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Abstract
Bi-erasure and color-blind racial ideologies (CBRI) are two systems of oppression that create barriers to wellness for bisexual + People of Color and Indigenous People (bi + POCI). The authors posited that, for college students, these forms of invisibility may be experienced in campus wellness support centers, including university counseling centers, multicultural centers, and centers for sexual and gender diversity. The authors explored the extent to which these wellness support centers’ web-based messages (e.g., identity-based group offering across centers, counseling staff interest listed in biographies, counseling center based resource lists) erase or affirm bi + POCI. This content analysis, guided by Neuendorf’s methodology, was delimited to universities that have American Psychological Association-accredited counseling centers (N = 139). Findings revealed that none of these centers’ websites housed messages acknowledging bi + POCI specifically, disparate affirmation was offered to POCI as compared to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) students through staff biographies irrespective of university type, and minority-serving institutions affirmed POCI and LGBT-identified POCI through their web-based resource lists at significantly higher rates than historically White institutions. These and other finding are discussed in the context of intersectionality and practical recommendations to increase the visibility of bi + POCI are offered.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Della V. Mosley
Della V. Mosley, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Counseling Psychology Program at the University of Florida. She developed and leads the Wellness, Equity, Love, Liberation, and Sexuality (WELLS) Healing and Research Collective. Dr. Mosley tends to pursue contextually rich, qualitative, and intersectional approaches to exploring the experiences and promoting the psychological and political wellness of Black, queer, transgender and/or gender expansive people.
Kirsten A. Gonzalez
Kirsten A. Gonzalez, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, specializing in counseling psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research interests include the psychological well-being of LGBTQ+ People of Color, the intersection of Latinx and LGBTQ+ identities, ally development, social justice advocacy and interventions, biracial/multiracial experience, intersectional theory, minority, race-related, and acculturative stress, and sociopolitical experiences of marginalization across race/ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual identity.
Roberto L. Abreu
Roberto L. Abreu, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in Counseling Psychology at Tennessee State University (TSU). His research focuses on the well-being of LGBTQ individuals, people of Color (POC), and those who self-identify at the intersection of LGBTQ and POC identities. Specifically, Dr. Abreu's research explores ways in which family and community members navigate relationships with their LGBTQ members and experiences of acculturative stress, vicarious posttraumatic growth, and oppression toward Latinx immigrants.
Nahal C. Kaivan
Nahal C. Kaivan, Ph.D., is an Academic Dean at Duke University's Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. Nahal's scholarship and teaching are focused on examining and interrogating Middle Eastern/North African identity development in diaspora, MENA womxns' issues, experiential learning through global engagement, student of color and marginalized student advancement in higher education/STEM disciplines and systemic improvement of life chances for marginalized populations. Dr. Kaivan is also interested in examining the ways that non-dominant, indigenous and Queer populations in MENA countries resist and exist through subversion, justice-oriented determination and collective thriving.