Symposia
Culture / Ethnicity / Race
Milton Fuentes, Psy.D.
Montcair State University
Montclair, New Jersey
Joshua W. Madsen, PhD, ABPP
Associate Professor of Teaching
The University Of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
The racial reckoning experienced in this country from 2020 and onward has pervaded all segments of society, including psychology. Aptly, in early 2021, the American Psychological Association (APA), released a resolution titled, Harnessing Psychology to Combat Racism: Adopting a Uniform Definition and Understanding, which urges psychologists to combat racism at individual and systemic levels. Later in the year, the APA issued an apology for its role in perpetuating racism and discrimination. These timely resolutions and APA’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) framework serve as much-needed impetuses for developing and promoting antiracist training initiatives that actively counter racist ideology, practices, and systems. Notably, unlike the former accreditation framework (i.e., the Guidelines and Principles), APA’s current Standards of Accreditation (SoA) address diversity across most of the five standards. However, while the diversity-centered spirit of the SoA is laudable, little guidance is available to help programs attend to EDI and ensure an antiracism stance through the standards in their training and self-study efforts. This paper will examine each standard and provide guidance to health service psychology programs on how to best address EDI and take an antiracist stance. Specifically, guided by diversity science, the interdisciplinary literature (e.g., Black feminist thought), and the Council of Chairs of Training Councils’ training toolkit, the paper will enumerate evidence-based strategies and best practices, as they relate to the SoA.