The Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity (CORED) is concerned with matters regarding the psychoanalytic study, training, recruitment, and treatment of racial and ethnic minorities. A black analyst practicing in Washington, DC, I chair this ad hoc joint committee, which will have its two-year anniversary at the December 1996 meetings. The committee was conceived about four years ago when Marvin Margolis, current president of The American, approached councilor-at-large Dorothy Holmes, a highly successful African-American training analyst at the Baltimore-Washington Institute, about his dissatisfaction with the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Margolis thought it was time for The American to actively concern itself with matters of diversity. He made the astute observation that the faces of the members of APsaA did not reflect the ever-increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the American population. He requested that Holmes advise him on establishing the committee now known as CORED. Shortly thereafter, Jennings joined this dynamic duo, and the threesome, with the thoughtfulness and support of then-President Judy Schachter and BOPS Chair Larry Chalfin, produced CORED.
CORED has twenty-three members from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. For example, Asian, African, and European Americans are reflected in the membership. Also represented are Hispanic and East Indian cultures. While our primary task concerns racial and ethnic minorities, the committee members as a whole have been informed by experiences with racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, immigration, and linguistic discrimination. Another interesting feature of CORED is its developmental diversity. The members include a significant number of candidates, recent graduates, experienced analysts, and teaching and training analysts. The diversity of the CORED members aids them in the constant challenge to “look at the man (woman) in the mirror and make the change.” This is important because diversity practices aimed at changing something about the members of a minority group, without investigating attitudes and misperceptions of the majority group, actually reinforce prejudice.
One major goal of CORED is to convince the members of The American that the effort to diversify the field of psychoanalysis is ultimately an individual- and institute-level responsibility. Certainly, standards and policies that encourage diversity can be set at the national level. For example, the question is raised whether The American should require its institutes to demonstrate diversity in curriculum, faculty, and candidates as one criterion for accreditation. Again, organizations like the American Psychological Association give serious consideration to such matters on site visits. One sure way for a diversity effort to fail is to isolate all of the information, initiative, and experience with diversity in one group of so-called experts. Time and again I have listened to patients and students complain that a therapist or course instructor addressed issues of racial and ethnic differences by assigning responsibility for the identification and exploration of such matters to the patient or student.
CORED plans to help The American's members and institutes launch diversity initiatives in a number of exciting ways. We will offer information regarding books, movies, and cultural events in the interest of expanding ethnic awareness. Kelly Reid, a candidate in Philadelphia and chair of the Community Outreach Subcommittee, is leading an effort to develop a community outreach workshop for the institutes. The Community Outreach Subcommittee surveyed institutes and established both a need for and an interest in attracting ethnic minorities as candidates and patients. CORED also sponsors a discussion group, chaired by Carlotta Miles, a Black analyst in Washington, DC. The discussion group “Fostering Racial Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Psychoanalytic Practices” meets at the Fall and Spring meetings and studies the clinical material of racially and ethnically mixed analyses.
The discussion group was organized by Seattle candidate and past Fellow Sandra Walker and myself. The chair of the Scientific Program Subcommittee, Salman Akhtar, has been quite successful at diversifying the discussant pool for scientific papers. Also, he has been leading efforts to realize CORED's goal to present a panel of papers on psychoanalytic explorations of issues like racial identity.
It should come as no surprise that the diversity group has been very much engaged in the exciting, though challenging, task of crystallizing a core identity. We routinely entertain questions about our task and mission. We regularly try to sift through what is practical versus what is ideal when it comes to producing results. We go back and forth on our definitions of terms that are basic to our identity, i.e., what is an ethnic minority? Some of our most engaging moments happen when our individual members have the courage to speak to their passions. For example, before her untimely death last spring, Myunghee Kim, an analyst in New Jersey who was chair of our International Outreach Subcommittee, advocated the establishment of institute-based, certificate-granting, visiting scholar programs for Korean and Japanese mental health professions.
It is clear to CORED members that there are people from foreign countries who are very much in need of psychoanalytic skills. However, we haven't figured out how to be good-enough hosts and hostesses for many of these countries. A special thanks to Myunghee Kim for her work in this area.
I hope this article has tapped interest in the work of the Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity. We plan to have a community outreach event during the December Meetings involving a film and discussion (title, date, and time to be announced) followed by a reception. Please feel free to join us.
Pamela Jennings is a psychoanalyst practicing in Washington, D.C. She chairs The American's Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity