10.

1177/0011000003260005
THE
Speight,
COUNSELING
Vera / SOCIAL
ARTICLE
A Social Justice Agenda:
PSYCHOLOGIST
JUSTICE AGENDA
/ January 2004

Ready, or Not?
Suzette L. Speight
Elizabeth M. Vera
Loyola University Chicago

This commentary highlights the innovative inclusion of social action groups in the 2001
Houston Conference and expands on their significance to the conference and the field. If
the 2001 Houston Conference has correctly forecast a (re)establishment of social action
as a mainstay of counseling psychology, then an in-depth exploration of how we train stu-
dents, conduct research, and engage in practice is warranted. Given the political nature
of social action and its inextricable connection to social justice, the implications of such
a stance for the future of the profession are discussed.

As Houston 2001 Conference attendees, we found the Fouad et al. (2004

[this issue]) behind-the-scenes account of the planning, development, con-
tent, and goals of the conference to be very informative and interesting. Their
efforts to locate the 2001 Conference within a historical context were particu-
larly appreciated. The best way to understand where we are going as a field is
to review how far we have come. This manuscript will undoubtedly become
an important archival reference point in documenting the evolution of our
field. Furthermore, future conference organizers will benefit greatly from the
procedures, recommendations, and lessons learned presented in the
document.
The Houston Conference itself exceeded expectations in some areas (e.g.,
conference attendance) and fell short in others (e.g., participation in social
action groups), as Fouad et al. (2004) described. The inclusion of the social
action groups was perhaps one of the most innovative and ambitious addi-
tions to the format of counseling psychology conferences of the past. The
Houston 2001 Conference organizers intended for the social action groups to
“examine the broader political, economic, cultural, and historical circum-
stances of a set of critical social issues” (Fouad et al., 2004, p. 35). Initial
interest in the social action groups was moderately high, with about 40% of
registrants indicating interest in a particular social action group. Unfortu-
nately, this interest did not hold throughout the course of the conference, as
only 7% (n = 77) of conference attendees actually participated in the social
action groups. Fouad et al. speculated that this low turnout might have been
due to competing conference options and confusion about attendance
requirements.
THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST, Vol. 32 No. 1, January 2004 109-118
DOI: 10.1177/0011000003260005
© 2004 by the Society of Counseling Psychology
109
110 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / January 2004

Counseling psychology’s renewed interest in social action, or a shift in

emphasis to a “social advocacy [that] now focuses on social justice” (Fouad
et al., 2004, p. 71), is noteworthy. This reaction paper will focus on the impli-
cations of this heightened emphasis on social action and social justice for
counseling psychology. Any discussion of social advocacy and social justice
requires a foundation in the psychology of oppression and liberation. Fortu-
nately, the multicultural movement in psychology, with counseling psychol-
ogists at its lead, can provide a framework for examining oppression, social
action, and social justice.
To embrace a social advocacy agenda in counseling psychology, one must
be willing to examine issues of diversity at the microsocial (i.e., interper-
sonal) and macrosocial level (i.e., institutional levels). Social action or social
advocacy is not an end unto itself. The action and the actors must have some
goal beyond the action itself. The point of social advocacy is the attainment
of justice for exploited, dominated, and marginalized people and communi-
ties. Advocating for social change is a “highly political and controversial
position[s] in professional psychology” (Fouad et al., 2004, p. 35) indeed,
and may not even be universally accepted within our specialty. As Fox (2003)
noted, “some find psychology’s limited approach to social justice depress-
ingly timid, other believe it goes too far” (p. 310).
The organizers of the social action groups were very careful to situate the
groups within a critical psychology framework (e.g., Prilleltensky, 1997) to
“explore ways for psychology to work on changing inequitable systems that
contribute to psychological distress” (Fouad et al., 2004, p. 35). “Specifi-
cally, rather than locating the cause of problems with in individual, the plan-
ners sought to infuse a structural and system analysis that fostered an under-
standing of how complex social, economic, and historical forces colluded to
privilege some groups and marginalize other groups” (Fouad et al., 2004,
p. 36). Reconceptualizing client problems in this manner necessitates refo-
cusing the lens of counseling psychology from the individual to the envi-
ronment, from the microsocial to the macrosocial level. The issues that the
field must confront are not only individual and personal but also collective
and social. Social justice work is critical, controversial, political, and per-
haps quite removed from our typical counseling psychology practice. Con-
cern about social injustice and working toward social justice is a serious
enterprise.
The conference organizers’ enthusiasm and the sincere efforts of the 77
social action group participants, while commendable and to some degree
infectious, are not enough to (re)establish social justice as a core value of the
field. Early in the article, Fouad et al. (2004) characterized attendance at the
social action groups as small and modest; however, near the end of the article
the same attendance pattern was called “an extraordinary success in terms of
 Speight, Vera / SOCIAL JUSTICE AGENDA 111

