racism thesis

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• Published: 20 December 2021

Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

• Mahzarin R. Banaji 1 ,
• Susan T. Fiske   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1693-3425 2 &
• Douglas S. Massey 2  

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications volume  6 , Article number:  82 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation, with disproportionate costs to Black Americans’ opportunities, networks, education, wealth, health, and legal treatment. These institutional and societal systems build-in individual bias and racialized interactions, resulting in systemic racism. Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans’ inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human . Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals’ systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior. Interracial interactions likewise convey disrespect and distrust. These systematic individual and interpersonal patterns continue partly due to non-Black people’s inexperience with Black Americans and reliance on societal caricatures. Despite systemic challenges, Black Americans are more diverse now than ever, due to resilience (many succeeding against the odds), immigration (producing varied backgrounds), and intermarriage (increasing the multiracial proportion of the population). Intergroup contact can foreground Black diversity, resisting systemic racism, but White advantages persist in all economic, political, and social domains. Cognitive science has an opportunity: to include in its study of the mind the distortions of reality about individual humans and their social groups.

Introduction

Significance.

American racial biases persist over time and permeate (a) institutional structures, (b) societal structures, (c) individual mental structures, (d) everyday interaction patterns. Systemic racism operates with or without intention and with or without awareness. But because these responses are based on socially defined racial categories, they are racialized, and because they are negative, they reveal the roots of racism. At the level of most behavior, they are also controllable, even if many non-Black people rarely notice these relentless patterns. Systemic racism is a unified arrangement of racial differentiation and discrimination across generations. Understanding these formidable challenges is necessary to understand and then dismantle them. Cognitive science can illuminate the fine-grained levels of inbuilt racial bias because it has the methods and the theories to do so. Moreover, studying racial bias is interesting; it will improve the science; and it is the obvious path to ensuring a mutually respectful, peaceful society that flourishes economically, politically, and socially.

At the Editor’s invitation, this article presents the social and behavioral science of systemic racism to a cognitive science audience. The tutorial defines systemic racism, describes its origins in US history, shows how the resulting racialized societal structures have become built-in cognitive structures that propagate in social interactions, resisting change. But these very societal-cognitive-social features can also be agents for change.

Systemic racism is said to occur when racially unequal opportunities and outcomes are inbuilt or intrinsic to the operation of a society’s structures. Simply put, systemic racism refers to the processes and outcomes of racial inequality and inequity in life opportunities and treatment. Systemic racism permeates a society’s (a) institutional structures (practices, policies, climate), (b) social structures (state/federal programs, laws, culture), (c) individual mental structures (e.g., learning, memory, attitudes, beliefs, values), and (d) everyday interaction patterns (norms, scripts, habits). Systemic racism not only operates at multiple levels, it can emerge with or without animus or intention to harm and with or without awareness of its existence. Its power derives from its being integrated into a unified system of racial differentiation and discrimination that creates, governs, and adjudicates opportunities and outcomes across generations. Racism represents the biases of the powerful (Jones, 1971 ), as the biases of the powerless have little consequence (Fiske, 1993 ). Footnote 1

We highlight the “inbuilt” aspect of systemic racism to be its signature feature and the touchstone necessary to understand the nature of systemic racism and its resistance to awareness and change. We begin with the concept’s more traditional domains: institutional and societal systems. Then, given the current venue, we expand the levels of analysis to include individual mental systems that have built in those systems of inequalities. We close with the interaction of those minds in social behavior, which can either maintain or change racial systems.

Institutions and Society . As the first section explains, the term systemic racism has traditionally referred to systems that uphold racism via institutional power (Feagin, 2006 ), with stark examples of what is also called institutional racism (Jones, 1972 ) visible in inequities in housing and lending, as well as more broadly in access to finance, education, healthcare, and justice. This section focuses on the institutional level in depth, as it provides the strongest evidence of systemic racism. At an even more macro s ocietal level, however, the inbuilt aspect of systemic racism is evident in race-based demarcations created by large-scale state and federal programs, which offer levers either to increase or decrease systemic racism. To remain within the scope of the paper, we consider the structures of institutional and societal racism in a single section.

Individuals and Interactions . In tandem with the previous section, this section focuses on individual bias and interactional racism, together bringing into view the inbuilt nature of systemic racism. To expand on this inclusive view of systemic racism, we end by reviewing what we know about the individual human being, alone and interacting with others. Individuals are agentic entities, the primary actors within all systems of life and living. Their attitudes (preferences, prejudices), beliefs (stereotypes), and behaviors (discrimination) are inbuilt or intrinsically enmeshed into the foundation of the mental systems that feed systemic racism. At the individual level, “inbuilt” refers to the common psychological processes that represent race in the minds of individuals. This evidence reveals systemic race bias.

Note that, here, we use slightly different terms: Systemic Racism refers to much of the sociological, demographic, and historic material as well as anything in the psychological section that is explicit and conscious racism. Systemic Race Bias is about implicit cognition—people who may not be aware of the harm they may cause. Implicit race bias does not mean a person is a racist. In this view, keeping racism and bias separate as terms seems advisable. Others view even unexamined racism as systemic racism in its individual manifestation. Each section elaborates on the meaning of racism in that context.

Individual racial bias propagates through both face-to-face and virtual interactions within families, classrooms, playfields, and workplaces, both verbally and non-verbally. Individual minds create and consume racial representations in books, social media, and entertainment. Footnote 2 We focus here on everyday interactions that convey disrespect and distrust of Black Americans.

Why? Role for psychological science in studying systemic racism

Individual humans are the creators and consumers of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but also the policies and practices that lie at the heart of systemic racism. Psychology as a field has historically remained silent on the topic of systemic racism, per se (e.g., Guthrie, 2004 , “Even the rat was white”; for exceptions, see: Jones, 1971 ; DuBois, 1925 ). Perhaps psychologists have regarded systemic racism to be a form of institutional racism and hence in the bailiwick of social scientists who study institutions and society, not individuals. Nonetheless, we attempt here to include individual minds and face-to-face interaction as playing a role. This goal has precedents: Early scholars who straddled disciplines, such as George Herbert Mead ( 1934 , p. 174), would likely find our attempt to be quite compatible with his stance that mind and society must be considered in intertwined fashion.

Today, psychologists are increasingly attempting to bridge the divide between the individual mind and society. Cultural psychology, for example, has attempted to analyze racism as the “budding product of psychological subjectivity and the structural foundation for dynamic reproduction of racist action” (Salter, Adams & Perez, 2018 , p. 151). This dynamic can emerge in individual racist actions (with or without awareness) that are fitted into the structure of everyday life and perpetuate systemic racism. Interpersonal interactions bridge individual and collective representations of race. Individual minds, sharing some notions about each other’s salient identities (e.g., probable race, gender, age) treat each other according to social norms, cultural habits, and cultural scripts. In the case of race, these individual mental representations and social interaction patterns rarely benefit Black participants facing Whites.

“Inbuilt”: A useful metaphor guiding the essay

There are these two fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ’Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’ Wallace, 2009

The fable highlights a simple idea—that the most fundamental feature of any system may be so completely pervasive that it ceases to be perceptible or when perceptible, fails to be recognized in its true form. This paradox creates a challenge for social and behavioral scientists, who must not only generate evidence about the complexities of systemic racism, but we must also confront unthinking rejection of that evidence. Other scientists face similar challenges in documenting their own complex phenomena, such as the resistance faced by the theory of evolution or the denial of evidence about climate change.

In most cases, evidence eventually reaches a tipping point, after which it ceases to be denied and even becomes sufficiently commonplace that its previous denial itself is puzzling. An easy example is the denial of scientific evidence about the position of the earth in the solar system and its shape, with few arguments today (but not zero!) about a flat earth. However, we are far from that tipping point of knowledge and acceptance when it comes to the idea of systemic racism. This paper, then, is yet another attempt, by connecting across the individual, interactional, and institutional/societal levels, to shed light on its existence.

The obvious allegorical lesson from the fable about the fish is of course the ease of being ignorant of that which is pervasive. However, the fable also points out that not all the fish are ignorant of their surroundings. The older fish, swimming the same ocean as the young fish, seems to have figured out the truth about the substance that suffuses its environment so fully that it is imperceptible to its peers. Ignorance then, need not be the only guaranteed outcome, even when perception and awareness are hard. Hence, one section uses the term “unexamined” to describe controllable attention to or willful neglect of one’s own biases (see also Fiske, 1998 ). Social scientists commenting on resistance to socioeconomic inequality have used the term “clueless” (Williams, 2019 ), which is admittedly harsh but suggests that learning some facts would permit more evidence-based understanding. Regardless, the evidence for systemic racism, at the level of institutions and society or at the level of individuals and interactions, requires re-examining the taken-for-granted, whether the water we swim or the air we breathe.

Systemic racism: the role of institutional and societal structures

Contemporary societal racism rests on Black–White segregation, historical and current. This first substantive section presents evidence that systemic racism has long pervaded US institutional and societal systems—creating a context for the minds of individuals within these systems, enabling an omnipresent neglect. First, this section shows that continued housing segregation by race obstructs Black opportunity and mobility, perpetuating racial disparities, challenging many Black Americans in ways White Americans never experience (Massey, 2020 ). At a societal level, Black disadvantage and White advantage come in part from residential hypersegregation (Massey & Tannen, 2015 ). More than any other racial group, Whites live in racially isolated neighborhoods (Rugh & Massey, 2014 ); and in the US neighborhood segregation translates directly into school segregation (Massey & Tannen, 2016 ; Owens, 2020 ). Both segregation and local funding undermine the quality of predominantly Black schools.

To elaborate these points, this section describes the historical context for US racism, territory likely to be less familiar to cognitive scientists. Our takeaway: Systemic racism pervades US social institutions, policies, and practices; later sections show how the societal structures make into the minds of the humans within these systems.

History: segregation and systemic racism

To explain systemic racism, we start with the historical origins of race in the US—that is, the social/political/economic mechanisms that have maintained it over time. Race is baked into the history of the US going back to colonial times (Higginbotham, 1998 ; Jones, 1972 , 1997 ) and continuing through early independence when slavery was quietly written into the nation’s Constitution (Waldstreicher, 2009 ). Although the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution ended slavery and granted due process, equal protection, and voting rights to the formerly enslaved, efforts to combat systemic racism in the US faltered when Reconstruction collapsed in the disputed election of 1876, which triggered the withdrawal of federal troops from the South (Foner, 1990 ).

The absence of federal troops to enforce Black civil rights enabled states in the former Confederacy to construct a new system of racial subordination known as Jim Crow (Packard, 2003 ). It rested on a simple principle: in any social encounter, the lowest status White person was superior to the highest status Black person. By law and custom, Black voting rights were suppressed, and Black Americans were socially segregated from Whites, relegated to menial occupations, inferior schools, dilapidated housing, and deficient facilities throughout Southern society. Any challenges to the Jim Crow system, perceived or real, were met with violence, often lethal, both within and outside the legal system (Tolnay & Beck, 1995 ).

From 1876 to 1900, 90% of all African Americans lived in the South and were subject to the dictates of the repressive Jim Crow system; 83% lived in poor rural areas, occupying ramshackle dwellings clustered in small settlements in or near the plantations where they worked. Although conditions were somewhat better for the 10% of African Americans who lived outside the South (68% in cities), anti-Black prejudice was widespread, racial discrimination was common and, as in the South, the prospect of racial violence was never far away (Sugrue, 2008 ).

Before, 1900, few African Americans lived in cities, and levels of urban racial residential segregation were modest. Black workers and servants generally lived within walking distance of their workplaces, and social contact between the races was common (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). At that time, the share of Blacks among city residents was small, and they were not perceived to be a threat to White hegemony, obviating the need for spatial segregation. The Great Black Migration of the twentieth century changed this status quo and transformed race relations in the US, making race truly a national rather than regional issue (Lemann, 1991 ). This transformation also created a new system of racial subordination based on Black residential segregation.

Between 1900 and 1970, millions of African Americans left the rural South in search of better lives in industrializing cities throughout the nation. As a result of this migration, by 1970 nearly half of all African Americans had come to live outside the South, 90% in urban areas (Farley & Allen, 1987 ). It was during this period of Black urbanization that the ghetto emerged as a structural feature of American urbanism, making Black residential segregation into the linchpin of a new system of racial stratification that prevailed throughout the US irrespective of region (Pettigrew, 1979 ).

