Anti-racism Allyship Amongst Psychologists and Students in Psychology Training in Aotearoa New Zealand

Critical race researchers define ‘racism’ as any programme or practice, based on an ideology of superiority and inferiority, that discriminates and mistreats individuals because of membership to a racial group (Tan et al., 2024). Racism is a known social determinant of health in Aotearoa New Zealand (Came & Griffith, 2018; Reid et al., 2019). Amid the rising racist rhetoric targeting Māori in Aotearoa, the need to develop an anti-racist psychologist workforce is imperative. Some examples of such rheteoric include the opposition to Māori exercising tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) in the health system restructure (Black et al., 2023) and discouragement of the use of te reo Māori (the Māori language) across government sectors (Radio New Zealand, 2023). Pacific^[1] and Asian^[2] communities are also subjected to racism through other means of racialisation^[3] in Aotearoa, as evident through the intergenerational impacts of Dawn Raids and Pacific income gaps (Parker et al., 2024), and xenophobic and anti-Asian sentiments (Jaung et al., 2022). As a workforce with key responsibilities in promoting the well-being of society (see Principle Four: Social Justice and Responsibility to Society; Code of Ethics Review Group, 2002), there is a clear need and potential benefit from fostering allyship and solidarity in psychology to dismantle racism.

Drawing on the literature on racial justice allyship by Monnica Williams and colleagues (Williams et al., 2023; Williams & Sharif, 2021), ‘allies’ are defined as individuals who acknowledge the unearned privilege they receive from society’s patterns of injustice and take action to change it. The role of allyship is an active ongoing process that is not restricted to Pākehā (Europeans) in Aotearoa (Williams & Sharif, 2021). In the process of taking up the responsibilities of an ally, Pākehā are required to reflect on mechanisms that maintain power of white settlers, including (but not limited to) white fragility, guilt, paralysis and positionality (Crawford & Langridge, 2022). A racialised person can also form allyship with other racialised and minoritised groups by choosing to be a ‘voice for the silenced’ through empathy for shared experiences of injustices and ‘a spy in the house of the unjust’ by implementing positive changes behind the scenes (Williams et al., 2023, pp. 13–14). Although the notion of ‘allyship’ has received limited scholarly attention in Aotearoa, particularly in the discipline of psychology, there have been attempts to define the roles of non-Māori in engaging in decolonisation and restoring the kawa (protocol) based on Te Tiriti o Waitangi^[4].

Below is a list of allyship concepts and roles that have been defined in the Aotearoa context.

• Tangata Tiriti (people of the Treaty who form meaningful partnership with tangata whenua (people of the land or Māori; Matike Mai Aotearoa, 2016). Tangata Tiriti embrace the constitutional values outlined in Matike Mai Aotearoa: tikanga (Māori customs as the basis of constitution); community (good relationships); affirmation of belonging; place (protection of Papatūānuku or the Earth mother), balance (equal political relationship between Māori and the Crown), conciliation (consensual democracy) and structure (fair representation, openness and transparency).

• Being in the relational sphere (Matike Mai Aotearoa, 2016) where joint decisions can be made in a way that respect and uphold the mana (esteem or authority) of all concerned.

• Waitangi Tribunal Treaty principles (Waitangi Tribunal, 2023) that include partnership (a balanced relationship between the Crown’s right to kawanatanga [governorship over non-Māori], and Māori right to tino rangatiratanga or self-determination), active protection (preserve taonga [treasure] Māori include reo [language], tikanga [protocol], and mātauranga [knowledge systems]), equity (ensure culturally safe health services and proportional resource allocation) and options (develop paths where Māori can choose between mainstream and kaupapa Māori systems).

• Engaging in kotahitanga (unity and solidarity) and mahi tūhono (working together towards collective goals of honouring Te Tiriti; Jackson, 2020).

• Hoa haere (friends coming together in solidarity with the struggle for recognition of Māori mana motuhake [absolute authority]; Simon, 2023).

Objective

In the context of wider discourses about the roles of tauiwi (non-Māori) in honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi, it is timely to explore how ‘allyship’ is understood and practiced in psychology. In particular, how allyship acts to disrupt the discipline, given its predominantly (Eurocentric) monocultural nature (Waitoki et al., 2023) and Pākehā workforce (Scarf et al., 2019). This paper aimed to investigate demographic and attitudinal factors associated with anti-racism allyship for psychologists and psychology students. As the discipline considers its role in decolonising the curriculum (NSCBI et al., 2018) and identifying solutions to address the Crown breaches in the training, employment and regulation of psychologists (see Waitangi Tribunal claim; Levy, 2018), our objective is to contribute empirical insights that can guide the development of targeted interventions to sensitise psychologists and students to various aspects intricately linked with allyship.

