important for the human service
professional to look at three client identities (individual, group,
and universal) and to develop
culture specific and universal strategies and roles as he or she
works toward treatment goals is
presented to students.
Four different models for developing cultural competence,
including the multicultural counseling
competencies (focusing on attitudes and beliefs, knowledge, and
skills) are explained. One
model of social justice work, the Advocacy Competencies,
which encompass three domains: the
client, community, and public is explained showing each of
these domains are divided into two
levels which includes a focus on whether the helper is “acting
on behalf” of the domain “or
acting with” the domain. This discussion concludes with the
Tripartite model of personal
identity, and then the RESPECFUL model.
The culturally competent helper is familiar with a wide range of
diversity issues and understands
basic definitions of words and terms, which give a common
framework within which to
communicate. Thus, basic definitions of the following are
offered: culture; prejudice,
stereotypes, and racism; discrimination and microaggressions;
ethnicity; minority and
nondominant group; power differentials; race; religion and
spirituality; sexism, heterosexism,
and sexual prejudice; sexual orientation; and social class

(“class”). The author concludes this
section with a short piece about political correctness relative to
when one should use which
words and terms. Students may find the words in italics under
“Political Correctness, or Oh my
God, What Do I Call Him or Her?” particularly interesting.
Finally the chapter concludes highlighting various aspects of
the human service professional’s
ethical code which speaks to culturally competent helping and
then note that becoming a
culturally competent helper is a process that encompasses four
stages: the affective/impulsive
stage, the dualistic rational stage, the liberal stage, and the
principled stage.
2
LECTURE NOTES: CHAPTER 9
Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?
By Walter Dean Myers
Of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about
black people, according to a study by the Cooperative
Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.
Reading came early to me, but I didn’t think of the words as
anything special. I don’t think my stepmom thought of what she
was doing as more than spending time with me in our small
Harlem apartment. From my comfortable perch on her lap I
watched as she moved her finger slowly across the page. She

probably read at about the third grade level, but that was good
enough for the True Romance magazines she read. I didn’t
understand what the stories were about, what “bosom” meant or
how someone’s heart could be “broken.” To me it was just the
comfort of leaning against Mama and imagining the characters
and what they were doing.
Later, when my sisters brought home comic books, I got Mama
to read them to me, too. The magazines and comics pushed me
along the road of the imaginative process. When I got my first
books — “The Little Engine That Could,” “Bible Stories for
Every Day,” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” — I used
them on the same journeys. In the landscape of my mind I
labored as hard as I could to get up the hill. I stood on the plain
next to David as he fought Goliath, and tasted the porridge with
Goldilocks.
As a teenager I romped the forests with Robin Hood, and
trembled to the sound of gunfire with Henry in “The Red Badge
of Courage.” Later, when Mama’s problems began to overwhelm
her, I wrestled with the demons of dealing with one’s mother
with Stephen Dedalus in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man.” But by then I was beginning the quest for my own
identity. To an extent I found who I was in the books I read. I
was a person who felt the drama of great pain and greater joys,
whose emotions could soar within the five-act structure of a
Shakespearean play, or find quiet comfort in the poems of
Gabriela Mistral. Every book was a landscape upon which I was
free to wander.
In the dark times, when my uncle was murdered, when my
family became dysfunctional with alcohol and grief, or when I
realized that our economics would not allow me to go to
college, I began to despair. I read voraciously, spending days in
Central Park reading when I should have been going to school.
But there was something missing. I needed more than the
characters in the Bible to identify with, or even the characters
in Arthur Miller’s plays or my beloved Balzac. As I discovered
who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw

