AMFT6103-9 Integrating Culture into Therapy -MFT 6103 Cultural Diversity - Northcentral University

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AMFT6103-9 Integrating Culture into Therapy Integrating Culture into Therapy Northcentral University RoustioAMFT6103-9 Integrating Culture into Therapy Integrating Culture into Therapy For ... this assignment, I chose the following two articles to reflect on: Robert Shelby’s White Privilege, Pathological Shame and Guilt, and the Perversion of Morality, and Kiran Shahreen Kaur Arora’s Brown in America: Living with Racial and Religious Bias. I picked Shelby’s article because I was interested to learn about White privilege from the perspective of a White man, especially considering that many of the White men in my own family do not think White privilege exists as a problem for many people in the United States. I picked Arora’s article because she talks about her experience as a “South Asian, Brown-Skinned, Sikh, Canadian, woman” in the United States (Arora, 2019, p. 251) and speaks to great length about the “Brownskinned” experience of racism and discrimination which is often pushed aside in “favor” of other racial/ethnic minority experiences. Shelby (2019) begins his article with a metaphor – “a fish is not aware of how it breathes in water until it attempts to breathe in air” (Shelby, 2019, p. 283) – and adds to this metaphor throughout the article, stating “a fish is not aware of the water it swims in until it is no longer in the water,” (Shelby, 2019, p. 286). These metaphors are then compared to White privilege in the United States – White people in the U.S. are born into a society that was founded on White privilege, and often do not immediately recognize these privileges until they examine their lives and experiences from the perspectives of others, or until they are “no longer in the water” (Shelby, 2019, p. 286). This metaphor resonates for me regarding my own life experiences – I am a White woman who was born in the United States to a (mostly) White family, and the town I grew up in consists mostly of other White families. It was not until I went to college that I really understood how privileged I was for simply being born “White,” because I did not know or experience anything different. Now when I return home, I am amazed at how far I have come RoustioAMFT6103-9 Integrating Culture into Therapy and how much I have grown from learning about other perspectives and the experiences of other cultures. Some of my own family members, mostly those of the older generation, do not believe White privilege exists, though they benefit from it every day of their lives – they think that other people are just “lazy” and need to “work harder” instead of “complaining” that they are being discriminated against by the very structure of our society. [Show More]

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