Methods

We used data from the Kia Whakapapa Pounamu survey that was designed to examine barriers and facilitators for Māori and other minoritised groups to participate effectively in psychology training and the workforce. The survey was open from 25 March to 30 June 2023. Ethics approval was obtained from Te Kāhui Manu Tāiko (Human Research Ethics Committees of Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies) at the University of Wikato. Recruitment methods included disseminating information about the survey through conferences, reaching out to directors of professional psychology programmes to share the survey among students in training, and distributing newsletters via the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists (NZCCP) and New Zealand Psychological Society (NZPsS) to engage registered members. Participants who completed the survey could opt to enter a prize draw. The present study focused on the responses of psychologists and students currently enrolled in professional psychology programmes (N=280). Participants came from all scopes of practice currently available in Aotearoa and almost all (98.3%) held an annual practicing certificate. Academic staff were excluded from the final sample for analysis.

The survey was part of a larger Working to End Racial Oppression (WERO) project of which the present authors (comprising Māori and tauiwi) are part of. Our research approach was guided by the overall project’s Takarangi framework that included shared axiology (e.g. Vā [relationality] and Taonga tuku iho [respect for ancestral knowledge]) and ethics (e.g. mana aki [strength-based] and utu [reciprocity]). The framework unites researchers of different ontologies and epistemiologies to achieve a shared understanding and advance toward decolonising and racial justice objectives consistent with foundational constitutional documents (e.g. Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Matike Mai) and human rights instruments (e.g. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples).

Participants

The median age of participants ranged from 35 to 39 years (range 20–84 years). European individuals comprised more than 61.1% of the sample and one-quarter identified as Māori (24.6%)^[5]. Asian participants constituted 8.6% of the sample, and 4.3% were Pacific. Cisgender women constituted the majority (80.7%) of the sample, followed by 16.8% identifying as cisgender men and 2.5% as transgender or non-binary^[6]. Approximately one-fifth of participants identified as part of the rainbow^[7] communities (19.1%). The majority of participants had received their training in Aotearoa (96.1%) and 3.9% had received psychology training overseas. Among those who received psychology training in Aotearoa, 13.9% began training before 2000, 12.4% in 2000–2009, 37.1% in 2010–2019 and 36.7% in 2020–2023.

Measures

Response options for all items ranged from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics for each item on the three scales used in this study. All three scales displayed adequate Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) scores (satisfactory level of sampling adequacy) and yielded significant Bartlett’s test of sphericity results (suitability for factor analysis).

Attitudes towards taha Māori (AM). The AM scale we developed comprised five items of which four were adapted from a survey of psychologists’ opinions and behaviours on taha (aspects) of Māori mental health (Sawrey, 1993). A new item (AM5) was added to reflect the growing racial tropes that discredit the scientific validity of mātauranga Māori. An exploratory factor analysis with one fixed factor revealed all items had a high factor loading of a range between 0.76 (AM5) and 0.80 (AM2). Overall, the AM scale demonstrated strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s α=0.88).

Attitudes towards racism and colonisation (AR). We adapted items from the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (Neville et al., 2000) to assess participants’ awareness of existence of Pākehā (white settler) privilege and pervasive racial oppression in Aotearoa. The factor loadings of items in the fixed 1 factor ranged from 0.57 (AR1) to 0.73 (AR3). The lower factor loadings were attributable to the presence of two underlying subfactors: Racial Privilege and Blatant Racial Issues (see Neville et al., 2000). The scale exhibited acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s α=0.73).

Anti-racism allyship (AA). Three items from the Anti-racism Behavioral Inventory (Pieterse et al., 2016) were adopted to measure anti-racism awareness and behaviour. The factor loadings of items (one fixed factor) ranged from 0.46 (AA3) to 0.86 (AA1). Compared with AA1 and AA2, which were classified as items on the Individual Activism subfactor, AA3 belonged to the Institutional Advocacy subfactor (Pieterse et al., 2016). We decided to retain this item in the scale to reflect engagement in anti-racism advocacy at the institutional level. The internal reliability of the AA scale was acceptable (Cronbach’s α=0.69).

Social desirability bias. As we anticipated participants would portray themselves more favourably in terms of anti-racist attitudes, we employed two items from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (Vilar et al., 2020) to measure self-deceptive enhancement and impression management. Participants were asked to rate the accuracy of two statements on a scale from 1 (not accurate at all) to 7 (extremely accurate): a) ‘I don’t gossip about other people’s business’ and b) ‘I don’t care to know what other people really think of me’.