that these characters, these lives, were not mine. I didn’t want
to become the “black” representative, or some shining example
of diversity. What I wanted, needed really, was to become an
integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.
Books did not become my enemies. They were more like friends
with whom I no longer felt comfortable. I stopped reading. I
stopped going to school. On my 17th birthday, I joined the
Army. In retrospect I see that I had lost the potential person I
would become — an odd idea that I could not have articulated at
the time, but that seems so clear today.
My post-Army days became dreadful, a drunken stumble
through life, with me holding on just enough to survive. Fueled
by the shortest and most meaningful conversation I had ever had
in a school hallway, with the one English teacher in my high
school, Stuyvesant, who knew I was going to drop out, I began
to write short columns for a local tabloid, and racy stories for
men’s magazines. Seeing my name in print helped. A little.
Then I read a story by James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues.” I didn’t
love the story, but I was lifted by it, for it took place in Harlem,
and it was a story concerned with black people like those I
knew. By humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s
story also humanized me. The story gave me a permission that I
didn’t know I needed, the permission to write about my own
landscape, my own map.
During my only meeting with Baldwin, at City College, I
blurted out to him what his story had done for me. “I know
exactly what you mean,” he said. “I had to leave Harlem and the
United States to search for who I was. Isn’t that a shame?”
When I left Baldwin that day I felt elated that I had met a writer
I had so admired, and that we had had a shared experience. But
later I realized how much more meaningful it would have been
to have known Baldwin’s story at 15, or at 14. Perhaps even
younger, before I had started my subconscious quest for
identity.
TODAY I am a writer, but I also see myself as something of a
landscape artist. I paint pictures of scenes for inner -city youth

that are familiar, and I people the scenes with brothers and
aunts and friends they all have met. Thousands of young people
have come to me saying that they love my books for some
reason or the other, but I strongly suspect that what they have
found in my pages is the same thing I found in “Sonny’s Blues.”
They have been struck by the recognition of themselves in the
story, a validation of their existence as human beings, an
acknowledgment of their value by someone who understands
who they are. It is the shock of recognition at its highest level.
I’ve reached an age at which I find myself not only examining
and weighing my life’s work, but thinking about how I will pass
the baton so that those things I find important will continue. In
1969, when I first entered the world of writing children’s
literature, the field was nearly empty. Children of color were
not represented, nor were children from the lower economic
classes. Today, when about 40 percent of public school students
nationwide are black and Latino, the disparity of representation
is even more egregious. In the middle of the night I ask myself
if anyone really cares.
When I was doing research for my book “Monster,” I
approached a white lawyer doing pro bono work in the courts
defending poor clients. I said that it must be difficult to get
witnesses to court to testify on behalf of an inner-city client,
and he replied that getting witnesses was not as difficult as it
sometimes appeared on television. “The trouble,” he said, “is to
humanize my clients in the eyes of a jury. To make them think
of this defendant as a human being and not just one of ‘them.’ ”
I realized that this was exactly what I wanted to do when I
wrote about poor inner-city children — to make them human in
the eyes of readers and, especially, in their own eyes. I need to
make them feel as if they are part of America’s dream, that all
the rhetoric is meant for them, and that they are wanted in this
country.
Years ago, I worked in the personnel office for a transformer
firm. We needed to hire a chemist, and two candidates stood
out, in my mind, for the position. One was a young white man

with a degree from St. John’s University and the other an
equally qualified black man from Grambling College (now
Grambling State University) in Louisiana. I proposed to the
department head that we send them both to the lab and let the
chief chemist make the final decision. He looked at me as if I
had said something so remarkable that he was having a hard
time understanding me. “You’re kidding me,” he said. “That
black guy’s no chemist.”
I pointed out the degrees on the résumé that suggested
otherwise, and the tension between us soared. When I
confronted my superior and demanded to know what about the
candidate from Grambling made him not a chemist, he grumbled
something under his breath, and reluctantly sent both candidates
for an interview with the chief chemist.
Simple racism, I thought. On reflection, though, I understood
that I was wrong. It was racism, but not simple racism. My
white co-worker had simply never encountered a black chemist
before. Or a black engineer. Or a black doctor. I realized that
we hired people not so much on their résumés, but rather on our
preconceived notions of what the successful candidate should be
like. And where was my boss going to get the notion that a
chemist should be black?
Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity.
What is the message when some children are not represented in
those books? Where are the future white personnel managers
going to get their ideas of people of color? Where are the future
white loan officers and future white politicians going to get
their knowledge of people of color? Where are black children
going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?
And what are the books that are being published about blacks?
Joe Morton, the actor who starred in “The Brother From
Another Planet,” has said that all but a few motion pictures
being made about blacks are about blacks as victims. In them,
we are always struggling to overcome either slavery or racism.
Book publishing is little better. Black history is usually
depicted as folklore about slavery, and then a fast-forward to

the civil rights movement. Then I’m told that black children,
and boys in particular, don’t read. Small wonder.
There is work to be done.
An author of books for children and young adults including
“Monster,” and the previous Library of Congress National
Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

Culturally Competent HelpingChapter Nine©2017 Ceng

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