Black out-migration from the South began slowly at first, but accelerated after 1914, when the onset of the First World War curtailed the arrival of workers from Europe. It accelerated again after 1917, when the US entered the war, boosting labor demand as conscription drew workers out of the labor force. The imposition of strict immigration restrictions in 1921 and 1924 guaranteed that Black workers and their families would continue to pour into cities during the economic boom of the 1920s (Wilkerson, 2010 ). The entry of ever-larger cohorts of impoverished Black laborers and sharecroppers into the nation’s cities unnerved White urbanites, prompting them to organize collectively by creating “neighborhood improvement associations.” These organizations pressured landlords not to rent to Black tenants and tried to convince Black home seekers that it was in their best interest to locate elsewhere, using persuasion and payoffs when possible but resorting to violence when these blandishments failed (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

As the number of incoming Black migrants continued to rise despite these efforts, White city residents demanded that politicians act to “do something” about the perceived “Black invasion.” Officials in smaller towns and cities responded by enacting “sundown laws” that required all Blacks to leave town by sunset (Loewen, 2018 ). In large cities, legislators passed municipal ordinances that confined Black residents to a specific set of already disadvantaged neighborhoods and excluded them from all others. These ordinances were the functional equivalent of South Africa’s Group Areas Act, which underlay the establishment of that country’s apartheid system in, 1948. These ordinances were widely copied and were spreading rapidly from city to city when, in 1917, the Supreme Court declared them to be unconstitutional (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). Sundown laws, however, were never challenged in court and remained in force well into the Civil Rights Era.

The end of legally mandated neighborhood segregation in cities occurred just as Black migration surged in the aftermath of America’s entry into the First World War. The sudden influx of workers caused existing areas of Black settlement to fill up rapidly and eventually overflow into adjacent White areas, where the arrivals met with increasingly violent resistance. The violence peaked in the late teens as anti-Black race riots swept through the nation’s cities, culminating in the Great Chicago Race Riot of 1919 (Tuttle, 1970 ). Even established Black neighborhoods were not safe, as evidenced by the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood was systematically attacked and razed by mobs of White vigilantes, leaving thousands homeless and dozens, perhaps hundreds, killed (Madigan, 2001 ).

Shocked by the wanton destruction of property, the real estate industry moved to institutionalize racial discrimination in housing markets and assert control over the process of racial change in cities (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). In 1924, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers adopted a code of ethics stating that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood” (Helper, 1969 , p. 201). In 1927, the Chicago Real Estate Board devised a model racial covenant to block the entry of Blacks into White neighborhoods and offered it to other cities for adoption throughout the country (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). A racial covenant is a private contract in which property owners within a defined geographic area collectively agree not to rent or sell to African Americans. Once approved by a majority of property owners, the contract became enforceable, and violators could be sued in civil court.

As the real estate industry gradually assumed control of racial change in urban areas, racial violence abated and neighborhood transitions from White to Black came to be managed professionally by realtors who sought to minimize confrontation and maximize profits. As Black migration continued throughout the 1920s, recognized Black neighborhoods steadily increased in density as housing units were divided and subdivided. Basements, garages, attics, and even closets were converted into rental units. Eventually, however, no more living space could be squeezed into the confines of the existing ghetto. Realtors then conspired to move the residential color line, selecting an adjacent neighborhood for racial transition and initiating an institutionalized process known as “block busting” (Philpott, 1978 ).

Realtors began the process by choosing a few poor Black families just arrived from the rural South and obviously unused to city ways to be placed strategically into selected units within the targeted neighborhood. Agents then moved through the neighborhood block by block warning residents of a pending Black “invasion.” Panic selling ensued, enabling realtors to purchase homes cheaply for subdivision into smaller apartments, which were then leased at inflated rents to African Americans desperate for living space. Owing to these institutionalized practices, Black segregation levels steadily climbed through the 1920s and ghetto areas gradually expanded their boundaries through the profitable management of neighborhood racial turnover by realtors (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

The exclusively private auspices of Black residential segregation ended with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. When Franklin Roosevelt came to power with his New Deal in 1933, the nation was in the midst of a catastrophic banking crisis. Millions of middle-class homeowners had lost jobs and were in danger of defaulting on their mortgages, putting both their homes and their bankers at financial risk. In response, the Roosevelt Administration created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to help middle class homeowners refinance their mortgages using long-term, federally insured, low-interest loans (Jackson, 1985 ). Together the federal guarantees and extended amortization periods reduced monthly mortgage payments to affordable levels, saving both the banks and the homeowners from financial losses through foreclosure.

To qualify for the federal guarantees, however, HOLC loans had to meet certain government-mandated criteria. In addition to low interest rates, minimal down payments, and long amortization periods, lenders were obliged to consider the riskiness of the neighborhoods in which properties were located. To this end, HOLC officials worked with local realtors and bankers to create a series of Residential Security Maps for use in cities throughout the nation. These maps color-coded neighborhoods according to their creditworthiness. Green indicated a safe investment, yellow indicated caution, and red indicated excessive risk and hence ineligibility for HOLC lending. Black neighborhoods were invariably coded red, along with adjacent neighborhoods perceived to be at risk of Black settlement (Rothstein, 2017 ).

The HOLC lending program only helped the minority of families that already owned homes, however, and in order to spread housing wealth to a wider population and create jobs in the real estate and construction industries, in 1934 the Roosevelt Administration created a much larger loan program under the Federal Housing Authority. The FHA offered long-term loans to prospective home buyers , not just owners. As before, federally guaranteed loans had to meet federally mandated criteria, which evinced a strong anti-urban bias. Specifically, they excluded from eligibility all multiunit buildings, attached dwellings, row houses, and structures containing a business. These provisions effectively restricted FHA loans to single family houses on large lots, thus channeling housing investment away from central cities toward vacant land on the urban fringes (Jackson, 1985 ).

Reflecting the prejudices of the realtors, bankers, and builders who helped to design the program, FHA underwriters were also required to make use of the HOLC’s Residential Security Maps, formally institutionalizing the practice of redlining in real estate and banking and systematically cutting off investment in Black neighborhoods for decades to come. The FHA Underwriter’s Manual explicitly stated that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” In addition to requiring the use of Residential Security Maps, the manual went on to advocate the use of racial covenants to protect FHA-insured properties. When a parallel loan program was created in the Veterans Administration by the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, it adopted the FHA’s racialized practices and procedures (Katznelson, 2006 ).

The anti-urban biases and discriminatory practices built into federal loan programs had little effect on housing patterns during the 1930s and 1940s owing to the tiny amount of new residential construction that occurred during the Great Depression and Second World War. In the postwar period, however, FHA and VA lending drove forward a massive wave of suburban home construction that made new homes widely accessible to White but not Black households. Given high rents and home prices in central cities owing to the influx of workers during the war years, in the late 1940s and early 1950s it was cheaper to buy a brand-new house in the suburbs than to rent an apartment in the city (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

The end result was a government-subsidized mass exodus of middle and working class White families from central cities to suburbs, creating a distinctly American urban configuration of Black cities surrounded by White suburbs. The homes left behind by the departing Whites seeking their piece of the American Dream in the suburbs were quickly occupied by Black in-movers coming to the city to take jobs in the still-vibrant urban manufacturing sector. Neighborhood turnover accelerated, and the nation’s urban Black ghettos rapidly expanded, both demographically and geographically (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

Although neighborhood transitions in the 1950s and 1960s improved Black access to housing in the short term, in the long term the neighborhoods turned into poverty traps. Because of redlining and racial discrimination built into housing and credit markets by federal policies and private practices, once a neighborhood became Black, it was cut off from investment, ensuring that its housing stock and business infrastructure would progressively deteriorate. It also left the Black middle class without a means to finance the purchase of homes, and predatory lenders stepped into the resulting void.

Drawing on their own capital, these lenders purchased homes and then offered to “sell” them to middle class Black families by means of Loan Installment Contracts (Satter, 2009 ). LICs were essentially rent-to-own schemes with high interest rates, bloated monthly payments, and no property rights or transfer of title until the final contract payment was made. Any missed payment could bring about immediate eviction by the property owner, no matter how long the aspiring family had been making payments under the contract.

Other predatory investors also purchased ghetto properties to become landlords, subdividing them into ever-smaller units and leasing them to poor and working class Black tenants at inflated rents (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). Whether city housing was being sold under an installment contract or rented on usurious terms, however, the absentee owners could not themselves get loans to offset depreciation or purchase insurance policies to protect their properties, creating a strong financial incentive for landlords to defer maintenance, minimize capital investment, and extract high rents as long as possible until the properties deteriorated to the point of becoming uninhabitable.

As Black ghettos expanded geographically during the 1950s and 1960s in cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, they ultimately came to encroach on zones in which White elites had place-bound investments in universities, hospitals, museums, and business districts. In desperation, local politicians and civic leaders turned to state and federal agencies for help. Drawing on funding from the National Housing Act, they created locally controlled Urban Renewal Authorities with the power of eminent domain, thereby enabling White interests to gain control of the Black neighborhoods threatening their place-bound investments (Bauman, 1987 ; Hirsch, 1983 ). Once in control of the land, they evicted the residents, razed their homes, and demolished neighborhood businesses, replacing them either with large-scale middle-class housing projects or institutional developments that strategically blocked the expansion of the ghetto toward the threatened White properties, prompting James Baldwin to quip that “urban renewal means Negro removal” (Dickinson, 1963 ).

Because of a “one-for-one rule” embedded within the National Housing Act, for every unit of housing torn down in the name of renewal, planners had to identify another unit into which the displaced tenants could theoretically move. To satisfy this rule, local elites once again turned to the federal government, garnering additional funds authorized by the National Housing Act to construct large public housing projects for families displaced by renewal. Given that the displaced families were Black, it was politically impossible to build the housing project in a White district, so another Black neighborhood was targeted for renewal and torn down to build dense collections of high-rise projects that now had to house two neighborhood’s worth of displaced families (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

This pairing of urban renewal and public housing did not itself increase the level of Black residential segregation (Bickford & Massey, 1991 ). Segregation levels were already high in the cities where this pairing occurred; but it did dramatically increase the spatial concentration of poverty within the ghetto by replacing relatively class-diverse Black neighborhoods and business districts with tightly packed blocks of high-rise projects in which being poor was a criterion for entry, yielding neighborhood poverty rates of 90% or more (Massey & Kanaiaupuni, 1993 ).

By 1970, high levels of Black residential segregation were universal throughout metropolitan America (Massey & Denton, 1993 ). Footnote 3 As of 1970, 61% of Black Americans living in US metropolitan areas lived under a regime of hypersegregation (Massey & Tannen, 2015 ), a circumstance unique to Americans. Although in theory, segregation should have withered away after the Civil Rights Era, it has not. In 2010, the average index of Black–White segregation remained high and a third of all Black metropolitan residents continued to live in hypersegregated areas (Massey & Tannen, 2015 ). This reality prevails despite the outlawing of racial discrimination in housing (the 1968 Fair Housing Act) and lending (the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act).

Why does modern segregation persist, despite Whites’ reported racial attitudes improving?

Accompanying these legislative changes was a pronounced shift in White racial attitudes. In the early 1960s, more than 60% of White Americans agreed that Whites have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods. By the 1980s, however, the percentage had dropped to 13% (Schuman et al., 1998 ). The fact that discrimination is illegal, and White support for segregation has plummeted, begs the question of why segregation persists. The reasons are multiple.

First, although the Fair Housing Act banned discrimination in the rental and sale of housing, enforcement mechanisms in the original legislation were eliminated as part of a compromise to secure the bill’s passage (Metcalf, 1988 ). Federal authorities were likewise granted only limited powers to enforce the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Community Reinvestment Act (Massey & Denton, 1993 ).

Although overt discrimination in housing and lending has clearly declined in response to legislation, covert discrimination continues. Rental and sales agents today are less likely to respond to emails from people with stereotypically Black names (Carpusor & Loges, 2006 ; Hanson & Hawley, 2011 ) or to reply to phone messages left by speakers who “sound Black” (Massey & Fischer, 2004 ; Massey & Lundy, 2001 ). A recent meta-analysis of 16 experimental housing audit studies and 19 lending analyses conducted since 1970 revealed that sharp racial differentials in the number of units recommended by realtors and inspected by clients have persisted and that racial gaps in loan denial rates and borrowing cost have barely changed in 40 years (Quillian, Lee, & Honoré, 2020 ).

Audit studies, conducted across the social and behavioral sciences, include a subset of resume studies in which researchers send the same resume out to apply for jobs, but change just one item: the candidate’s name is Lisa Smith or Lakisha Smith. Then, they wait to see who gets the callback. The bias is clear: employers avoid “Black-sounding” names (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004 ). In fact, in both Milwaukee’s and New York City’s low-wage job market, Black applicants with no criminal background were called back with the same frequency or less as White applicants just released from prison (Pager, 2003 ; Pager, Western & Bonikowski, 2009 ).

That is, in the minds of hiring managers whose mental make-up is expected to be no different than the readers of this article, a White felon is equivalent to a Black non-felon. The same housing application, the same bank loan application, the same health data, the same behavior, lead to different outcomes depending on the race of the applicant, even though the decision-makers believe they are paying attention to the merits of the case and explicitly not to race, which most decision makers in these studies regard to be irrelevant to the decision.