Data Analysis

Not all participants completed the whole survey because of attrition over a long survey. Missing data for items across the three scales varied from 0.4% to 1.6%. Imputation for missing data in the scales was performed using the expectation maximisation method that involved estimating means and covariances of available data in regression models using IBM SPSS v29. We performed correlation and linear regression analyses in jamovi version 2.3.28 (The jamovi project, 2023). Multivariate regression analysis for anti-racist allyship was adjusted for age, the period of entering psychology training, gender, rainbow identity and social desirability bias. The threshold for statistical significance was set at p<.05 for all analyses.

Results

Table 2 shows a correlation matrix of the scale items. Anti-racism allyship (AA) demonstrated a weak significant correlation with attitudes towards taha Māori (AM) and attitudes towards racism and colonisation (AR).

Table 3 presents the results of bivariate regression analyses of demographic variables predicting the three scales. Our findings showed that compared with Māori, ‘Asian’ and ‘Pākehā and Others’ participants scored significantly lower on AM. Cisgender female and trans and non-binary participants scored higher than cisgender males in AM and AR. In addition, rainbow participants scored higher on AR compared with their non-rainbow counterparts. Furthermore, participants who entered psychology training in 2010–2019 and 2020–2023 scored higher in AM and AR compared with those who entered training before 2000. Younger participants had higher scores in both the AM and AR scales. The multivariate regression analysis, adjusted for demographic variables and social desirability bias, showed the only significant predictors for AA were AM and AR.

Discussion

Drawing on data from a large sample of psychologists and students in psychology training in Aotearoa, the present study offers novel insights into demographic characteristics and attitudinal factors towards taha Māori, racism and colonisation that are crucial for predicting anti-racist allyship.

Compared with a survey of psychologists in Aotearoa conducted three decades ago (Sawrey, 1993), our study revealed an increase in positive attitudes towards embracing taha Māori. Our sample had almost twice the likelihood of agreeing that 20% of the training should comprise taha Māori (88.6% vs. 48.5%), the loss of land was a factor predicting poor mental health (85.7% vs. 48.7%) and that Te Tiriti should be the basis for the provision of health services (85.0% vs. 35.2%) than the previous survey. Moreover, our participants were more likely to report wairua or spirituality was an essential component of the psychotherapeutic process that the previous survey (88.2% vs. 65.6%) (Sawrey, 1993). However, there is a caveat when comparing the findings of the two surveys, as our survey had a larger sample of Māori psychologists and students (n=69) compared with Sawrey (1993), which had only one Māori participant. The improvement in overall attitudes towards taha Māori is likely to be related to changing societal attitudes following decades of activism and calls from Māori and allies to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Came & Griffith, 2018; Matike Mai Aotearoa, 2016), if not a reflection of the discipline’s incremental contribution in training psychologists to be culturally competent in taha Māori (NSCBI et al., 2018).

Nevertheless, the full realisation of Te Tiriti articles related to tino rangatiratanga (Māori self-determination) and mana ōrite (equal privileges and outcomes for Māori and non-Māori) in professional psychology programmes remains an ongoing challenge. A survey of programme directors in 2023 (Waitoki et al., 2023) documented persistent concerns about the limited number of Māori students applying to psychology training and the dominance of monocultural psychology, despite similar issues being raised almost four decades ago. Conversations around settler colonialism, racism and oppression are often invisible within psychology training because of apprehensions of evoking white fragility and paralysis (Crawford & Langridge, 2022). The limited capacity of Māori staff members within schools of psychology further restricts students from meaningful exposures to taha Māori (Waitoki et al., 2023). As our findings demonstrate the benefits of upskilling psychologists on taha Māori and knowledge on racism and colonisation to build an anti-racist workforce, we pose a wero (challenge) to current professional programmes to effectively fill in the training gaps on these topics. The identified group discrepancy for the degree of attitudes towards taha Māori prompts a targeted approach to introduce Asian (a collective group subjected to the model minority stereotype; Tan, 2023), Pākehā (who may at times be blinded to a need to acknowledge Pākehā as a culture; Black & Huygens, 2016), male and older-aged psychologists to components such as Te Tiriti and mātauranga Māori. Our findings also highlighted the need for tailored training for male, older-aged, cisgender and heterosexual psychologists on topics related to the roles of racism, colonisation and colour-blindness in engendering Indigenous and ethnic inequities (Came & Griffith, 2018; Reid et al., 2019).

The responsibility for expanding opportunities to receive competent training in taha Māori and increasing awareness of colonial impacts on Māori should not be confined to schools of psychology alone. Other Crown organisations, including regulatory bodies (e.g. the New Zealand Psychologists Board) and employers of psychologists (e.g. Te Whatu Ora and Ara Poutama Aotearoa), also play crucial roles in responding to Te Tiriti breaches in psychology (Levy, 2018). Foundational training opportunities on taha Māori and anti-racism for psychologists should be offered through training programmes before such awareness, knowledge and skill are further reinforced through workshops at workplaces and conferences that cater to specific institutional and service needs (Waitoki, 2012). The recent announcement by the populist coalition government to remove incentives for public servants to train in taha Māori and te reo Māori (Radio New Zealand, 2023) is antithetical to our findings that underscore such training as a key aspect of developing an anti-racist workforce.

