Navigating Racial Micro-aggressions in a Clinical Setting (CANCELLED)

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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The racial uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd brought renewed attention and urgency to addressing anti-Black racism in institutional and social settings throughout the United States. Law schools and clinical programs are no exception. The social justice missions of law school clinics, our commitment to dismantling systemic discrimination, and our goal to create more equitable and inclusive learning environments for our students call on clinicians to deepen our skills to navigate racial tensions that arise in the clinical setting. While discussing racial “macroaggressions”--institutional or systemic discrimination--may be challenging, addressing racial “microaggressions” are often harder. Racial microaggressions are the “everyday slights and insults” that people of color experience with “generally well-intentioned White Americans who may be unaware that they have engaged in racially demeaning ways toward target groups.” (Sue et al., 2007) Microaggressions cause harm to the targets and undermine our teaching and service goals. In this session Robin Walker Sterling will introduce a framework she has developed for clinicians to use to prevent and address microaggressions in a clinical setting. This framework normalizes the topic of racial microaggressions, offers a structure for the target of a microaggression to address it with the perpetrator, and identifies how clinical supervisors, fellow students, and allies have a role in preventing and addressing microaggressions. Participants will discuss how they might adapt training their students on this framework given their racial identity and positionality. The use of hypotheticals as a clinic teaching method for microaggressions will also be introduced, and the tradeoffs of this methodology will be discussed. Finally, we will explore how clinicians may adapt Walker Sterling’s approach based on the racial identity of the clinician and racial composition of their clinic.