Negotiating white racial identity in multicultural courses: A model

Abstract

Positing that white racial consciousness may be expected to develop chronologically through a series of distinct stages, much of the discussion surrounding stage-wide theories of white racial identity initially took place in the field of counseling, where the impetus for describing how whites construct a racial identity arose out of a concern to assist white therapists in recognizing their own racial biases, and to prevent them from viewing people of color monolithically (Hardiman, 2001; Pack-Brown, 1999; Reynolds and Baluch, 2001). Use of the models has now spread to other disciplines. Recently, however, they have come under criticism from various quarters (eg, Behrens, 1997; Fisher and Moradi, 2001; Rowe, Bennett, and Atkinson, 1994), to the extent that it seems advisable to reconsider their usefulness for understanding white student performance of identity in multicultural courses