P ERS PE CT IVE S ON PS YC HOLOGIC AL SC IENC E
Social Issues
Impact of Racism on Ethnic Minority Mental Health Sumie Okazaki Department of Applied Psychology, New York University
ABSTRACT—A problem in ethnic minority mental health that
can be solved in the foreseeable future is understanding how subtle and covert forms of racism affect psychological health of racial minorities. Although scientific psychology has generated a large body of literature on racial prejudice, stereotypes, intergroup attitudes, and racial bias and their often implicit and automatic nature, relatively little is known about the effects of these subtle racial bias on minority individuals. Following a selective review of recent developments in experimental psychology and multicultural psychology, I suggest some promising approaches and opportunities for future integration that would advance the field. What is the biggest question in ethnic minority mental health research that I would like to see the field solve in the foreseeable future? What question will most advance our field? Ethnic minority psychology is a field that is still relatively young (Jenkins et al., 2003), and it is difficult to select one question—or even a few questions—given the many unknowns and pressing needs. However, with the election of the first biracial African American candidate to the presidency of the United States, conversations about race and race relations have never been timelier. Given the ongoing discussions about racism and racial bias in the public discourse and given the recent developments in various subfields in psychology, I believe that there is a great potential for scientific psychology to make a substantial progress toward understanding the following question: How do subtle and covert forms of racism affect psychological health of racial minorities? WHY IS THIS QUESTION IMPORTANT?
My reason for selecting this question as critical to the future of scientific psychology of ethnic minorities is twofold. First, there is an imbalance in the knowledge base: We know much more Address correspondence to Sumie Okazaki, Department of Applied Psychology, New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development, 239 Greene Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003; e-mail: [email protected].
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about the psychological processes of White individuals who hold varying levels of racial bias than about the psychological processes of non-White individuals who are directly or indirectly affected by racism. Although it can be argued that understanding and intervening with racism in those who hold the power in our society can have significant social benefits, it is also important to understand and intervene with effects of racism among those who hold relatively less power in our society. Second, even though both psychologists and the lay public likely agree that extreme and overt racism is harmful, there continues to be scholarly and public debates as to whether racial minorities who perceive racism in subtle forms are psychologically harmed or whether they are simply being ‘‘too sensitive.’’ For example, in reaction to Sue et al.’s (2007) paper on racial microaggression—everyday, invisible encounters that racial minorities perceive as racism—one scholar (Thomas, 2008) suggested that much of what Sue and his colleagues presented were ‘‘macrononsense,’’ that the strong negative emotional reaction to an encounter that Sue felt was racially discriminatory ‘‘seems excessive,’’ and that some of the racial stereotypes ‘‘may be inappropriate, but they hardly necessitate the hand-wringing reactions’’ (p. 274). Given the various advances that I review in this article, there is a good deal of promise that the future of scientific psychology will answer this ‘‘hot topic’’ question that has significant societal consequences. WHAT DO WE ALREADY KNOW?
My encouragement to take up the question of the effect of racism on racial minorities is not to suggest that the scientific psychology community has ignored questions surrounding racism, racial bias, racial prejudice, and racial attitudes. To the contrary, we know much about the social and cognitive processes surrounding White racism toward Blacks. There is a large body of psychological literature on the complex and multifaceted nature of racism that intersect the psychology of stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination (Jones, 1997). Racism is understood as not just as the expression of individual negative attitudes, beliefs, and acts against minorities, but as a system of
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cultures and institutions involving social power and resulting in inequitable outcomes for various racial groups. Psychological research has accumulated vast evidence that personal or institutional racism in contemporary life often occurs implicitly, automatically, without intent to harm member of minority groups or any awareness of one’s role in a system that disadvantages member of minority groups (Henkel, Dovidio, & Gaertner, 2006). We also know a great deal about cognitive processes involved in racial face recognition among adults as well as infants. Research has shown how the own-race effect (the tendency to be more accurate in recognizing faces from one’s own race) can be affected by multiple factors such as contextual information, individual differences in racial bias and motivation to respond without prejudice, and so on (e.g., Kelly et al., 2007; Richeson & Trawalter, 2008). With the advances in social neuroscience, there is also an active research on cognitive, affective, and neural mechanisms involved in race perception and regulation of anti-Black prejudice among Whites (e.g., Amodio, Devine, & Harmon-Jones, 2007; Eberhardt, 2005). Recent research suggests that interracial encounters exact psychosocial toll on Whites. For example, Mendes, Gray, Mendoza-Denton, Major, and Epel (2007) found that when White Americans were being evaluated by Black interviewers, those with lower implicit racial bias showed lower stress responses (i.e., lower threat appraisals, lower observed anxiety, and more adaptive neuroendocrine reactivity) than did those who had higher implicit racial bias. However, in comparison with how much we know about cognition and behavior of White individuals who hold varying levels of racial bias, we know relatively little about how being an actual or potential target of those racially biased encounters affect racial minorities’ mental health. To be sure, psychology and other social sciences have shown a long-standing interest in— and have made major contributions to—the understanding of the deleterious effects of race and racism on racial minorities (primarily Blacks). For example, psychological research has documented that racial bias and racial stereotypes matter in high-stakes contexts such as in employment (e.g., Dovidio & Gaertner, 2000) and criminal justice (e.g., Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006). In worst case scenarios, racial bias can have deadly consequences such as in the case with police officers’ tendencies in computer simulations to shoot at unarmed Black criminal suspects more frequently than at unarmed White suspects (Plant & Perusche, 2005). A myriad of ill-health effects of racism has also been documented. For example, a recent study showed that perceived racism by African American pregnant women over their lifetime as well as during their childhood predicted their infants’ birth weight, above and beyond the effects of medical and sociodemographic factors (Dominguez, Dunkel-Schetter, Glynn, Hobel, & Sandman, 2008). There have been a handful of efforts by ethnic minority research scholars to address the question of racism’s effect on racial minorities. In surveying the literature on physiological
