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I sat in a conference room surrounded by four white women ― Dr. Westwood-Court, Dr. Bleekman, Maddie, and Bella. Blue and green eyes watched me with measured expressions, all communicating concern. The pale faces seemed to be commanding me to get out.
My emotions bounced like a tossed tennis ball, ricocheting from confusion to rage to helplessness. My inner voices, a vortex. My outer voice, silent.
I had arrived at this place innocently enough, in pursuit of a better life — for myself and my people. My 7-year-old self’s desire to be a doctor was one step away from being a reality.
Study hard and get good grades so you can get into college. Check. Make A’s in college. Check. Volunteer at mental health clinics. Check. Apply and get into graduate school. Do well in graduate school. Make your white professors and supervisors like you. Check. Check. Check.
I had pursued the plan to the letter. I was now at my final hurdle: completing the yearlong doctoral internship at the Indianapolis Midway Academic Medical Center.
Although there was little evidence in the Psychology Department, the all-white, all-heterosexual diversity committee agreed that diversity was a priority. They had codified it in their trainee handbook as one of the five domains in which we interns needed to demonstrate competency.
“All of our clients are diverse. They bring with them diverse backgrounds and experiences. As psychologists, it is very important that we understand how to respect and treat clients from backgrounds different from our own. To facilitate getting outside our comfort zones and understanding what it’s like to be a minority, you will complete a diversity project.”
Dr. Westwood-Court, the training director, beamed with enthusiasm as she began to describe a required assignment to my intern cohort during one of our clinical group supervision meetings. She was a psychologist in her late 30s. Her specialty was trauma and personality disorders.
She often engaged us in discussions about “meeting patients where they are,” and seemed open-minded concerning all things cultural. I respected her clinical expertise but questioned her cultural humility when it came to people from the global majority.
Dr. Jillian Bleekman, a staff psychologist, continued the explanation. “You will put yourself in a situation where you are a minority for at least two hours. We want you to experience what it is like to be the odd person out. You will then come back to group supervision and share with us what you learned from your experience.”
The voices in my head protested: “Excuse me? Wait…what? What did you say? Are you telling us to go be a minority for two hours? Ma’am, that’s called my life. How is this assignment at all appropriate for someone who is already a minority? This is fucked up.”
My Southern Black father’s warning fired off in my head: “Never tell white people the truth. They can’t handle it. Even when they are wrong, they will find a way to make it your fault.” Heeding his internalized advice, I did not give voice to my thoughts. I was offended and hurt by how they trivialized diversity with this weird project that clearly only had white, heterosexual, cis-gender, able-bodied interns in mind.
Although I was fuming, I kept my face smooth and used a tactic I knew would work. I feigned confusion and hesitantly raised my hand.
“What should I do? This is my life. I’m always a minority.” I tried to sound as meek as possible. I tried to cultivate a look of openness so as to not seem annoyed or averse to learning.
Dr. Westwood-Court smiled warmly and said, “Well, put yourself in a situation where you are a different type of minority. What ways are you not usually a minority?”
Again, I sat there silently. The training director attempted to console me, saying, “Don’t worry. No one has ever failed this assignment. We just want you to have an experience of being a minority and come back and tell us about it and what you learned.”
Dr. Westwood-Court went on to describe a gold-star diversity project. “Bella, you remember Caroline? She was an intern here last year?”
Bella nodded yes. “Caroline was one of our best interns that trained with us last year. For her diversity project, she attended a service at an all-Black Protestant church.” She paused and looked at each of us. “This was a significant shift for her. She had grown up in predominantly white environments where everyone looked like her.”
Dr. Westwood-Court articulated each syllable with care as she described how all of Caroline’s classmates, teachers and clergy were just like her in skin color and values. Caroline’s childhood place of worship had been the Catholic church where Parishioners kneeled in silence and crossed their chests as they listened to scripture. The rituals were precise, polite.
“Given this rearing, it made sense that Caroline was apprehensive. She told us that she was unsure of whether she would be accepted by the Black congregants. But she challenged herself to move beyond her anxiety. And she learned a lot. After completing the project, she shared with us that the congregants made her feel so welcomed. She felt at home.”
Dr. Westwood-Court’s pride for Caroline radiated into the room. I rejected it, and refused to beam it back. Dr. Westwood-Court continued, “Caroline learned that their worship experiences were not so different from hers, except they were much more lively and the music was so rhythmic. She was impressed by the big, colorful hats that many of the women wore and the way people danced in the aisles. She really put herself out there and came back with a better understanding of what it was like to be a minority.”
