Introduction to Anti-Racist Feminist Practice, Advocacy, and Activism Special Issue

Abstract

This special issue draws together Black feminist, womanist, mujerista, and anti-racist approaches to theory and praxis. Authors provide recommendations and guidance toward liberatory approaches to psychology, therapy, activism, and healing. The collection builds upon presentations and conversations that took place at the Association for Women in Psychology 2021 virtual conference about how to best work toward a more just, anti-racist, and liberatory world as feminist and womanist therapists in increasingly difficult social contexts. The articles provide important herstories, testimonies, analyses, and promising actions. Together, these works invite readers to join together in imagining and enacting radically inclusive paths to healing and collective liberation.

Keywords:

• Anti-racism
• collective liberation
• feminist therapy
• womanist therapy

In the summer of 2020, as the pandemic was still in the early stages, and protests were filling the streets as a result of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (Cheung, 2020; Putnam et al., 2020), the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP) implementation collective decided to plan a virtual conference for 2021, formed a planning collective, and developed the conference theme of Doing Anti-Racism Work and Addressing Intergenerational Trauma. Across three days of online programming, we brought together speakers with the intention to “inspire members to think deeply and critically about racial and social justice, as well as systems that impede social progress and/or cause harm to marginalized communities.” Many of the contributions in this special issue of Women & Therapy began as presentations or keynote addresses at this virtual conference held in March of 2021. Further, many of the coeditors for this special issue served on either the conference planning collective or the implementation collective for AWP. In keeping with the feminist understanding that the personal is political, and in recognizing that our positionality influences all of our actions, including our editorial choices, we believe it is important to introduce each of the coeditors to this issue.

Noelany Pelc is a Puerto Rican, White-passing, mostly straight, cisgender woman who identifies as a feminist psychologist and educator. She has served on the AWP conference planning committee from 2019 to 2023, co-coordinating conference platform and technology. She is an assistant professor in psychology and a licensed psychologist. shola shodiya-zeumault is a Nigerian and Black American, heterosexual, cisgender woman from California whose research and clinical work focuses on resistance as a means of healing from oppression and sustaining hope among Black women-identified folks. She is an environmental justice advocate, a social science storyteller, and an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. shola currently serves on the Implementation Collective for AWP as the Membership Coordinator, and was the conference coordinator for the 2023 AWP conference centered on transformative justice and abolition feminism. Katherine W. Bogen is a White, queer/bisexual, cisgender, Ashkenazi Jewish woman from New England. She is a trauma therapist for survivors of sexual harm and a PhD student in clinical psychology. Katherine served as the conference co-coordinator for the 2021 and 2024 virtual conference(s) and has remained involved as an AWP caucus member and volunteer. Celina Whitmore is a multiracial Black, queer cisgender woman from Connecticut. She is a practioner-scholar-activist and Doctoral Candidate in Clinical Psychology. Celina is a wellness entrepreneur and adjunct professor who is passionate about mentoring the next generation of students. Celina served as the Communications and Website Coordinator for AWP (2019–2022).

Rachel L. Dyer is a White, queer/bisexual cisgender woman from the Midwest. She is a scholar-activist and PhD candidate in counseling psychology. Rachel served as the Media Chair for the 2021 virtual conference and is the current Communications and Website Coordinator (2022–2025) for AWP. Anju Kaduvettoor Davidson is a South Asian American, heterosexual, cisgender woman who identifies as a feminist psychologist. She is a licensed psychologist and is in private practice. Alicia M. Trotman identifies as an Afro-Caribbean demisexual cisgender woman who is the 2021–2022 APA Division 1 Program Chair and Newsletter Editor for AWP (2019–2023). She is an Assistant Professor in Psychology who conducts research in emotions using humanistic and spiritual methodologies. Tiffany O’Shaughnessy is a White, bisexual, cisgender woman who identifies as a feminist psychologist and served as the co-coordinator for the 2021 virtual conference as well as the collective coordinator (2020–2023) for AWP. She is an associate professor of counseling and also a licensed psychologist in part-time private practice.

We came together to edit this special issue during the dual pandemics of racism and COVID-19 impacting our world (Neville et al., 2021). Throughout the editing of this special issue, we have attempted to practice the feminist principles of empowerment, egalitarianism, and anti-racist practices. In her book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, pleasure activist and community organizer, adrienne maree brown (2017), noted that a key principle of working toward change is to recognize that “there is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.” (p. 41). This special issue attempts to bring the conversations that occurred at AWP 2021, and that are ongoing, about how to best work toward a more just, anti-racist, and liberatory world as feminist and womanist therapists into the therapy scholarship. Acknowledging the adage from Audre Lorde (2018) that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” many of the articles contained in this special issue utilize language, formats, approaches, and structures that are not readily seen in the hegemonic psychotherapy and psychology literature. We contend that a departure from scholarship as usual is necessary in order to move the field toward anti-racist praxis.

Within the “matrix of domination” (Collins, 1990) to which individuals with marginalized identities are subjected, multiple systems of oppression operate together to support and uphold White supremacist, sexist, transmisogynistic, and capitalist structures. These structures, along with their social, economic, and interpersonal consequences, have significant deleterious impacts on individuals, communities, families, women, and gender expansive people (Alvarez et al., 2016). The matrix of domination increases risk for minoritized and marginalized people to experience hate crimes and race-based incidents, legislation targeting their bodily autonomy and rights (i.e., anti-abortion restrictions), voting restrictions designed to limit their policy influence, laws targeting and policing their identities (i.e., anti-trans legislation and erasure of nonbinary identity), and disproportionate negative outcomes associated with national and global crises (i.e., the impact of COVID-19 on incarcerated folks, poor folks). The rise of corporatism and economic monopolies further undergirds these inequities, allowing access to power levers only for those who have the access to and privilege of accumulated capital.

As COVID-19 exposed the proliferation of oppressive structures and their impact on marginalized communities, therapists and mental health clinicians have been forced to grapple with the implications of such oppression on their clients’ lives and in their own lives. Impacts on clients may include limited access to mental health care and non-exploitative telehealth therapy, as capitalistic approaches to mental health services proliferate web and app spheres. Further, clients may be contending with intersectional and racial trauma, as well as the expansion of the influence(s) of these oppressive structures to clients’ partners, families, and community members across generations. Additionally, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, clients are likely navigating new roles as family systems shift, labor demands change within the household, and waves of layoffs impact earning potential, resulting in domestic and economic stress.

Within the therapeutic space, designed to be healing and transformative, clinicians and providers themselves may be grappling with vicarious trauma and their own experiences of racial harm, each exacerbated by the effects of COVID-19. Broadly, mental health providers are reporting record high levels of burnout and exhaustion (Joshi & Sharma, 2020; Rosen et al., 2023). However, these emotionally demanding contexts may motivate therapists and providers to engage in meaning-making and derive new purpose within the field by engaging in activist practices, creating pathways to serve whole communities, advocating for minoritized client groups, and establishing rest, abolition, and transformative justice as central to their approach to mental health work (Hassan, 2022). The pressure of this moment is spurring in therapists and mental health providers an acute desire to create more space for liberatory healing practices that meet the complex needs of clients, providers, and broader communities.

Impact on the Field

The role of mental healthcare in intervening to mitigate and disintegrate oppressive forces has been reinforced by the broadening collective acknowledgment of both the necessity and impacts of self- and community care during collective trauma. As such, mental health clinicians now more than ever are navigating what it means to be a therapist at this time. What does it mean to be accountable to one’s client? To one’s community? To embrace a collectivist way of being that encourages the therapist to see oneself as a part of a myriad healing community that involves not only therapy but activism, advocacy, and critical consciousness?

Over the last decade, we have witnessed the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement in response to the persistent violence of White supremacy (Taylor, 2016); an epidemic of police brutality and institutional oppression of BIPOC folks in the United States and internationally (Chaney & Robertson, 2013; Ritchie & Mogul, 2007); a COVID-19 pandemic that has contributed to the deaths of 6.7 million people (at time of publication, World Health Organization, 2023); a growing wealth gap, depressed wages, inflation, and endemic poverty (Oliver & Shapiro, 2019; Saimi-Namini & Hudson, 2019); the revivification of the MeToo movement, initially founded by Black activist Tarana Burke (Gieseler, 2019; Gómez & Gobin, 2020); and growing awareness of power-based interpersonal violence across spheres of identity.