What makes the problem of systemic racism so perverse is that “good people” with no explicit expression of we would call “racism” are the contributors to such decisions that produce widespread and unnoticed bias, resulting in systemic racism (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013 ). Racial discrimination continues because, although White support for Black segregation may have declined in principle, Whites nonetheless continue to harbor negative racial stereotypes about Black people , which limit their tolerance for integration in practice. Indeed, the willingness of Whites to enter or remain in a neighborhood declines steadily as the percentage of Black neighbors rises (Charles, 2003 ; Emerson, Chai & Yancey, 2001 ). And negative racial stereotyping of Black Americans strongly predicts White opposition to government efforts to enforce Black civil rights (Bobo, Charles, Krysan & Simmons, 2012 ).

In White American social cognition, as later sections elaborate, racial biases remain entrenched both explicitly (Moberg, Krysan & Christianson, 2019 ) and implicitly (Eberhardt, 2019 ). This extends to preferred neighborhoods : Residential searches are inevitably embedded within racialized expectations about neighborhoods and homes that reflect the racially segregated world that most Americans inhabit (Krysan & Crowder, 2017 ). The “correlated characteristics heuristic” relies on a single salient neighborhood trait—in this case racial composition—to represent an area’s acceptability. In White social cognition, the mere presence of Blacks denotes lower property values, higher crime rates, and struggling schools, irrespective of what the objective neighborhood conditions are (Krysan, Couper, Farley & Forman, 2009 ; Quillian & Pager, 2001 , 2010 ). Although Whites in surveys and interviews say they welcome the presence of Black neighbors, in practice Whites avoid neighborhoods containing more than a few Blacks and confine their searches to overwhelmingly White residential areas exhibiting White percentages well above those they report in describing their “ideal” neighborhood on surveys (Krysan & Crowder, 2017 ).

Although rarely admitted, explicit prejudice against Black Americans has hardly disappeared. Google search frequencies on the epithet “nigger” for different metropolitan areas strongly predicted an area’s level of Black residential segregation (Rugh & Massey, 2014 ). This index of explicit racism also strongly predicts the degree to which a city’s suburbs are covered by restrictive density zoning regimes (Massey and Rugh ( 2018 ), a key proximate cause of both racial and class segregation (Rothwell & Massey, 2009 , 2010 ). Owing to the persistence of discrimination, Black Americans are far less able that other Americans to translate their income attainments into residential mobility, greatly compromising their ability to access more integrated and favored neighborhoods (Massey & Denton, 1985 ). As of 2010, the most affluent Black Americans were still more segregated from Whites than the poorest Hispanics (Intrator, Tannen & Massey, 2016 ).

No other group in the history of the US has ever experienced such intense residential segregation in so many areas and over such a long period of time (Massey & Denton, 1993 ; Rugh & Massey, 2014 ). Systemic racism in federal housing policies (Katznelson, 2006 ), real estate (Helper, 1969 ), banking (Ross & Yinger, 2002 ), and insurance (Orren, 1974 ) has ensured a vicious cycle of racial turnover and neighborhood deterioration for most of the past century. As a result, many Black Americans have been compelled to live in societally isolated, economically disadvantaged, physically deteriorated neighborhoods produced and sustained by powerful external forces beyond their ability to control, the precise embodiment of systemic racism.

Because of racial residential segregation and the blocked mobility and spatial concentration of poverty it produces, neighborhoods have become the key nexus for the transmission of Black socioeconomic disadvantage over the life course and across the generations (Sharkey, 2013 ). Half of all Black Americans have lived in the poorest quartile of urban neighborhoods for two consecutive generations, compared with just 7% of Whites, a gap that cannot be explained by individual or family characteristics.

Whereas in the 1960s Black poverty was transmitted across generations by the inheritance of race and the discrimination and exclusion that came with it (Duncan, 1969 ), in the twenty-first century Black poverty is transmitted by the inheritance of place and the concentrated poverty it entails (Massey, 2013 ; Massey & Brodmann, 2014 ; Peterson & Krivo, 2010 ; Sampson, 2012 ; Sharkey, 2013 ). Black disadvantage with respect to income and social mobility is explained almost entirely by the poor neighborhood circumstances they experience (Chetty, Hendren, Jones & Porter, 2020 ; Massey & Brodmann, 2014 ). Racial residential segregation has become linchpin for systemic racism in the US in the twenty-first century (Massey, 2016 , 2020 ).

Discussions of segregation typically highlight how it operates to increase the social isolation of Blacks, but in fact it does more to isolate Whites, who are by far the most spatially isolated group in the US. In 2010, the average Black metropolitan resident lived in a neighborhood that was 45% Black, but the average White metropolitan resident occupied a neighborhood that was 74% White (Massey, 2018 ), and in suburbs the figure rose to 80% (Massey & Tannen, 2017 ). As a result, the advantages of segregation to Whites and the disadvantages to Blacks are invisible to most White Americans.

Feagin ( 1999 , p. 79), put this paradox into perspective by relating the experience of a British immigrant’s confrontation with the realities of race in the US:

Some time after English writer Henry Fairlie emigrated to the USA in the mid-1960s, he visited Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation and took the standard tour. When the White guide asked for questions, Fairlie inquired, “Where did he keep his slaves?” Fairlie reports that the other tourists looked at him in disturbed silence, while the guide “swallowed hard” and said firmly that “the slaves’ quarters are not included in the official tour.” (Fairlie, 1985 .) Housing segregation, and the systemic racism it reveals, are still not on the official tour.”

Two decades later, the question we must answer is whether we are willing, as scientists and citizens, to put housing segregation—and all the other institutions that do so much to dictate the vicissitudes of Black life—on the official tour of the USA.

Systemic racial bias: the role of mental structures and resulting social interactions

We began with institutions and society. Now, we move to individual minds surrounded and shaped by these societal structures. Next, we then move to interacting minds, which further perpetuate societal and individual racial distinctions. Racial bias at each level supports bias at the other levels, creating a racist system.

To understand individual mental structures, we start with unconscious inference, identified by Helmholtz, and its heir, implicit bias, most relevantly as expressed by Whites associating Black racial cues with negative concepts. Socially motivated (mis)perception goes one stage earlier to bias information seeking and interpretation. More specific links among racial bias in perceiving physiognomy, linked to dehumanizing associations, and aggressive behavior close this first section on the individual.

Unconscious inference

Among the intellectuals who contributed to the emergence of experimental psychology as an independent discipline in the nineteenth century was the German polymath, Herman von Helmholtz, whose numerous contributions to science include the concept of “ Unbewuste Schluss ” or “ unconscious inference .” Helmholtz’s concept was simple, but its implications are profound, even more so today with recent advances in the mind and brain sciences. Given the complexity of just the visual world, how are humans to represent it based on their individual-level, meager sensory and perceptual system, which entails the shunting of packets of data from the world outside, through the eyes and into the brain? Helmholtz offered two ideas. First, perception is not veridical, given the complexity of the world and the rudimentary nature of the minds attempting to make sense of it. Second, as implied by the word inference , what one deduces from the evidence provided by the senses is not a replica of what is out there. Rather, mental representations of the physical world are mere approximations.

Whittling the self-esteem of Homo sapiens down further, Helmholtz went on to say that perception is not controllable, but rather that it unfolds automatically. He used a commonplace example to make this point. We know that it is not the Sun that rises, but rather that the Earth revolves around it. But when we sit on our porch at sunrise, and look toward the horizon, we incontrovertibly experience ourselves as being fixed, and the Sun, however bulky, pushing itself up to meet us. To say about the Sun that “it rises” is completely inaccurate yet completely compelling. That incorrect perception is not something over which we have choice. To think otherwise is to delude ourselves.

Helmholtz’s two ideas contained in the phrase “unconscious inference,” with many additional levels of social complexity, summarizes the challenge when we confront systemic racism. On the one hand, we “know” the facts about an economy purportedly mounted on free labor for 250 years, the undelivered promise of 40 acres and a mule, the failure of Reconstruction, the resistance to desegregation, the history of redlining and gerrymandering, a history of unequal access to education, jobs, housing, finance, healthcare, and a lack of equal protection under the law. On the other hand, the limited sensory, perceptual, learning, and memory systems of humans set up a built-in blindness and automatic inferences that generate the illusions that, for instance, White people experience more discrimination than Black people (Norton & Sommers, 2011 ). Or, if Black Americans have any challenges, they have created their own situation in America today (Pettigrew, 1979 ) and therefore are responsible for getting themselves out of that situation. Not that minorities have no illusions, but the illusions of the higher-status group have more consequences because they usually also have more power.

The features of human minds that feed into the production of systemic racism come in two forms: ordinary errors of perception, attention, learning, memory, and reasoning that are the hallmarks of all thinking systems with human-like intelligence. In addition, we add another level of theorizing familiar to psychologists, that of motivated reasoning , the idea that our preferences, goals, and desires can bias our reasoning and lead to prejudicial decisions and outcomes (Fiske & Taylor, 2021 ; Kunda, 1990 ).

Another hallmark of human cognition is the phenomenon of loss aversion , the finding human beings much prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979 ). Even as White Americans resist and deny the reality of systemic racism, they nonetheless feel the loss of White privilege and social status quite keenly, creating powerful resentments that motivate them to reason away the potential existence of systemic racism (Craig & Richeson, 2014 ; Parker, 2021 ).

Implicit racial bias

Beginning in the 1980s, psychologists began to document a puzzling result. Individuals who claimed to have no racial animus showed evidence of negative attitudes and stereotypes toward Black Americans (Devine, 1989 ; Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986 ). Soon, the hunt for methods to better access “implicit bias” (as contrasted with standard, explicit bias measured in surveys) was underway, with specific calls for the invention of better technologies that could bypass conscious awareness or conscious control (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995 ).

One such measure, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has demonstrated a wide array of group evaluative associations. Typically, people can pair own-group cues faster with positive concepts, and other-group cues faster with negative ones—compared with vice versa. For example, White and other non-Black Americans show robust race bias in their inability to associate “good” and “bad” equally rapidly with the social categories Black and White. The IAT has attracted considerable attention (see Greenwald et al., 2020 , for best practices, reliable effects, and ongoing investigations). A public online location, since 1998, has provided data from millions of tests taken by volunteer participants at http://www.implicit.harvard.edu . Several signature results have replicated multiple times with large samples over time:

Race bias is consistently visible in the data.

A small positive correlation between stated and implicit race attitudes exists, but the two are largely dissociated, i.e., many of those who report being neutral (no negative explicit attitudes toward Black or White Americans), do carry implicit associations of Black + bad and White + good to a larger extent than White + bad and Black + good. This result prompts us to yet again note that the term “racism” has been used by contemporary psychologists to refer to conscious forms of race prejudice and to emphasize its semi-independence from less conscious or implicit forms of race bias. To make this distinction clear, researchers who study implicit race bias have gone to great lengths to reserve the term racism to only refer to conscious expressions of racial animus. Our usage of the term systemic racism in this article is undertaken is in the interest of including all levels of analysis (individual, institutional, societal) and all forms, from the most explicit to the most implicit. The result of a low correlation between explicit racism and implicit race bias makes the point empirically that the two are not the same. Of course, implicit race bias feeds into what may become racism, and for this reason it is best to think about implicit race bias as the roots of racism, not the above ground, visible structure. Implicit race bias also results from systemic racism.

Asian Americans show the same pattern as White Americans, even though as a third-party group in response to a Black–White test, they might be assumed to have neutrality. From the point of view of systemic racism, this is an example of what it means to live in a system of inequity at all levels. Even third-party groups will acquire negative and positive attitudes toward groups that are not their own.

Black Americans express strong positive feelings toward their own group but on the measure of implicit cognition, they show no preference for their own group, with scores of almost any sample of Black Americans showing relative neutrality, i.e., equal association of good and bad for Black and White Americans. This absence of ingroup-favoring attitudes—juxtaposed with the ingroup-favoring lack of neutrality in all other groups in the same society—is open to various interpretations, from moral balance to internalized racism to astute pragmatism; all await other data.

Tests of anti-gay bias revealed it to be quite high in 2007 but steadily dropping off (by 64% since 2013) to be at an all-time low today. By comparison, anti-Black bias has dropped, but to a much lesser extent, by about 25% (Charlesworth & Banaji, in press). A 25% drop-off in race bias is not insignificant, and although the genders differ in magnitude of bias, both men and women are losing bias at equal speed. Although all demographic groups are changing, young Americans are changing faster than older Americans, suggesting that the world they inhabit is signaling a less biased set of attitudes.