conference participation” (p. 50). Perhaps the convictions of the authors are
responsible for this hyperbole. To a certain extent, one must ask whether the
values of the organizers and group participants are truly representative of
those of the membership of Division 17. Nevertheless, the bigger concern is
whether there is a potential danger in “jumping on the justice bandwagon”
without adequately examining what social justice and social advocacy really
mean for our research, practice, and training. Without such an examination,
social justice, social action, and social advocacy may become buzzwords
rather than substantive cores of the profession.
An important question is, Do we really know what we are getting into?
Social advocacy is more than a service learning project at the end of the
semester where students volunteer at a soup kitchen. Commitment to a social
justice agenda might require fundamental changes to the way we currently
think about, define, and carry out our work as counseling psychologists. Are
we ready, or not?

DEFINING SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SOCIAL INJUSTICE

Theorists and philosophers from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Marx,

and Rawls have all wrestled with the virtues of quality and liberty as they
sought to define social justice. As Fouad et al. (2004) described, Prilleltensky
and Gonick (1996) described a communitarian approach to social justice as
particularly relevant to the field of psychology. The communitarian view-
point assumes that humans are “radically interdependent” (Spohn, 2001, p.
9). This interdependence arises from the global connections of our social,
political, and commercial institutions, not just our common humanity
(Young, 2002). A communitarian viewpoint considers the balance of the
principles of dessert (i.e., what is deserved), need (i.e., what is required), and
equality (i.e., what is equivalent) to vary according to relationships. Social
justice then becomes a deliberation about process and relationships, not
simply outcomes (Miller, 1999).
Young (1990) defined social justice as “the elimination of institutional-
ized domination and oppression” (p. 15). Social justice goes beyond the mere
distribution of benefits (i.e., income and wealth) among the members of a
society to an examination of institutional and social relations. Social justice
involves the degree to which a society supports the elements necessary for the
good life. These general elements are “(1) developing and exercising one’s
capacities and expressing one’s experience and (2) participating in determin-
ing one’s action and the conditions of one’s action” (p. 37). Social justice,
then, involves the promotion of the values of self-development and self-
determination for everyone. Counseling psychologists have a unique vantage
112 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / January 2004

