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Mis_ing fr_m th_ Narr_tive
How mixed race clinicians are filling gaps in clinical experiences
BY KIRA GOLDENBERG
When Sarah Yang Mumma was earning her M.S.W. in the late aughts, her academic studies felt disconnected from her experience as a multiracial person moving through the world. Most classic clinical literature either assumes clinicians and clients are white by default or attempts to grapple with race and white supremacy—but within and outside the consulting room, the multiracial experience has been largely overlooked.
“I just remember moving through my masters in clinical social work feeling like, when do I get into literature?” Mumma said. “The idea of race being ambiguous in any way— I don’t recall it being brought up.”
After about a decade of postmaster’s clinical work, Mumma ultimately decided to create the literature herself. She just completed a Ph.D. at SSW, penning a dissertation on how multiracial therapists experience, understand and navigate racial dynamics within clinical work.
“It was a lot of self reflection and trying to engage with this with various supervisors, with colleagues,” she said, describing how she went about digging into the issue. “It was a process of acknowledging this is important and empowering myself to seek out that literature.”
Along the way, Mumma has published multiple papers on multiracial identities in clinical social work, including one, published this year in Smith College Studies in Social Work, that analyzed her experience of microaggressions from a clinical mentor related to Mumma’s multiracial identity. In the paper, she recounted how she sought counsel on navigating “racialized transference and countertransference themes within the clinical dyad,” but ended up in “a defense of my multiracial reality and a struggle for who has the power to define it.”
Mumma is one of an expanding cadre of multiracial SSW clinicians working to create the inclusivity they felt was missing from their own graduate studies and clinical experiences.
“There’s a growing body of things that have been published but, when I was in school, there wasn’t a ton out there,” said EJ Seibert, M.S.W., Smith College’s Director of Disability Services. “There were so many frameworks that didn’t make sense to me.”
“It doesn’t really align with what I know that comes from my lived experience, which is largely influenced by being mixed,” they added. “I’m never white enough to be white, but I’m also not BIPOC enough to be BIPOC. Am I neither of those things? Am I both of those things? Am I neither and both?”
Seibert noted that, in the absence of a dedicated body of research on multiracial clinical work, they found that Indigenous methods and monoracial theoretical frameworks were most helpful to guide their thinking, useful but incomplete fits for addressing unique and multivariate identities.
That uniqueness formed the foundation of a workshop that Seibert and Ann Augustine, M.S.W. ’98, co facilitated at SSW in June focused on the issue. (They are running a second workshop online in October, through the Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership, that is free and open to anyone who identifies as mixed.) The June workshop, in Seibert’s words, served to “open the space for people to explore what can come up in clinical spaces due to the absence of more specific guidance in the training that we have had.”
One thing is for sure, noted Augustine: what comes up is sure to be complicated.
“To me, mixedness—being mixed— is so complex and nuanced, whether you’re a clinician or not,” she said. “I think there’s not a lot of spaces to talk through the complexities, and that’s what we were hoping for – to create a safe space for clinicians to explore.”
This desire for communities of mixedrace clinicians—of fellow social workers, clinicians, and therapists who understand the ways in which multiracial identities bring up unique clinical issues around selfdisclosure and transference in client work—became so clear to Mumma that she led the creation of an online directory of multiracial therapists with a group she formed through the biennial conference Critical Mixed Race Studies.
“I didn’t feel like I was finding the spaces where I could explore this, and explore this more depthfully,” Mumma said. “So I just began to create some of those relationships and spaces for myself.”
As Mumma notes in her recent paper, multiracial identities are uniquely complicated. Clinicians may be perceived differently depending on a client’s own ethnic or cultural background, creating evershifting relational webs in which some form of racialized disclosure may—or may not—be useful within the dyad’s clinical work.
“We all have different experiences of what it is to hold this unique space,” said Simone Jacobs, M.S.W. ’05, owner of a private group practice in Takoma Park, Maryland, where she works with survivors of abuse, neglect and intergenerational trauma. Jacobs’s parents are a Black Oklahoman and a white Brit, giving her an identity that sets her both within and outside of the experience of being a Black or brown person in America.
“One of my clients came to me at one point and said, ‘Well, you’re a Black woman and you understand.’ I said, “Well number one, yes, and number two, no, because I didn’t grow up here, so my experience isn’t the same as the average Black woman in this country.’”
Is disclosing that difference—that the racialized assumptions Jacobs’ client made about their common identity was not completely true— beneficial in a clinical encounter, or do the shades and nuances of experience create unhelpful distance in a therapeutic dyad? Is it helpful to work with the transference inherent in the initial assumptions or to challenge that dynamic? What if client and therapist have more similarities than the client assumes based on their racialized perceptions? Or fewer?
It may be complicated, but multiracial identity can be an invaluable tool, subtly adaptable to every clinical relationship.
“With some clients, it can be really helpful for them to know my identity and for other clients across the racial identity spectrum it can be not helpful,” Seibert said. “When does the client need to be in the projection that they’re in to do the work that they’re doing and when do they need to be brought out of it?”
Mumma’s dissertation findings, stemming from interviews with mixedrace clinicians, echoed Seibert’s observations.
“There was this sense of strength and drawing positively on their identity to help them join with clients,” Mumma said. “A number of participants talked about this experience of duality as a mixedrace person and being able to draw from this experience to work with a person who isn’t mixed race but experiences ‘duality’
in other ways,” such as someone with an invisible disability or an LGBTQIA identity.
The potential clinical advantages contained in a therapist’s multiracial identity as a resource are just beginning to be harnessed. But it’s a superpower that cannot be realized without community support, making it crucial to build and nurture those networks.
“Every time we talk about these topics, it’s so healing and informative and I get insights every time,” Augustine said. “One of the things that I was realizing is, when I was newer, I was trying to fit myself into the theory. ‘Why can’t I fit in this box? Why am I not a blank slate?’ I had a therapist image in my mind and I wasn’t that person.”
“Over time, I’m more and more comfortable with who I actually am, not with who I should have been,” she continued. “In my mind’s eye there were a lot of old white men, and I couldn’t quite be them, but I could be me.” ◆