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responses to racism and discrimination among Blacks, Harrell, Hall, and Taliaferro (2003) reviewed four types of research designs used in physiological research: self-report correlational studies, basic psychophysiology, moderated psychophysiology, and mediated psychophysiology. In correlational studies, racism and discrimination are assessed by self-report recall of past encounters and correlated with physiological indices (typically blood pressure and/or heart rate). In the other three designs, laboratory analogues of bias treatment are presented and physiological reactions to the encounters are assessed. Harrell et al.’s review, which included only research involving Black participants with or without White counterparts, found some inconsistent results among correlational studies but found more uniform results among experimental studies. Generally, the experimental studies found that exposure to subtle or overt forms of racism in laboratory had measurable physiological arousal that mirrored other forms of social stress. Clark, Anderson, Clark, and Williams (1999) framed the effects of impact of racism on African Americans within a contextual model, suggesting that a race-based encounter—when perceived as racism—act as a stressor that elicit coping responses as well as psychological and physiological stress response, which in turn can lead to negative health outcomes among African Americans. Clark et al.’s model is based on existing literature linking racial stress and health (particularly cardiovascular reactivity and higher rates of hypertension) among African Americans, in which chronic perceptions of racism and passive coping responses are thought to lead to elevated and prolonged activation of sympathetic responses (e.g., higher resting systolic blood pressure) that then lead to hypertension in this population. In results consistent with this view, Blascovich, Spencer, Quinn, and Steele (2001) have shown that even subtle racism, such as stereotype threat, can elicit increases in mean arterial blood pressure among African Americans. In a more clinical vein, Comas-Dı´az and Jacobsen (2001) argued that past exposure to historical and contemporary racial trauma can result in ethnocultural allodynia or ‘‘an abnormally increased sensitivity to ethnocultural dynamics associated with past exposure to emotionally painful social and ethnocultural stimuli’’ (p. 246). They maintained that some racial minority individuals may sustain a lasting psychological injury from a traumatic racial victimization, which results in hypervigilance and hypersensitivity toward potential racial re-victimization in ambiguous social situations. More recently in an integrative review of the literature on psychological and emotional effects of racism on people of color, Carter (2007) suggested that it is important for the field to better facilitate recognition of ‘‘systematic, covert, subtle, and unconscious forms of racism’’ (p. 17) to assess the potentially traumatic impact of racism. Carter’s model of race-based traumatic stress injury proposed that an event—whether at an individual, cultural, or institutional level, or whether it is racial
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discrimination, racial harassment, or discriminatory harassment—must be experienced by the targeted individual as negative, sudden, memorable, and uncontrollable for the traumatic stress reactions to occur and for the PTSD-like symptom clusters to emerge. Carter did note that because of the potentially cumulative nature of racism, a seemingly innocuous or minor event may trigger a stress reaction. Based on his survey of the existing literature, Carter concluded that there is ample evidence that racism has negative impact on the mental health of ethnic minorities. Sue et al. (2007) presented a taxonomy of racial microaggressions, which they defined as ‘‘brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color’’ (p. 271). Some of the examples included an Asian American being questioned ‘‘Where are you from?’’, an African American being described as ‘‘clean cut and articulate,’’ or a person of color being mistaken as a service worker. Sue and colleagues argued that because racial microaggressions are often dismissed as being innocent and innocuous, those who respond with negative reactions are labeled as being overly sensitive or paranoid. The reviews of existing evidence provided by Carter (2007), Clark et al. (1999), Harrell et al. (2003), and Sue et al. (2007) converge to suggest that perceived racism is associated with negative psychological states including symptoms of depression and anxiety, lower well-being, lower self-regard, and ill health. However, the majority of the evidence (with the exception of psychophysiology studies) come from correlational studies, primarily with African Americans, which relied on self-reported and recalled past experiences with racism. These methodological issues leave some unanswered questions regarding how subtle and covert forms of racism affect psychological health of racial minorities. REMAINING QUESTIONS
In documenting the vast disparities in knowledge, access, utilization, and quality of mental health care for racial and ethnic minorities, the Surgeon General’s supplement report on mental health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001) commented on the role of racism in mental health disparities. The report noted that racism and discrimination adversely affect health and mental health of racial minorities and likely place them at risk for mental disorders. The report proposed three possible pathways through which racism and discrimination adversely impact the mental health of minorities: (a) through internalization of negative racial stereotypes that harm their self-worth, (b) through the effects of chronic stressors of poorer living conditions as a result of institutional and historical racism, and (c) through the effects of chronic or discrete stressors of encounters with racism and discrimination. Each of these possible pathways generates a number of testable hypotheses.