This special issue is situated within the context of racial, economic, and health inequities driving violence, marginalization, impoverishment, disease, and even death in the US (Abedi et al., 2021; Fortuna et al., 2020; Pirtle, 2020). In the U.S., numerous recently-passed bills and changes in national policy have reinscribed violent hierarchies of race (CRT legislation; Stout & Wilburn, 2022), gender and sexual orientation (Roe v. Wade; Center for Reproductive Rights, 2022 anti-trans legislation; American Civil Liberties Union, 2023), ethnicity and nationality (immigration policy; Anderson, 2020), and ability (Chen & McNamara, 2020; Kanter, 2019). However, from the ashes of this trauma, coconspirators for social justice have built bridges and formed communities. Grassroots activism has continued to flourish from major cities to rural enclaves (Corrigall-Brown, 2022; Sarai, 2021). Protest signs and marches have graced the steps of state houses. Healing approaches have been communicated in classrooms and clinics, during civil disobedience efforts (Flynn et al., 2021), through social media channels, and across communities. The process of liberation is grounded in struggle.

Black liberation scholar and anti-carceral activist Angela Davis (1975) asserted, “We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death” (p. 583). It is our job as justice-oriented scholars and members of the field of psychology to evade death in an effort to establish freedom; in the hope of world-changing and bending the arc of history toward justice; in the service of creating a society that enables ourselves, our community members, our colleagues, our students, and our client not only to survive, but to thrive. This special issue draws upon Black feminism, womanism, mujerista psychology, theory, and anti-racist praxis to provide recommendations and guidance toward liberatory approaches to psychology, therapy, and healing.

To highlight the ongoing urgency of the need for feminist psychologists to rise up and better meet the needs of the communities we serve, Williams and colleagues (2023) provide us with data from 241 Black women that includes essential first person narratives regarding the ways that experiences of gendered racism have deleterious effects on psychological well-being. Their thematic analysis is an important read for therapists who wish to deepen their understanding of the needs of Black women, as well as the best ways to support them as they attempt to thrive within white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist systems. Complementing this paper and building a clear bridge between the scholarship on gendered racial microaggressions and clinical practice, Lewis and Williams (2023) provide a foundational understanding of the development of Black Feminist theory and the growing scholarship on gendered racism. They outline strategies to apply these frameworks to research and practice to help address the staggering disparities in health and economic outcomes that have become even more pronounced throughout the global pandemic for Black women. Through the use of a case example, the authors provide guidance on how to apply Black feminist and intersectional frameworks to therapy in order to better support Black women.

A common, though often unfounded, critique of feminist approaches to therapy is that they are heavy on theory and lighter on skills, techniques, and application (Brown, 2017). That is, one may learn how to think like a feminist therapist, but still be uncertain what it means to practice as a feminist therapist. Four papers in this special issue (i.e., Bryant-Davis, 2023; Barlow, 2023; Hargons et al., 2023; Cahoon & Mitchell, 2023) provide examples of specific skills and interventions that demonstrate feminist, womanist, and mujerista therapy in action. Bryant-Davis outlines the ways that structural dehumanization underlies poor mental and physical health outcomes and provides a trauma informed framework that practitioners and scholars can use to address this root cause as we support healing and liberation. With an emphasis on the ways gendered racism creates unique challenges for BIPOC women, she describes several promising practices that can help promote liberation and healing and encourages a focus on changing the structures that lead to the persistence of gendered racism. Barlow introduces writehealing, an Womanist-informed, evidence-based, writing-focused approach to healing emotional trauma and specifically designed for Black women. The article describes a foundational study for writehealing, the Saving Our Sisters, Saving Ourselves (SOS2) project, and the impact of participation on women. The writehealing approach is situated within Indigenous, African, and Chinese healing practices, as well as Black literature, Southern Black feminism and feminist thought, bodily autonomy, community healing, daughter-sistering, prayer, restoration, and autoethnography. The writehealing choreomusing process—a non-linear, self-reflexive, critical, collaborative approach to narrative healing—has been implemented at retreats in Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD, and Havana, Cuba.

