Privilege, oppression, microaggressions, and the ACA Advocacy Competencies
Last reviewed September 2026 by Dr. Andrew Wichterman · Aligned to the current NCE blueprint. Valid for exams through June 30, 2027.
AI-narrated overview made with Google NotebookLM. The written lesson below is by Dr. Andrew Wichterman.
The social justice items ask about how power operates and what counselors are expected to do about it beyond the therapy hour. The vocabulary is specific and the exam uses it precisely.
Try to answer each from memory first, even if you have to guess. Guessing before reading makes the answer stick; reveal only after you have tried.
Prejudice, discrimination, and the three levels of racism
Prejudice is an attitude, usually negative and preconceived. Discrimination is behavior that treats people unequally. Racism operates at three levels: individual, in personal beliefs and acts; institutional, in policies and practices that produce unequal outcomes regardless of intent; and cultural, in the assumption that one culture's products and values are superior. Items often test whether you can identify institutional racism when no individual in the scenario is prejudiced.
Privilege and intersectionality
Privilege is unearned advantage that comes with membership in a dominant group and is often invisible to those who hold it; Peggy McIntosh's knapsack essay is the usual citation. Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality describes how multiple identities, such as race and gender and class, combine to create experiences that are not the sum of the parts. The MSJCC ask counselors to locate both themselves and their clients in terms of privileged and marginalized statuses.
Microaggressions
Derald Wing Sue defined microaggressions as brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to members of marginalized groups, often unintentionally. Three types. Microassaults are explicit and deliberate, like a slur. Microinsults are rude or insensitive communications, like praising a Black colleague for being articulate. Microinvalidations negate or dismiss a person's experience, like telling a person of color that you do not see race. The exam asks you to classify an example, and microinvalidation is the one most often missed.
Stereotype threat and internalized oppression
Claude Steele's stereotype threat is the anxiety of confirming a negative stereotype about one's group, which can impair performance on the very task in question. Internalized oppression is the acceptance by members of a marginalized group of the dominant culture's negative view of them. Both explain client presentations that a counselor might otherwise attribute to individual deficits.
The ACA Advocacy Competencies
Lewis, Arnold, House and Toporek wrote the Advocacy Competencies, endorsed by the ACA in 2003 and updated in 2018. They organize advocacy on two dimensions. Level: client or student, school or community, and public arena. Mode: acting with the client, which is empowerment and collaboration, or acting on behalf of the client, which is advocacy proper. The six resulting domains run from client empowerment through community collaboration and systems advocacy to public information and social or political advocacy.
The exam's point: advocacy is a professional expectation, not an optional interest. When a scenario describes a systemic barrier, an answer that stays entirely inside the counseling room is usually incomplete.
Without scrolling up, write everything you remember from this lesson. Then check yourself against the key terms. Recalling the whole lesson once, right after reading it, does more than reading it twice.
Ten questions from this domain, with an explanation after each answer.
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