Together, these data point to the individual manifestation of systemic racial bias, hidden from view but robustly present. However, psychologists have also gone beyond such demonstrations of basic cognitive associations as markers of implicit mental content to show that individual and institutional change is possible if the will to create change exists.

Socially motivated (mis)perception

The idea of motivated reasoning or motivated cognition gathers several useful ideas to understand how individual humans shape and even distort perception to deal with real or perceived threats to self. Kunda ( 1990 ), for example, posited that the individual need for accuracy is thwarted by the demand to reach a conclusion prior to the evidence being satisfactorily in place and that one’s goals and motives often drive decisions. These decisions reveal many identifiable biases that emerge to weaken the orientation toward accuracy (see Fiske & Taylor, 2021 ).

With more direct focus on motivated reasoning as it concerns social change, Kay et al., ( 2009 ) presented empirical evidence for a motivated tendency to view things as they are and conclude that such a state of affairs exists because it is reasonable and even representative of how things ought to be. The connection to systemic racism is quite clear, as the authors further demonstrate that motivated cognition exists in the interest of justifying sociopolitical systems that maintain inequality and resist change. People justify the status quo, preferring stability especially if they are privileged, but even if not (Jost & Banaji, 1994 ). Groups in a secure position show the cultural equivalent of inertia, seeking stability, but groups on the move express inertia as continuing to move (e.g., acquiring mainstream standing) (Zárate et al., 2019 ).

Two substantive theoretical accounts undergird these ideas as they concern complex interactions of within-person and across-person phenomena such as systemic racism. First, Sidanius and Pratto’s ( 1999 ) Theory of Social Dominance offers evolutionary and cultural evidence to support the idea that hierarchies are an almost obligatory feature of human social groups. A related but independent idea may be found in Jost’s System Justification Theory (Jost, 2020 ), which explicitly makes the case that individuals will sacrifice self and group interest in order to maintain larger “systems” of social arrangements and work to keep them in place. The reason, Jost argues, is that such a motivation serves to meet deep psychological needs for certainty, security, and acceptance by others. The overarching social structure is important to protect because if it is stable, then all within it will be safe, including those disadvantaged by established hierarchies.

Perception of phenotypes, deadly associations, and system-maintaining behavior

With regard to perceptions of race, the mere categorization of someone as Black shifts perceptions of their phenotype. For example, a series of experiments documented that people’s knowledge about race phenotypes drives perception of lightness of the skin tone (Levin & Banaji, 2006 ). In other words, experiments held skin-tone constant and varied only the features, from Afrocentric to Eurocentric; this variation in features shifts perception of skin tone, such that Afrocentric faces are viewed to be darker skinned than Eurocentric ones, despite the same gray-scale tone.

Skin tone and features are critical cues to make life and death decisions, especially in ambiguous situations that are often present in so many interactions between police and Black citizens. In simulations of police-citizen encounters, people are more likely to “shoot” unarmed Black men than otherwise equally unarmed White men (Correll, Wittenbrink, Park, Judd, & Goyle, 2010 ). Black men with more phenotypically Black features are more likely to receive the death penalty for murdering a White person, holding constant the features of the crime (Eberhardt, 2019 ). The phenotypicality effect extends even to Whites with Afrocentric features (Blair, Judd, & Chapleau, 2004 ). Judgments of criminality can be primed by a Black face (Eberhardt, 2019 ).

And there’s more: the race–crime association overlaps the dehumanizing association of Black faces with great ape faces, that Staples ( 2018 ) called the “racist trope that won’t die”; Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson ( 2008 ) provide evidence from policing that links apes and Black people, from the first moments of perception to the radio dispatch and other media, with systemic implications. In more recent work, Morehouse et al., ( 2021 ) have shown that White Americans associate White with human and Black, Asian, and Latinx with animal with greater ease than the opposite pairing (White with animal), regardless of the category of animal (generic or specific). Implicit racial biases (Whites favoring Whites) are consequential, correlating with judged trustworthiness and economic investment (Stanley, Sokol-Hessner, Banaji & Phelps, 2011 ).

More recently, Kurdi et al., ( 2021 ) measured attitudes toward a phenotypic feature that happens to be a dominant perceptual marker of race, Afrocentric and Eurocentric types of hair. First participants took an IAT measuring their implicit attitude toward Black women with natural or straightened hair. Then, subjects read a summary of a real legal case involving a corporation that fired a Black employee for refusing to change her natural hair ( Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Catastrophe Management Solutions , 2016). The more negative the implicit attitude toward Afrocentric hair, the greater the sympathy with the corporation’s position rather than the plaintiff’s position in the legal case.

A relatively new approach to racial associations comes with the promise of epitomizing the term “systemic” in systemic racism. These are studies of large language corpora that are now possible using machine learning approaches to natural language. With the increasing availability of trained datasets—including large samples of the language of the Internet (content archives continuously collected by the nonprofit Common Crawl) or specific trained datasets of media such as books, TV shows, etc.—allow measuring the extent to which language contains attitudes and beliefs about Black and White Americans across time. Charlesworth and Banaji (in preparation) analyzed data from Google Books from 1800 to 1990. Setting aside the data from older books to focus on whether bias is present in the language today, these are the traits most associated with Black Americans (and not with White Americans) in the late twentieth century: earthy, lonely, sensual, cruel, lifeless, deceitful, meek, rebellious, headstrong, lazy . By contrast, these are the traits associated with White Americans (and not with Black Americans): critical, decisive, hostile, friendly, polite, able, diplomatic, belligerent, understanding, confident . Other work in natural language processing (NLP) sorts adjectives into 13 stereotype-content dictionaries (Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, 2021 ). The above adjectives convey ambivalent reactions to Black Americans on several dimensions, but notably neglect competence; Whites in contrast feature several competence adjectives. NLP allows efficient analysis of language in the culture or in spontaneous, open-ended descriptions (Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, under review). Footnote 4

Words have an important role to play. People often express surprise about implicit biases in the minds of individuals who have no intent to harbor them. Considering how and why it occurs—plausible mechanisms—may prove convincing. One causal candidate is language , the predominant way humans communicate and express themselves. Words undertake much of the labor of creating racism in thoughts and feelings that are reflected in speech. Machine learning approaches to understanding racial bias in language will likely be a critical method to objectively uncover how words, spoken and written, create systemic racism. That is, linguistic patterns connect groups with valenced concepts, and the repeated pairings create associations. Without awareness, language produces the inbuilt in the architecture of social cognition (as an example, the NLP stereotype-dimensions dictionaries capture more than 80% of spontaneous stereotype content; Nicolas, Bai, & Fiske, under review).

From cognitive racial bias to aggregate racialized behavior

Individual implicit attitudes have been repeatedly shown to predict behavior; Kurdi et al. ( 2019 ) offer the largest number of studies included in a meta-analysis to date. However, as the authors note, the actual attitude–behavior relationship is marred by the poor quality of many studies, especially given the lack of psychometric control over the predicted behavior. Among the controversies that have marked this work is an intriguing idea put forth by Payne, Vuletich and Lundberg ( 2017 ), who proposed that the small correlations between individual attitude and behavior must be acknowledged as a function of what they call the “bias of crowds,” the idea that an individual’s behavior is determined by the larger social context in which that individual exists. A number of studies have appeared recently to challenge the idea that individual attitude–behavior correlations is the right place to be looking. That the actual correlation between implicit attitude and behavior is larger than it may have appeared has been revealed in a series of studies that predict behavior at the aggregate level by using aggregate IAT scores by region, such as metropolitan areas, counties, and states. Charlesworth and Banaji ( 2021 ) reviewed these studies to demonstrate more substantive relationships between IAT racial bias and consequential social outcomes.

For example, the studies reviewed reveal that the greater the implicit bias against Blacks in a region (using average IAT scores of a region) the greater is the lethal use of force by police, the greater the Black American deaths from circulatory diseases, the lower is spending on Medicaid disability programs (more likely to assist Black Americans), the greater the Black–White gap in infant low birth weight and preterm births, the greater the Black–White gap in school disciplining (suspension, law enforcement referrals, expulsions, in-school arrests), the Black–White gap in standardized testing scores (3rd–8th grade for math and English), and lower upward mobility.

To grasp the meaning of systemic racism as it exists at the individual level within larger society, not just in a single moment by across time, a study by Payne, Vuletich and Brown-Iannuzzi ( 2019 ) is illustrative. Their analysis of IAT data today yields strong correlations with the ratio of enslaved to free people in the southern US in 1860. States with a larger ratio in 1860 are the states with greater race bias today, 160 years later (r = 0.64). This correlation is much larger in magnitude than even the correlation between regional IAT race bias and Black American representation across the US (r = 0.32). As Charlesworth and Banaji ( 2021 ) note, “the result also suggests that today’s Americans who live in regions with greater historical legacies of slavery must be acquiring the particles of race bias embedded in the social atmosphere. Systemic discrimination is a useful term in this case as it helps capture the pervasiveness of race bias as it extends across both space and time.”

Summary. As explicit bias decreased, measured forms of implicit bias have persisted, potentially attributable to racial segregation. White Americans have limited direct experience with Black Americans, so cultural associations substitute for more individuated impressions. Implicit associations of “Black-bad” and “White-good” are weakening, but far from neutral. Meanwhile, socially motivated (mis)perception favors these system-justifying biases. Together, they support a syndrome linking racial phenotypes, deadly associations, and system-maintaining behavior. Further, cognitive racial biases underpin aggregate racialized behavior. These are some cognitive-motivational mechanisms of systemic racism. Other mechanisms involve everyday interactions that perpetuate bias. In particular, predictable patterns of disrespect and distrust maintain the interpersonal racial divide.

Racialized social interactions

Face-to-face behavior propagates bias. Individuals carry racial biases into their social settings largely by interacting with others. Repeated patterns of behavior that differ by race are, at a minimum, racialized (defined by race) and often experienced as racist. Individual racial biases, enacted in daily life, perpetuate bias, which then links the individual to the norms, scripts, and habits that constitute the social system. Interpersonal interaction conveys bias, intentionally or not. In scores of studies, White Americans distance themselves from Black interaction partners, express non-verbal discomfort, and avoid them (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami & Gaertner, 2002 ; Richeson & Shelton, 2007 ; Word, Zanna & Cooper, 1974 ). In the aggregate, these patterns constitute the concrete manifestations of a racially biased social system.

We have already seen White people’s generically negative default associations with Black Americans, linking them to crime (untrustworthy) and to animals (incompetent). These reflect the two key stereotype dimensions in intergroup perception (Fiske, 2018 ): warmth and competence. These dimensions organize people’s perceptions of social systems: perceived competence reflects groups’ stereotypic status in society. The hierarchy supposedly reflects merit, so rank predicts their supposed competence and evokes respect—or supposed incompetence and disrespect. Besides groups’ status (competence), the other aspect of social structure is groups’ apparent cooperative or competitive goals, interdependencies that stereotypically predict warmth and trustworthiness. Cooperators on our side are nice; competitors are not. Stereotypes derive from social structural perceptions (status and interdependence), especially when people learn about others they might encounter (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002 ; Nicolas et al., 2021 ). Black Americans do not get a break on either dimension. And because these racialized perceptions derive from social structure, they pave the way for systemic racism. Consider the evidence for these two dimensions: competence and warmth in racialized perceptions and behavior.

Disrespect communicates Whites’ view of Blacks as low status and incompetent

The default representation of Black Americans is low status (Dupree, Torrez, Obioha & Fiske, 2021 ). Whites spontaneously associate Black faces with low-status jobs, compared to Whites. The structural belief that Blacks are low status appears in associating them with jobs such as janitor, dishwasher, garbage collector, taxi driver, cashier, maid, prostitute. This race–status association correlates with endorsing social dominance (believing that some groups inevitably dominate others, and it is better that way) and with meritocracy (group get what they deserve). All these judgments share a common element of disrespect and assumed incompetence.

Race–status associations emerge in behavior that maintains Black people at the bottom of the hierarchy. Respondents endorsed Black applicants for lower status jobs and withheld support for organizations and government policies aiding minorities. Thus, racialized associations, assumptions, and preferences all identify a view of Black people's structural position as low status, on average. Behavior communicates these attitudes, whether examined or not. Thus, race–status associations imply Black incompetence, covarying with feeling-thermometer (0–100) ratings of interracial bias, social dominance orientation, meritocracy beliefs, as well as hierarchy-maintaining hiring and policy preferences.

Disrespectful behavior that presumes incompetence of Blacks appears in another series of studies. Well-meaning liberals, expected to introduce themselves to a Black partner, dumbed-down their speech, as they did in vocabulary for a task assignment (Dupree & Fiske, 2019 ). Similarly, White Democratic presidential candidates also showed a competence downshift in speeches to minority audiences only (Dupree & Fiske, 2019 ).

