Not All Blacks Are African American: The Importance of Viewing Advisees as Individuals in a Culturally Mosaic Context

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Louisiana, Media Archive, United States on 2013-08-25 02:41Z by Steven

Not All Blacks Are African American: The Importance of Viewing Advisees as Individuals in a Culturally Mosaic Context

The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal
Pennsylvania State University
2013-08-15

Mary M. Livingston, Professor of Psychology
Louisiana Tech University

Latoya Pierce, Assistant professor of Psychology
Louisiana Tech University

Lou’uan Gollop-Brown, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Louisiana Tech University

When an advisee walks through the door, it is important for an adviser to consciously refrain from making possibly fallacious assumptions about the advisee’s racial heritage on the basis of skin color. Of course, this is also a mistake that may also be made by the advisee. One author of this paper, who is from the Caribbean, was selected as a preferred adviser by many undergraduate African American advisees, because they felt, as one of them, she would know and understand their experiences. Initial impressions influence the adviser-advisee interaction. This is not to say that the adviser should eschew accurate cultural recognition, which may be an important part of an advisee’s identity and a key to understanding and communication. Instead, we should attempt to verify our assumptions since our suppositions may not be correct…

…An additional issue is the racial identity of individuals who consider themselves to be biracial or multiracial. Biracial is defined as “of, relating to, or involving members of two races” (Biracial, 2013). Multiracial is defined as “composed of, involving, or representing various races” (Multiracial, 2013). When individuals are biracial or multiracial, our human tendency to fit them into one category no longer works. Numerous times, biracial or multiracial advisees have told stories about meeting a person, and during the conversation, racial identity came up. The multiracial student was almost always asked to readily identify himself or herself as a member of an established racial group. The acronym VREG coincides with this experience. VREG stands for visibly recognizable ethic groups, and the concept speaks to our need to classify and recognize people as such (Helms & Cook, 1999)…

Read the entire article here.

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