Racial Identity: Key to self-understanding

Recent race-related protests have brought deep-seated inequity and injustice that pervades our national consciousness to the forefront. Those who seek to understand the importance of racial identity aim to bring about change in attitude, reduce racism, and promote equitable public policy.

According to Oyenike Balogun-Mwangi, Ph.D, full-time assistant professor at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, racial identity is “…how we come to understand ourselves as racial beings.”

As a private practitioner in Boston, Balogun-Mwangi reported that in order to effectively treat a person, it’s important to examine their racial identity. “It’s difficult to understand a person’s experience of the world without contextualizing everything about them, including racial identity,” she said. “Race is really an important part of the entire clinical picture.”

In the U.S., race is in many ways in the pores of every interaction, whether people want to validate that or not, according to Balogun-Mwangi. Just as a child learns how to become part of a family from messages they receive from siblings and parents, interactions, and expectations, the individual takes cues from the external world that shape identity.

For many of the Black women she treats, subtle or overt messages juxtapose some of their experiences from being normative, i.e., white, and induce the perception of being “othered,” Balogun-Mwangi said.

Balogun-Mwangi noted that looking at the presenting problem, whether that is anxiety, depression, grief or something else, should be viewed in the context of whether or not the patient is a Black man or woman, an immigrant from Sri Lanka or a descendent of an enslaved person.

Without that information, she noted that it’s difficult to understand what issues the person is facing and to ask culturally affirming questions. This knowledge helps the psychologist clarify and appreciate the patient’s challenges and find better ways to improve his or her life.

While most of Balogun-Mwangi’s clientele are Black women, she does treat a small portion of white women. In recent weeks following the death of George Lloyd, some of her white clients have brought up the issue of race and how they are experiencing internal and external conflict with family and others as they attempt “to figure out their place.”

She said, “For Black women, race is central and comes up in every conversation as a subtext or central issue. This may not have been the case for some white women, until now.”

Balogun-Mwangi noted that bringing race into the room from the beginning makes a huge difference. “Silence is damaging. People are so afraid to bring up race in a way that could be useful in a clinical context,” she said.

“There is a lot of work to be done around this if we are to be able to serve the diversity of clients that come our way. The current moment is important.”

Addressing race during therapy sessions can be informative for both client and clinician. “As a field, psychologists need to get comfortable with culturally affirming work,” said Balogun-Mwangi. “Psychologists may not necessarily share the same racialized experiences as their clients, but our role requires that we are doing our own work in understanding systemic racism, validating its impact on the lives of our clients and being overtly antiracist in our interactions and with our interventions.”

Maryam Khodadoust, Psy.D, staff psychologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Student Mental Health and Counseling Services, explained that “…while racial identity is a socio-political construct that supports phenotype stereotypes and has been co-opted to assign/justify power and privilege along racial divides, it also brings with it pride and community, including strengths borne out of shared journeys, experiences, and even in surviving oppression.”

Also a private practitioner in Brookline, she added that cultural identity can play a role in as intimate a relationship as that of romantic partners or family members, as it does in larger societal settings such as school, work, and health care system.

“Different acculturation levels of family members, for example, can both instigate and/or intensify family conflicts,” she said. “These culturally mismatched values also occur in other settings, including school and work.”

Khodadoust said that families, communities, schools, work, and places of worship play a critical role in the development of healthy racial identity, such that experiences of racism and exclusion in those spheres can lead to dysphoria, confusion, marginalization, loss of self-esteem, and internalizing racism, and a host of physical and mental health issues.

According to Khodadoust, gathering information about racial demographics can be used to correct the injustices of the system, by providing more resources to a community or through affirmative action.

“We also witness how those efforts are sometimes used by individuals or even whole communities to reinforce stereotypes,” she added.

Khodadoust said that clients come to see her for help/support around stress, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, relationship problems, perfectionism, procrastination, eating disorders, and more.

“As we get to detail their experience, we find their racial identity plays a role in those issues. Issues of race I encounter more directly include racial stress, macroaggressions, microaggressions, internalized racism, imposter phenomenon in general and stereotype threat in particular.”

Her model for assessment and primary intervention is feminist/relational lens. As a feminist therapist, Khodadoust does not “…play the role of a benevolent, invisible expert.  Nor do I pretend that the relationship has equal power.”

She believes in “…naming what’s in the room and in doing so, I help my client name what happens in various rooms in their life. It also helps in our building an authentic connection and trust that not only do I see them for who they are, but that I can be a helpful partner in investigating all aspects, ranging from the personal to the socio-political nature of their experiences.”

Khodadoust hopes to create a safe space for the client to explore various factors that may contribute to their issues. “In helping clients with navigating their various identities, my aim is to support the process of decontaminating themselves of any internalized stereotype and to uncover their own unique identity,” she said.

“Given our tendency to desire consistency in how we view ourselves, there is a close relationship between identity and empowerment and resiliency.”

Khodadoust said, “So long as we live together in a society, societal forces will have an important impact on how we see ourselves and in relation to other people.  As practitioners of mental health, I see good, responsible care of the whole individual to mandate acknowledging the unacknowledged socio-political forces, which shape and continually impact a person’s most personal/intimate space – their identity.”