ABSTRACT
The authors believe that race, ethnic, and cultural dialogues in group psychotherapy can play a major role in reducing racial tensions and promoting racial harmony. Race dialogues involve intense and challenging interactions about race between members from diverse groups that incorporate discussions about prejudice, biases, worldviews, power, and privilege, oftentimes resulting in strong emotional reactions and can be easily embedded in group psychotherapy. To provide a foundation for understanding the critical need for group psychotherapy to address race relations through difficult race dialogues, the authors describe changing racial demographics in the US as an example that is representative of countries worldwide, especially in the global north. Facilitating difficult race dialogues in group psychotherapy is to encourage expressing and examining issues of power, privilege, status, biases, prejudice, oppression, racism, discrimination, marginalization, cultural mistrust, systematic oppression, and the influence of dominant culture on racial group members, all of which have an impact on mental health.
