Slipping into Self-Disclosure: A Multiracial Negotiation with Dissonance in Connection

I am a mixed-race, Egyptian and European-American clinician and second-generation immigrant. Light-skinned, my multiraciality is easily missed and I am unequivocally read as white. A generation of rapid assimilation has effectively concealed my Arab heritage; my body does not carry any of the conspicuous and expected markers of brownness. Despite my emotional proximity to my mother's experience of immigration, I have learned to internalize and reflect back a racial identity attributed to me by others. This practice of concealment has fractured me in two: she who wears the adornments of whiteness in congruence with how I am viewed, and she who privately holds the unseen complexity of my heritage. I am both white and not-white. Exposing my racial complexity through self-disclosure renders me vulnerable to rejection, humiliation, and erasure — a possibility that can deepen a disoriented sense of self.

In spite of this risk, I have been repeatedly drawn to disclose my hidden racial identity to my clients, predominantly clients of color, with whom I work in a community mental health setting. Why here, above other settings in my life, was I pulled to disclose my race and whom did it serve? My fantasy to disclose may reflect a mutually held wish for joining, recognition, and resonance in the otherwise polarized space between client of color and presumed-to-be white clinician. Self-disclosure may also serve to distance me from the pernicious illusion of racial purity, which has been systemically reproduced by the “one drop rule,” anti-miscegenation laws (Bonovitz, 2009), the denial of white men raping black women (St. John, 2001), and the categorical absence of multiraciality on the U.S. Census Bureau until the year 2000. The cultural construct of racial purity perpetuates an unnatural racial logic that erases multiraciality, whereas self-disclosure undermines this erasure by making it visible.

From another perspective, my own self-disclosure in the treatment dyad might inste