I have been a Public Health Nurse for three years now. I work with teenage youth in San Francisco suffering from abuse and trauma. Recently one of my coworkers, who happens to be a person of color, admitted that he was involved in my hiring process. When asked what was the most important quality for the next therapist or nurse who comes on board he decided to be blunt, “we need a person of color, preferably a black person.” Three years ago, I may have been slightly uncomfortable with that knowledge. I’ve already been pushed into every POC outreach event, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with my job description. I enjoy spending time with the youth, but it was beginning to get irritating being singled out simply because I’m the black employee in the overwhelmingly majority white school district. My white co-workers clearly were just too uncomfortable to step up to the challenge and no one was making the effort to actually hire more POC employees to fill the role. In turn, I found myself spending hours after work running Black Student Union meetings for teen youth, which I admit were thrilling, but had absolutely nothing to do with my role as nurse and therapist. My focus always has always been trauma therapy and I was eager to get to the work I considered my passion project.
Today, as I sit across from a patient and his mother both struggling with homelessness, suicide ideation, health conditions related to lack of access to quality foods, and the struggles of just being black in an increasingly white tech gentrified expensive AF city, I reflect. I needed to be in this role simply because I am black and am living the black experience. I needed to be in this role because I have survived trauma and am still experiencing trauma. Being able to identify, truly, with the experience your client is living is key to any type of healing work. Being black is an experience in itself. Walking into a room and understanding you are introducing yourself as not only, in my case, “Rachel” but as “Rachel the Black Nurse” is the reality and weight we carry yet rarely acknowledge. We then forget that when we need to connect and care for ourselves, being in POC spaces often times is the most healing environment. The same goes for individuals struggling with trauma; being in spaces with others who can identify with trauma is pivotal for any healing to occur between therapist and patient.
My role first and foremost is a nurse, however, over the years I have adopted the role of a therapist. Reason being, the population I work with consists of majority black teenage youth re-entering academia after time away in prison. I listen to my white co-workers, who have nothing but the best intentions in mind, yet are completely unable to understand what the root cause underneath so much of the poverty, trauma, and pain is. On top of that, when they do happen to understand, it’s too uncomfortable to say what it is, for both therapist and patient. So I find myself, more recently, willing and eager to be that point person for our youth of color and trauma who need a release. Just being able to hold space in that room with the patient when they need to vent about the white woman in the gym who smirked at them when their “black girl hair” was swimming around the drain yet all that “white girl hair” was all over the place and no one said a damn thing, mhmm (yeah, this just happened to me last week). I understand the struggle.
Written by Rachel Kigano, a Yoga Green Book team member
Comment below!!
Do you think practitioners of color are more effective in the community?
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Your message in this article really resonates with me, especially the part about being black as an experience in and of itself. Walking this earth as a black woman in America comes with its own special complications and our community needs therapists whom are uniquely equipped to handle those struggles and at least relate to them.
The same goes for the white police who may be policing black communities. Black people will have to come together and care for eachother. I am not saying that other races can’t care for us, cause there are great nurses, doctors, policeman in every race. Although, you can’t heal what you know nothing about. With that said I think this article hit right on the head what we as the black community needs. We need to be with our own in order to heal, just for a while.
This is pretty selfish and ignorant in my opinion. to imply that race is able to allow you to identify with someone better is most likely why racism continues in the first place. Realistically, the perspective is what causes your own burden. We need more practictioners in general, not just black or female. To say you can’t identify with someone as well based on their ethnicity in relation to their struggle is similar to saying that you need to smoke crack in order to effectively identify with the experience of a substance abuser. Truly, if you feel that their is not a white homeless suicidal counterpart to the patient you are referring to then you are dilusional. As a doctor for 38 years and now CFO of a behavioral clinic (and I’m black) I have found that the only difference in people are their perspectives and ability to determine their own truth. Both can be shaped into whatever they allow themselves to be open to. So maybe we need more practitioners that don’t have to look at the complexion of another human being in order to determine how to relate to them. Because what I find is that the majority of small minded people on this planet that need to see people that look like them to be comfortable have already coined their experience and are living in a world that they’ve created in order to feel comfortable with themselves.
