We Must Dismantle the “Matrix” from Within: Liberatory Practices in Counseling
If our goal in schools is to help all students thrive and become their best selves, equity and inclusion cannot be an afterthought. There is no way to support student mental and emotional health without challenging the multiple and interconnected ways in which the culture of white supremacy privileges some “selves” above others.
For school counselors and school psychologists this work poses a challenge. We live and work within systems designed to socialize youth into specific cultural values and norms that have emerged from our country’s history. These values and norms are never neutral. They prime and shape behaviors in ways that reinforce the inequitable and exclusive status quo. So we find ourselves operating in a system that we are also encouraging our schools to help dismantle and our students to transcend and transform. To put it another way, we work within and for the very “matrix” that has shaped and influenced us and that we know to be the cause of harm. It’s quite the conundrum for those of us committed to walking an antiracist path.
I was recently speaking with another educator, also a parent, about the challenges of integrating antiracist values into our educational practices. We were noticing, for instance, how we often go to great lengths to teach students how to win arguments, and at the same time wonder why, as a society, we seem to have little ability to handle disagreement or have any taste for finding common ground. In the vast majority of schools, individual achievement and competition are so valued and rewarded that we still don’t know what our world could look like if we centered collaboration and cooperation as key values — if we focused on lifting each other up and sharing resources. Because we operate within systems ultimately designed to both teach and maintain inequities and disparities, it often feels virtually impossible not to be complicit in them.
If you are a school counselor or psychologist who is wrestling with a sense of disconnect between your work and your professional goals, there are steps you can take to align them better. For one, it is useful to think of antiracist work within systems through a “harm reduction” lens —“harm reduction” not being the end goal, but a useful approach while wider transformation is still afoot. In other words, while we are unlikely to disentangle ourselves completely from the legacy of white supremacy, we can still incrementally disrupt it. If we engage in hurt reduction as a regular practice, we are helping to put enough pressure on the system itself so that, in time, it will not be able to function as structured.
At its core, the process of incrementally enabling for more and more liberation in our students rests on two key assumptions about white supremacist values and norms. We can assume that:
these values and norms are woven into the protocols, policies, and practices of our jobs and institutions. Therefore, even our counseling practices and therapeutic goals will reinforce oppression rather than promote liberation — at least to some extent.
these values and norms impact everyone in the system. Therefore, every concern a client brings to us is shaped by white supremacist ideology — at least to some extent.
Pretending this is not the case will not make the continued noxious effects of white supremacy any less real. On the other hand, assuming that our clients’ struggles and the way we try to help them are intertwined with oppressive forces, allows us to see where we fall short of our liberatory goals and make it possible to do something about it.
I think of this approach as a way to change “the matrix” while working “within the matrix.”
This transformative practice is not easy. Indeed, at the start much of it may sound overly abstract or theoretical — and perhaps disconnected from our work. The reason for this is that, living within the matrix, most of us are not aware of our own racial socialization in our everyday lives. It takes a sustained period of conscious attention to understand how wide-ranging this socialization is. My neighborhood, my home ownership status, the friends I have, my child’s school options, what I do for a living, how easily or confidently I navigate my career, how much leisure time I have, where I travel, what I value, my access to health care, my degree of physical and emotional safety and so on — all have deep roots in my sociopolitical standing within white supremacy. While none of these outcomes may be wholly determined by my identities, my identities are profoundly impacted by them in myriad ways. Seeing these roots is seeing “the matrix.” And seeing our own lives in context of the “matrix” allows us to see the “matrix” in the places we work and in the lives of the students we want to support. The more we see, the more we can disrupt. And the reverse is also true: if we don’t see these tentacles of white supremacy in our own lives, we are bound to reinforce an oppressive system in our work lives. There is no neutral standing.
A book I co-authored with best-selling author and educator Dr. Ali Michael, Our Path, Our Problem: Collective Antiracism for White People, provides a step-by-step framework to optimize antiracist lenses in both your own life and work. And in this book chapter you’ll find detailed clinical examples of how to apply this framework to clients.
But even before you get to these, or engage with other antiracist resources, it helps to develop a set of questions that provide a lens of equity and justice to your work. For each student you meet — no matter the gender, race, or socioeconomic status — consider asking the following questions from a systemic perspective:
Where does the student internal sense of worthiness, self-efficacy, and life aspirations originate?
E.g., where does a cis-girl’s doubt of her mathematical abilities come from?
Who benefits (both in terms of finance and power) from that internalized sense of self?
E.g., who ends up having easier access to high-paying STEM jobs or decides what research questions get answered?
Does the student’s concerns emerge from failing to live up to white supremacist values and norms, from fitting too well within them, or from trying to dismantle them?
E.g., continuing the example above, what is the role of stereotype threat in a student’s academic success and professional aspirations?
Do the tools I’m offering support the student to better fit within white supremacist values and norms or to better resist them?
E.g., does assertiveness training for a marginalized student without a larger classroom/faculty intervention help the student in question or put the student at greater risk?
Should my interventions be geared toward increasing resilience or toward empathy building in the student?
E.g., is empathy building in mainstream students needed to help create a culture of inclusion? Is empathy intrinsically antithetical to white supremacist thinking for some, and a survival mechanism for others?
Are counseling or advocacy skills needed to support this student?
E.g., is it the student’s worldview that needs intervening, or a school policy or norm.
If we want to chip away at white supremacy from the ground up and the inside out, we must move from taking symptoms at face value to considering them always and for everyone in their cultural, historical contexts. Doing anything else inevitably reaffirms and reinforces the status quo.
The good news is that, to the extent that we dare to become a conscious, collective force within our schools, we have tremendous power. Let’s harness it!
Eleonora Bartoli, Ph.D., is a consultant and licensed psychologist specializing in trauma resilience-building, and multicultural social-justice counseling.