Decolonizing & decentering oppressive structures: practical strategies for social justice in school and clinical counseling

The counseling profession has long claimed a commitment to social justice and multicultural competence. However, the authors contend that these efforts often remain superficial, failing to address the foundational White-centric, Western, and colonized structures that govern school and clinical settings. Because the field was historically established by and for a specific, privileged demographic, many standard practices—such as traditional assessment, treatment planning, and standardized testing—inadvertently reinforce White supremacy and marginalize non-dominant groups. This paper calls for a paradigm shift: a move from merely acknowledging diversity to actively decolonizing the counseling environment.

To move beyond performative social justice, the authors propose two primary, action-oriented strategies: broaching and advocacy. Broaching involves the deliberate, ongoing effort by a counselor to initiate conversations about race, ethnicity, and culture. By normalizing these discussions, counselors can validate the client's lived experience, challenge power imbalances, and create a therapeutic space that does not rely on White norms as the default. The authors categorize broaching into four dimensions—intracounseling, intraindividual, intra-REC (race, ethnicity, culture), and inter-REC—to help practitioners address both interpersonal dynamics and systemic influences.

Advocacy serves as the second pillar, requiring counselors to act as agents of change within their institutions. Using the ACA Advocacy Competencies as a guide, counselors are encouraged to move beyond the individual level to address systemic barriers. In schools, this might mean advocating for inclusive curricula and equitable policy enforcement; in clinical settings, it involves using systemic models that account for social determinants of health and rejecting universal, Western-designed diagnostic tools that fail to capture the complexity of a client’s intersectional identity.