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In addition to the test of these general mechanisms, I would like to pose two more specific questions. First, is the perception of racism by a racial minority individual necessary for an encounter or an environmental factor to have a deleterious effect? Much of the existing studies associating racism with psychological distress rely on reports of perceived racism. However, scholars have also noted that contemporary racism can take on subtle and attributionally ambiguous forms, and Sue et al. (2007) argued that some of the adverse effects of racial microaggression derive from its ambiguous nature. A recent study on effects of attributional ambiguity on stigmatized groups suggests that attributional ambiguity in some situations can allow societally stigmatized individuals (such as Latinos and other racial minorities) to attribute negative encounters to discrimination and thus have self-protective effect, albeit at some psychological cost (Hoyt, Aguilar, Kaiser, Blascovich, & Lee, 2007). However, another study found that Black men who perceived higher levels of racism in an attributionally ambiguous scenario involving unfair treatment showed increased cardiovascular reactivity in a subsequent stressful task (Merritt, Benett, Williams, Edwards, & Soller, 2006). More research is needed to resolve these apparent contradictions regarding the particularities of the attributionally ambiguous contexts and individual factors that act as risk or protective factors in interracial encounters. Second, it would also be important to interrogate the historical and sociological contexts that may give rise to different responses among racial minority individuals. As have already been mentioned, much of the existing research on racism involve Black–White race relations, which is not surprising given the long history of anti-Black racism in the United States. The biopsychosocial model of racial stressor on health among African Americans (Harrell et al., 2003) also makes sense because of the documented high rates of high blood pressure and hypertension in this population. However, to what extent is the proposed mechanism of racial stress and racial traumatic injury (Carter, 2007) applicable to Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, or Pacific Islanders? How do the different individual and racial group histories with racism matter? And how does the complex and dynamic nature of racial positionality among various minority groups, in which Asian Americans are valorized as model minorities at the cost to other minority groups (see, e.g., Kim, 2004), affect psychological health of minority individuals? Certainly, there is emerging evidence that racism toward Asian Americans takes on a different tone than does racism toward African Americans. For example, Lin, Kwan, Cheung, and Fiske (2005) showed that anti-Asian prejudice and discrimination by Whites is based on resentment and envy for Asian Americans’ competence, work ethic, and success-orientation as well as derision for their perceived social ineptitude. Similarly, Maddux, Galinsky, Cuddy, and Polifroni (2008) showed that the stereotypes of Asian Americans as the ‘‘model minority’’ (e.g., intelligent, hard-working, serious) aroused
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negative attitudes and emotions among other Americans toward them because Asian Americans were perceived as threats to their own opportunities and resources. At the same time, exposure to racial stereotype of one group is not necessarily helpful to other groups. A recent study by Kim-Prieto, Goldstein, Okazaki, & Kirschner (in press) found that individuals who were primed with an image or a text about an American Indian sports mascot were more likely to endorse stereotypes about Asian Americans than were those who were primed with nonracial or neutral symbols. Many questions still remain as to the conditions under which psychological injuries occur for minority individuals being exposed to racism against in-group or outgroup minorities. WHAT SHOULD PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE DO TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS?
Scientific psychology can make major progress toward answering the questions about impact of racism on racial minorities in the next decade by forming new intellectual and methodological collaborations. One of the critical new alliances would be with multicultural psychology scholars in applied subfields (such as clinical and counseling psychology) who have begun to lay the conceptual groundwork on the impact of racism on mental health (e.g., Carter, 2007; Sue et al., 2007). Carter’s extensive survey of the existing literature suggested that much of the existing knowledge concerns anti-Black racism and that correlational designs with self-reports of past racism and current distress symptoms has been the dominant methodology, which has made it difficult to explicate the causal relationship between perception of being a target of racism and mental health. Some of the laboratory-based methods to study race-based encounters used in recent studies may be especially useful to apply to the studies of racial minorities’ reaction to subtle or ambiguous racial encounters. Recent studies have demonstrated that laboratory conditions that simulate real-life, subtle raced-based encounters (including interactions with varying levels of attributional ambiguity) have a myriad of cognitive, affective, and physiological effects among White individuals (e.g., Mendes et al., 2007). Some of these experimental simulations have also been used effectively on psychophysiological studies with African Americans (e.g., Blascovich et al., 2001). Recent advances in immersive virtual environment technology have been used to simulate realistic race-based social encounters (e.g., Hoyt et al., 2007). The use of these experimental paradigms as well as biological and physiological assessments to assess the in-the-moment impact of laboratory stimuli can be extended to future research with minority individuals. Other recent efforts in social and personality psychology surrounding the measurement of implicit racial bias among Whites (Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003) can also be adapted to examine internalized racism among minorities (e.g., David & Okazaki, in press). These efforts, of course, take considerable resources and
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mutual investments across subfields of psychology, and they must be guided by sound theories. However, the potential discoveries of similar and dissimilar ways in which subtle forms of racism may impact the mental health of minorities would make socially significant contributions. Diversification of methods and paradigms in future research on racism effects on minorities should also extend beyond experimental methods. Although laboratory methods can mirror some of the critical elements of race-based (or racially ambiguous) social encounters that may be psychologically distressing, they are—by design—limited in temporality to examining relatively immediate reactions to discrete events. To answer questions about the potentially cumulative effects of subtle or covert forms of racism, one could employ daily ecology studies spanning days and weeks using experiential sampling methods (e.g., Cole & Yip, 2008) or longitudinal methods (e.g., Greene, Way, & Pahl, 2006). Mixed methods that incorporate qualitative and narrative approaches (e.g., Bauer, McAdams, & Pals, 2008) may also be fruitful in discovering the characteristics of minorities who are relatively resilient or vulnerable in face of various forms of racism. Discussing race and racism in scholarly discourses and in lay conversations can be challenging, but scientific psychology can do much to contribute to potential solutions. By paying attention—and investing resources—to examine the ‘‘other side’’ of the well-researched coin of White racial bias against minorities, psychology can begin to address the insidious effects of racism on individuals in our society.
