Janet Helms

Introduction

Janet E. Helms is an American counseling psychologist whose racial identity models supplied most of the vocabulary used in counseling psychology for thinking about how people are located by race. Working from the 1970s onward, she argued that what damages mental health is not being Black or being a woman but how people in those categories are treated, and she built instruments intended to make that claim testable. Her two best-known contributions are a model of Black racial identity derived from William Cross Jr.'s nigrescence theory, operationalised in the Racial Identity Attitude Scale developed with Thomas Parham, and a model of White racial identity - contact, disintegration, reintegration, pseudo-independence and autonomy - operationalised with Robert Carter in the White Racial Identity Attitude Scale.

She spent most of her career insisting that race was a legitimate empirical variable at a time when colleagues told her it was not, and she extended the argument into testing: cultural bias in assessment, test fairness in education and employment, and ultimately expert testimony in the administrative proceedings that underlay Ricci v. DeStefano. Her models are also among the most psychometrically contested instruments in the multicultural literature, and her published exchange with critics over what the White identity scale actually measures remains one of the sharpest methodological disputes in the field.

Early Life and Education

Helms was born in the Kansas City area and was, by published accounts, the second child and first girl among seven siblings, raised in Kansas during the Jim Crow era of legally segregated and unequal schools. She has described deciding in second grade that she would become a psychologist, after reading about autism in a magazine, and said she chose mathematics as an undergraduate major partly because of her father before switching to psychology.

She completed her undergraduate degree and then a master's degree in psychology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, working full-time while studying. Her master's thesis concerned Black students' attrition and test scores, which set the agenda for everything that followed: the measurement instruments, group differences they appeared to show, and the question of whether the tests or the circumstances explained those differences.

She applied to a single doctoral programme and was accepted at Iowa State University, where she was the first Black woman doctoral candidate in her programme, one Black student among roughly forty and the entire faculty white. She received her Ph.D. in psychology with a specialisation in counseling psychology in 1975.

Academic and Professional Career

In 1975 Helms took an assistant professorship at Washington State University in Pullman. From 1977 to 1981 she was in the psychology department at Southern Illinois University, where colleagues repeatedly told her that race was not a real research topic; it was there that she decided to treat it as one that could be studied with empirical data, publishing early work on Black women. She was then invited onto the editorial board of the Journal of Counseling Psychology, which reassured her that the area was growing.

She moved to the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1981 and stayed until 1999, rising from assistant to full professor, co-directing the counseling psychology programme, affiliating with the women's studies programme, and maintaining a private practice. Much of the instrument development for which she is known dates from this period.

In 2000 she was recruited to Boston College, where she held the Augustus Long Professorship in the Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology, and founded and directed the Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture for more than two decades, hosting its annual Diversity Challenge conference. She is now Augustus Long Professor Emerita. She has served as president of the Society of Counseling Psychology (Division 17 of the American Psychological Association), as a Fellow of Divisions 17, 45 and 35, as co-chair of the Joint Committee on Testing Practices and a member of the APA Committee on Psychological Tests and Assessment, and on the Commission for the Recognition of Specialties and Subspecialties.

Her honours include the Society of Counseling Psychology's Leona Tyler Award (2002), the Association of Black Psychologists' Distinguished Psychologist Award (2007), the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Education and Training in Psychology (2006), the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy (2008), the Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award for mentoring, a Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award from Division 17 (2017-2018), a 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from APA's Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race, the APA/APF Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Public Interest, and the American Psychological Foundation's 2019 Arthur W. Staats Lecture.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Racial identity statuses rather than stages

Helms's central move was to reinterpret racial identity models as descriptions of schemas people can hold simultaneously, rather than stages through which everyone marches in lockstep. A person has scores on several statuses at once, and what matters clinically is the configuration and the person's capacity to move flexibly among them. This is why she recommended reporting all subscale scores as a profile rather than assigning someone to a single stage, and it distinguished her usage from stricter stage readings of Cross's nigrescence model.

Her people-of-color model describes conformity, dissonance, immersion-emersion, internalisation and integrative awareness. Her White racial identity model describes six statuses grouped into two phases: the abandonment of racism (contact, disintegration, reintegration) and the definition of a non-racist identity (pseudo-independence, immersion-emersion, autonomy). Contact means obliviousness to race; disintegration is the discomfort that follows a realisation of what whiteness means; reintegration is the retreat into blaming victims; pseudo-independence is intellectual rather than lived commitment; autonomy is a non-racist identity held with genuine understanding.

Measuring identity

Working with Thomas Parham, Helms operationalised Cross's original nigrescence theory in the Racial Identity Attitude Scale (Parham & Helms, 1981), a 30-item instrument covering pre-encounter, encounter, immersion-emersion and internalisation; the fifth nigrescence stage was deliberately left unmeasured because it described a behavioural style not unique to one status. With Robert Carter she built the 50-item White Racial Identity Attitude Scale (Helms & Carter, 1990), five schemas of ten items each on a five-point Likert format. These were the first widely usable quantitative instruments in the field, and for two decades almost all quantitative research on racial identity ran through them.

Dyads and interaction

Helms also modelled what happens between people rather than within them, cross-referencing White and people-of-color statuses to classify therapeutic dyads as parallel, crossed, progressive or regressive. The framework predicted friction or ease depending on the fit, and gave supervisors a language for discussing racial dynamics in supervision, to which she devoted extensive later work with Tina Richardson and others.

Race, testing and method

Parallel to identity work ran a sustained programme on assessment. Helms published widely cited work on cultural and racial bias in cognitive ability testing, argued that multiculturally competent practice requires attention to testing fairness rather than only to therapeutic technique, and brought that expertise into litigation, including the proceedings underlying Ricci v. DeStefano. She has also been an articulate critic of "multiculturalism" as a catch-all that, in her view, obscures the specific operation of race by folding it into a general competence.