point from which to (a) examine the processes involved in maintaining sys-
tems of oppression and (b) provide strategies for combating the demoralizing
psychic impact of oppression for targets and perpetrators alike. Oppression
as a state and a process (Prilleltensky & Gonick, 1996) becomes the key
construct within a social justice agenda.
Prilleltensky and Gonick (1996) defined oppression as “a state of asym-
metric power relations characterized by domination, subordination, and
resistance, where the dominating persons or groups exercise their power by
restricting access to material resources and by implanting in the subordinated
persons or groups fear or self-deprecating views about themselves” (pp. 129-
130). Oppression is structural, not the result of a few people mistreating oth-
ers. Oppression is “systematically reproduced in major economic, political,
and cultural institutions” and operates through “the normal processes of
everyday life” (Young, 1990, p. 41). Bell (1997) emphasized the interlocking
quality of oppression, stating that the “pervasive nature of social inequality
[is] woven throughout social institutions as well as embedded within individ-
ual consciousness” (p. 4). Oppression is felt in the mundane activities of daily
life and in the violence of discrimination and bashing. Oppression is cumula-
tive and omnipresent, invading one’s psyche while constraining one’s body.
Oppression yields political and psychological consequences for individu-
als, groups, and societies (Prilleltensky & Gonick, 1996). There exist com-
mon processes and similar consequences of oppression across various
groups (e.g., African Americans, the homeless, and gay men), as well as
unique experiences across these groups. According to Bell (1997), oppres-
sion in all its forms is pervasive, restricting, hierarchical, and internalized,
involving complex, multiple relationships. Across the various types of
oppression (e.g., sexism, classism, racism, and heterosexism) there exists a
common imbalance of power and a resultant domination and privilege sys-
tem. Hence, “For every oppressed group there is a group that is privileged in
relation to that group” (Young, 1990, p. 42). The oppression based on gender,
sexism, is thought of as having a target subordinate group (women) and a
privileged, dominant group (men). Because identity is multidimensional,
one can have privileges and disadvantages owing to one’s various group
memberships.
Targets of all forms of oppression suffer constraints on self-determination
and self-development. There is not a hierarchy of oppressions. Davis (1998)
cautioned against participating in the “Oppression Olympics,” a futile exer-
cise in ranking whose suffering is worse and more deserving of recognition.
Although oppression is similar across groups, there are important differences
in experiences. Young (1990) provided five criteria that can be employed to
determine whether and how individuals and groups are oppressed. Accord-
ing to Young, oppression is characterized by the presence of any one of the
 Speight, Vera / SOCIAL JUSTICE AGENDA 113

following conditions: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural

imperialism, and violence. It is apparent that undertaking a social justice
agenda moves counseling psychology into arenas that the field has yet to
fully explore, either through theory or research. There is abundant scholar-
ship in philosophy, sociology, critical studies, and education available to
explore the psychology of oppression, beyond the scope of this commentary.
Crossing disciplinary boundaries will be key to successfully (re)integrating
social justice into counseling psychology.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AGENDA

Social justice efforts raise obligations of justice that require people to be

concerned about the welfare of others (Young, 2000). The obligations of jus-
tice bring to the fore the challenging personal question, “What do I owe the
Other?” (Harnett, 2001) and, when extended into our professional work,
necessitate a critical examination of our practices and values, at minimum.
The emerging field of critical psychology offers guidance on what a social
justice agenda might mean for counseling psychology. Prilleltensky and Fox
(1997) called for a critical psychology that “focuses on the central themes of
pursuing social justice, promoting the welfare of communities in general and
oppressed groups in particular, and altering the status quo of society and the
status quo of psychology” (p. 4). A social justice agenda necessitates a com-
mitment to praxis, “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform
it” (Freire, 1990, p. 33). Social advocacy, then, is action linked with theory to
alter the status quo. According to Bulhan (1985), psychology has favored
cognition and affect over purposeful, organized, collective action.
A commitment to social justice stems from an essential dedication to eth-
ics, an expansive view of ethics. Counseling psychologists currently tend to
think of ethics rather narrowly in terms of codes of conduct for our various
roles as researchers, teachers, clinicians, and supervisors. According to
Brown (1997), ethics has been “diminished into a set of rules to be obeyed”
(p. 58). A contrasting view of ethics is presented by Giroux (1994), who
described ethics as a sense of personal and social responsibility to the Other.
In this expanded sense of ethics, it becomes “a social discourse that refuses to
accept needless human suffering and exploitation” (p. 74). This is a collective
responsibility to care for one another, requiring accountability beyond pro-
fessional obedience to the American Psychological Association (APA) Ethi-
cal Principles and Codes of Conduct (APA, 2002). As it currently stands,