Dr. Westwood-Court finished her story and looked intently at each of us. I put on a happy face; my torn and raging heart was not her business. But my internal world was frenzied. I … was … appalled.
Photo Courtesy Of Jonathan Lassiter
I wanted to jump on the table and scream. My inner voice raged, “What did she expect them to do? Rob and rape her in the church? This is how I know white people crazy!” I felt as if I had just been assaulted physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Before listening to that story, I sensed that I was separated from my white supervisors and peers due to culture and professional training. After listening to that story, I felt separated from them due to humanity. Could they not recognize the innate humanity in others?
Caroline’s diversity project was voyeuristic and dehumanizing. It was as if she was visiting a foreign land that was rumored to be dangerous. To her surprise, she left with the stunning revelation that the inhabitants were civilized. For me, and apparently only for me in that space, the story and its telling represented the sickness of the whiteness mindset. The project fragmented the “regular white people” from the “diverse Black people.”
Clearly Caroline and the diversity committee carried the whiteness mindset within them. They set themselves as the default. As the default, the way they saw the world was always most important.
Caroline had achieved the goal of putting herself in a situation where she was a statistical minority. But was that good enough? Did she not still carry unspoken power in that space? Caroline crept into the church and soaked up the artistic, spiritual gifts. But there was no evidence that she had confronted what she represented as a white woman in that place.
Had she reckoned with the legacy she carried on her skin? Did she realize she represented the scores of white women whose deceptive words incited murder? Did she know that she evoked the well-meaning white women social workers who ripped children from their families?
For several congregants in that church, the combination of Caroline’s gender and race was likely triggering, insidious. But their love of the Lord instructed them to pray for those who persecuted them. It had probably never occurred to Caroline that the congregants could welcome their enemy, offer her peppermint and wish her a blessed day.
The assignment did not require Caroline to reflect on herself as a person with a heritage of destruction. It only requested that she put herself in a situation where she was a minority for two hours.
This positioning is consistent with a primary assumption of whiteness, fragmentation, and a value of whiteness, competition. The assignment did not encourage cultural exploration of the environment before engagement. It did not require reverence for the people before reaching out to them. There was no reckoning with how our presence in the environment would impact a community, only what we would take from it. It was a one-sided scene, defined by individualism.
My direct supervisors called the project “one of those American Psychological Association things that’s required” — the same APA that sets regulatory and ethical guidelines for psychologists’ and psychology trainees’ professional conduct. The same organization that had perpetuated racist stereotypes and provided scientific support to justify Black intellectual inferiority, mental illness, and harm for over a century. The same APA that issued an apology in 2021 for its “role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, racial discrimination, and human hierarchy.”
The APA was in existence for 110 years before it finally published “Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists.” This document attempted to provide recommendations on how to understand one’s own culture and the culture of others while practicing psychology. In reality, it suggested how a group of overwhelmingly white mental health professionals should conduct themselves.
We decided that I would visit a sports bar and try to understand sports culture because I was not at all familiar with or interested in sports. My direct supervisors and I reasoned that I would be a different type of minority in such an environment. Although this did not totally make sense to me, Dr. Westwood-Court accepted this plan. So, with much trepidation, I committed to completing the assignment.
Photo Courtesty Of Jonathan Lassiter
One cold November night I ventured to a sports bar in downtown Indianapolis. That night there was supposed to be a basketball game playing on television. The plan was to go watch the game with sports enthusiasts in the bar and soak up sports culture. It was hard to leave the house that night. It all seemed dumb. I did not understand why people — mostly men — would dress up, sometimes even paint themselves, and holler and hoot about someone shooting an alley-oop.
Despite my reservations, I picked an outfit that wasn’t too gay or too nerdy. A pair of regular-fit jeans. A long-sleeve T-shirt as opposed to one of my regular button-downs. I gave myself a pep talk in the mirror.
“You can do this! You’ll sit at the bar, order a Shirley Temple.”
“Wait, that’s so gay. Maybe you should get a beer?” a stern voice in my head interrupted.
“But I don’t like beer.”
“Order a Coke. That’s more manly,” the stern voice suggested.
The pep talk continued: “You’ll watch the game, drink your Coke, spot someone or a group, and strike up a conversation about sports.”