This pattern reproduces itself when respondents imagine introducing themselves to a lower-status person (race unspecified) at work (Swencionis & Fiske, 2016 ). They claim their goal is to communicate their own warmth (as they downplay their competence), but this rests on the presumption of the other’s incompetence. Trying to be folksy does not communicate respect.

The presumption that structural status predicts competence is widespread (averaging r > 0.80 across US and international samples; Fiske & Durante, 2016 ). The implication is that for most White Americans, the association that pops into their minds will link a Black person with incompetence. People communicate such disrespect by failing to bet on or invest in the other’s performance (Walsh, Vaida, & Fiske, under review).

Structurally, this amounts to racism. Black people are widely perceived as inferior in these ways, which are baked into the social hierarchy, reflecting disrespectful patterns of interpersonal behavior. All of this perpetuates the social hierarchy and the image of Blacks as incompetent.

Worse yet, disrespect surfaces in police encountering Black drivers. From the first moment (“Hey” instead of “Sir” or “Ma’am”), police officer language shows computationally derived, measurably lower respect (Voigt et al., 2017 ). Given the already fraught relationships between police and Black community members, this worsens an already dangerous encounter and undermines the chances to create trust.

Distrust communicates Whites’ views of Blacks as uncooperative and not warm

Besides incompetence, the other major dimension of social cognition is warmth (trustworthy, friendly), as noted. The default stereotype of a Black person is probably also untrustworthy, but the data on this point are surprisingly indirect. Whites can be expected to distrust Blacks as part of the larger principle that, categorically, people mistrust outgroups. More specifically, as noted, Whites associate Blacks with crime, which certainly undermines trust. Footnote 5 This configuration fits survey data showing that ratings of poor (i.e., explicitly low-status) Black people allege incompetence (disrespecting them) but also lack of warmth (distrusting them).

Plotting these ratings in a warmth x competence space, poor Blacks are frequently judged as low on both. Because White Americans link race and status, the low-income Black person is the default Black person, allegedly incompetent, but also untrustworthy. Mistrust is indicated by excessive surveillance of Black Americans (driving while Black, shopping while Black, false accusations of theft or assault, police shootings…). Footnote 6

Distrust can be operationalized as behavior: In the economic Trust Game, a player must decide how much of their starting endowment to share, on the knowledge that it will be tripled, and on the hope that their partner will share back, generously. Incentivized trust-game behavior closely tracks warmth ratings; that is, societal groups rated as low warmth and untrustworthy receive less shared endowment, presumably because they are not trusted to share it back. In nationally representative samples, people of color do not fare well in the Trust Game (Walsh et al., under review). In more prosaic settings, non-verbal behavior reveals unmonitored dislike (if not specifically mistrust), as noted.

Black Americans experience repeated treatment as incompetent and untrustworthy. Because this stereotype and ensuing behavior is racially category-based and negative, as well as potentially controllable, it is racist. Because the behavior comes from societal stereotypes, which come from social structure, Footnote 7 it is systemic.

Whites’ potential control implies responsibility for reinforcing system racism

Racialized interactions could also be termed racist, in the sense that White people could potentially observe their own inequitable behavior if they chose (Fiske, 1989 ). People rarely examine these unwritten rules, typical behaviors, but conceivably they could, so “unexamined” bias captures the higher potential control for behavior than for implicit associations. Control implies responsibility in the minds of lay people and the law, so this interpretation of “racialized” as “racist” creates concern and is likely to be contested. But the science makes the empirical point here that racialized social behavior is demonstrably controllable, given sufficient incentive (Monteith, Lybarger & Woodcock, 2009 ; Sinclair, Lowery, Hardin & Colangelo, 2005 ). So systematically different behavior by race reflects a racist habit, script, or norm, the components of a system from the bottom up.

The challenge in controlling racist habits is that they are the cultural default. Much of this systematic behavior results from White Americans’ inexperience with Black Americans, thereby substituting societal representations for individuating information about the unique human (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990 ). People use especially those default representations that fit their natural human tendency to detect and prefer people they view as similar to themselves. To unpack this, consider some basic principles of affiliation that would predispose Whites to favor other Whites and exclude Black people. First is the basic tendency to categorize others and to favor those of the ingroup. For decades, principles of attraction have established its foundations in similarity (Byrne, 1971 ; Montoya & Horton, 2013 ) or homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook, 2001 ). And mere categorization suffices to produce ingroup favoritism (Tajfel & Turner, 1979 ). No animus is necessary, although it easily develops. As a basis for categorization, race is arbitrary (more so than gender and age; Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides, 2001 ) but common (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999 ). Thus, race-based ingroup favoritism is a default, in the absence of other experience. Footnote 8 This makes it hard to over-ride.

Societal segregation by race makes difficulties for overcoming the racial default. Segregation limits White exposure to Blacks, undermining their direct experience, leaving Whites to rely on cognitive shortcuts to represent Blacks as a group. Indeed, the less exposure people have to outgroups, the more clearly they differentiate among them–stereotypically. That is, White Americans who know the least about other races have the clearest stereotypes about them; the less diversity, the more differentiated their cognitive representations (Bai, Ramos & Fiske, 2020 ).

What’s wrong with that?

As a scientific question, a skeptic might ask, what’s wrong with differentiating by stereotypes? One set of answers concerns the demeaning individual and face-to-face interaction, just addressed. The other answers pertain to sheer demographic diversity of Black Americans, covered next.

Given its racial history and ongoing systems, societal patterns and cultural stereotypes prevailing in the US tend to associate Blacks with low status and Whites with high status as noted. To the extent this race–status association has a kernel of statistical accuracy (Blacks are over-represented in low-status jobs), it fails several tests as an argument for using stereotypes as a constructive strategy of intergroup relations. First, it ignores variability, individuality, and (especially) Black diversity. Second, category-based thinking exaggerates perceived between-group variability and minimizes perceived within-group variability (Tajfel & Turner 1979 ; Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff & Ruderman, 1978 ). So “nouns that cut slices” (Allport’s, 1954 felicitous phrase for category labels) do violence to the human data. What’s more, society has civil rights laws protecting people from being judged by their group membership, so the consensus is that this is not only wrong, but illegal.

Race–status associations, in practice, ignore all the structural contributors to race–status associations, such as the neighborhood effects, already described. Whites assume meritocracy, believing that status accurately reflects individual competence (Fiske, Dupree, Nicolas & Swencionis, 2016 ); globally, the perceived status—perceived competence correlation hovers around 0.80. (The only countries where people are more cynical about the status-merit link are former Communist ones; Grigoryan et al., 2020 .) The point here is that status has many antecedents, and not all of them are merit (or other personal, stereotypical explanations, e.g., innately good/bad at math). Systemic factors such as neighborhood, school, family resources, connections, and especially race all receive no mention in the meritocracy account.

Whites do differentiate Black Americans by subcategories, e.g., by status, specifically social class, viewing low-income Black people as incompetent and untrustworthy, but Black professionals as competent and trustworthy (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002 ). Black Americans themselves differentiate several subtypes of Blacks likewise along a social-class dimension (Fiske, Bergsieker, Russell & Williams, 2009 ).

Status-keeping shortcuts are easier to maintain without information to the contrary, such as experiencing human variability. Whites with less exposure to Blacks are more overtly prejudiced as a function of structural features such as rural residence, where they encounter less diversity (Bai et al., 2020 ), and lack of education, where they experience less variability of ideas. As a structural matter, segregated White rural residence also predicts lower school quality partly because of the American policy of locally funding schools; this creates an association between a weaker tax base, rural location, ethnic homogeneity, and overt bias. These systemic factors interact to produce prejudice. As an earlier section shows, the social structure permeates American arrangements since the arrival of Whites on native lands.

Nevertheless, for most Whites, their isolated lives make them inexperienced about their Black fellow citizens. Housing segregation disfavors most Whites in experience with diversity, making them often inept and naïve when speaking about issues that are facts of Black lives. This means that Whites rely on cultural shortcuts to understand the Black people whose life experience they do not know. These cognitive representations derive from perceived structural patterns such as race–status associations and race-resource unfairness (Krysan & Crowder, 2017 ).

We have seen that Whites’ racial beliefs are relatively automatic (implicit bias) and ambivalent (warmth/competence). The resulting associations (stereotypes) are more subtle than most people believe. They are consequently hard for anyone to detect in themselves (unexamined) or in any one person (under the radar), but the patterns appear systemically as aggregate biases. Supposing the aggregate biases are problematic, at least because they ignore variability, examine that more closely.

Aggregate bias ignores diversity

So far, this review has described the relentless systems of racism that limit opportunity and outcomes by race. Many Black Americans nevertheless succeed despite the rigged system. Black diversity thus results from those who escape the system, but also from African and Caribbean immigration, and from intermarriage. For Black students enrolled at selective colleges, especially, the diversity of their backgrounds is the main fact that underscores their success (Charles, Kramer, Massey & Torres, 2021 ). Any given White student’s background is far more predictable than any given Black student’s, which potentially ranges from extreme disadvantage to extreme wealth. For that minority (a third) of Black students whose segregated neighborhoods entail underfunded schools, gang violence, and concentrated police violence, their presence in college testifies to extraordinary resilience (Charles, Fischer, Mooney & Massey, 2009 ).

Most non-Black people do not realize that Black Americans are more diverse than most American ethnic groups. Underestimating their variety allows an oversimplified image to dominate every level, from mind to society, making it a systemic racism. This section describes diversity based on place, intermarriage, immigrant experience, parent education, and sheer escape.

A century ago, most Black Americans lived in the rural South, but after the Great Migration, most lived in cities, often in the North, usually hyper-segregated, but with family roots in both the North and South. By the turn of the current century, Black American student bodies at selective colleges were the most diverse in history, more biracial, more immigrant, more middle or upper class, and equally identifying themselves as both American and as Black (Charles et al., 2021 ). Black students, even as elites, show “unprecedented variation in terms of racial origins, skin tone, nativity, generation, class, and segregation” (Charles et al., 2021 , Ch. 10).

Clusters of characteristics and attitudes illustrate the variety. Mixed-race students identify less with being Black, are comfortable with both Blacks and Whites, see Whites as less discriminatory, and report deep parental involvement in their schooling and cultural experiences. Mixed race students also have more White friends and fewer Black friends than their monoracial peers and are more likely to date outside the group, especially with Whites. In addition, mixed-race students are less likely to join majority-Black organizations on campus, and thus report less intense interaction with Blacks . Psychologically, the White view of biracial individuals continues to demonstrate hypodescent, i.e., the view that biracial individuals belong to the less advantaged group, or the cognitive expression of the “one drop rule.” Combining the sociological and psychological angle demonstrates the lack of consistency between how biracial Americans are viewed and the way they see themselves.

Black students with an immigrant background are most comfortable with other Black students, and report having strict parents who expect obedience, respect, hard work, and family loyalty without hands-on, hovering involvement. First-generation immigrants, especially African immigrants (versus Caribbean ones), believe in meritocracy and see Whites as not so discriminatory. After a generation, idealism gives way to pragmatism: Hard work pays off. African immigrant origins predict reliably higher grades.

As for segregation, Black students growing up with more exposure to Whites feel closer to them but also view Whites as more discriminatory, a psychologically complex mental state to manage. In contrast, living in segregated neighborhoods especially exposes Black students to higher (the top third) levels of disorder and violence, leading them to view Whites as more distant and discriminatory. But parents are more protective, relying on strict discipline but not trying to use shame or guilt as an influence strategy (more frequent in Asian families).

As with all students, high-school GPA predicts college GPA. Besides that, again as with all students, Black women do better than Black men, as do those with educated parents . Differences in academic preparation vary by segregation in two ways: the more White students in their schools, the worse Black students’ grades but the higher their SATs, suggesting more rigorous standards. Thus, the portraits of Black college students are diverse; generalizations are unreliable, except perhaps for one: resilience in the face of systemic bias and a diversity of adaptations to a variety of challenges.

We document Black diversity here for these reasons: First, to avoid making the litany of systemic Black disadvantages the sole image conveyed here. Second, because of segregation, many White people, including University faculty, see a Black person on campus and—assuming they realize this is a student—they presume the person comes from a low-income background, unprepared for college, with uneducated parents, native born, but with little experience outside the imagined ghetto, etc. This may be true for some small fraction of students, but not just the Black ones, and not true of most Black students on campus today. A third reason to remind the reader of Black diversity on campus is to highlight experiences of inter-racial contact as important one mechanism for overcoming racial bias, and—if scaled up to integrated neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces—for shifting systemic racism.

Contact: exposure to racial diversity

People with least exposure to diversity have the most differentiated images of the outgroups they have never met (Bai et al., 2020 ). And the prospect and first experience of diversity is not salutary; newly diverse contexts show lower well-being (Putnam, 2007 ; Ramos, Bennett, Massey & Hewstone, 2019 ). But over time, people get used to each other: well-being is higher and stereotypes melt into each, forming an undifferentiated cluster of people like us, mostly warm and competent.

