Final Assignment: Self-Exploration Project
Directions: Please write a 3-5 page double spaced paper exploring the following:
1. Your ethnic and cultural background.
a. Discuss what aspects/qualities of your ethnic/cultural background are prominent in your life (e.g., language, religion, character traits) and the childhood experiences that reinforced them.
c. Describe the childhood and adolescent experiences or relationships that shaped your view of people who are culturally different from you. What is your current view of people who are culturally different than you?
2. The cultural values you currently hold.
a. What cultural values do you currently hold (relational, basic human nature, religion)?
b. Which of these values will be different from common values of African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, or Native Americans?
c. How do you plan to manage values conflicts with your clients?
3. Describe your process in racial identity development (see Chapter 11 pages 233-252).
a. What stage are you currently experiencing? Give examples.
b. What factors/experiences influenced your progression?
c. How do you plan to further facilitate your racial identity development?
Self-Exploration Project
My mom and dad divorced when I was roughly 2 years old. My dad being Mexican and his grandparents from Spain, my mom Dutch and Italian with her mom's grandparents from Amsterdam and her dad's grandparents from Sicily. I know that's confusing to type, but for a little white girl growing up in Southern California, it was very exciting and important to me how close I felt to my cultural backgrounds. I haven't seen my dad since they divorced, haven't spoken to him on the phone since I was 8 years old, so all I had was knowing he was there at some point, and this is wh,at was in my blood. Growing up, my family became very upset at the fact that I would call myself and my brother Mexican. "You're not Mexican!" they would scold back, even though our mom would cook Mexican food and still listened to artists who had crossed over to the US. The confusion was, and still is, hard to process. We spent our childhood moving around a lot, having been to ten different schools before graduating high school, so there was a lot of diversity that we experienced.
Our family would make republican-type and racist comments here and there, but those didn't stick too well with my brother and I as we experienced different people fi rst -hand . We did spend some time in a very white and racist town as we reached middle school and high school, but we didn't gravitate towards the kids who held those views. That's absolutely not to say that we didn't have any biases that we were taught because our minds were still being molded and influenced. I know this because there was a lot of work to be done throughout my early twenties in unlearning those biases that I didn't even realize I internalized. When I had found the Christian religion in 9th grade and tried to follow it all throughout high school, (that's a whole lot to unpack on its own with continued questioning and arguments with youth leaders and pastors), that's when my judgment really spiked. Looking back, I was cruel to people who were different, and I fully understand that. I also understand that not everyone with a Christian belief thinks this way, this is just what happened to me.
I had a paradigm shift one night while watching a tv movie in bed around 2008. It was about a boy who came out gay to his religious parents and they refused to accept him. Ultimately in the movie, he committed suicide and the rest of the film was about how his parents regretted not accepting him for who he was. I sobbed and called my cousin, who came out to us and I told him that I loved him but didn't agree with him, and apologized profusely. My entire way of thinking changed, and I became an advocate, even realizing I had suppressed my own sexuality for many, many years. It opened my eyes to who I had become, and I was starting to gain awareness of those biases that had been taught to me at younger ages from my family. This was the beginning of that change.
Currently, I am still growing and still learning. I truly believe, as any white person, you can never be done learning and unlearning ideas that are systemically built into our society. I am accepting of different people and of their different backgrounds. I do travel outside of our country a lot and always look for hole-in-the-wall places to eat food, to shop, to drink, to have conversations with locals to learn and to grow. Listening and being vulnerable to having your ideas and lifestyles challenged is key. In no way do I have this figured out, but I truly believe this is how to connect on a human level.
