Article archive / April 1, 2010
Originally published: . Volume 1, No. 8. Source pages: 1, 11, 12.
Editor’s note: The Times interviewed Dr. Marva Lewis from Tulane, Dr. John Robinson, now at Howard University, School of Medicine, and Dr. Linda Brannon, from McNeese, and asked for their ideas about the diversity within the psychological community.
“People perceive diversity and approach it
as a problem,” said Dr. Marva Lewis, Associate Professor at Tulane, School of Social Work, and professor of Sociocultural Psychology.
“When I think of the benefits of diversity, I work with families, individuals, and communities with a whole different approach,” she said. “I’m passionate about what diversity can create.” Her website hosts this theme, named Diversity Creates.com.
The first thing Dr. Lewis does in her work is to take people through a process where they reclaim
their identity, whether it is cultural, ethnic, or in the case of the psychology community, the various sub- disciplines.
“You come from some place,” she said. “You have a heritage, you do things for a reason. We can come up with our solutions to our conflicts, when we preserve our diversity. So, a different way to think about diversity is to preserve who we are, as an ethnic group, as an individual, or, in this case, as a discipline.”
Marva does this in her training and consulting work, called Cultural Competency Workshops, where she uses her model to help individuals and groups. “When we celebrate and preserve our identity, we are in a much better position to create something new with somebody who’s different than we are,” she said. “We are better able to address those really hard issues when we preserve who we are.”
“The other piece with reclaiming who you are, from the model that I’ve developed, has to do with understanding your emotional response to diversity. That’s where we get into trouble.” Marva pointed out, “In the emotional response, you forget who you are. If you reclaim your identity, and are aware of the emotional response, then you can manage the emotions.”
Marva has developed a self-report measure used in her workshops, for participate insight and goal setting. “People want to know where they stand in relation to other people,” she explained. The measure includes racial openness, openness to diversity ethic identity, and emotional response to diversity.
Cultural competence for work with diverse populations is an “on-going process,” she said. “Not something that is resolved in a one or two hour workshop. Diversity is way, way bigger.” And, “The best place to start with is self.”
Dr. John Robinson came to Louisiana in 1982, from his position on the psychiatry faculty of Harvard Medical School. In New Orleans he was one of the administrators who opened the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital. From there he went to the Office of the Dean and psychiatry and pediatrics faculty at LSU Medical Center in New Orleans. Later he moved back to Washington DC, but remains licensed in Louisiana. He is currently professor of psychiatry and surgery at Howard University, College of Medicine, and clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. He is also president of
the American Board of Clinical Health Psychology (ABPP) and Vice Chair of the Psychology Board in D.C. He is author of Diversity in Human Interactions, The Tapestry of America.
“What we do naturally is try to stratify people,” Dr. Robinson said. “Based on gender, based on race, profession, even within a profession––we try to build some type of hierarchy.”
“That’s a human characteristic,” he said. “We want someone under us. We always try to do that. A majority population does not always refer to numbers; it’s power. What you see in psychology is that we started off with the clinical psychologist vs. everybody else. If you were not a clinician, you really were not a psychologist. Then we embellished that by getting licensed.”
“Now it seems to be that break between those with prescription privileges and those without. Are you ‘better’ because you have a quasi-medical license? Because in our heads, medicine is superior to psychology.”
“It’s that kind of hierarchical thing,” he continued. John works in a medical setting, and sees the similar dynamic. “So in psychology we’re doing the same thing. We’ve done that all along. Now we’re developing that extra hierarchy by adding medical psychologists. So for the practice people it’s going to be the licensed psychologists left behind because the attention is on the medical psychologists, because they also have support of the medical board. But we also have to understand they’re still subservient.”
“So you’re an independent practitioner but you can’t
practice independently. We fought hard to be independent practitioners, to be autonomous. And to get that extra piece of status, we gave away our independence and our autonomy.”
When asked what might help, John said, “We have to realize that all of us are psychologists, and we’re all there trying to do a job. And not try to find differences with each other, because when we find differences, we tend to have some sort of hierarchy in mind.”
He pointed to a common mistake in thinking, saying, “When we look at diversity, regardless of what areas we are talking about, we think of it as a blending, as a melting.” But, he said, “That’s not diversity. Diversity is like a salad. Different components put together to make something else. You can distinguish each part. It is not a stew.”
“We need to enjoy the diversity,” he continued. “Like my book says, in a tapestry you can see all the different threads and themes and colors. It‘s not all blended in and dyed in as one. And the diversity is the thing that keeps the fabric intact: it keeps it vibrant, it keeps it renewed, and it keeps it interesting.”
Dr. Linda Brannon, Professor of Psychology at McNeese State University, is author of textbooks in introductory, gender, and health psychology. Her writing and teaching leaves little time for research, but when it did, her topics revolved around social cognition and attribution. Her work in gender (Gender: Psychological Perspectives, 5th edition, Allyn & Bacon) brought her to the wider issues of diversity.
When asked about the issues within psychology she said, “I thought of the classic social psychology research on group formation and polarization. When people think about the groups to which they belong, and those to which they do not, thinking tends to fall into in-groups and out- groups and forms the basis for prejudice and discrimination,” she said.
“This is classic social psychology, which psychologists began researching 60 years ago. Louisiana psychologists have formed in-groups and out-groups and are behaving exactly the way that the social psychology research discovered.”
“It's too bad that we've become caught up in things we discovered,” she said. “And additionally too bad that we don't recognize it.”
Dr. Marva Lewis, Tulane, Sociocultural Psychology.
Dr. John Robinson, professor at Howard U., Medical School. Licensed in Louisiana, John authored Diversity in Human Interactions, The Tapestry of America, Oxford Press.
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