REFERENCES Amodio, D.M., Devine, P.G., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2007). A dynamic model of guilt: Implications for motivation and self-regulation in the context of prejudice. Psychological Science, 18, 524–530. Bauer, J.J., McAdams, D.P., & Pals, J.L. (2008). Narrative identity and eudaimonic well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies, 9, 81–104. Blascovich, J., Spencer, S.J., Quinn, D., & Steele, C. (2001). African Americans and high blood pressure: The role of stereotype threat. Psychological Science, 12, 225–229. Carter, R.T. (2007). Racism and psychological and emotional injury: Recognizing and assessing race-based traumatic stress. Counseling Psychologist, 35, 13–105. Clark, R., Anderson, N.B., Clark, V.R., & Williams, D.R. (1999). Racism as a stressor for African Americans: A biopsychosocial model. American Psychologist, 54, 805–816. Cole, E.R., & Yip, T. (2008). Using outgroup comfort to predict Black students’ college experiences. Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, 14, 57–66. Comas-Dı´az, L., & Jacobsen, F.M. (2001). Ethnocultural allodynia. Journal of Psychotherapy Practice & Research, 10, 246–252. David, E.J.R., & Okazaki, S. (in press). Activation and automaticity of colonial mentality. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Dominguez, T.P., Dunkel-Schetter, C., Glynn, L.M., Hobel, C., & Sandman, C.A. (2008). Racial differences in birth outcomes: The role of general, pregnancy, and racism stress. Health Psychology, 27, 194–203.
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Dovidio, J.F., & Gaertner, S.L. (2000). Aversive racism and selection decisions: 1989 and 1999. Psychological Science, 11, 315–319. Eberhardt, J.L. (2005). Imaging race. American Psychologist, 60, 181– 190. Eberhardt, J.L., Davies, P.G., Purdie-Vaughns, V.J., & Johnson, S.L. (2006). Looking deathworthy: Perceived stereotypicality of Black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes. Psychological Science, 17, 383–386. Greene, M.L., Way, N., & Pahl, K. (2006). Trajectories of perceived adult and peer discrimination among Black, Latino, and Asian American adolescents: Patterns and psychological correlates. Developmental Psychology, 42, 218–238. Greenwald, A.G., Nosek, B.A., & Banaji, M.R. (2003). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 197–216. Harrell, J.P., Hall, S., & Taliaferro, J. (2003). Physiological responses to racism and discrimination: An assessment of the evidence. American Journal of Public Health, 93, 243–248. Henkel, K.E., Dovidio, J.F., & Gaertner, S.L. (2006). Institutional discrimination, individual racism, and Hurricane Katrina. Analysis of Social Issues and Public Policy, 6, 99–124. Hoyt, C.L., Aguilar, L., Kaiser, C.R., Blascovich, J., & Lee, K. (2007). The self-protective and undermining effects of attributional ambiguity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 884–893. Jenkins, A.M., Albee, G.W., Paster, V.S., Sue, S., Baker, D.B., ComasDiaz, L., et al. (2003). Ethnic minorities. In D.K. Freedheim (Ed.), Handbook of psychology: History of psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 483–508). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Jones, J.M. (1997). Prejudice and racism (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Kelly, D.J., Quinn, P.C., Slater, A.M., Lee, K., Ge, L., & Pascalis, O. (2007). The other-race effect develops during infancy: Evidence of perceptual narrowing. Psychological Science, 18, 1084–1089. Kim, J.C. (2004). Unyielding positions: A critique of the ‘‘race’’ debate. Ethnicities, 4, 337–355.
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Kim-Prieto, C., Goldstein, L., Okazaki, S., & Kirschner, B. (in press). Effect of exposure to American Indian mascots on the tendency to stereotype a different minority group. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Lin, M.H., Kwan, V.S.Y., Cheung, A., & Fiske, S.T. (2005). Stereotype content model explains prejudice for an envied outgroup: Scale of anti-Asian American stereotypes. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 34–47. Maddux, W.W., Galinsky, A.D., Cuddy, A.J.C., & Polifroni, M. (2008). When being a model minority is good . . . and bad: Realistic threat explains negativity toward Asian Americans. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 74–89. Mendes, W.B., Gray, H.M., Mendoza-Denton, R., Major, B., & Epel, E.S. (2007). Why egalitarianism might be good for your health. Psychological Science, 18, 991–998. Merritt, M.M., Benett, G.G., Jr., Williams, R.B., Edwards, C.L., & Soller, J.J., III. (2006). Perceived racism and cardiovascular reactivity and recovery to personally relevant stress. Health Psychology, 25, 364–369. Plant, E.A., & Peruche, B.M. (2005). The consequence of race for police officers’ response to criminal suspects. Psychological Science, 16, 180–183. Richeson, J.A., & Trawalter, S. (2008). The threat of appearing prejudiced and race-based attentional biases. Psychological Science, 19, 98–102. Sue, D.W., Capodilupo, C.M., Torino, G.C., Bucceri, J.M., Holder, A.M.B., Nadal, K.L., & Esquilin, M. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice. American Psychologist, 62, 271–286. Thomas, K.R. (2008). Macrononsense in multiculturalism. American Psychologist, 63, 274–275. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2001). Mental health: Culture, race, and ethnicity—a supplement to mental health: A report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Public Health Service, Office of the Surgeon General.
