Helms White Racial Identity Model Essay

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The Helms White Racial Identity Model, created by Dr. Janet Helms, has six stages which are now referred to as statuses. The statuses are, contact, disintegration, reintegration, pseudoindependence, immersion/emersion, and autonomy. The first status, contact, shows obliviousness to being unaware of racism. This status shows that an individual believes everyone has an equal chance to success and lacks understanding of discrimination and prejudice. The second status is the disintegration status meaning that there is conflict among an individual’s loyalty to their group and “humanistic ideals”. These people may try to avoid people of a different race, may attempt to be “color blind”, and may seek reassurance from other Whites that racism is not their fault. The next status is reintegration. If reintegration occurs, racial/ethnic minorities may be blamed for their problems. …show more content…

Fourth, the pseudoindependence status is the start of the second phase of the Helms’s Model. This second phase includes the building definition of a nonracist White identity. Pseudoindependence contains the individual understanding and being aware that there are racial and ethnic minorities and the unfairness that they may have experienced or may be experiencing. This also means understanding White privilege. The fifth status, immersion/emersion status, involves the search that an individual may make to understand personal meaning of racism and how he or she may benefit from White privilege. The individual in this status will work to stop any biases he/she may contain and begin to advocate to stop racism and oppression. The last status of the Helms White Racial Identity Model is the autonomy status. This status shows the commitment to end privileges of racism and to steer away from any form of

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