Clare Lane: The field of psychology is having its own racial reckoning. And now a team of professionals in the field has created a training model to combat racism in the field. WBEZ's Esther Yoon-Ji Kang talked with Nidia Ruedas-Gracia. She's a psychology professor at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

Esther Yoon-Ji Kang: In a recently published paper, you and other psychologists outlined an anti racist training model that's designed to help dismantle racism in society and not just help people with their own mental health issues. It's called the Public Psychology for Liberation Training Model. Tell us a little bit about it.

Nidia Ruedas-Gracia: Yeah. So the idea behind our training model is that we want to re-center diverse voices. We want to re-center the populations that have felt silenced for many, many decades, maybe all of time. So, so psychology has a lot of strengths, but some limitations are that we've tended to focus on mainstream or white practices and traditions and psychological phenomenon and try to generalize that to the rest of the world. But we have realized that there are different cultures, there are different cultural orientations and some phenomenon in one culture might not transfer over to the other. 

Esther Yoon-Ji Kang: So what would the training look like on a very practical level?

Nidia Ruedas-Gracia: I'll start with things that I think it's not. So, it's not necessarily a standalone workshop or a seminar or a one day event where you take it, you check off the box, I completed it, I have a certificate and now I'm ready to go, I'm a public psychologist. It's more of something that is spread out throughout the training. So for example we have lifelong practices and we talk about reciprocity, about respect and relationality, cultural humility. It's not one standalone thing where we teach you cultural humility. But it's something where you learn about cultural humility, perhaps in a course, and then you practice cultural humility throughout your training, your internship, that kind of thing. So who we're trying to reach is is all types of psychologists at all levels, novices, experts, people who are developing as psychologists, social workers, school psychologists, therapists. We want all of them to have a better understanding of the populations that they're servicing.

Esther Yoon-Ji Kang: Your paper also challenges "anti-blackness racial oppression and myths of white supremacy that is built uncritically into our training and discipline." What are some racist theories and practices entrenched in the field of psychology?

Nidia Ruedas-Gracia: Traditionally, psychology was founded by sampling white, middle to upper class samples. And so all of these foundational theories and practices, a lot of them really did focus on this very small segment of the world and it just snowballed after that. These theories started growing and developing, but at its core they had focused on a small part of the global representation. There are also things like the eugenics movements, where you have this black and white idea of there's things that are right and there's things that are wrong. And things that are right, look like this, things that are wrong, look like everything else. And if you don't fit that prototype of what's right, then you're wrong, you are not up to speed, you are not going to do well in life. And so we really are pushing towards less of a "right/wrong" mentality and more of a "difference" mentality

Clare Lane: That was psychology professor Nidia Ruedas-Gracia speaking with WBEZ's Esther Yoon-Ji Kang.

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