Psychology has 70 years of research to explain how this works, following Allport’s ( 1954 ) contact hypothesis. In one meta-analytic perspective (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006 ), intergroup contact reduces prejudice, the more it meets Allport’s conditions: shared goals, non-trivial interactions, authority sanctions, and rewarding results. Much of the process seems to be affect-driven. If the contact setting would afford the opportunity for friendship, the contact effect is stronger (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005 ). This is a useful reminder that much prejudice is emotional, not cognitive. In fact, a meta-analysis of 50 years of research on racist attitudes found that they predict racist behavior the most when they are emotions (“hating them”) rather than stereotypes (“they are lazy”) or even simple evaluations (2 on a 5-point scale) (Talaska et al., 2008 ).

Nevertheless, the core element of successful contact, goal interdependence, does operate via information processing. In laboratory experiments, interdependence makes people attend specifically to unexpected, stereotype-inconsistent information, and they make dispositional inferences, generating an individualized coherent impression of the teammate (Ames & Fiske, 2013 ; Erber & Fiske, 1984 ). Neural signatures of mindreading prominently include the mPFC regions that reliably activate when people are inferring another’s predispositions. The mind-reading mPFC activates most for an interdependent partner’s stereotype-inconsistent attributes. Although supporting evidence includes these mechanisms, a subsequent meta-analysis (Paluck, Porat, Clark & Green, 2021 ) notes that few high-quality intergroup studies have focused on race per se, few look at adults, few are experiments. We have much to learn.

Conclusion: systemic racism is individual/interpersonal and institutional/societal but rarely recognized

Segregated housing disadvantages many Black Americans, and its effects are far-reaching, not only in life opportunities and outcomes (education, employment, health, well-being) but also in the psychology of systemic racism. We have argued that case here. Most Whites fail to recognize and appreciate the growing diversity of America’s Black population, which has arisen from a mixture of Black resilience, a growing middle class, rising intermarriage, and global-South immigration. Generally, White Americans—because of the segregation perpetuated to sustain their advantage—have limited exposure to Black Americans, so their knowledge is indirect, and based on cultural caricatures. Segregation allows White people to be clueless about race, and because racial bias is more automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent than people think, they fail to detect it in themselves and others. As a result, White people have many unexamined biases, undergirded by earlier stages of information processing (e.g., attention, perception, learning, memory, reasoning) that sustain such a lack of awareness. These cognitive errors and biases stem from lack of exposure, lack of the accurate evidence, and a lack of necessary knowledge.

The assumption here is that if people were simply made aware of the facts that have been described in the earlier sections, they would slap their palm to their head and immediately vote for reparations. But as readers may no doubt deduce on their own, confronting accurate data and internalizing it is not a smooth or pretty process. That our minds resist information that challenges certain types of prior beliefs is a fundamental discovery from the mind sciences. Basic cognitive processes such as motivated cognition help to maintain a lack of awareness of racial experiences as they exist on the ground. But no lack of awareness need exist.

The human ability for conscious awareness, deliberate thought, and the motivation to link values to behavior cannot be underestimated as vehicles of change. We have accomplished this regarding how we understand the relationship of Earth to our Sun, so we know it is not as it seems. If we choose, we can similarly put our minds to derive the best evidence to learn about the presence or absence of systemic racism. If we can acquire the appropriate knowledge (often hidden from our conscious perception), we will be more likely to remain open to evidence that shows its presence.

If we do not undertake this effort, it is at our own peril. If, in the twenty-first century, we cannot mount a new struggle to see the social world for what it is, we are by choice dooming ourselves to extended ignorance that will be costly to us, our society, and the world we inevitably leave to our descendants. Earlier we provided evidence about unexpected (by scientists) decreases in implicit sexuality bias (massive drop) and race bias (more modest change) since 2007. These data provide optimism that mental content that we cannot change at will is nonetheless capable of movement toward racial neutrality across the US.

In other words, who-we-have-been need not be the future-selves-we-are-becoming. Here, we demonstrated that grappling with the correct data is a necessary step on the path to understanding our role in the creation of systemic racism. Among the blind spots that we will need to shake off, once and for all, is the belief that racism is the product of a few bad people in our society, and that removing them from power will suffice to deal with the issue.

Space and time preclude our covering the targets’ perspective, identity, resilience. Nor do we cover racial socialization in children.

Through the sensory and perceptual systems granted to our species by evolution, these dyadic and small-group social interactions evolve into larger and larger social units, such as the hundreds of so-called friends or millions of so-called followers on more recent forms of social media. Today we transcend ancestral, small-group interactions to generate larger-scale groups whose interactions occur on an exponential scale. The internet provides avenues for the high-speed transmission of individual attitudes, beliefs, values, as well as for propelling action across communities and nations. These communications have the potential to spread both social good and social harm, with explicit racial animus and implicit prejudicial bias being examples of the latter.

Using the most common measure of segregation (the dissimilarity index), in that year 94% Black metropolitan residents lived under conditions of “high” segregation (an index of 60 or greater on a 0–100 scale), meaning that at least 60% of Blacks would have to exchange neighborhoods with Whites to achieve an even distribution of the races across neighborhoods (Rugh & Massey, 2014 ). Moreover, in a subset of metropolitan areas, not only were Black residents unevenly distributed across neighborhoods, they were also isolated within overwhelmingly Black districts that were themselves densely clustered near the central business district, a geographic pattern that Massey and Denton ( 1989 ) labeled "hypersegregation.”

The NLP fits more traditional findings, a form of cross-validation. Based on content analysis of an 84-adjective checklist, the language describing Black Americans did not change much, across samples from 1933 to 2007 (Bergsieker, Leslie, Constantine, & Fiske, 2012 , Study 4): The most recent data describe ambivalent view of sociality (aggressive, gregarious, passionate), and some specific stereotypes (loud, talkative, religious, loyal to family, sportsmanlike, musical, materialistic), but saying nothing about competence. Neglecting to mention an obvious dimension can reveal taboo topics, stereotyping by omission (Bergsieker et al., 2012 ).

Black people may distrust Whites, too, but they have less standing (status and power) to do damage.

An odd anomaly: Abundant research describes Black people’s generalized trust as lower then Whites’ generalized trust. Also, social science has studied Black Americans’ mistrust of government, business, healthcare, and education systems that have historically abused them (see next section). This would hardly seem puzzling enough to be the lion’s share of the trust literature and to eclipse White Americans’ pockets of mistrust. Specifically, no one seems to study Whites’ mistrust of Black people. Overlooking the obvious is one symptom of a systemic bias.

The combination of status-competence and warmth-trustworthiness creates remarkably stable perceptions of social structure (Durante et al., 2015). In social systems across the globe, middle classes are stereotypically competent and warm (trustworthy) whereas homeless people are neither. And in the mixed quadrants, rich people seem competent but cold, whereas old people seem well-intentioned but incompetent. These class and age patterns are nearly universal. In contrast, ethnic, racial, religious, and other cultural stereotypes are accidents of history, reflecting what subset of a group arrived under what circumstances. Compare stereotypes of Chinese railroad workers in the nineteenth century to stereotypes of Chinese entrepreneurs in the twenty-first century.

Implicit bias is difficult to monitor, as noted. Yet another way that prejudice goes undetected, is in its modern form, of being exhibited less as outgroup harm and instead as ingroup help (Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014 ). Despite this ambiguity, the net effect is the same—just harder to detect, and even lauded, because helping is a prosocial act that garners praise.

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Banaji, M.R., Fiske, S.T. & Massey, D.S. Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society. Cogn. Research 6 , 82 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00349-3

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Coping With Racism: A Selective Review of the Literature and a Theoretical and Methodological Critique

Elizabeth brondolo.

St. John’s University

Nisha Brady

Melissa pencille, danielle beatty.

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

Richard J. Contrada

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Racism is a stressor that contributes to racial/ethnic disparities in mental and physical health and to variations in these outcomes within racial and ethnic minority groups. The aim of this paper is to identify and discuss key issues in the study of individual-level strategies for coping with interpersonal racism. We begin with a discussion of the ways in which racism acts as a stressor and requires the mobilization of coping resources. Next, we examine available models for describing and conceptualizing strategies for coping with racism. Third, we discuss three major forms of coping: racial identity development, social support seeking and anger suppression and expression. We examine empirical support for the role of these coping strategies in buffering the impact of racism on specific health-related outcomes, including mental health (i.e., specifically, self-reported psychological distress and depressive symptoms), self-reported physical health, resting blood pressure levels, and cardiovascular reactivity to stressors. Careful examination of the effectiveness of individual-level coping strategies can guide future interventions on both the individual and community levels.

Racism is a stressor that contributes to racial/ethnic disparities in mental and physical health and to variations in health outcomes within racial and ethnic minority groups ( Anderson 1989 ; Clark et al. 1999 ; Mays et al. 2007 ; Paradies 2006 ; Williams and Williams-Morris 2000 ). Racism, in particular, self-reported ethnic or racial discrimination is a highly prevalent phenomenon. Members of most ethnic or racial minority groups report exposure over the course of their lifetime, and recent research indicates that episodes of ethnicity-related maltreatment occur on a weekly basis for some groups (Brondolo et al. 2009). The evidence points consistently to a relationship between self-reported racism and mental health impairments, specifically negative mood and depressive symptoms ( Brondolo et al. 2008 ; Kessler Mickelson and Williams 1999 ; Paradies 2006 ). Some evidence has linked self-reported racism to hypertension and a more consistent body of evidence has linked racism to risk factors for hypertension and/or coronary heart disease ( Brondolo et al. 2003 , 2008 ; Harrell et al. 2003 ; Lewis et al. 2006 ; Peters 2004 ; Steffen and Bowden 2006 ). Racism has also been linked to several other health conditions ( Paradies 2006 ), and to perceived health, which is itself a predictor of all-cause mortality ( Borrell et al. 2007 ; Jackson et al. 1996 ; Schulz et al. 2006 ).

Since racism persists within the US, it is critical to identify the strategies individuals use to cope with this stressor and to evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies. As noted by Fischer & Shaw (1999) , in 1996 the National Advisory Mental Health Council highlighted the importance of investigating individual-level factors that buffer the health effects of discrimination ( Fischer and Shaw 1999 ). Although the knowledge base has grown since 1996, there is an ongoing need for greater understanding of the ways in which individuals can mitigate the health risks associated with racial/ethnic discrimination.

The aim of this paper is to identify and discuss key issues in the study of individual-level strategies for coping with interpersonal racism. It is important to note that we do not intend this review to communicate the idea that the burden of coping with racism should be placed on the shoulders of targeted individuals alone. Eliminating racism and the effects of racism on health will require interventions at all levels: from the individual to the family, community, and nation. Nonetheless, careful examination of the effectiveness of individual-level coping strategies is needed to guide future interventions at both the individual and other levels.

We begin with a discussion of the ways in which racism acts as a stressor and requires the mobilization of coping resources. Next, we examine available models for describing and conceptualizing strategies for coping with racism. Third, we discuss three major approaches to coping: racial identity development, social support seeking, and anger suppression and expression. These coping approaches have received sufficient research attention to permit a systematic review of evidence regarding their effectiveness for both mental and physical health outcomes. In addition, these coping approaches are intuitively plausible as potential buffers of the effects of racism on health, and if shown to be effective, would lend themselves to skills and information-based intervention approaches. We examine empirical support for the role of these coping approaches in buffering the impact of racism on mental health-related outcomes (i.e., specifically, self-reported psychological distress and depressive symptoms), self-reported physical health, resting blood pressure levels, and cardiovascular reactivity to stressors. These outcomes were chosen because they have been among those most consistently identified as correlates of racism ( Paradies 2006 ). Finally, we discuss theoretical and methodological issues that are important to consider when conducting and evaluating research on strategies for coping with racism. Although much of the research on coping with racism has focused on African American samples, we have included the available data on other groups, including individuals of Asian and Latino(a) descent as well.

Definitions

Clark et al. (1999 , p. 805) define racism as “the beliefs, attitudes, institutional arrangements, and acts that tend to denigrate individuals or groups because of phenotypic characteristics or ethnic group affiliation”. Contrada and others (2000, 2001) use the more general term ethnic discrimination to refer to unfair treatment received because of one’s ethnicity, where “ethnicity” refers to various grouping of individuals based on race or culture of origin. We consider racism a special form of social ostracism in which phenotypic or cultural characteristics are used to assign individuals to an outcast status, rendering them targets of social exclusion, harassment, and unfair treatment.

