Multicultural Competency

Multicultural Competency

This paper is analyzing the article "Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists" published in the American Psychologist, the official journal of the American Psychological Association, in May 2003, and is reflecting the author point of view interconnected with personal life experiences.

This article provides guidelines on multicultural education, research and psychological practices, and analyzes the first two guidelines of the article, regarding the attitudes and beliefs that author may hold, and how those can influence perceptions or interactions with persons who are different from ethical and racial point of view. Also it focuses the importance of the multicultural sensitivity and responsiveness, offering valuable data and knowledge about people who are ethnically and racially different.

The author's ethical conduct was influenced and shaped by many variables across the years. His cultural heritage developed certain biases and attitudes when he interacted for the first time with various ethnical and racial groups in Ecuador, South-America. His perception was distorted when he traveled there, coming from Eastern Europe, at the age of 24. The cross-cultural impact at that time was high, leading to a negative perception about the individuals in Ecuador, after landing at the airport. The negative perception has persisted about two weeks, and one of the reasons was the different factions that people had, and the different skin color.

At that time, in 1992, because of his age and lack of experience, and also because he spent more than 20 years in a socialist country, he had the tendency to exaggerate the differences between himself and the ethnic group of the population (Hispanic and Indigenous). The negative perception that he experienced was a feeling of unexplainable fear, when he walked in the street or traveled with the bus.

Now he realized that it was an unconscious process of his mind. The perception disappeared after the author interacted with individuals of that society, discovering good manners, and unbelievable kindness in comparison with Eastern Europe region. His interaction with the people from Ecuador radically changed in few months.

He started to consider the Inca culture, in many ways, superior to the Eastern European culture. In the small villages, the Indigenous people were extremely friendly. They were very polite, and they had the correctness as an extra quality in comparison with the Romanian people (the origin country of the author). He was buying silver jewelry from Indigenous and he was exporting it to Europe. The first time when he went to a certain village in the Andes Mountains, the owner of the silver store told him to enter inside and to choose any silver items that he liked. The owner left outside, and he waited for him on a bench. The author was completely alone in the store, with hundreds of handmade items of silver jewelry. The fact that the Indigenous owner trusted the foreigner, considered a possible client, was completely unusual for the author. That was one of the moments when he changed the whole perception about those persons and their culture. His attitude changed too, and very soon, after few months, his behaviors had the same patterns with the Ecuadorian people.

When he came back to Europe, after two years, the people from the old continent appeared to him as persons not so polite, without certain feelings, cold, or rudely persons. He realized that the cross-cultural experience changed