On Counseling The Culturally Diverse

I believe I have read all that I needed to of Dearald & David Sue's Counseling The Culturally Diverse It's one of those therapy/social work books that just winds up stating the obvious in spite of its pages and pages of charts theories. I got the feeling that the book was very clearly articulating some ideas to somebody who was interested in what the authors had to say. Unfortunately, that somebody wasn't me. Where to start...It’s hard, because while I didn’t agree with everything in the book, it never really aroused an emotional response in me. (2003).

For entertainment’s sake, I’ll start an interesting two sentences taken out of context.

“Mass murders committed over the years have been traced to Chinese juvenile gangs operating in Chinatowns and recent news reports show this trend to be on the increase.”

(Sue & Sue, 2003, p.329).

What? This book goes out of its way to cite sources, and here, without saying where these “juvenile gangs” are, which chinatowns they are taking over, or which “mass murders” they are committing! Did this happen in the Chinatown in Boston where I go for dim sum and dumplings? Are there hidden mass graves inside the Big Dig tunnels? I’m not going to write off the entire text because of this one error, but it still says something about the authors’ way of looking of the world and their intended audience.

I did learn a few interesting things from the text:

●According to research by D. S. Sandu, the poverty rate of certain Southeast Asian groups is “five times higher than that of the general population.” (cited in Sue & Sue, 2003, p.328)

●Southeast Asians are three times more likely to be on welfare than is the general population.” (cited in Sue & Sue, 2003, p.328). These facts illustrate a larger problem that comes up when discussing Asian Americans---there is tremendous variety in race, ethnicity, culture and standards of living within Asia.

For example, Korea is a country roughly the size of Indiana with a population of around 48 million. Technology arrives in Seoul before it is released in the US. Cambodia is country the size of Oklahoma and has a population of 14.8 million. It is still recovering from genocide. Some of the main players in this genocide are currently working in the Cambodian government. Somehow these totally different cultures share something in common. To an untrained eye, Cambodians and Koreans look similar. Aside from this, what do they share? There may be some commonalities, and I’m really interested in seeing where they come from historically. This will be the topic of a later post.

It seems that more than any kind of training of the art of empathy or “therapeutic technique,” to engage in successful “multicultural counseling,” people need to get lessons in history and geography. Ties between cultures can be better forged by concrete knowledge than abstract technique.

I believe in the richness of human experience. Regardless of intention, writing like we see in the Sues’ text only serves to solidify stereotypes:

“The father maintains an authoritative and distant role and is generally not emotionally demonstrative or involved with his children. His role is to provide for the economic and physcail needs of the family. Shame and guilt are used to control and train the children. Mothers are more responsive to the children but use less nurturance and more verbal and physical punishments than do Euro-American mothers (Kelly & Tseng, 1993).”

Rather than simply accept this portrayal of Asian fathers as the truth, it is more helpful to Asian American clients to find out more about their complex interior lives. How would Asian fathers explain this way of acting? They must have reasons for acting the way they do. In their own words, what are these reasons?

In this recent article in the New York Times about a training program for Korean fathers, we see participants make real changes in the way they act towards their families. I'm curious as to what it is that these men actually experienced while going through these changes. The best way to get a better idea of these men’s lives is by forming close relationships with people in Korean families or reading Korean literature. Books like the Sues’ don’t seem to be too helpful.

In their chapter on Culturally Appropriate Intervention Strategies, the authors present a diagram titled “Communication Style Differences (Overt Activity Dimension-Nonverbal/Verbal)

Here is a reproduction of the first line of the table:

American Indians	Asian Americans and Hispanics	Whites	Blacks
1.Speak softly/slower	1. Speak softly	1. Speak loud/fast to control listener	1. Speak with affect.

(Sue & Sue, 2003, p.143)

Regardless of whether or not these characterizations are accurate, how can a counselor utilize this sort of information in his or her practice? I've noticed some of these traits of speech in my own personal life by being around different kinds of people. If you need a chart to explain these differences in speech, you probably lack perception and shouldn't be a counselor.

As I've said: you can learn about people by being physically around them or by finding a way to immerse yourself in their worlds. The Sues' textbook does not help you do either of these things. By presenting its information in official, authoritative, almost scientific sounding language, it promotes the illusion that it may be a substitute for actual learning.

In order to try to find better ways of becoming close to cultures other than my own, I will try reading Morrisson's essay on Moby Dick, Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey & The Language of Discourse and analyzing the photos of Nikki S. Lee. It's a gamble, but I have a hunch that I will learn something valuable.