Racism exists at multiple levels, including interpersonal, environmental, institutional, and cultural ( Harrell 2000 ; Jones 1997 , 2000 ; Krieger 1999 ). However, the bulk of empirical research on coping with racism focuses on strategies for coping with interpersonal racism. Interpersonal racism has been defined by Krieger as “directly perceived discriminatory interactions between individuals whether in their institutional roles or as public and private individuals” ( Krieger 1999 , p. 301). Racism may have deleterious effects even when the target does not consciously perceive the maltreatment or attribute it to racism. However, this review considers the effectiveness of individual-level coping strategies employed to address episodes of racism that are both directly experienced and perceived. This focus on an interpersonal approach to examining racism is consistent with much recent work by Smith and colleagues examining the health effects of other psychosocial stressors (e.g., poverty) within an interpersonal context (see, for example, Gallo et al. 2006 ; Ruiz et al. 2006 ; Smith et al. 2003 ).

Types of ethnicity-related maltreatment

Racism/ethnic discrimination can encompass a wide range of acts including social exclusion, workplace discrimination, stigmatization, and physical threat and harassment ( Brondolo et al. 2005a ; Contrada et al. 2001 ). Social exclusion includes a variety of different interactions in which individuals are excluded from social interactions, rejected, or ignored because of their ethnicity or race. Stigmatization can include both verbal and non-verbal behavior directed at the targeted individual that communicates a message that demeans the targeted person (e.g., communicates the idea that the targeted individual must be lazy or stupid because he or she belongs to a particular racial or ethnic group). Workplace discrimination includes acts directed at individuals of a particular race or ethnicity that range from the expression of lowered expectations to a refusal to promote or hire. Threat and harassment can include potential or actual damage to an individual or his or her family or property because of ethnicity or race. Any of these discriminatory acts can be overt, such that the racial bias is made explicit (e.g., when accompanied by racial slurs), or the acts can be covert such that racial bias may not be directly stated but is implicit in the communication ( Taylor and Grundy 1996 ).

Racism as a stressor

A number of conceptual models, including those which consider racism within stress and coping frameworks, have described the ways that racism may confer risk for health impairment ( Anderson et al. 1989 ; Clark et al. 1999 ; Harrell et al. 1998 ; Krieger 1999 ; Mays et al. 2007 ; Outlaw 1993 ; Williams et al. 2003 ). In general, each model emphasizes the need to consider the acute effects of individual incidents of ethnicity-related maltreatment, as well as factors that sustain the damaging effects of these events. They highlight the importance of considering racism as a unique stressor, and as a factor that may interact with other potential race and non-race-related stressors, including low socioeconomic status and neighborhood crime. Racism itself and the environmental conditions associated with racism (e.g., neighborhood segregation) limit access to coping resources. The cumulative effects of acute and sustained stress exposure, combined with limited coping resources are likely to cause perturbations in neuroendocrine and autonomic systems that respond to acute stressors and that maintain or re-establish physiological homeostasis ( Gallo and Matthews 2003 ; McEwen and Lasley 2003 , 2007 ).

From the perspective of the targeted individual, racism is a complex stressor, requiring a range of different coping resources to manage both practical and emotional aspect of the stressor. Features of the racist incident, as well as the corresponding coping demands, may vary depending upon the physical, social, and temporal context of exposure. Targets must cope with the substance of racism, such as interpersonal conflict, blocked opportunities, and social exclusion. They must also manage the emotional consequences, including painful feelings of anger, nervousness, sadness, and hopelessness, and their physiological correlates. Targets may also need to manage their concerns about short and long term effects of racism on other members of their group, including their friends and family members. Indirect effects of racism (e.g., poverty, environmental toxin exposure, changes in family structure) may require additional coping efforts ( Mays et al. 1996 ). A theme that may cut across and link many or even most of the coping tasks posed by racism is the management of damage to self-concept and social identity ( Mellor 2004 ).

Episodes of ethnicity or race-based maltreatment can occur in a number of different venues. The effectiveness of the coping response may vary depending on the context in which the maltreatment occurs. Factors that may influence the choice and effectiveness of a coping strategy include variations in the intensity and nature of the threat, the perceived degree of intentionality of the perpetrator, the potential consequences of the act and of the coping response, the availability of resources to assist the target, and perceptions of the need to repeatedly muster different coping resources and the appraisal of one’s ability to do so ( Richeson and Shelton 2007 ; Scott 2004 ; Scott and House 2005 ; Swim et al. 2003 ).

Different types of coping may be needed at different points in time: in anticipation of potential exposure to ethnicity-related maltreatment, at the time of exposure, following the episode, and when considering longer term implications of persistent or recurring exposure. The strategies that are effective for quickly terminating a specific episode of maltreatment are not necessarily the same as those needed to manage the possibility of longer term exposure. A variety of coping strategies may be needed at each point.

Consequently, one of the most serious challenges facing minority group members is the need to develop a broad range of racism-related coping responses to permit them to respond to different types of situations and to adjust the response depending on factors that might influence the effectiveness of any particular coping strategy. Targets must also develop the cognitive flexibility to implement an appropriate and effective strategy in each of the wide range of situations in which they may be exposed to discrimination, judge the relative costs and benefits of these strategies, and deploy them as needed over prolonged periods of time. This level of coping flexibility is beneficial, but difficult to achieve ( Cheng 2003 ). The perception that one’s coping capacity is not adequate to meet the demands increases the likelihood that ethnicity-related maltreatment will be experienced as a chronic stressor.

Coping with racism: models and measures

There are a number of early models ( Allport 1954 ; Harrell 1979 ) of the different strategies individuals used to respond to racism that have been reviewed in Mellor (2004) . Some of the difficulties with these models are a function of more general problems with models of coping that have been well reviewed elsewhere ( Skinner et al. 2003 ). Other concerns are more specific to the difficulties of developing models for coping with racism.

Most models fail to explicitly incorporate strategies designed to manage the interpersonal conflict associated with ethnicity-related maltreatment as well as with its emotional sequelae. They do not always include strategies both for coping with an acute event (i.e., responding to the perpetrator during episodes of ethnicity-related maltreatment) and for coping with the awareness that race-related maltreatment is likely to be an ongoing stressor. Additionally, it can also be difficult to determine if the coping strategies included in the models are intended to address racism specifically or the various consequences of discrimination, such as unemployment, denial of a job promotion, or poverty.

More recent work has utilized dimensions of coping that are more explicitly tied to theories of stress and coping, including problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping, approach versus avoidance coping, and social support ( Danoff-Burg et al. 2004 ; Scott 2004 ; Scott and House 2005 ; Thompson Sanders 2006 ). However, as Mellor (2004) points out, many of the strategies included in models of coping responses can only be loosely organized according to available rubrics for categorizing coping strategies. For example, it is unclear how to classify spirituality and Africultural coping, which appear to represent multifaceted strategies with some aspects involving problem-focused coping and others involving emotion-focused coping ( Constantine et al. 2002 ; Lewis-Coles and Constantine 2006 ; Utsey et al. 2000a ). There have been inconsistencies even within specific coping domains. For example, seeking social support when confronted by racism has been considered an approach coping strategy ( Scott 2004 ; Scott and House 2005 ; Thompson Sanders 2006 ), a problem-focused coping strategy ( Noh and Kaspar 2003 ; Plummer and Slane 1996 ), an emotion-focused strategy (such as when seeking emotional social support) ( Tull et al. 2005 ), an avoidance strategy (if it involves venting, but no direct confrontation), and a strategy in an entirely separate category ( Danoff-Burg et al. 2004 ; Swim et al. 2003 ; Utsey et al. 2000b ).

Mellor (2004) suggests an alternate framework for organizing racism-related coping that focuses on the function of the coping strategies versus the content of their focus. His model highlights the importance of distinguishing between tasks that serve to prevent personal injury (e.g., denial, acceptance) from those that are intended to remediate, prevent, or punish racism (e.g., assertiveness, aggressive retaliation). This functional approach may be an important step toward developing more effective models of coping with racism, particularly if the purpose is closely linked to the various specific challenges that face targets of discrimination.

Measurement issues

The development of more comprehensive models is further limited by the small number of instruments available to assess racism-related coping. The Perceived Racism Scale ( McNeilly et al. 1996 ) is one of the only instruments available to assess strategies for coping with racism. It is intended for use with African Americans and measures both exposure to experiences of ethnicity-related maltreatment and coping responses to the exposure. For each venue or domain in which racist events might occur (i.e., job-seeking, educational settings, the health-care system), participants are asked to indicate the cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses used to cope with each experience. Other researchers have used generic coping scales (e.g., the Ways of Coping or the Spielberger Anger Expression Inventory) and modified the presentation to inquire about coping in response to race-related maltreatment (e.g., Brondolo et al. 2005b ).

Each of these measures is subject to the limitations of traditional self-reported trait coping indices ( Lazarus 2000 ). It is difficult to evaluate the timing or circumstances in which the coping response is used. For example, when the Self-Report Coping Scale ( Causey and Dubow 1992 ) is applied to the study of racism-coping (e.g., Scott and House 2005 ), participants indicate the degree to which they use strategies such as externalizing (i.e., getting mad or throwing things) as a response to race-related stress. It is unclear if the item refers to expressing anger at the perpetrator of the racist acts (possibly a problem-focused or approach coping strategy) or discharging anger later when thinking about specific incidents (possibly an emotion-focused coping strategy).

Careful delineation of the timing and function of the coping strategy is valuable, because there may be some strategies that are effective in the short run, but counterproductive if used persistently over time. For example, “keeping it to myself” may be a safe strategy to use as an immediate course of action in a situation in which the target may face immediate retaliation, but may be deleterious once the acute maltreatment has ended. Similarly, there may be strategies that are effective and acceptable in some settings, but not others. Measures which include items assessing both immediate and longer term responses and inquire about the circumstances of exposure to maltreatment are needed.

How do people cope with racism?

There are no population-based epidemiological data on the strategies most commonly used to cope with episodes of ethnicity-related maltreatment at the time of the event. There are very limited population-based data on the strategies used to manage discrimination in general. In a population-based sample of over 4,000 Black and White men and women, participants were asked about the ways they handled episodes of racial discrimination ( Krieger and Sidney 1996 ). Most (69–78% depending on race and gender group) indicated they would “try to do something and talk to others.” Only 17–19% indicated that they would “accept it as a fact of life and talk to others.” Most individuals (86–97%) indicated that they would talk to others whether they took action in response to racism or accepted the racist behavior ( Krieger and Sidney 1996 ). In contrast to the tendency of Black and White Americans to indicate that they would try to do something about racism, other research suggests that Asian immigrants in Canada would prefer to “regard it as a fact of life, avoid it or ignore it” ( Noh et al. 1999 ). The ethnic and national differences in response suggest that the moderating effects of culture and immigration status on racism and coping must be further evaluated in larger ethnically diverse population-based studies.

Evaluating different coping approaches

In the next three sections, we review in detail the data on the effectiveness of three coping approaches that have been considered as responses to racism: racial identity development, social support seeking, and confrontation/anger coping. We restrict the reviews to published, peer-reviewed papers. For each topic area, studies for consideration were identified by accessing all major databases including PsychInfo, ERIC, MEDLINE, and Sociology Abstracts, using both ProQuest and EBSCO search engines. We included thesaurus terms racism, ethnic discrimination, racial discrimination, race discrimination, race-related stress . For a general review, we included the terms: coping, active coping, approach coping, stress-management . For the specific review on racial and ethnic identity, we included the terms: racial identity, ethnic identity, and racial socialization. For the section on social support, we included terms: support, social support, support coping, active coping, approach coping . For the section on anger, we included the terms: confrontation, anger, anger expression, anger suppression, anger management, anger-in, anger-out . We further searched the reference sections of each paper to identify additional studies. We also examined all published work of each author of each paper to determine if additional studies could be identified. Examining the empirical data on these three coping approaches highlights in specific detail some of the methodological issues involved in research investigating effective strategies for coping with racism.

Our evaluation of coping effectiveness focuses on stress-buffering effects. A coping response may be said to buffer stress when, among individuals exposed to the stressor, those who engage in that response (or who engage in it to a greater degree) are less likely to experience a negative outcome than those who do not (or who engage in it to a lesser degree). The relative benefit associated with performing the coping response should be smaller or not at all in evidence among those who are not exposed to the stressor. It should be noted that stress-buffering is not the only manner in which a coping response might confer an advantage. Other models are plausible, including mediational models that describe a causal chain in which exposure to stress promotes performance of the coping response which, in turn, promotes more positive outcomes. However, a focus on stress-buffering is warranted since the aim of the paper is to identify those strategies which might be effective in ameliorating the health effects of exposure to racism, and could form the basis of coping-based interventions. Figure 1 provides a graphical illustration of these different possible pathways.