To be an ethical APA member, one need not actively fight racism, sexism, or
heterosexism or other forms of oppression in the profession and in the world.
114 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / January 2004

One merely needs to avoid being discriminatory in an overt way and break no
enunciated rules. No ethical sanction is placed on the psychologist who stands
by silently while oppression occurs, because there is no rule against such pas-
sive collusion. (Brown, 1997, p. 59)

Thus, counseling psychology would step out beyond the APA Ethical
Principles and Codes of Conduct (APA, 2002) to assert forthrightly that it
was committed to using psychology as a tool for social justice. Counseling
psychology as practiced would be neither neutral, objective, nor value-free;
instead, it would be “visionary and aspirational” (Brown, 1997, p. 61). Fox
(1993) said it clearly: “Psychologists should have a professional bias in favor
of significant social change” (p. 239). Counseling psychologists would be
proactively utilizing the transformative potential of psychology in working
for the liberation of oppressed peoples through our various professional roles
as clinicians, consultants, educators, and researchers.
Our explicit commitment to social justice and liberation would necessitate
the removal of individual counseling or psychotherapy from its current hege-
mony. Our traditional training and education has emphasized counseling to
the virtual exclusion of any other methods of intervention. “There is a distinct
tendency to frame human predicaments in apolitical, intrapsychic, and defi-
cit-oriented diagnoses” (Prilleltensky, 1997, p. 526), which predictably
results in solutions that are remedial in nature and individually rather than
system focused. Individual interventions will not provide liberation for
oppressed people because they do not alter the prevailing social conditions.
Liberation cannot only happen to one person at a time. “The oppressed can-
not attain liberty by individual means” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 274). Liberation is a
social project requiring concerted, focused effort by a committed, conscious,
interdependent collective (Freire, 1990). Consequently, counseling psychol-
ogy will have to rethink its reliance on individualism. We are typically trained
to conceptualize problems as individual ones, and while our multicultural
emphasis may punctuate the recognition of the insidiousness of systemic fac-
tors (e.g., racism, sexism, and heterosexism), too often our interventions
overemphasize individualized solutions (Vera & Speight, 2003).
By ignoring the collective, psychologists, perhaps unintentionally, justify
social inequity by

interpreting social problems that originate in the structure of the socioeco-

nomic system in intrapsychic terms, by attributing excessive weight to individ-
ual factors in explaining social behavior, and by abstracting the individual from
the sociohistorical context. Our narrow view of client problems result in the
fortification of an unjust societal status quo. (Prilleltensky, 1997, p. 523)
 Speight, Vera / SOCIAL JUSTICE AGENDA 115

Jacobs (1994) asserted that it is the oppressive social environment that is

the cause of psychopathology. As long as psychologists persist in defining
problems intrapsychically and individually, social injustice will be perpetu-
ated due to efforts to change individuals and not the social context (Albee,
2000; Prilleltensky & Fox, 1997). Thus, a social justice agenda would require
counseling psychologists to emphasize the collective, the community, and
the social environment in our theories and interventions. Counseling psy-
chology appears to be moving forward in this direction (or we are resurrect-
ing our foundational values), following the lead of our members who are
committed to social justice.
We should remember that, fortunately, we are not alone. The specialty of
community psychology can be instructive. Community psychology
“reframed problems in terms of an ecological perspective that is sensitive to
human diversity, at the same time that it promoted community-based solu-
tions” (Prilleltensky & Nelson, 1997, p. 173). Prilleltensky and Nelson
(1997) argued that community psychology fell short of its goals because it
sought to foster change from within the system rather than transforming the
system that created the problems in the first place. According to Serrano-
Garcia (1994), “The main goal of community psychology is to promote
social change to alter unjust and oppressive situations by generating knowl-
edge, carrying out research, and developing and evaluating interventions” (p.
2). Community psychology’s ideals, when combined with critical psychol-
ogy’s principles, provide a valuable blueprint for a social justice agenda. For
instance, Prilleltensky and Nelson, throughout their text Doing Psychology
Critically: Making a Difference in Diverse Settings (2002), describe a variety
strategies psychologists can engage in to promote social justice including
community development, partnering with self-help/mutual aid organiza-
tions, conducting participatory action research, creating partnerships and
coalitions, and working in natural community settings.
In our roles as educators, counseling psychologists would value a liber-
atory education that has the potential to transform society through the
empowerment of the learner (hooks, 1994). What is called for is the develop-
ment of Freire’s (1990) conscientizacao, “Learning to perceive social, politi-
cal, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive
elements of reality” (p. 17). Counseling psychologists would be embracing
emancipatory knowledge for all of the consumers of psychology (i.e., stu-
dents, clients, and communities). Emancipatory knowledge aims to reformu-
late both the process and the product of education. Accordingly “education
as the process of freedom,” challenges notions of teaching and learning
through a discourse that examines power, identities, biases, and justice
(hooks, 1994).
116 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / January 2004

