Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

  I returned to work one day and discovered my office had been moved. Well, I really didn’t have an office anymore. I asked a friend, "what happened?" She mentioned something about the new boss. I did not have plans to find different employment so I put up with what turned out to be a loss of social status and privileges, which I had the year before. No one complained about my work. This was one example of a location in the United States when I was not privileged for being a white man.  White men can point to examples of discrimination. Perhaps that's what makes it hard to deal with generalizations about race and privilege. As I read the a  WP story  of a man who lost his teaching job allegedly because he taught his students that white privilege was a fact and that conservatives are acting to censor what teachers can say about race, I began to think about the lack of nuance in the story. For the most part, I have not experienced discrimination based on my ethnici...

Reality is breaking in on my work in an incredibly powerful way. I am writing about racism and sexism in a book about counseling Pentecostal Christians, which I started early in the Covid Spring of 2020. Then along came the horrible videos of violence against Black Americans.  Then, as I am searching for examples of the reality of the lived experience of Black Christians, I read an interview with Dr. Estrelda Y. Alexander that captured so much of the same issues I am trying to convey to young counselors. This post tells about what I learned from Dr. Alexander. Here's the context. Counselors are supposed to be aware of, and knowledgeable about, the culture of their clients. So, I write about Pentecostal cultures. And I find out Alexander shares similar comments with her interviewer. I also want counselors to be aware that race matters and there is a history of racism in Pentecostal churches. Alexander says that too and has a book on the subject! Fortunately, I had ment...