Training on taha Māori and anti-racism cannot be condensed into a single-day workshop or class, as this is unlikely to address the generational issues of societal and systemic inequalities. Instead, our findings offer preliminary support for the development of a racial justice allyship model across all institutions that train, employ and regulate psychologists in Aotearoa that is informed by: Te Tiriti o Waitangi; the Treaty Principles outlined in the Hauora Report (Waitangi Tribunal, 2023); and Matike Mai Aotearoa (Matike Mai Aotearoa, 2016). Parts of this framework should include solutions for psychologists to increase competency on taha Māori and issues surrounding the impacts of racism and colonisation. The responsibility to educate oneself on taha Māori and engage in anti-racist praxis should not be restricted to Māori and other racialised groups, as these actions are fundamental to mobilising solidarity and enacting power-sharing to foster the long-term flourishing of everyone in Aotearoa as envisioned in Te Tiriti.

Limitations

There are some limitations to consider when interpreting the findings of this study. First, the cross-sectional design of the survey means that causality cannot be inferred regarding the predictability of attitudes towards taha Māori and racism on anti-racist allyship. However, the alternative hypothesis of anti-racist allyship heightens positive attitudes towards embracing taha Māori and acknowledging factors (i.e. racism and settler colonialism) that lead to ethnic inequities, continues to highlight the importance of offering training in these aspects. Second, the objective of our survey, which was to examine the operation of racism in psychology, was likely to attract participants with a stronger interest in eradicating racism and oppression in the discipline. This was partly evident through the over-recruitment of Māori participants (24.6%), despite Māori making up only 5% of the psychologist workforce (Scarf et al., 2019). Therefore, our sample might have overestimated the positive ratings of the aforementioned measures compared with the actual psychologist workforce.

Our measurements on anti-racist behaviours through ‘individual activism’ and ‘institutional advocacy’ should be understood as preliminary constructs for racial justice allyship (Williams & Sharif, 2021). Moreover, there are other elements of anti-racism praxis (e.g. engagement in reflexive relational practice and conducting structural power analysis) that we have yet to assess in this study (Came & Griffith, 2018). Furthermore, although our study provides useful exploratory evidence on factors interrelated to anti-racist allyship, further studies are required to ground the notion of ‘allyship’ in Aotearoa and specifically examine the roles of tangata Tiriti allies in psychology. Finally, we are aware that survey responses on anti-racism does not necessarily translate to actual practices, and this was partially mitigated through our attempt of adjusting for social desirability bias.

Conclusion

Overall, our findings demonstrate that those with favourable attitudes toward taha Māori and who also acknowledge racism as a problem are more likely to display allyship behaviours. The New Zealand Psychologists Board, NZPsS and NZCCP are currently engaged in responding to the Waitangi Tribunal claim (Levy, 2018). This process specifically focuses on delivering an authentic tangata tiriti apology, including outlining specific actions for redress to Māori (Anstiss, 2023). Our findings emphasise the need to create platforms for training in all three components assessed in the study (i.e. taha Māori, anti-racism and the roles of allyship) for all psychologists as key actions to bridge the inequity gaps for Māori and other minoritised groups in psychology. This training should delve into the recommendations outlined in Matike Mai (tangata Tiriti; relational sphere) and the Waitangi Tribunal (Treaty principles). A discipline that honours Te Tiriti o Waitangi can bring benefits to all, as all groups can participate in the discipline with equal opportunities presented.

Biographical statement

Kyle Tan is a Malaysian Chinese immigrant. He is a research fellow for the WERO programme.

Svanté Johansson (Tainui, Ngāpuhi, Sweden) worked as a summer research scholar for the WERO programme in late 2023. He recently graduated with a Bachelor of Social Science in Psychology from the University of Waikato.

Logan Hamley (Ngāti Rangi, Whanganui) is a Lecturer at the School of Psychology at the University of Waikato and a member of the WERO programme.

Waikaremoana Waitoki (Ngāti Hako, Ngāti Mahanga) is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies, University of Waikato. She is the Science Lead for WERO.

Acknowledgement

The current research constitutes part of a larger WERO research programme (Systemic Racism in Health Education, Training, and Practice) that focuses on the three dimensions of racism in psychology in Aotearoa: its costs, systems and the potential responses that exist. This work was supported by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Endeavour Research Programme, ‘Working to End Racial Oppression’ (UOWX2002). We would also like to thank the University of Waikato for granting a summer research scholarship to support Svanté’s involvement in this project.