Going into a multicultural counseling practice means connecting on a human level, it means being open and vulnerable to challenges. Having knowledge of cultural traditions and backgrounds, also historical and present traumas, will take a counselor far with multicultural clients because, while they might not understand from personal experience, they can empathize from the knowledge they've gained. Having values is great as a counselor and as a person, but it's also important to be aware that different cultures hold different values. Being mindful of this and not putting pressure on your client to stick to your values, but what they deem valuable in their culture and traditions will build that trust and rapport smoothly
According to the process of the racial identity development, it seems like I might be between the stages of Introspection and Integrative Awareness. I am fully aware of my culture and my blood, but I haven't experienced my father's side of my culture. After my mom died, I've been rummaging deeper into old photos and when I find photos of family gatherings from his side, it's incredible how large the family is. I love looking at their styles and the decorations, all the celebrations they had. My dad owned a cowboy boot store in Mexico, so everyone wore what he made and sold. He was also a professional photographer, so there are beautiful shots of my mom and the family during the late 80's. I don't struggle with who I am, but I am also not in a place where I feel like I can walk into that country or a gathering and say, "Hey everyone, I'm one of you!" Because look at me. Not only am I so light skinned, but I also don't know the language, I don't own anything authentic, I haven't been to Mexico since I was one year old, I'm completely disconnected. I've tried engaging on social media with Mexican influencers who are around my age, but I'm met with a lot of questions. Which is completely understandable, and I'm also not good with social media. I want to reconnect, but I mostly don' t know how. I'm not sure which category this puts me in.
There was a longing that I began to feel once I started to travel internationally . I wanted more for my life, I wanted to represent more, and I wanted to have this knowledge of rich culture and be proud. I've been to Amsterdam five times to really explore my roots and see where this side of my family comes from. I've grown up with Dutch artwork and ceramic figurines all around me and to see where they were made in person was overwhelming. The food, the people, the language, the architecture almost felt like home already, in a weird way. I've made friends there that I visit, and I've received many tattoos from different artists around the city. My next steps are to begin this exploration process with Mexico, Leon to be precise.
This is where my dad is from, and I would love to explore Mexico City. I currently have a membership to Memrise, which is a language learning app, and I've got both Dutch and Spanish going. I've been taking baby steps towards exploring my Mexican side, but I am happy that I am finally doing so.
This class has helped me tremendously in feeling like I am ready to dive into that part of myself, my culture. Breaking the racist boundaries from my family was the hardest part and then I plateaued at feeling like I needed to stay within my bubble because of how I look. It just goes to show that conversation and empathy go a long way in understanding where each person is coming from and now that I know people are more willing to be understanding than not, I'm learning to not be afraid to take the steps to seek it out. I want to look further into social justice as a part of my counseling career and this class has solidified that want.
I truly loved this class and am so sad it must come to an end. Your teaching and conversations have been so wonderful. Thank you for everything this semester.
Learning from Myself and Others
There is only so much a person can learn from others if they have not learned from themselves yet. I place a lot of value in introspection and finding out who I am and what I stand for. It not only makes my relationship with myself stronger, but it also better allows me to understand, listen to, and learn from others as well.
I grew up in generally liberal areas as a child, and while my neighbors and classmates were mostly White, there was a significant sprinkling of many other races and ethnicities I was exposed to as well. Looking back, it was clear that everyone who was not White was still trying to fit in with the White majority, my family included. Not all my family had to pretend to be White; my father is a White, green-eyed Texan whose ancestors came from Scotland, so there was no pretending there. My mother is a first-generation child of Chilean immigrant parents; parents that pushed very hard to become "full-blooded Americans" as they saw it. They never taught her Spanish or spoke it around her because they feared that she would carry an accent that could be used by others to treat her discriminatorily. They also left most of their Chilean culture behind them, carrying the belief that America was a better place and that to reap those benefits they needed to become American; a process which meant throwing away the Chilean.
My mother considered herself mostly White and for a short while, so did I. I happened to inherit a lot of my maternal grandmother's features though, making it harder for me to feel like I could be as "White" as the rest of my close family. My grandmother comes from indigenous Diaguita Chilean ancestry, giving her much darker features than many others in her own family. I remember hearing stories about how she was called anti-Black slurs from other Chileans and treated as a sort of outcast in her own family because of these darker features. While my skin is not as dark as hers, I carry more of those features than someone like my sister does, who looks much more like the White side of my family. I relate to a lot of the struggles my grandmother had because I was also treated as an outcast in my own family. My parents would joke how I looked like their little adopted brown baby.
When I moved to Arizona and went to an almost entirely White school, this feeling of being an outcast set in even more. This was also when I finally accepted that I am transgender, something that did not help me fit in. Working through the struggles of my gender identity took center stage and I was able to push away those conflicted feelings about my racial identity until 2016 when the pent-up anger from the shooting in Ferguson and the Donald Trump presidential election seemed to explode in a lot of people. The Black Lives Matter movement was something I had heard about, but I had been too young to really learn about it and understand it until that year.
