Racial/Cultural/Gender Identity

The Racial/Cultural Identity Development Model was constructed to help counselors to better understand what frame of mind a client was in when they came into therapy. The development of cultural and ethnic identity occurs in a stage-wise manner throughout a person’s lifetime. According to the Racial/Cultural Identity Development Model (R/CID), this process occurs in five phases and reflect an individual’s understanding of his or her relationship with the dominant culture. These phases can guide the counselor to a better understanding of their client, although not everyone will fit into one of these phases. Some can be in several of the phases and some may not be in any of the phases. All five phases are guidelines to help a counselor if a client is dealing with racism or oppression. Ideally, once a person has reached the final stage, he or she is able to appreciate and respect his or her native culture and the dominant culture (Sue & Sue, 2016). These phases include: conformity, dissonance, resistance and immersion, introspection, and integrative awareness. Phase one, the conformity stage, is where the client is guided by the dominant group and follow their behaviors and actions. The client is easily persuaded to follow the majority, going against their own race. This type of attitude helps the client feel more accepted by the majority because he or she believes that validation comes from a White perspective. The client accepts belief in White

"Good bye honey! Take care! Call us when you get there safely!" my mother cried. I can still hear those words as if it were yesterday and in reality it was fourteen years ago, that I packed up and left my small town back in southern New Jersey.

I am a Hispanic woman who if I am honest have a lot of self hate for myself and my culture. “Internal racism has been the term used to describe the process by which persons of color absorb the racist messages that are omnipresent in our society and internalized them” (Sue, 2016). I grew up in a small border town where stereotypes are made. I never experienced much racism because we were the majority. However, looking at it now I have a lot of self hate, and I always identified as white growing up, because I am light skinned I still believe I can pass for white at least until I moved to Georgia. Living here has taught me that I miss my culture I miss the cooking, the camaraderie, the unity that Hispanics have. The other day I was asked at

The Racial/Cultural Identity Development model (R/CID) is an expansion of the Minority Identity Development model. The R/CID model encompasses a broader population and removes the term “minority,” which can be disempowering to individuals. This model works to aid therapists in assessment and intervention of culturally diverse clients. It has five levels of development that individuals undergo to understand the dominant culture, their own culture, and the relationship between the two cultures, which is often oppressive. The first level of development is the conformity phase.

"I am an American," says over 308,745,538 people in the United States this year ("2010 Census Data.") These people originate from everywhere; America is a "melting pot" of culture, and that can unfortunately cause social inequalities to arise through the Matrix of Domination, a theory that mirrors the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, as coauthor of Race, Class, & Gender, an Anthology Patricia Hill Collins claims (Andersen, and Collins xi-xiii.) These two terms give label to the commonplace phenomena of race, class, and gender work within a system of social relationships. The understanding of people from other

Have you ever been guilty of listening to a voice of a random caller on the radio who is eager to win tickets to the next Bruno Mars concert or a hopeful caller requesting for a song to play next, and automatically assumed that you knew what race he or she was? Maybe you have had the television on low in the background as you complete a last minute paper. Your eyes are not on the television, but you hear a voice and you are certain that the speaker is a White female or a gay male. This phenomenon is called Linguistic Profiling. Linguistic Profiling is the act of identifying one’s social characteristic based on his or her dialect or accent (Alim, 2005). It may be too easy for one to drawl a conclusion about the sexuality and race of someone based solely on the way he or she sounds.

What is gender and how is it defined? Gender and its definition have been argued over for decades, by the religious, scientific and civilian community. Everyone has created their own definition and their opinion on how to define gender. From a nonscientific perspective, gender is defined by society, which is based on anatomy and basic aesthetics.

Throughout the second season of ABC’s American Crime, there were an extreme amount of ways in which race, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity were depicted, troubled, and interrogated. While watching the second season of American Crime in class, it almost seemed as if the entire series was made just to explore each and every component of this course, Ethnics 1010. The series successfully explored through numerous situations with all of these important components that we have discussed throughout the semester. However, there happens to be three specific components that I would like to elaborate on throughout this essay.