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Social Issues
Impact of Racism on Ethnic Minority Mental Health Sumie Okazaki Department of Applied Psychology, New York University
ABSTRACT—A problem in ethnic minority mental health that
can be solved in the foreseeable future is understanding how subtle and covert forms of racism affect psychological health of racial minorities. Although scientific psychology has generated a large body of literature on racial prejudice, stereotypes, intergroup attitudes, and racial bias and their often implicit and automatic nature, relatively little is known about the effects of these subtle racial bias on minority individuals. Following a selective review of recent developments in experimental psychology and multicultural psychology, I suggest some promising approaches and opportunities for future integration that would advance the field. What is the biggest question in ethnic minority mental health research that I would like to see the field solve in the foreseeable future? What question will most advance our field? Ethnic minority psychology is a field that is still relatively young (Jenkins et al., 2003), and it is difficult to select one question—or even a few questions—given the many unknowns and pressing needs. However, with the election of the first biracial African American candidate to the presidency of the United States, conversations about race and race relations have never been timelier. Given the ongoing discussions about racism and racial bias in the public discourse and given the recent developments in various subfields in psychology, I believe that there is a great potential for scientific psychology to make a substantial progress toward understanding the following question: How do subtle and covert forms of racism affect psychological health of racial minorities? WHY IS THIS QUESTION IMPORTANT?
My reason for selecting this question as critical to the future of scientific psychology of ethnic minorities is twofold. First, there is an imbalance in the knowledge base: We know much more Address correspondence to Sumie Okazaki, Department of Applied Psychology, New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development, 239 Greene Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003; e-mail: [email protected].
Volume 4—Number 1
about the psychological processes of White individuals who hold varying levels of racial bias than about the psychological processes of non-White individuals who are directly or indirectly affected by racism. Although it can be argued that understanding and intervening with racism in those who hold the power in our society can have significant social benefits, it is also important to understand and intervene with effects of racism among those who hold relatively less power in our society. Second, even though both psychologists and the lay public likely agree that extreme and overt racism is harmful, there continues to be scholarly and public debates as to whether racial minorities who perceive racism in subtle forms are psychologically harmed or whether they are simply being ‘‘too sensitive.’’ For example, in reaction to Sue et al.’s (2007) paper on racial microaggression—everyday, invisible encounters that racial minorities perceive as racism—one scholar (Thomas, 2008) suggested that much of what Sue and his colleagues presented were ‘‘macrononsense,’’ that the strong negative emotional reaction to an encounter that Sue felt was racially discriminatory ‘‘seems excessive,’’ and that some of the racial stereotypes ‘‘may be inappropriate, but they hardly necessitate the hand-wringing reactions’’ (p. 274). Given the various advances that I review in this article, there is a good deal of promise that the future of scientific psychology will answer this ‘‘hot topic’’ question that has significant societal consequences. WHAT DO WE ALREADY KNOW?
My encouragement to take up the question of the effect of racism on racial minorities is not to suggest that the scientific psychology community has ignored questions surrounding racism, racial bias, racial prejudice, and racial attitudes. To the contrary, we know much about the social and cognitive processes surrounding White racism toward Blacks. There is a large body of psychological literature on the complex and multifaceted nature of racism that intersect the psychology of stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination (Jones, 1997). Racism is understood as not just as the expression of individual negative attitudes, beliefs, and acts against minorities, but as a system of
Copyright r 2009 Association for Psychological Science
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Impact of Racism
cultures and institutions involving social power and resulting in inequitable outcomes for various racial groups. Psychological research has accumulated vast evidence that personal or institutional racism in contemporary life often occurs implicitly, automatically, without intent to harm member of minority groups or any awareness of one’s role in a system that disadvantages member of minority groups (Henkel, Dovidio, & Gaertner, 2006). We also know a great deal about cognitive processes involved in racial face recognition among adults as well as infants. Research has shown how the own-race effect (the tendency to be more accurate in recognizing faces from one’s own race) can be affected by multiple factors such as contextual information, individual differences in racial bias and motivation to respond without prejudice, and so on (e.g., Kelly et al., 2007; Richeson & Trawalter, 2008). With the advances in social neuroscience, there is also an active research on cognitive, affective, and neural mechanisms involved in race perception and regulation of anti-Black prejudice among Whites (e.g., Amodio, Devine, & Harmon-Jones, 2007; Eberhardt, 2005). Recent research suggests that interracial encounters exact psychosocial toll on Whites. For example, Mendes, Gray, Mendoza-Denton, Major, and Epel (2007) found that when White Americans were being evaluated by Black interviewers, those with lower implicit racial bias showed lower stress responses (i.e., lower threat appraisals, lower observed anxiety, and more adaptive neuroendocrine reactivity) than did those who had higher implicit racial bias. However, in comparison with how much we know about cognition and behavior of White individuals who hold varying levels of racial bias, we know relatively little about how being an actual or potential target of those racially biased encounters affect racial minorities’ mental health. To be sure, psychology and other social sciences have shown a long-standing interest in— and have made major contributions to—the understanding of the deleterious effects of race and racism on racial minorities (primarily Blacks). For example, psychological research has documented that racial bias and racial stereotypes matter in high-stakes contexts such as in employment (e.g., Dovidio & Gaertner, 2000) and criminal justice (e.g., Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006). In worst case scenarios, racial bias can have deadly consequences such as in the case with police officers’ tendencies in computer simulations to shoot at unarmed Black criminal suspects more frequently than at unarmed White suspects (Plant & Perusche, 2005). A myriad of ill-health effects of racism has also been documented. For example, a recent study showed that perceived racism by African American pregnant women over their lifetime as well as during their childhood predicted their infants’ birth weight, above and beyond the effects of medical and sociodemographic factors (Dominguez, Dunkel-Schetter, Glynn, Hobel, & Sandman, 2008). There have been a handful of efforts by ethnic minority research scholars to address the question of racism’s effect on racial minorities. In surveying the literature on physiological
