Racism and Psychological and Emotional Injury

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to discuss the psychological and emotional effects of racism on people of Color. Psychological models and research on racism, discrimination, stress, and trauma will be integrated to promote a model to be used to understand, recognize, and assess race-based traumatic stress to aid counseling and psychological assessment, research, and training.

The relationship between racial identity status attitudes, racism-related coping, and mental health among Black Americans.

“…For the purpose of the current study, the scale was adjusted to specifically assess how participants felt after coping with the experience of racism they reported in the first portion of the study packet, rather than how they felt in the last 30 days. Researchers have employed the scale with Black samples suggesting that the measure is valid for this population (e.g., Franklin-Jackson & Carter, 2007;Pieterse & Carter, 2007). Cronbach's alpha for the current sample was .95 for the Well-Being index score.…”

Institutional betrayal.

“…Betrayal trauma theory helps to generate empirical questions about the effects of institutional betrayal and allows us to better account for the range of psychological and physical difficulties following interpersonal violence. Existing literature provides ample description of the form and impact of systemic factors surrounding interpersonal violence, but often this literature examines systemic responses through a lens of identity separate from institutional membership (e.g., racism-based trauma, R. T. Carter, 2007) or at an organizational or cultural level where the individual experience of betrayal is less visible (e.g., societal trauma; Bloom & Farragher, 2010). Institutional betrayal is a description of individual experiences of violations of trust and dependency perpetrated against any member of an institution in a way that does not necessarily arise from an individual's less-privileged identity.…”

Ethnic and mainstream social connectedness, perceived racial discrimination, and posttraumatic stress symptoms.

“…These results also support Pieterse et al's (2012) call for future researchers to examine other outcomes such as posttraumatic stress symptoms in addition to depression and anxiety. In the present study, we applied growing evidence of race-based traumatic stress (Carter, 2007;Sanders Thompson, 1996) to the Chinese intemational student population. Moreover, these results suggest that racial discrimination is a unique Stressor associated with posttraumatic stress symptoms over and beyond general life stress (Harrell, 2000;Pieterse et al, 2010).…”

“…Although this finding and other recent findings (e.g., Pieterse et al, 2010) support the association between racial discrimination and posttraumatic stress symptoms, we need to be careful not to overpathologize psychological responses to racial discrimination. Carter (2007) asserted that race-related trauma should be viewed as an emotional and/or psychological injury, and not necessarily as a mental disorder.…”