Multiculturalism Good, Multicultural Theory

Whether two people can understand each other depends not so much on racial or cultural backgrounds, but on how strongly each of them believes in the correctness or even the superiority of what is personally familiar. Truly understanding someone from another culture begins with acceptance of differences as normal, interesting aspects of being human.

Social scientists have explored the phenomenon we refer to as stereotyping from numerous perspectives. One important ?nding is that, in general, stereotyping others varies inversely with the person’s experience with individual members of other groups.

Although simple exposure to different cultures is not suf?cient to end stereotyping, it can improve attitudes and decrease anxiety between individuals from different racial backgrounds .

Multiculturalism remains a hot issue in psychology and counseling. Not infrequently, discussion of multicultural theory and practice results in heated argument.

One example is an article published in the American Psychologist titled “Why Is Multiculturalism Good?” . The article emphasized a European American tradition and was subsequently attacked by numerous authors on a variety of grounds, including claims that Fowers and Richardson minimized the extent of contemporary discrimination and racism, portrayed multiculturalism as inherently adversarial, and were insuf?ciently realistic . What this series of articles demonstrates, aside from intellectual controversy surrounding multicultural issues, is that cultural and ethnic issues are inherently emotional. The implication for clinical interviewers is that individual clients’ cultural roots need to be explored and understood on an emotional level. More speci?c guidelines for multicultural interviewing are provided in Chapter 13.