“To return to the metaphor that racism is like the water in which fish swim, a cultural-psychological approach suggests that the solution to the problem of racism is not to change the fish so that it can survive in toxic water but instead to change the water the fish has to live in. It may do little good to address racism by changing people’s dispositions if they will return to the same racist worlds that constituted those dispositions in the first place”
(Salter, Adams, & Perez, 2018, p. 153)
“…counseling and psychotherapy do not take place in a vacuum, isolated from the larger sociopolitical influences of our societal climate”
(Sue & Sue, 2012, p. 91)
If you want to join the fight for racial justice for Black Americans:
You can be involved in many ways, including protesting, donating, voting, and sharing resources/information. For some, protesting is showing up as their full-selves at work, school, or in their artwork. Here are some resources to help you get started:
DONATE, JOIN, or SUPPORT
American Civil Liberties Union
VOTING
North Carolina State Board of Elections
HOW TO BE AN ANTI-RACIST ALLY (in addition to the items above)
Checking on the well-being of friends during this time is good, but also engaging in changing of systems and culture is better.
If you want to understand how racism affects health:
A person’s race intersects with their other identities such as their sex, gender-expression, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and ability status, and can expose them to more racism and other forms of oppression.
Physical features like skin tone, hair texture, eye shape, and other features impact someone’s exposure to racism. Most of what psychologists know about how racism affects its targets is about Black Americans, but there is a growing body of research on how it impacts Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous peoples.
Research focused on racism and People of Color (POC) is very young because most research on racism has historically (and ironically) focused on White people (e.g., social psychology’s focus on measuring implicit biases). This is likely largely due to the fact that most psychologists are White , which is an example of how systemic racism operates. As the workforce has diversified, we have learned more about racism’s impact and we are trying to find ways to help people heal from it and survive it.
A major challenge of addressing the effects of racial stress and trauma is that the “illness” is located within society and not the person impacted by it.
RACISM AND HEALTH
Here is some of what we know about the ways racism affects mental health (note that much of this work focuses on the impact of individual racism and not systemic racism, something we are striving to measure in research more effectively). For a much more comprehensive review, two academic papers cover this (Williams & Mohammed, 2013; Neblett 2019). Experiences of racial discrimination are related to the presence of:
•Trauma-related symptoms (Pieterse et al., 2010)
•Anxiety (Carter et al., 2016)
•Depressive symptoms (Gattis et al., 2016)
•Psychological distress, lower life satisfaction, lower happiness (Williams & Williams-Morris, 2000)
•Lower heart rate variability (Hill et al., 2017)
•Sleep problems (Fuller-Rowell et al., 2016)
•Ambulatory blood pressure (Beatty Moody et al., 2016)
Over the course of a person’s lifetime, it is hypothesized that these problems can lead to shorter lifespans or more health problems in POC.
PROTECTIVE PROCESSES AND FACTORS
In addition to elements of traditional psychotherapy (e.g., trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) there are culturally-relevant protective processes that can help to reduce the negative impact of racism on health including:
Racial socialization (how parents and other people/organizations communicate messages to youth about race and racism)
Racial Identity (the meaning and significance of race in someone’s life)
A resource, which has not been studied in a research study, but was compiled by researchers and clinicians is:
Racial Trauma is Real support manual (Please note that this does not take the place of psychotherapy, but is meant to be supportive)
If you want to understand how COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting communities of color:
Photo by @aaronburden