Day 18 and 19 - Professional and personal networking and accountability
While I could feel the energy and desire of the region to share the support and spirit of networking, I could also feel the shadow of the active harm and disconnection our colleagues of color in music therapy have experienced. Music therapists of color have actively spoken up (Norris, 2020; Thomas & Norris, 2021a; Murakami, 2022), and expressed the ways the organization has caused harm and failed to recognize a continued perpetuation of the “status quo” (Thomas & Norris, 2021a).
Yet, as we consider the multiple potentials of our work, we recognize that the sociopolitical realities within our practice are continually diminished as the profession strives toward legitimacy within the broader arenas of healthcare and popular culture. Not only do these aspirations leave us grasping to recognize our contextualized existence as cultural beings, but we also have yet to fully embrace how the professional and personal are tethered and inherently political. Our understanding of differentiated power and its connection to professional relationship and practice does not fully take into account historical legacies or current belief structures that inform the key assumptions and ideological practices that permeate our work. These assumptions and practices negate nondominant perspectives, non-monolithic historical underpinnings, and the cultural legacies that make it resoundingly more difficult to comprehend who “we” (music therapists) are and what “we” do. (Thomas & Norris, 2021a, p. 5)
Creative arts therapies have not “recognized the sociopolitical realities” and the ways they affect our professions (Thomas & Norris, 2021a). How has our striving for legitimacy as arts therapists within the professional contexts in which we work diminished our recognition of the “historical legacies…nondominant perspectives (and) non-monolithic underpinnings” which so deeply affect both clients and practitioners who do not adhere to the dominant ideals? How has the adherence to the status quo or to an inclusion of “the right kind of outsider” while excluding the “others” represented a “persistent and torrid affair that expresses a deep affection and attachment to the aforementioned sociopolitical systems, even as it claims to aspire against them” (Thomas & Norris, 2021a, p. 6).
I spent part of the day trying to understand this harm done by professional organizations – there are several examples within the American music therapy association, the American Dance Therapy association, and the American art therapy association. IEATA has yet to have a “reckoning” – partly because it doesn’t really have many forums for such – no journal specific to expressive arts therapy, no regular regional structures or yearly conferences that bring members and the board together, few regulatory actions that demonstrate these collusions.
The hardest part of this is the inability of these organizations to successfully apologize and repair. Accountability and repair must happen! Thomas and Norris (2021a) offer two resources for this - Hassan & Makeba’s Fumbling Towards Repair and the online training Centered Accountability.
Ok… so I am going to take steps towards accountability myself – I will not look away, but work towards understanding my part in the perpetuation of systemic exclusion and harm done within our professional organizations and within my role as professor.
What will you do?
References
American Art Therapy Association. (2018, February 22). Leah Gipson, LCPC, ATR-BC. https://arttherapy.org/featured-member-leah-gipson/
Chan, M. W. L., Coburn, D., Coburn, S., Grayson, A. M., Lerman, P. F., Lo, H. Y. C., Marshall, C., Nichols, E. T., Roberts, M., Sevett, P., Quintus, M., Wang, S. B., Williams, A., Yokokawa, A. N., & Gamba, M. (2020). ADTA 2019 plenary panel-honoring multiplicity: An embodied keynote experience ADTA 54th annual conference Miami, FL. American Journal of Dance Therapy, 42(1), 90–106. https://doi-org.ezproxyles.flo.org/10.1007/s10465-020-09329-4
Murakami, B. (2021, July 26). What we owe each other as music therapists. I’m a music therapist. http://www.imamusictherapist.com/what-we-owe-each-other-as-music-therapists/
Murakami, B. (2022, January 18). Update: What we owe each other as music therapists. I’m a music therapist. http://www.imamusictherapist.com/update-what-we-owe-each-other-as-music-therapists/
Norris, M. (2020). A call for radical imagining: Exploring anti-Blackness in the music therapy profession. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 20(3), 6. https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v20i3.3167
Thomas, N. & Norris, M. S. (2021a). “Who you mean ‘we?’” Confronting professional notions of “belonging” in music therapy, Journal of Music Therapy, 58 (1), 5–11. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmt/thaa024
Thomas, N., & Norris, M. (2021b). Open letter to the MT community on justice & equity. Retrieved November 3, 2021, from https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1_-GPQP6zHbYn_OmBZyidR_WogTAliSxJ8ynMuWKNkUE/mobilebasic
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