ACA Blog

So I’ve been thinking about this idea of the Angry Black woman. Specifically, I’ve been relating this concept to the workplace. I recently attended a diversity training where the presenter was arming us with tools on how to work with a client that has persistent anger related to her job, boss or co-workers. We were empowered with breathing exercises, visualization exercises and friendly confrontational techniques to help our female client deal with the irrational ideas that she was holding that was creating anger. What I never heard was how to work with a client who has the right to be angry.

The news has been filled with stories this week of equality and human rights regarding the right to choose whom to marry. There have been many personal stories shared on the nightly news of disenfranchisement, discrimination and unfairness by those brave enough willing to risk their privacy and their financial security to advocate for their rights. It has been empowering to witness.

During my career as a police officer I recall moments when compassion and a second chance were warranted. It was through law enforcement that I realized character is not always accurately reflected by a criminal record or a bad decision. I have learned that people function according to their level of awareness. If people do not have access to information or resources conducive to awareness, then, they become students of trial and error.

It seems like when the “day goes wrong” in the criminal justice system, it really goes wrong. I have been spending a great deal of time thinking about just how to write this blog. Then I realized I had been thinking about it for a month, and it is just time to write.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about social justice and how the concept can be applied to our region. According to Chung & Bemak (2012) Social justice can be defined as issues that involve the individual, the family, the community, the wider society, and even the international community. It refers to unfair treatment or inequities that have resulted from racism, sexism, socioeconomics, sexual orientation, religion, ableism and other “isms” all o which affect quality of life.

I live in the Midwest (Missouri) and have been enduring over 100 degree weather now for too many days. Not only am I unmotivated, but all my outdoor plants have died. My yard has a few weeds and my grass lies dormant. Snow has never sounded so good. In the middle of this horribly hot summer I have had an experience that I will never forget. A mentally ill client, with legal problems herself, has become a victim of a horrendous crime. She opened the front door to her apartment in the middle of the night and was brutally beaten and raped.

I do a lot of social consciousness lectures and presentations in my work as a consultant. One of the things I’ve continually stressed is the need to learn from and engage in each other’s civil rights efforts because these are essentially our own. This seems to puzzle many people, so I use examples of some of the more successful civil rights outcomes of the 1960s. Many groups, such as the Black Panther Party, understood that their sociopolitical agenda was in fact part of a larger global effort for all persons of color to actively overcome the racially oppressive and imperialist contexts in which they lived. Even while the settings and players were different, as the BLP and other organizations understood, the system of oppression and the pain of loss it caused were shared by all. The shared value was of dismantling that system.

March, recognized as Women’s History Month, is drawing to a dreary and demoralizing close. To many women, it hasn’t appeared there was much cause for celebration lately. Women’s reproductive freedom – and it with it our potential for full and equal participation in society – has been under near-constant assault recently by some lawmakers and religious groups.

I am in the midst of teaching a course on social justice in which I use Sue and Sue’s (2008) well known text which requires an examination of areas of personal and systemic prejudice, bias and privilege. It is within this framework that I have been assessing the sexual abuse scandal at Penn State. Rereading Mark Kiselica’s introductory remarks (who coincidentally attended Penn State for his doctorate) was a timely reminder that we are both the products of and contributors to our culture. As I’ve read numerous articles on what the Penn State story entailed it has become clear that the culture at this university both produced and supported behaviors and beliefs while maintaining spoken and unspoken rules around who could speak up and who would be believed.

No wonder the clash between Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan is so confusing. Each seems to be using a different metaphor in their moral thinking. (See my blog 2 weeks ago or, better yet, H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Responsible Self’.) For the most part, Kohlberg uses ‘man-the-lawmaker’ to guide his description of the development of moral consciousness—justice and the order of community are two of his driving ideas. This metaphor requires answers to these three questions: 1. What is the law governing this situation? 2. What authority requires obedience to this law? and 3. What is the punishment for disobeying this law? Even in stage 3 when he talks about good motives and intentions, man-the-lawmaker is being followed because these are an important part of determining punishment in any court of law. This stage and further stages note that it is human beings who make and enforce the rules and that human beings are not as rigid as the legalist morals might imply. Justice has a human side.