With all due respect, I believe that you are looking at this from your point of view rather that that if a troubled black youth who may be intimidated by a white therapist and thus become more isolated than he/she already is showing up to be. Let’s at least acknowledge that illness and patient/doctors Occur on a spectrum and need to be treated with their perspective in mind and an effort to meet them where they are regardless of where we think the therapist ought to be.
Thank you for this article. This was a sincere and powerful read.
To answer your question, yes! When practitioners of color are working in the community it makes a world of a difference. We have the experiences that no other people have. That trauma has travelled. So our youth are suffering. They need someone who can relate and empathize but yet pick them up and show them the positive way out. So YES!! Practitioners of color are greatly needed in the community!
This article was sooo good. I appreciate you for accepting the challenge-because I know our black youth can be a challenge-and being there for the youth. And knowing that it wasn’t in your job description speaks volumes of you.
Good article. I think this is a fair question to ask and I think the answer is yes. Being black in America is an experience in itself. It’s hard to explain to black people who aren’t from America, let alone to anyone else. We need people who go through similar struggles to talk and identify with.
This piece hit a very hard trigger; associating Black with our existence! Very well expressed and I think further more shows how, Black people being in our presence, around our presence and going through the motions of being Black IS crucial for us. Good read to chew on
This was a great read, and thank you for sharing. My friends and I have had similar conversations and believe that having more POC in all industries or fields is vital. From mental health, to education, to human resources, banking. The list could go on forever. Being able to relate to someone else who understands the cultural nuances that you go through is important and necessary in the workplace.
This is needed. We must talk about the mental health of our communities. How else will we break the mental chains?
When was San Francisco diverse? Increasingly white? Take a look around. It’s Asians who are the fastest growing population. Nothing wrong with that, but you’re narrative is incorrect.
Thank you for sharing this. It needs to be said and exactly the way you said it…bluntly! Keep going sis you’re doing a GREAT thing for our youth! I’d love to collaborate with you on some health and wellness, trauma informed care, ACEs screening type stuff.
As someone who has lived in a mostly white city/state that happens to have the highest incarceration rate of black men in the country, and who has experienced white therapists who have actually told me that I didn’t experience what I know I experienced (because from their viewpoint racism wasn’t happening in our city), this article was a breath of fresh air. As a patient, I feel unable to fully express my frustrations of living in a city where I, an educated black woman, am constantly assumed to be poor, uneducated, a criminal, and/or the spokesperson for all black people, to a white therapist. @Ron Farr above stated that you don’t need to be a crack addict to identify with a substance abuse but former drug addicts are fast tracked into AODA counseling careers because it is well known that they can identify best, and therefore best treat drug addiction. The same goes for counseling black people.
I believe what is needed, consistent with many codes of ethics, is culturally competent clinicians. Being a black clinician does not mean I am necessarily a trauma informed & family systems clinician. It only means I have an observeable connection to POC clients, which could translate to distant family (what is said in our house stays in our house) in a field dominated by a majority race.
I am Caucasian and studying to be a vocational rehabilitation counselor. Currently I am in a Trauma and Grief Counseling class and I have recently completed a Culturally Aware Counseling course. That said, I do believe that in many cases, a counselor who has grown up within the same culture or community would be more effective. However, all practitioners need to make their best effort to be effective as part of the client’s support system and when needed, to try to connect the client with peer coaches or other practitioners who may be even more helpful due to their first hand experience. Also, a client can be assigned to a person with the same background and still be ineffective due to many factors. I do believe that helying professionals who are persons of color are often the most effective, but at times, it can become a great responsibility and overwhelming for thsee practitioners.