Continuing this emphasis on practical applications, Hargons and colleagues (2023) discuss the use of a healing therapy retreat designed to address and heal intersectional racial trauma using a multi-practitioner model to support a Black, queer woman. The authors outline ways that a collectivistic therapy model that weaves together mind-body (i.e., meditation) healing practices, critical consciousness and reflection, explorations of personal and familial dynamics (e.g., genogram activity), and interpersonal process approaches can facilitate healing that specifically addresses symptoms of race-based traumatic stress in Black women. Building on community healing efforts, Cahoon and Mitchell (2023) present the development of a new mental wellness resource, Therapists for Protester Wellness (T4PW), that was developed during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. They urge therapists to serve as coconspirators with communities facing violent racial oppression, advocate for therapist support for civil disobedience in the face of white supremacy, and demonstrate the potential healing impact of therapists’ direct engagement with communities on the front lines of racial justice work. The article further accentuates the strengths-based theory underlying the creation and success of T4PW, and provides a series of recommendations for future approaches to community-based healing.

Deepening an emphasis on the importance of working toward structural change, four papers in this special issue (i.e., Brodt & Roberts, 2023; Macht et al., 2023; Sapna & Tsong, 2023; Banerjee et al., 2023) provide important history paired with actionable plans that feminist psychologists can use to advocate for change. Brodt and Roberts highlight the intersections of ableism, White supremacy, and police violence. Specifically, authors emphasize the ways that over-policing of disabled and Black people has led to involuntary hospitalization and lasting psychological trauma. Drs. Brodt and Roberts emphasize the carceral roots of involuntary hospitalization; resulting distrust between disabled folks, Black people, and mental health institutions; and the imperative for mental health providers to support disabled clients using anti-carceral methods. Utilizing testimonios, Banerjee et al. outline the major tenets of womanist and mujerista theories alongside liberation psychology, and argue for a pedagogical and therapeutic approach that combines womanist practices and liberation psychology. Their position is that a framework of both womanism and liberation psychology can serve to support women of Color in academic and clinical spaces, as they navigate experiences of gendered racism and toxic White male supremacist attitudes and practices. Macht et al. highlight both the responsibility and capability of psychologists to act as anti-racist change agents against structures of oppression in institutions of higher learning. They discuss five prevalent systemic injustices that regularly occur on college and university campuses, as well as the contextual factors that inhibit change within these systems. Most importantly, the authors argue for the application of psychological science and theoretical frameworks (e.g., Black Feminism) that can move academic institutions toward radical inclusivity such that all constituents are able to experience liberation and justice based on institutions’ commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Chopra and Tsong present a critical consciousness-informed pedagogy as a mechanism to practice anti-racist feminism, engage in grassroots activism, and cultivate liberatory healing for Asian American students in counseling and psychology. Chopra and Tsong highlight the discrimination and violence experiences of Asian Americans and emphasize the impact of these experiences on Asian American scholars and providers. Authors present cognitive, social, affective, and behavioral approaches to critical consciousness raising to facilitate development of pedagogy, foster a positive racial/ethnic identity, build community solidarity, and support student activism. The article weaves feminist theory, recommendations for teaching and practice, identity-building exercises, and psychoeducation regarding the Asian American experience to promote radical healing and liberation for Asian Americans in the field.

Finally, two articles in this special issue speak more directly to sustaining ourselves as we commit to anti-racist advocacy work. Abdallah and Turner (2023) discuss the importance of engaging in collective action and collective healing to disrupt oppressive systems. The authors share their own experiences participating in protests in the summer of 2020 which led to the arrest of one of the authors. They then share strategies that helped them and their community to heal in the face of state sponsored oppression. Bellamy and colleagues (2023) present a history of Black feminism starting with the 1830s through the present and provide a love letter to the Black feminists that came before them and a call to the field to be better, to do more to create healing spaces, and to stop putting up barriers to Black feminist brilliance. The personal narratives as well as the ten strategies they outline to promote healing for practitioners are powerful and outline areas for growth in the field of psychology.

Taken together, these papers provide critical insights, reflections, and calls to action that we hope feminist therapists will use to continue deepening their work, supporting recovery and healing, and building a more just, sustainable, and connected future. As bell hooks so eloquently tells us, “rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion” (hooks, 2000, p. 247). Our hope is that as you review the articles in this special issue, and commune with the voices of the authors, participants, and community members who have shared here, you will be inspired to make changes in your practice. “Nothing that has existed so far was the right way for everyone, but there are pieces out there we can begin to imagine together” (Brown, 2017, p. 60). We invite you to join us in imagining and enacting more inclusive paths to healing and collective liberation.