Counselor Quick Reference

Glossary

Colorism

A bias toward lighter skin tones that shows up even within Black families and communities, not just from outside them. It functions as a form of internalized racism and carries genuine consequences for self-esteem and body image.

Scientific racism

Pseudoscientific work produced by European institutions from the 1700s through the 1900s, designed to give a false scientific cover to a racial hierarchy. It's a major reason race is understood today as a social construct rather than a biological fact.

Drapetomania

A fabricated 19th-century diagnosis, coined by Cartwright in 1851, that framed enslaved people's attempts to escape as a mental illness rather than a rational response to bondage.

Fictive kin

People with no blood or legal tie who are nonetheless treated as full family members. Worth actively asking about in assessment, since a strict nuclear-family lens often fails to capture how Black families are actually structured.

Bicultural competence

The ability to move comfortably between predominantly Black and predominantly White settings. For many middle-class Black clients and children, this is a routine but genuinely taxing demand.

Achievement gap

The persistent gap in academic performance between Black and White students. Older explanations leaned on a now-discredited "deficit perspective"; a more accurate account looks at an ecological perspective — the structural resource gaps students are actually working within.

Afrocentrism

A worldview grounded in communalism, cooperation, and a reciprocal relationship with the natural world, deliberately positioned against a Eurocentric emphasis on individualism, competition, and dominion over nature.

Black psychology / ABPsi

Both a field of study and the organization founded in 1968 to push psychology toward directly confronting how racism damages Black Americans' wellbeing — a deliberate departure from a Eurocentric psychology that tended to stay apolitical.

Strong Black Woman (SBW) schema

A cultural script that prizes self-sacrifice and emotional toughness in Black women. It often gets framed as praise, but it's been linked to a lower likelihood of reaching out for psychological help.

Table 9.1 values, at a glance

Traditional counseling approaches — fit with Black clients

Clinical checkpoints

• Ask what racial/identity term a client prefers — don't assume "Black" vs. "African American"
• Actively assess extended family and fictive kin, not just the nuclear unit
• Treat social class (not race alone) as its own axis of presenting concerns
• Assess acculturation level before recommending Black community institutions as supports
• Watch for somaticized psychological symptoms — a documented pattern in Black clients
• Never assume "one theoretical approach fits all" for Black clients