ABSTRACT
Who decides what is margin and what is text? Who decides where the borders of the homeland run? Absences and silences are potent. It is the eloquent margins which frame the history of the land.
Janette Turner Hospital (Biggs, 1996, p. 82)
The population of the United States is becoming more and more diverse. Thirty-one percent of the current population is African American, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander American, or American Indian (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001), yet the vast majority of counselors are European American by ethnicity and all of the major theoretical approaches to counseling were developed by Europeans (Freud, Jung, Adler, Perls, etc.) or Americans of European descent (Rogers, Skinner, Ellis, etc.). The counseling profession is basically a product of European American culture (Das, 1995). As the field of counseling moves into the 21st century, cultural differences in addition to ethnicity have increasingly gained recognition as important considerations in the counseling process: gender roles, sexual orientation, aging, and physical disability. Understanding the complex social and cultural background of each client is integral to successful counseling. This book is written for beginning counselors, practicing counselors, and other helping professionals who have not had previous formal training in working with multicultural clients.
