Great and Good in Action: Counseling for Racial Trauma

by James A. Bacon

President Jim Ryan has rebranded the University of Virginia as “Great and Good.” Great stands for academic excellence which, despite rampant grade inflation, UVA purportedly stands for. Good stands for social justice with a bit of environmental sustainability thrown in. Not only has UVA become a center for the formulation of ever more exotic forms of thinking about intersectional oppression, it is exporting its insights to the community at large.

As we come across examples of Great and Good in action, we will highlight the force that UVA exerts upon the community around it. The Facebook post shown above describes how the Counseling Alliance of Virginia (CAV) partners with UVA’s Federal and Employee Assistance Program (FEAP) to advance FEAP’s work to “enhance racial awareness and sensitivity.”

FEAP, we are told, has expanded its services to include not only UVA but 35 organizations in Charlottesville.

The Facebook post describes how CAV is partnering with FEAP to ensure that the UVA organization “remains a comfortable, safe, and inclusive place for everyone in the community while being transparent about the impact of white supremacy, racial trauma and oppression.”

What does FEAP do? Its website describes the following services:

• Treatment for alcohol and drug addiction
• Learning how to cultivate sustainable compassion
• Connecting with local organizations for food, housing, clothing and utility assistance
• Couples counseling
• Critical-incident response
• Treatment for depression
• Domestic-violence counseling
• Addressing eldercare concerns
• Personal financial counseling
• Free 30-minute legal consultations
• Mindfulness training
• Parenting seminars
• Stress management

Are all these services delivered through an intersectional, oppressor/victim lens or only some of them?

That’s hard to say from the website itself, which does not employ the rhetoric of intersectional-oppression ideology. The same applies to CAV’s antiseptic website. To understand the philosophical theories at work, you have to follow social media posts which haven’t been scrubbed to avoid controversy.

Here’s another CAV social media post highlighting its first Racial Awareness & Sensitivity session in Albemarle County schools. Here we learn that CAV’s mission is to “create a safe space dedicated for the difficult yet necessary conversations around race.”

The CAV post atop this post uses a buzzword common in the counseling community today: “trauma.” Once upon a time, the term was reserved for devastating physical or emotional experiences. Now it’s equated with victimization experienced by racial minorities, women and LGBQT+ people. 

Funny how this works. Racism, sexism and homophobia are supposedly omnipresent and deeply ingrained in American society. But the racists, sexists, and homophobes aren’t the ones constantly holding conferences and blathering endlessly about race, sex and gender — it’s the leftist ideologues!

From an outsider’s perspective, here’s how counseling and therapy seems to work: Convince people that they are “trauma” victims of systemic racism, sexism, genderism, etc. Get them to interpret and obsess over every negative experience through the intersectional lens. Validate their anxiety and depression as symptoms of phantom forces they cannot control. Explain that racism is systemic and never goes away. Voila! Therapists and counselors create a never-ending demand for their services!

Race hustling has evolved from episodic, headline-driven Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton shakedowns into a mainstream business model.

Is that what’s happening in Charlottesville with UVA’s help? The CAV posts are suggestive but not definitive. The UVA/nonprofit nexus in Charlottesville-Albemarle County is worth exploring in greater detail. The Jefferson Council will continue digging to see what we find.