438 The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 4 Confronting Biases: My Journey of Self-Exploration Existing biases, stereotypes, and misinformation may lead counselors to assume that Black youth use cannabis more frequently than their White peers, which further justifies pathologization of their cannabis use, just as I did when working on the interdisciplinary team. My and the team’s prejudices against Diondre’s cannabis use caused us to see him and people in his community as pathological users of drugs, unlike Johnny, who was only experimenting and would get over it. These biases were likely, in part, informed by research, which continues to find that Black youth report a greater likelihood of cannabis use than their White counterparts (R. M. Johnson et al., 2019; Lanza et al., 2015; Wu et al., 2016). As I embarked on a journey of deep self-reflection after my epiphanic moment with Diondre, one of the things I realized was that science and research have historically not only failed the Black community, but they have also been weaponized against it in all domains, especially behavioral health science (Scharff et al., 2010). I thus had to confront an epistemological assumption that helped me understand research differently. Although research articles were limited in describing the complexity of cannabis use within the Black community and Black youth, I came to understand the role of these and other research limitations in the perpetuation of bias and stereotypes. As explained by Connelly (2013) and Puhan et al. (2012), despite the primary goal of presenting limitations being to provide meaningful information to the reader, too often, limitations in medical education articles are overlooked or reduced to simplistic and minimally relevant themes. Whether clearly communicated by researchers or neglected by practitioners, overlooking limitations and other aspects—such as sample size, population, and other methodological or analytic procedures—can reinforce very harmful beliefs that influence our practice of counseling. Research had informed me and others on the team that Black youth used cannabis more than White youth, but questioning research, particularly research limitations, had opened my eyes to a reality that contradicted what I believed. I came to realize, as explained by Unger (2012), that much of the research on racial or cultural differences in cannabis use tends to categorize racial groups into broad umbrella designations (e.g., White, Hispanic, Black, Asian) without considering the extensive heterogeneity of people within these categories. Social, biological, cultural, and other factors may contribute to the heterogeneity of risk for substance use by non-racial characteristics, but these factors are not often examined (Unger, 2012). Lee et al. (2021) examined the complexity of youth’s cannabis use across racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. A total of 68,263 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 were divided into seven subgroups by race/ethnicity (White, Hispanic, Black, Asian, Native American, Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander, and mixed race). Lee et al. then examined cannabis-specific risk and protective factors, including perceived availability of cannabis, adolescents’ perceived risk of cannabis use, and perceived disapproval of parents, peers, and close friends. Past-month, past-year, and lifetime cannabis use were used as cannabis use outcomes to examine the associations with risk and protective factors as well as with race/ethnicity. Lee et al.’s (2021) study found that 1) the perceived availability of cannabis was associated with higher use, 2) lower disapproval of cannabis use perceptions and lower cannabis risk perceptions were also associated with greater cannabis use, and 3) disapproval of one’s parent(s)/peer(s)/friend(s) was inversely related to past-month, past-year, and lifetime cannabis use. These findings suggest there is substantial heterogeneity of cannabis risk, protective factors, and cannabis use across race and ethnicity among U.S. adolescents when other sociological and cultural factors are considered,
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