key: cord-1006390-3vwxiep2
authors: Messent, Philip
title: Covid‐19, race and family therapy
date: 2020-10-11
journal: J Fam Ther
DOI: 10.1111/1467-6427.12315
sha: e2d0d34e4701c2c4281bff36fb07a399b2334d6b
doc_id: 1006390
cord_uid: 3vwxiep2

nan

Eurocentric lens, constructed as part of the movement of modernity, reinforcing a narrative that people of colour have a 'deficient humanity', and forgetting in its efforts to be 'colour blind' to examine how cultures are shaped by 'colonies, empires, universities, lobbyists and markets'. De-colonising psychology, he suggests, will involve undoing our ways of thinking about 'social structures, knowledge, relationships and the self'. Early models of family therapy can be seen as falling within this modernist paradigm, and have been criticised as assuming a normative and Eurocentric view of family development. Postmodern approaches are less likely to make these assumptions, but do not necessarily pay attention to the sort of contextual issues or offer the self-reflexivity demanded by the sort of 'radical care' advocated by Bhatia. Family therapy does have a long and proud history of including a social justice dimension, including some recognition of the significance of the impact of race and social circumstances upon the lives of our clients and of the appropriateness of the services we offer. I remember in my early career as a family therapist the impact on our field in the UK of the work of Charles O'Brien on family therapy with Black families (1990) and later Ann Miller (2002) on organisational change in order to address the challenges of working in a multi-ethnic society. Using the ever-evolving SOCIAL GRAACCES (Burnham, 1993 (Burnham, , 2012 as a reminder to include all aspects of the contexts of our clients and our own lives in our formulations has been widely influential in the UK, while the concept of intersectionality, first introduced by Crenshaw (1989) to describe the influences of different intersecting contexts and identities such as race and gender, has been similarly influential in the US (Davids and Mitchell, 2018; Gutierrez, 2018) .

However, our family therapy community cannot assume that it has somehow avoided the institutional racism that has been shown to be endemic in our societies. No Western institution can rest easy and assume it is providing equal access, privileges and appropriate services to Black, Asian and other non-White 2 people. Our UK national Association has published a statement on Black Lives Matter (AFT, 2020) in which it makes a commitment to 'address systemic racism from within', including 'revising training material to take into account the political and social ideologies that create and maintain racism'. A family therapy journal no less than other institutions has a responsibility now to take an actively anti-racist stance, and the Journal of Family Therapy Editorial Board is at the time of writing examining Board membership and access, ways of attracting and supporting writers to ensure that the voices of Black, Asian and other non-White scholars and practitioners are heard, and that ways of working that are appropriate to the needs of these families and communities are foregrounded. Our Board is currently undertaking this process of self-examination and review, and its commitments to action will appear on its website by the end of the year. The journal has also issued a call for papers for a special edition on 'Impacts of racism and systemic responses' https://onlin elibr ary.wiley. com/journ al/14676427.

Another way in which family therapy remains open to a critique of colonialism is that it remains a discipline largely developed in Europe and the US, yet now is beginning to be taught and applied widely in other parts of the world. Three articles in this edition, as well as Chao and Lou's recent (2018) paper, offer a window into how practitioners in East Asia are beginning to elaborate local adaptations of family therapy and its application to ensure a cultural fit in these contexts.

1 Public Health England report (11 August 2020) found that people from 'Black ethnic groups' were more likely to be diagnosed and that death rates were highest among Black and Asian groups. Brown and Ravallion (2020) in the US found a strong effect of race, independent from poverty, with a higher proportion share of Black Americans and Hispanics associated with higher infection rates. 2 The language with which we refer to non-White groups has been widely debated and contested: how can we refer to groups of people in a way that is descriptive, inclusive and respectful? I am using this term after wide consultation as the most appropriate for an international audience, for whom the more usual (in the UK) description of 'other minority ethnic groups' makes little sense.

Family Therapy (2020) AFT Statement -BLM

The pandemic is a mirror: race, poverty and radical care in times of crisis. Keynote address

2020) Poverty, inequality, and COVID-19 in the US

Systemic supervision: the evolution of reflexivity in the context of the supervisory relationship

Editorial © 2020 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice

Developments in Social GGRRAAACCEEESSS: visible-invisible, voiced-unvoiced

Construction of core competencies for family therapists in Taiwan

Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics

Intersectionality in couple and family therapy

COVID-19 and the color line

The role of intersectionality in marriage and family therapy multicultural supervision

Changing the face of the organization: addressing the challenges of work in a multi-ethnic society

Family therapy with Black families

Grenfell: the 72 victims; their lives, loves and losses