The Convergence Of Race, Ethnicity, And Gender: Multiple Identities In Counseling

by Tracey L. Robinson

For courses in Multicultural Counseling and Cross-Cultural Psychology. This text presents diversity from a much broader perspective than just race and ethnicity, exploring a broad spectrum of cultural and diversity issues and their impact upon the client-counselor relationship. The author, herself an African-American, examines the dominant cultural beliefs and values in the United States, and discusses how their nearly wholesale acceptance as "normal" and "better" can perpetuate feelings of inadequacy, shame, confusion, and distrust on both sides of the counseling "couch." Embracing feminist and diversity theories, methods, and techniques, while injecting humor and fascinating stories, she has created a genuinely insightful and thoroughly practical volume.

287 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I was expecting more from this book. It's not bad and does have a wealth of information. However, most of the information passed on include statistically insignificant numbers (they talk as if there is a big difference, but the variance is usually less than 10% between minority groups), case studies which are examples of doing it wrong (wanted more examples of doing it right), and tons of pages of history. The history is of course important to understand where we are today, but I felt that the actual focus of being a better psychologist when it comes to diversity was overshadowed by it rather than supplemented.

So, not bad per se. Just dry and not as resourceful as I'd like. Oh, and there are a few instances of glaring bias.