104
responses to racism and discrimination among Blacks, Harrell, Hall, and Taliaferro (2003) reviewed four types of research designs used in physiological research: self-report correlational studies, basic psychophysiology, moderated psychophysiology, and mediated psychophysiology. In correlational studies, racism and discrimination are assessed by self-report recall of past encounters and correlated with physiological indices (typically blood pressure and/or heart rate). In the other three designs, laboratory analogues of bias treatment are presented and physiological reactions to the encounters are assessed. Harrell et al.’s review, which included only research involving Black participants with or without White counterparts, found some inconsistent results among correlational studies but found more uniform results among experimental studies. Generally, the experimental studies found that exposure to subtle or overt forms of racism in laboratory had measurable physiological arousal that mirrored other forms of social stress. Clark, Anderson, Clark, and Williams (1999) framed the effects of impact of racism on African Americans within a contextual model, suggesting that a race-based encounter—when perceived as racism—act as a stressor that elicit coping responses as well as psychological and physiological stress response, which in turn can lead to negative health outcomes among African Americans. Clark et al.’s model is based on existing literature linking racial stress and health (particularly cardiovascular reactivity and higher rates of hypertension) among African Americans, in which chronic perceptions of racism and passive coping responses are thought to lead to elevated and prolonged activation of sympathetic responses (e.g., higher resting systolic blood pressure) that then lead to hypertension in this population. In results consistent with this view, Blascovich, Spencer, Quinn, and Steele (2001) have shown that even subtle racism, such as stereotype threat, can elicit increases in mean arterial blood pressure among African Americans. In a more clinical vein, Comas-Dı´az and Jacobsen (2001) argued that past exposure to historical and contemporary racial trauma can result in ethnocultural allodynia or ‘‘an abnormally increased sensitivity to ethnocultural dynamics associated with past exposure to emotionally painful social and ethnocultural stimuli’’ (p. 246). They maintained that some racial minority individuals may sustain a lasting psychological injury from a traumatic racial victimization, which results in hypervigilance and hypersensitivity toward potential racial re-victimization in ambiguous social situations. More recently in an integrative review of the literature on psychological and emotional effects of racism on people of color, Carter (2007) suggested that it is important for the field to better facilitate recognition of ‘‘systematic, covert, subtle, and unconscious forms of racism’’ (p. 17) to assess the potentially traumatic impact of racism. Carter’s model of race-based traumatic stress injury proposed that an event—whether at an individual, cultural, or institutional level, or whether it is racial
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discrimination, racial harassment, or discriminatory harassment—must be experienced by the targeted individual as negative, sudden, memorable, and uncontrollable for the traumatic stress reactions to occur and for the PTSD-like symptom clusters to emerge. Carter did note that because of the potentially cumulative nature of racism, a seemingly innocuous or minor event may trigger a stress reaction. Based on his survey of the existing literature, Carter concluded that there is ample evidence that racism has negative impact on the mental health of ethnic minorities. Sue et al. (2007) presented a taxonomy of racial microaggressions, which they defined as ‘‘brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color’’ (p. 271). Some of the examples included an Asian American being questioned ‘‘Where are you from?’’, an African American being described as ‘‘clean cut and articulate,’’ or a person of color being mistaken as a service worker. Sue and colleagues argued that because racial microaggressions are often dismissed as being innocent and innocuous, those who respond with negative reactions are labeled as being overly sensitive or paranoid. The reviews of existing evidence provided by Carter (2007), Clark et al. (1999), Harrell et al. (2003), and Sue et al. (2007) converge to suggest that perceived racism is associated with negative psychological states including symptoms of depression and anxiety, lower well-being, lower self-regard, and ill health. However, the majority of the evidence (with the exception of psychophysiology studies) come from correlational studies, primarily with African Americans, which relied on self-reported and recalled past experiences with racism. These methodological issues leave some unanswered questions regarding how subtle and covert forms of racism affect psychological health of racial minorities. REMAINING QUESTIONS
In documenting the vast disparities in knowledge, access, utilization, and quality of mental health care for racial and ethnic minorities, the Surgeon General’s supplement report on mental health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001) commented on the role of racism in mental health disparities. The report noted that racism and discrimination adversely affect health and mental health of racial minorities and likely place them at risk for mental disorders. The report proposed three possible pathways through which racism and discrimination adversely impact the mental health of minorities: (a) through internalization of negative racial stereotypes that harm their self-worth, (b) through the effects of chronic stressors of poorer living conditions as a result of institutional and historical racism, and (c) through the effects of chronic or discrete stressors of encounters with racism and discrimination. Each of these possible pathways generates a number of testable hypotheses.
