Social-justice shrinks: how identity politics infected therapy
In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.” “We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology. Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.