The numerous cases of police violence that I saw captured in video and plastered all over social media changed me and turned me into an activist. I wanted to know why all of this was happening, so I learned about the history of racism in America and listened to the stories of African Americans and other people of color.
Hearing about the racism and systemic injustices that were occurring towards people of color pushed me to learn more. I formed a lot of my core beliefs around that time and the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement protests only continued to propel my knowledge and cement my values. It also changed my outlook on a lot of the interactions I had experienced in my life. The rude comments, weird jokes, and uncomfortable questions that I had gotten before now had a new racialized element to them that I had never understood.
As much as the Black Lives Matter movement and other anti-racist movements like it helped me understand the world we live in and form many of my beliefs and values, it also showed me that there were two talked about sides to this conversation: White oppressors and the oppressed people of color. This was the encounter stage of my racial identity development as I was faced with the question, "where do I fit in all of this?" I had never been seen as truly White by my peers, and a long list of racially charged comments and questions I had faced proved this, but I had also never been seen as a person of color entirely. The unique struggle that comes with racial identity development for me as a multiracial person is that most of the time, I don't get to choose how people see my race. I could identify as White, American, Chilean, Brown, multiracial, or anything else and I would still have people treat me like I'm one thing or the other. Barack Obama can call himself White because of his White mother if he wants to, but he will only ever be referred to as "America's first Black president." I find it difficult to relate to monoracial experiences because of this and although this idea is something I spend a lot of time ruminating on, I have not made much progress past this encounter stage.
For many people, the immersion and internalization stages are reached with education and connection to one's own culture. It has been hard learning about my Chilean and Diaguita heritage because most resources are inaccessible, and most of my family that is connected to Chilean culture lives in Chile and only speaks Spanish. Recognizing that this is a struggle I have has been a big step and while I may not have a strong racial identity yet, it leaves room for me to create my own path and build a racial identity that I can be proud and confident of.
As I move towards a career in counseling, I know how important it is to be aware of my biases and personal experiences. As a multicultural counselor, I would want to use my experiences as a multiracial and transgender person to help give an understanding ear to those who often are not given one. I know from firsthand experience how flawed the healthcare system is towards transgender and LGBTQ people, and one of my goals is to work with LGBTQ clients in an environment where they can feel believed, heard, and understood by someone who is also LGBTQ. Once I am more comfortable with my racial identity, I could also connect with clients more who have experienced struggles with their racial identity or are multiracial. There is not often a place for multiracial experiences in conversations on race, and I would want to make sure my counseling services did not exclude multiracial struggles and identities.
Growing up American has had a big influence on a lot of my cultural norms and social comforts. I prefer a lot of personal space, I've been taught to use a lot of eye-contact, and I tend to view things from a more individualistic perspective than many other cultures. Being LGBTQ, I strongly value finding a family of your own that is not necessarily a biological one, and I also value community and the power that comes from working together. That being said, neither my White nor Latino sides of the family put significant value in biological family relationships. It does sadden me a bit that I cannot relate to the experience of being close with your grandparents or having family get-togethers with your cousins, but that was simply not the family I was born into. I also did not grow up religious and have trouble relating to people who are deeply connected with a religion, partly because of my LGBTQ identity being pushed out and demonized by many of these religious groups.
I recognize these experiences and biases and I know that these differences in viewpoints could cause conflict between myself and future clients. While I may not be able to relate to clients with strong religious beliefs or a deep connection with their family lineage, that does not mean I will not be able to listen and empathize with their struggles. The more I learn about counseling, the more I am reminded of the importance of not assuming anything about your client. The client is the focus of counseling, and they are the ones to really lead the conversation where they need it to go. When I make mistakes, I want to be honest and admit where my biases are and then expand my knowledge and experience to account for those biases. I have very little knowledge about religion, but I have found that opening myself up to the stories and ideas of religious people has really helped me feel more connected with them in a way I did not feel before.
I am ready to learn more about not just other cultures, religions, beliefs, and experiences, but also to learn more about myself. I think that to be a counselor, and a good listener in general, you need to have a strong connection with yourself and with others. Learning more about myself and strengthening my identities is a lifelong process that can bring lifelong rewards.