Racism and The Black American Experience: Recent Articles

"Racial trauma, a form of race-based stress, refers to People of Color and Indigenous individuals’ (POCI) reactions to dangerous events and real or perceived experiences of racial discrimination. Such experiences may include threats of harm and injury, humiliating and shaming events, and witnessing racial discrimination toward other POCI. Although similar to posttraumatic stress disorder, racial trauma is unique in that it involves ongoing individual and collective injuries due to exposure and reexposure to race-based stress. The articles in this special issue introduce new conceptual approaches, research, and healing models to challenge racial trauma. The authors encourage psychologists to develop culturally informed healing modalities and methodologically sophisticated research and urge the inclusion of public policy interventions in the area of racial trauma."

"The University of Iowa Acculturation theories often describe how individuals in the United States adopt and incorporate dominant cultural values, beliefs, and behaviors such as individualism and self-
reliance. Theorists tend to perceive dominant cultural values as 'accessible to everyone,' ...even though some dominant cultural values, such as preserving White racial status, are reserved for White people. In this article, the authors posit that White supremacist ideology is suffused within dominant cultural values, connecting the array of cultural values into a coherent whole and bearing with it an explicit status for White people and people of color. Consequently, the authors frame acculturation as a continuing process wherein some people of color learn explicitly via racism, microaggressions, and racial trauma about their racial positionality; White racial space; and how they are supposed to accommodate White people’s needs, status, and emotions. The authors suggest that acculturation may mean that the person of color learns to avoid racial discourse to minimize eliciting White fragility and distress. Moreover, acculturation allows the person of color to live in proximity to White people because the person of color has become unthreatening and racially innocuous."

"The present study examined daily ethnic/racial identity as a moderator for racial discrimination.The idiographic approach was used to understand when Black youth are at risk for negative outcomes in the context of racial discrimination. ... assessed if within-person changes in racial centrality, private regard, and public regard moderated the daily relation between racial discrimination and depressive symptoms. Daily measures of racial discrimination, ethnic/racial identity, and depressive symptoms were administered to a sample of 103 Black adolescents for 2 weeks. The results suggest that neither racial centrality nor private regard moderated the same-day or lagged associations between daily racial discrimination experiences and daily depressive symptoms. Although low public regard fluctuations evidenced no moderation for the within-day relation, low public regard fluctuations exacerbated the lagged day relation between daily racial discrimination experiences and daily depressive symptoms. When Black youth experienced lower levels of public regard compared to their average levels, previous-day racial discrimination experiences were associated with an increase in depressive symptoms."

"Given the immense harm inflicted on individuals and groups of color via prejudice and discrimination, it becomes imperative for our nation to begin the process of disrupting,dismantling, and disarming the constant onslaught of micro- and macro aggressions. For too long, acceptance, silence, passivity, and inaction have been the predominant, albeit ineffective, strategies for coping with microaggressions. Inaction does nothing but support and proliferate biased perpetrator behaviors which occur at individual, institutional and societal levels. This article introduces a new strategic framework developed for addressing micro aggressions that moves beyond coping and survival to concrete action steps and dialogues that targets, allies, and bystanders can perform (micro interventions)."

"Public Significant Statement: In the United States of America, racism is alive, well, and increasing. To reduce American racism,one must examine and understand the psychological and sociocultural forces that enable it. This essay amasses a large body of classic and contemporary research to provide a straightforward overview of those forces"