Major Publications

A Practitioner's Guide to the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (1982), Charles C Thomas.
Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice (1990), Praeger. Her systematic statement of both models and the research behind them.
Helms, J. E., & Carter, R. T. (1990). "Development of the White Racial Identity Attitude Scale inventory." Journal of Counseling Psychology, 37(1), 67-74.
A Race Is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life (1992), later editions through a third edition in 2020 from Cognella.
Helms, J. E., & Cook, D. A. Using Race and Culture in Counseling and Psychotherapy: Theory and Process, Allyn & Bacon.
Helms, J. E. (1997). "Implications of Behrens (1997) for the validity of the White Racial Identity Attitude Scale." Journal of Counseling Psychology, 44(1), 13-16.

Impact and Legacy

Helms's influence is institutional as well as intellectual. Several generations of counseling psychologists were trained on her status descriptions; the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development's multicultural competencies and much culturally informed counseling theory carry her fingerprints. Recent work continues to apply her White racial identity model, including a 2021 longitudinal qualitative study by Ursula Moffitt, Leoandra Onnie Rogers and Kara Dastrup that used it with white American youth aged eight to fourteen and found age-related movement toward resistance to racism alongside high individual variability.

The measurement record is far less comfortable, and critics have been specific. John Behrens's 1997 analysis and meta-analysis of twenty-two studies reported average internal consistency estimates for the five White identity subscales of .50 for contact, .77 for disintegration, .78 for reintegration, .67 for pseudo-independence and .61 for autonomy - with contact falling as low as .18 to .33 in individual samples. Tokar and Swanson (1991) found that the factor structure did not support the five hypothesised constructs, and confirmatory factor analyses by Bennett, Behrens and Rowe (1993) and by Behrens (1997) did not support the simple structure either. Charlene Alexander's 1992 investigation found reliabilities ranging from .33 to .76 across subscales, could not complete a confirmatory factor analysis because the data failed the test of admissibility, and found that 77.4 percent of participants could not be classified into any status using the usual highest-score criterion; her exploratory analysis produced a different five-factor solution altogether. Similar complaints attach to the Black identity instrument: Ponterotto and Wise (1987) found support for pre-encounter, immersion-emersion and internalisation but only minimal support for encounter, and subsequent studies by Burlew and Smith, Yanico and colleagues, Lemon and Waehler, Fischer and colleagues and others raised reliability and validity questions. In a clinical sample of African American veterans, Harkley, McLellan and Randall found most BRIAS items unstable over time and had to delete twenty-six items to obtain even marginal subscales. Rowe, Bennett and Atkinson (1994) pressed a conceptual objection: that models developed to explain how minorities adapt to oppression are being stretched to explain whites, whose experiential relationship to race is radically different, and that the "developmental" reading of these statuses forces data into a Procrustean sequence. Partly in response, Choney and Behrens built the Oklahoma Racial Attitudes Scale around a White racial consciousness model, and Vandiver, Cross and Worrell built the Cross Racial Identity Scale, which for many researchers has superseded the earlier instruments.

Helms answered these charges directly rather than conceding them. In rejoinders to Rowe and colleagues and later to Behrens (both 1997), she argued that the apparent simplicity of the scale's structure reflects a lack of fit between her theory and the measurement models her critics imposed on it, possible failure to correct for artifacts in their data sets, and unusual readings of classical measurement theory - while conceding that the results bear on construct validity but disputing their relevance to convergent and discriminant validity. Behrens and Rowe replied that the simple-structure conclusion holds, that the complex pattern the theory predicts simply is not present in the data, and that both classical and latent-trait analyses converge on that answer. Her defenders add that the earliest favourable reliability figures came from small homogeneous college samples, that the instruments were always intended for research rather than individual diagnosis, and that because she recommended profile rather than stage assignment much of the classification-based criticism attacks a use she never endorsed.

The evaluation that most historians of the literature would now accept is two-part. Helms established that racial identity could be studied quantitatively and that it mattered for counseling process, testing and supervision, which no one had done before her. The specific instruments she built to do it, however, have not survived independent psychometric scrutiny in the form she published them, and the field has largely moved to second-generation measures while retaining her conceptual vocabulary. That combination - durable theory, contested tools - is probably the most accurate summary of her legacy.

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References

Helms, J. E. (1990). Black and white racial identity: Theory, research, and practice. Greenwood Press.
Helms, J. E. (1992). A race is a nice thing to have: A guide to being a white person or understanding the white persons in your life. Content Communications.
Helms, J. E., & Carter, R. T. (1990). Development of the White Racial Identity Inventory. In J. E. Helms (Ed.), Black and white racial identity: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 67-80). Greenwood Press.
Helms, J. E. (1997). Implications of Behrens (1997) for the validity of the White Racial Identity Attitude Scale. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 44(1), 13-16.
Helms, J. E., & Cook, D. A. (1999). Using race and culture in counseling and psychotherapy: Theory and process. Allyn & Bacon.
Cross, W. E., Jr. (1991). Shades of black: Diversity in African-American identity. Temple University Press.
Behrens, J. T. (1997). Does the White Racial Identity Attitude Scale measure racial identity? Journal of Counseling Psychology, 44(1), 3-12.
Ponterotto, J. G., & Wise, S. L. (1987). Construct validity study of the Racial Identity Attitude Scale. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 34(2), 218-223.
Rowe, W., Bennett, S. K., & Atkinson, D. R. (1994). White racial identity models: A critique and alternative proposal. The Counseling Psychologist, 22(1), 129-146.