Finally, this new critical, engaged counseling psychology might require a

different level of responsibility from those counseling psychologists com-
mitted to issues of social justice. The stakes are raised as the field commits to
a social justice agenda informed by an understanding of the psychology of
oppression. Moving from counseling offices to the larger social arena and
from a concern with individual problems to collective ones, much like Frantz
Fanon, counseling psychologists might conclude that their only alternative is
to fight (Bulhan, 1985). The confrontation called for might not resemble the
armed struggle against oppression that Fanon joined in Algeria’s colonial
battle with France. It will undoubtedly be a confrontation nonetheless.

To live the value of social justice means that we must take some risks. By
becoming more outspoken advocates, our credibility as professionals and
researchers will be challenged. At a minimum, those who uphold the status quo
will label us as “biased” or “political”. In some cases, our jobs in human ser-
vices, research institutes, and universities may be in jeopardy. (Prilleltensky &
Nelson, 1997, p. 183)

As D’Andrea (cited in Lewis, Lewis, Daniels, & D’Andrea, 1998)

asserted, embracing social justice as integral to our work as psychologists
requires courage. Counseling psychologists will have to address those
sociopolitical conditions that continue to oppress members of many commu-
nities, thereby necessitating modifications in the current curriculum to
include coursework on public policy, consultation models, and oppression
theory. We will be required to expand service delivery skills to include pre-
ventive interventions, client advocacy, and social action.
Ultimately, counseling psychologists will need to apply a critical gaze to
the privileges that they themselves gain due to their status within the existing
social structure. As Martin-Baro (1994) so eloquently stated, “Our impera-
tive is to examine not only what we are but, also what we might have been,
and above all, what we ought to be, given the needs of our peoples” (p. 38).
The diverse multiethnic, multiracial, and multicultural communities that
experience social inequities could undoubtedly benefit from the counseling
psychologists making a difference through a social justice agenda. The
question remains, Are we ready, or not?
The integration of a social justice agenda into our professional work as
counseling psychologists is an idea that we advocate (see Vera & Speight,
2003). If the social justice path envisioned by Fouad et al. (2004) is primarily
a cocreation of the conference organizers and the social action group partici-
pants, then certainly time will tell. Sounding an optimistic note, however,
Ivey and Collins (2003) suggested, “Perhaps this time counseling psychol-
ogy will listen and start systemic efforts toward social justice” (p. 290).
 Speight, Vera / SOCIAL JUSTICE AGENDA 117

Arredondo and Perez (2003) and Helms (2003) have asserted that the multi-
cultural counseling movement in counseling psychology has always been
inexorably linked to social justice. Fouad et al. are making the case that the
wheels on the wagon are turning, propelling counseling psychologists into
the cutting-edge, socially relevant, political territory of a social justice
agenda. To the extent that Fouad et al. have documented the future path of
counseling psychology, we hopefully embrace their vision and congratulate
them for their efforts and foresight.

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