“But what if they think I’m trying to hit on them? What if they beat me up? You’ve seen The Matthew Shepard Story.” My mind was racing with all the what-if, worst-case scenarios.
“Use your man-voice when you talk to them.”
When I arrived at the sports bar, barely anyone was there. The floor felt sticky. Announcers’ voices and the screams of fans bounced from the TVs and off the walls. The sounds took me back to the excruciatingly long and boring Sundays of my childhood. I remembered my father sucking his thumbs watching football from sunup to sundown.
As a child, I wanted to watch “Breakfast with the Arts” on A&E and “In Living Color” on Fox. I was fascinated with the stories of artists and amused by Homey D. Clown. But Joshua didn’t play that. He hogged the TV in the living room, not seeming to care that my brother and I did not have one of our own. I suffered in silence and hoped he would fall asleep so I could switch the channel. The ache of powerlessness pulsed in my chest as I stepped into that bar and back into those memories. I hopped up onto a barstool.
“A Coke, please. With a straw,” I managed to eke out. I prayed I didn’t sound too gay.
The bartender put the drink in front of me. I paid. Another stool separated me and a blond, burly man in a yellow-and-blue Pacers hat. He ordered a Budweiser and reached into his blue jeans for his wallet.
I made eye contact with the man. “I’m Jonathan,” I said in my best man-voice. “Who’s your favorite team?”
The guy looked at me with skepticism. “Bill.” He nodded.
“I’m rooting for the Pacers, of course.” He looked at me like I was a Black gay man in a place he didn’t belong. I knew that look and took a deep breath. I powered through and rattled off my questions: “How long have you been following them? What do you like most about basketball?”
Honestly, I had no clue what I was doing. I hoped he did not call me the f-word or the n-word. Would he call me both? I guess God was with me. Bill obliged in answering my questions hastily. After he finished, he did not query me. He took another sip of his beer and quickly moved away.
I was embarrassed. Feelings of inadequacy flooded me as his curt responses triggered memories of laughter and ridicule and, alternatively, disregard from my peers due to my lack of knowledge of sports. The shame my father made me feel all those years during my youth for not being the right kind of boy resurfaced.
On the drive home, I listened to Kirk Franklin’s “More Than I Can Bear.” I felt like I had gone through the fire that Kirk sang about and been broken down. But I tried to remember my dignity. I tried to remember the end goal of the exercise. At home, in the shower, I tried to wash away the humiliation.
The following week, I reported back to Maddie, Bella, Dr. Bleekman and Dr. Westwood-Court. I tried to pretend that it was enlightening to be surrounded by team spirit and pride. Truthfully, I had not learned anything. It was traumatizing. My performance was not convincing.
“Jonathan, we appreciate how you tried to experience being a minority in a different way. But to be honest, we think you should redo the assignment,” the training director and diversity committee director announced. “It sounds like you experienced more bar culture than sports culture. We want you to try it again. Maybe pick something where you will be more immersed? How does that sound?”
I failed the diversity project. My Black, same-gender-loving, born-poor, nonapparent-disability-having ass failed the diversity project.
If I could go back in time, I would suggest to Drs. Linwood and Shulman that they advocate for a diversity project that challenges the whiteness mindset. I would de-emphasize diversity and center cultural humility.
Cultural humility is the active engagement in an ongoing process of self-reflection to better understand ourselves and others with the goal of establishing and maintaining honest, mutually beneficial, and healing-oriented relationships.
In contrast, diversity emphasizes welcoming and indoctrinating people into the whiteness mindset or “the norm.” The mindset and the systems behind it are rarely examined.
By the end of my internship, my morale had been halved. I was more competent in my psychotherapy and diagnostic skills, and I finished my program as Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter. But that achievement came with a devastating cost. Many Black and other students from the global majority must do more than just put in long nights of studying. We have to not only effectively regulate the intense emotions that arise when working with suffering clients, we must also suppress our pain when our culture is ignored and our intelligence and skills are challenged because of our supervisors’ and professors’ subtle and overt bias.
The predominately white field of psychology that is structured by the whiteness mindset demands that people from the global majority pay with our peace, mold our professional passion to its will by pursuing goals whiteness deems worthy and forgo our cultural values and ways of being to master its methods. To succeed, we must center whiteness or fail.
Adapted from HOW I KNOW WHITE PEOPLE ARE CRAZY AND OTHER STORIES. Copyright © 2025 Jonathan Lassiter. Published by Legacy Lit, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette Book Group company. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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