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In addition to the test of these general mechanisms, I would like to pose two more specific questions. First, is the perception of racism by a racial minority individual necessary for an encounter or an environmental factor to have a deleterious effect? Much of the existing studies associating racism with psychological distress rely on reports of perceived racism. However, scholars have also noted that contemporary racism can take on subtle and attributionally ambiguous forms, and Sue et al. (2007) argued that some of the adverse effects of racial microaggression derive from its ambiguous nature. A recent study on effects of attributional ambiguity on stigmatized groups suggests that attributional ambiguity in some situations can allow societally stigmatized individuals (such as Latinos and other racial minorities) to attribute negative encounters to discrimination and thus have self-protective effect, albeit at some psychological cost (Hoyt, Aguilar, Kaiser, Blascovich, & Lee, 2007). However, another study found that Black men who perceived higher levels of racism in an attributionally ambiguous scenario involving unfair treatment showed increased cardiovascular reactivity in a subsequent stressful task (Merritt, Benett, Williams, Edwards, & Soller, 2006). More research is needed to resolve these apparent contradictions regarding the particularities of the attributionally ambiguous contexts and individual factors that act as risk or protective factors in interracial encounters. Second, it would also be important to interrogate the historical and sociological contexts that may give rise to different responses among racial minority individuals. As have already been mentioned, much of the existing research on racism involve Black–White race relations, which is not surprising given the long history of anti-Black racism in the United States. The biopsychosocial model of racial stressor on health among African Americans (Harrell et al., 2003) also makes sense because of the documented high rates of high blood pressure and hypertension in this population. However, to what extent is the proposed mechanism of racial stress and racial traumatic injury (Carter, 2007) applicable to Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, or Pacific Islanders? How do the different individual and racial group histories with racism matter? And how does the complex and dynamic nature of racial positionality among various minority groups, in which Asian Americans are valorized as model minorities at the cost to other minority groups (see, e.g., Kim, 2004), affect psychological health of minority individuals? Certainly, there is emerging evidence that racism toward Asian Americans takes on a different tone than does racism toward African Americans. For example, Lin, Kwan, Cheung, and Fiske (2005) showed that anti-Asian prejudice and discrimination by Whites is based on resentment and envy for Asian Americans’ competence, work ethic, and success-orientation as well as derision for their perceived social ineptitude. Similarly, Maddux, Galinsky, Cuddy, and Polifroni (2008) showed that the stereotypes of Asian Americans as the ‘‘model minority’’ (e.g., intelligent, hard-working, serious) aroused
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Impact of Racism
negative attitudes and emotions among other Americans toward them because Asian Americans were perceived as threats to their own opportunities and resources. At the same time, exposure to racial stereotype of one group is not necessarily helpful to other groups. A recent study by Kim-Prieto, Goldstein, Okazaki, & Kirschner (in press) found that individuals who were primed with an image or a text about an American Indian sports mascot were more likely to endorse stereotypes about Asian Americans than were those who were primed with nonracial or neutral symbols. Many questions still remain as to the conditions under which psychological injuries occur for minority individuals being exposed to racism against in-group or outgroup minorities. WHAT SHOULD PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE DO TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS?
Scientific psychology can make major progress toward answering the questions about impact of racism on racial minorities in the next decade by forming new intellectual and methodological collaborations. One of the critical new alliances would be with multicultural psychology scholars in applied subfields (such as clinical and counseling psychology) who have begun to lay the conceptual groundwork on the impact of racism on mental health (e.g., Carter, 2007; Sue et al., 2007). Carter’s extensive survey of the existing literature suggested that much of the existing knowledge concerns anti-Black racism and that correlational designs with self-reports of past racism and current distress symptoms has been the dominant methodology, which has made it difficult to explicate the causal relationship between perception of being a target of racism and mental health. Some of the laboratory-based methods to study race-based encounters used in recent studies may be especially useful to apply to the studies of racial minorities’ reaction to subtle or ambiguous racial encounters. Recent studies have demonstrated that laboratory conditions that simulate real-life, subtle raced-based encounters (including interactions with varying levels of attributional ambiguity) have a myriad of cognitive, affective, and physiological effects among White individuals (e.g., Mendes et al., 2007). Some of these experimental simulations have also been used effectively on psychophysiological studies with African Americans (e.g., Blascovich et al., 2001). Recent advances in immersive virtual environment technology have been used to simulate realistic race-based social encounters (e.g., Hoyt et al., 2007). The use of these experimental paradigms as well as biological and physiological assessments to assess the in-the-moment impact of laboratory stimuli can be extended to future research with minority individuals. Other recent efforts in social and personality psychology surrounding the measurement of implicit racial bias among Whites (Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003) can also be adapted to examine internalized racism among minorities (e.g., David & Okazaki, in press). These efforts, of course, take considerable resources and
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mutual investments across subfields of psychology, and they must be guided by sound theories. However, the potential discoveries of similar and dissimilar ways in which subtle forms of racism may impact the mental health of minorities would make socially significant contributions. Diversification of methods and paradigms in future research on racism effects on minorities should also extend beyond experimental methods. Although laboratory methods can mirror some of the critical elements of race-based (or racially ambiguous) social encounters that may be psychologically distressing, they are—by design—limited in temporality to examining relatively immediate reactions to discrete events. To answer questions about the potentially cumulative effects of subtle or covert forms of racism, one could employ daily ecology studies spanning days and weeks using experiential sampling methods (e.g., Cole & Yip, 2008) or longitudinal methods (e.g., Greene, Way, & Pahl, 2006). Mixed methods that incorporate qualitative and narrative approaches (e.g., Bauer, McAdams, & Pals, 2008) may also be fruitful in discovering the characteristics of minorities who are relatively resilient or vulnerable in face of various forms of racism. Discussing race and racism in scholarly discourses and in lay conversations can be challenging, but scientific psychology can do much to contribute to potential solutions. By paying attention—and investing resources—to examine the ‘‘other side’’ of the well-researched coin of White racial bias against minorities, psychology can begin to address the insidious effects of racism on individuals in our society.