The Virginia Military Institute was a higher education school in Virginia. It claimed to train the leaders of the future, or “citizen-soldiers” and impart to its students great discipline; however, it only enrolled male students. In 1996, the United States government sued the state of Virginia and the Virginia Military Institute for its male-only policy as a violation of the Fourteenth amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The District Court ruled in the school’s favor. The Fourth Circuit demanded Virginia to reverse this constitutional violation (Van Camp). In response to this complaint, Virginia proposed a similar program for women: the Virginia Women’s Institute for Leadership. The District Court found that this plan satisfied the equal protection requirement, and the Fourth Circuit affirmed that although these two institutions would differ in prestige (and the historical benefit), they would still offer essentially similar educational opportunities. The United States then appealed to the Supreme Court, and it raised the issue whether this new women’s only academy satisfied the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The Supreme court ruled, in a 7-to-1 decision, that Virginia Military Institute’s male-only policy was unconstitutional. In order to not violate the Equal Protection clause of the amendment, VMI must make its program available to women as well. VMI

When I was younger I never really thought I was different from other kids; I mean I knew I was adopted by my grandparents but I never had to do anything differently until about second grade. We were doing a family tree activity which was meant to be an easy assignment because it was pretty much just fill in the blank of your family member, but I can remember the feeling I got as my teacher was almost done with the directions and all of my other classmates were already rushing to start while I was still just staring at my blank

By outlining the social and racial inflicted prejudice which consumed British ideology, there is a clear identity crisis for the black female characters in The Final Passage, Small Island and Second-Class Citizen. The inexplicable cultural ties to the colonial country indicate an erasable diasporic history which often surfaces within the relationships and liminal spaces which the Black female characters encounter in the mother country. As a result, we can see the character of Leila in severe turmoil due to her hybrid identity and the racial discrimination inflicted upon her. Thus, racial identity is crucial in mapping, re-negotiating and constructing the female diaspora throughout the texts. The positioning of Black women in post-war Britain

When my brother started going to preschool and I was 2 years old, I used to think it was the most amazing thing ever, according to my teachers and parents i used to cry for them to let me go to school with him, but I couldn’t, once i turned 3 years old they let me stay for a while and I learned to write my name and my brothers name, which may seem kind of insignificant but being able to do that was prodigious. Once he left for Kindergarten I had to wait 2 more years until I could officially go to preschool but once I did i knew my way around the place like it was my home. I was excited to go there because I knew my brother had gone there, and I emulated everything he used to do. Once I graduated preschool and started kindergarten I was happy to be going to the same school as my big brother, but since he was older he had friends of his own and gave

The construction of a self-identity can be a very complex process that every individual is identity is developed through the lenses of cultural influences and how it is expected to given at birth. Through this given identity we are expected to think, speak, and behave in a certain way that fits the mold of societal norms. This paper aims to explain how gender perform gender roles according these cultural values. I intend to analyze the process in which individuals learned and internalized their respective gender identities, through their cultural background. I will be conducting a set of interviews with the intention to compare my experience as a self-identified male of Mexican descent, to the experience of another male character of Japanese heritage in order to understand how we come to self-identify as masculine in diverged cultures. In this paper, I argue that the construction of gender identities is a direct consequence of societal influential factors such as family values; values that reflect the individual’s culture. This analysis will not only utilize evidence from these identity formations, but also in explaining why and how these self-identities were constructed using both theoretical sources and empirical studies as a framework.

“If we don’t fully understand our individual and collective roles in maintaining a system of white superiority, our relationships with people of color remains superficial, our ability to work in diverse workplaces is greatly diminished, and we fail to create a just world in which everyone has an equitable opportunity to contribute and thrive” (Kendall, 2013, p. 1). This paper discusses who I am as a cultural person and how I have come to be this way. The first section of this paper discusses my cultural background and my cultural identity. I address the factors that make up my cultural identity and the challenges that I have faced because of my cultural identity. The next section discusses my White racial identity development and the events in my life that have led me to become the person I am today in relation to my racial identity. The final section of this paper outlines the implications my own racial and cultural identity will have on my career as a clinical mental health counselor.

Cultural identity is the basis in which identification is used to express different aspects pertaining to identity and heritage. A person's cultural identity may be created by social organization, as well as traditions and customs within their lives. The two aspects that construct my cultural identity are the frequent chores I must complete every day in order to fulfill my behavioral expectations, and the youth group I attend weekly. These aspects are important to my family and me. Therefore, my identity has an immeasurable effect on my upbringing into this multi-cultural world I live in.