REFERENCES Amodio, D.M., Devine, P.G., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2007). A dynamic model of guilt: Implications for motivation and self-regulation in the context of prejudice. Psychological Science, 18, 524–530. Bauer, J.J., McAdams, D.P., & Pals, J.L. (2008). Narrative identity and eudaimonic well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies, 9, 81–104. Blascovich, J., Spencer, S.J., Quinn, D., & Steele, C. (2001). African Americans and high blood pressure: The role of stereotype threat. Psychological Science, 12, 225–229. Carter, R.T. (2007). Racism and psychological and emotional injury: Recognizing and assessing race-based traumatic stress. Counseling Psychologist, 35, 13–105. Clark, R., Anderson, N.B., Clark, V.R., & Williams, D.R. (1999). Racism as a stressor for African Americans: A biopsychosocial model. American Psychologist, 54, 805–816. Cole, E.R., & Yip, T. (2008). Using outgroup comfort to predict Black students’ college experiences. Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, 14, 57–66. Comas-Dı´az, L., & Jacobsen, F.M. (2001). Ethnocultural allodynia. Journal of Psychotherapy Practice & Research, 10, 246–252. David, E.J.R., & Okazaki, S. (in press). Activation and automaticity of colonial mentality. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Dominguez, T.P., Dunkel-Schetter, C., Glynn, L.M., Hobel, C., & Sandman, C.A. (2008). Racial differences in birth outcomes: The role of general, pregnancy, and racism stress. Health Psychology, 27, 194–203.
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Dovidio, J.F., & Gaertner, S.L. (2000). Aversive racism and selection decisions: 1989 and 1999. Psychological Science, 11, 315–319. Eberhardt, J.L. (2005). Imaging race. American Psychologist, 60, 181– 190. Eberhardt, J.L., Davies, P.G., Purdie-Vaughns, V.J., & Johnson, S.L. (2006). Looking deathworthy: Perceived stereotypicality of Black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes. Psychological Science, 17, 383–386. Greene, M.L., Way, N., & Pahl, K. (2006). Trajectories of perceived adult and peer discrimination among Black, Latino, and Asian American adolescents: Patterns and psychological correlates. Developmental Psychology, 42, 218–238. Greenwald, A.G., Nosek, B.A., & Banaji, M.R. (2003). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 197–216. Harrell, J.P., Hall, S., & Taliaferro, J. (2003). Physiological responses to racism and discrimination: An assessment of the evidence. American Journal of Public Health, 93, 243–248. Henkel, K.E., Dovidio, J.F., & Gaertner, S.L. (2006). Institutional discrimination, individual racism, and Hurricane Katrina. Analysis of Social Issues and Public Policy, 6, 99–124. Hoyt, C.L., Aguilar, L., Kaiser, C.R., Blascovich, J., & Lee, K. (2007). The self-protective and undermining effects of attributional ambiguity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 884–893. Jenkins, A.M., Albee, G.W., Paster, V.S., Sue, S., Baker, D.B., ComasDiaz, L., et al. (2003). Ethnic minorities. In D.K. Freedheim (Ed.), Handbook of psychology: History of psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 483–508). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Jones, J.M. (1997). Prejudice and racism (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Kelly, D.J., Quinn, P.C., Slater, A.M., Lee, K., Ge, L., & Pascalis, O. (2007). The other-race effect develops during infancy: Evidence of perceptual narrowing. Psychological Science, 18, 1084–1089. Kim, J.C. (2004). Unyielding positions: A critique of the ‘‘race’’ debate. Ethnicities, 4, 337–355.
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Kim-Prieto, C., Goldstein, L., Okazaki, S., & Kirschner, B. (in press). Effect of exposure to American Indian mascots on the tendency to stereotype a different minority group. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Lin, M.H., Kwan, V.S.Y., Cheung, A., & Fiske, S.T. (2005). Stereotype content model explains prejudice for an envied outgroup: Scale of anti-Asian American stereotypes. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 34–47. Maddux, W.W., Galinsky, A.D., Cuddy, A.J.C., & Polifroni, M. (2008). When being a model minority is good . . . and bad: Realistic threat explains negativity toward Asian Americans. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 74–89. Mendes, W.B., Gray, H.M., Mendoza-Denton, R., Major, B., & Epel, E.S. (2007). Why egalitarianism might be good for your health. Psychological Science, 18, 991–998. Merritt, M.M., Benett, G.G., Jr., Williams, R.B., Edwards, C.L., & Soller, J.J., III. (2006). Perceived racism and cardiovascular reactivity and recovery to personally relevant stress. Health Psychology, 25, 364–369. Plant, E.A., & Peruche, B.M. (2005). The consequence of race for police officers’ response to criminal suspects. Psychological Science, 16, 180–183. Richeson, J.A., & Trawalter, S. (2008). The threat of appearing prejudiced and race-based attentional biases. Psychological Science, 19, 98–102. Sue, D.W., Capodilupo, C.M., Torino, G.C., Bucceri, J.M., Holder, A.M.B., Nadal, K.L., & Esquilin, M. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice. American Psychologist, 62, 271–286. Thomas, K.R. (2008). Macrononsense in multiculturalism. American Psychologist, 63, 274–275. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2001). Mental health: Culture, race, and ethnicity—a supplement to mental health: A report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Public Health Service, Office of the Surgeon General.
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