Different pathways through which coping approaches may offset the effects of racism on mental and physical health.

Racial/ethnic identity as a buffer of the effects of racism on distress

Based on Phinney (1990 , 1996) , Cokley (2007 , p. 225) defines ethnic identity as “the subjective sense of ethnic group membership that involves self-labeling, sense of belonging, preference for the group, positive evaluation of the ethnic group, ethnic knowledge, and involvement in ethnic group activities.” Similarly, racial identity has been defined as “a sense of group or collective identity based on one’s perception that he or she shares a common racial heritage with a particular racial group” ( Helms 1990 , p. 3). There are differences of opinion about the degree to which ethnic and racial identity represent distinct constructs ( Cross and Strauss 1998 ; Helms 1990 ; Phinney and Ong 2007 ). Definitions of both constructs include a focus on shared history, values, and a common heritage. However, those who advocate the study of racial identity as a separate construct suggest that it entails a complex developmental process, reflecting the individual’s attempts to resolve the problems associated with racism directed both at the individual and at the group as a whole.

How could racial or ethnic identity serve as a coping strategy?

Racial and ethnic identity are generally considered individual difference variables, (i.e., an underlying set of schemas that help individuals make sense of and respond to their experiences as a member of their ethnic or racial group) ( Cross and Strauss 1998 ; Helms 1990 ; Phinney and Ong 2007 ). However, researchers explicitly link the process of developing an ethnic identity to other acts that can have stress-buffering effects ( Phinney et al. 2001 ). Some research explicitly frames ethnic identity as a variable possessing characteristics similar to other potential coping responses, capable of buffering the effects of stress exposure (see for example, Lee 2003 ). Despite the ambiguity about the degree to which racial identity can be considered within the domain of coping resources, research on racial identity has a potential impact on public health. If racial identity is mutable, and aspects of racial identity are effective in modifying psychological or psychophysiological responses to racism, those aspects of identity could be incorporated into health communications and could guide racial socialization practices.

Racial/ethnic identity may serve as a coping mechanism in several different ways. Specifically, some aspects of racism may influence the salience of race-related maltreatment and affect the subsequent appraisals of and coping responses to these events ( Oyserman et al. 2003 , Quintana 2007 ). A well-developed racial identity may be associated with historical and experiential knowledge about one’s own group and its social position. In turn this knowledge may help a targeted individual distinguish between actions directed at the person as an individual versus those directed at the person as a member of a particular group ( Cross 2005 ). This can protect targeted individuals from injuries to self-esteem or distress when they are exposed to negative events that may be a function of ethnic discrimination rather than individual characteristics of behavior ( Branscombe et al. 1999 ; Mossakowski 2003 ; Sellers and Shelton 2003 ). Racial socialization could provide an individual with an opportunity to consider possible approaches to this maltreatment and could serve to expedite the implementation of coping responses ( Hughes et al. 2006 ). Ethnic connection and belonging could ameliorate some of the pain of ostracism from other groups.

Appreciating the potential benefits of a well-developed sense of ethnic or racial identity, investigators have generated a large body of research that has examined the nature of racial and ethnic identity, and a smaller body of research that has tested the hypothesis that a strong positive racial or ethnic identity might buffer the effects of racism on mental health/psychological distress. However, the findings to date have been conflicted and present a number of methodological problems that need resolution.

Our review identified 12 published peer-reviewed papers that explicitly tested the hypothesis that ethnic or racial identity buffers the effects of exposure to racism on psychological distress or depression ( Banks and KohnWood 2007 ; Bynum et al. 2007 ; Fischer and Shaw 1999 ; Greene et al. 2006 ; Lee 2003 , 2005 ; Mossakowski 2003 ; Noh et al. 1999 ; Sellers et al. 2003 , 2006 ; Sellers and Shelton 2003 ; Wong et al. 2003 ). Details of the studies, including the samples, measures, and results, are presented in Table 1 . The effects of ethnic identity as a buffer of the relationship of racism to depressive symptoms or psychological distress were tested in samples of African Americans, Filipinos, Koreans, South Asian Indians, and Latino(a)s, with most, but not all, studies employing samples of convenience.

Studies of the buffering effects of racial identity on the relationship of racism to mental physical health indices

Note. AA = African American; MH = mental health; sx = symptoms; discrim. = discrimination; EI = ethnic identity. MIBI = Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity ( Sellers, Smith, Shelton, Rowley, & Chavous, 1998 ). RaLES Daily Exper. = Daily Life Experiences subscale from the Racism and Life Experience Scales ( Harrell, 1997 ). CES-D = Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale ( Radloff, 1977 ). TERS = Teenager Experience with Racial Socialization Scale ( Stevenson et al., 2002 ). BSI = Brief Symptom Inventory ( Deragotis & Melisarotis, 1983 ). PSS = Perceived Stress Scale ( Cohen & Williamson, 1988 ). RaLES-R - Brief Racism Scale = Brief Racism Scale from the Racism and Life Experiences Scales-Revised ( Harrell, 1997a , 1997b ). SORS-A = Scale of Racial Socialization for Adolescents ( Stevenson, 1994 ). SRE = Schedule of Racist Events ( Landrine & Klonoff, 1996 ). MHI = Mental Health Inventory ( Veit & Ware, 1983 ). MEIM = Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure ( Phinney, 1992 ); EI = ethnic identity. PDS = Perceived Personal Ethnic Discrimination ( Finch et al., 2000 ). SCL-90 = Symptom Checklist – 90 – Revised ( Deragotis, 1994 ). DLE = Daily Life Experience subscale of the Racism and Life Experience scales ( Harrell, 1994 ). STAI = State–Trait Anxiety Inventory ( Spielberger, 1983 ).

These studies assessed different aspects of ethnic or racial identity and used several different strategies for measuring these dimensions. Some investigators used measures of pride or belonging, including the Multi-Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM; Phinney 1992 ) or the private regard subscale of the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI; Sellers et al. 1997 ). Other investigations included measures of racial centrality, a construct involving the degree to which one’s race or ethnicity forms an important part of self-concept ( Sellers et al. 1997 ). Still other studies included aspects of racial identity that refer to the development of preparation for discrimination, including measures of racial socialization. Three studies ( Greene et al. 2006 ; Sellers et al. 2003 ; Wong et al. 2003 ) used longitudinal designs to examine the degree to which racial identity buffers racism-related changes in depression. The remainder used cross sectional, correlational designs. In all the studies, participants completed measures of racial identity, perceived racism and a measure of depression or psychological distress. To test the buffering effects of racial identity, all researchers directly examined the statistical interactions of racial identity and racism on measures of distress, with the exception of those who used path analytic models ( Sellers et al. 2003 ).

These studies provide only very limited evidence for the hypothesis that racial or ethnic identity buffers the effects of racism on psychological distress. Of the 12 studies specifically examining effects of racism on distress or depression, only two found evidence of a buffering effect of racial identity on at least one measure of distress ( Fischer and Shaw 1999 ; Mossakowski 2003 ). One study was a population-based study investigating these issues in Filipino-American adults ( Mossakowski 2003 ). In this study, ethnic identity acted as a buffer only for the predictive effects of a single item measure of discrimination on depressive symptoms. Ethnic identity did not appear to buffer the effects of everyday maltreatment on depressive symptoms. The other study reporting buffering effects on depressive symptoms was a study of African American young adults ( Fischer and Shaw 1999 ). Six studies ( Bynum et al. 2007 ; Fischer and Shaw 1999 ; Lee 2003 , 2005 ; Sellers et al. 2003 ; Wong et al. 2003 ) reported no buffering effects for either distress or depression. Four studies found some evidence that an aspect of ethnic identity (i.e., pride; Lee 2005 ); public regard ( Sellers et al. 2006 ); commitment/centrality ( Noh et al. 1999 ) or positive attitudes towards other cultures ( Banks and Kohn-Wood 2007 ) may intensify the relationship of racism to distress. 1

In contrast, positive main effects of racial identity on distress were obtained in several studies examining dimensions related to ethnic pride or attachment (e.g., positive attachment to one’s ethnic group (i.e., including the MEIM; Phinney 1992 ), the private regard component of the MIBI or the cultural pride dimension of racial socialization or connection to ethnic group) ( Bynum et al. 2007 ; Lee 2005 ; Mossakowski 2003 ; Sellers et al. 2006 ; Wong et al. 2003 ). However, some studies obtained null ( Fischer and Shaw 1999 ; Lee 2003 ; Noh et al. 1999 ; Wong et al. 2003 ) or reverse effects ( Bynum et al. 2007 ). The effects for dimensions such as centrality were more mixed, with some studies reporting that greater racial centrality was associated with less negative mood ( Sellers et al. 2003 ), whereas another study failed to find the same connection ( Sellers et al. 2006 ). In one study a measure that more explicitly assess those aspects of identity that address preparedness for discrimination was associated with increased distress ( Bynum et al. 2007 ).

These main effects analyses suggest that the pride and belonging dimensions of racial identity may produce a more general feeling of well-being. Aspects of racial identity may buffer the effects of other stressors common to the research participants that were not assessed in the study. However, the effects of these positive racial identity dimensions were not sufficient to offset the impact of perceived racism, and in particular everyday maltreatment, on distress and depressive symptoms.

Findings from Lee (2005) suggest a complex relationship of centrality and pride to depression. In this study of Asian young adults, there was a significant main effect of Ethnic Identity (EI)-Pride, such that those with relatively high scores on the ethnic pride dimension of the MEIM (derived from a factor analysis conducted in the same sample) had fewer depressive symptoms than those with low scores. However, among those with high EI-Pride scores, the effects of racism on depressive symptoms were stronger than for those who did not feel a great deal of pride in their ethnic group. This suggests that enhancing pride may reduce depression overall, but may be related to greater symptom reports when individuals are exposed to racism. Racial identity as a buffer of cardiovascular reactivity to race-related stress

There are also two studies that examined racial identity as a moderator or buffer of the relationship of race-related stress to an index of cardiovascular response. These measures of cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) appear to be markers for processes involved in the development of hypertension and coronary heart disease. However, it is difficult to evaluate the meaning of reactivity data in some of these studies, since there are some limitations to the presentations of the existing studies. Clark and Gochett (2006) reported finding an inverse relationship between private regard and cardiac output and stroke volume (measures of sympathetic nervous system influences on the heart) before, during, and after racial and non-racial stressors. The authors interpreted the inverse relationship to suggest higher levels of arousal for those high in private regard; however, analyses directly examining the relationship of identity to the change from baseline are not reported. Similarly, Torres and Bowens (2000) reported positive correlations of the Black Racial Identity Attitude Scale (RIAS-B) internalization attitudes (indicating more acceptance of both Black and Caucasian groups) with systolic blood pressure (SBP) reactivity to both race and non-race related stressors. These findings may indicate that individuals with Black oriented identities (i.e., those who are low on internalization) are better prepared to confront episodes of racism as they expect this maltreatment. However, the data are difficult to interpret, as greater increases in SBP may also indicate greater task engagement and no measures were made of level of effort or involvement. Without data on subjective response to the task, it is difficult to interpret these findings.

In contrast, in a study of the main effect of racial identity on both resting and ambulatory blood pressure (BP), Thompson et al. (2002) found that a transitional racial identity, marked by an intense involvement in in-group activities and an “idealization of African American and African American culture and a devaluation of White culture,” was associated with higher levels of resting and ambulatory BP. The authors suggest that a transitional identity may intensify the perception of racial bias and make race-related conflict more salient, increasing the frequency with which individuals experience interpersonal stress. However, no data were available on the race-related social interactions experienced by the participants.

What accounts for the mixed findings on the effects of racial identity?

The effects of racial identity on mental and physical health are complex, and the data do not support a uniformly positive effect of each aspect of racial or ethnic identity on mental health. The bulk of the evidence suggests that ethnic pride may be associated with fewer depressive symptoms overall, but the results indicate that pride and other aspects of ethnic/racial identity are not sufficient to buffer the effects of racism on depressive symptoms for most (but not all) samples. It is important to note that some aspects of racial identity appear to intensify the relationship of racism to depression.

Ethnic pride may not buffer the pain of race-based ostracism, since social rejection is painful, even when other sources of social connection are available ( Baumeister et al. 2005 ; MacDonald and Leary 2005 ). Further, race-based social rejection or exclusion may heighten the awareness of race-related stereotypes and elicit concerns about stereotype threat. In turn these concerns may evoke feelings of anxiety and shame ( Cohen and Garcia 2005 ; Steele 1997 ). Messages of cultural pride may not be adequate to counteract the emotional consequences of demeaning treatment.

There is also some evidence that ostracism is associated with a decrease in self-awareness and self-regulation ( Baumeister et al. 2005 ; MacDonald and Leary 2005 ). This blunting of self-awareness may help the individual block some of the injury to self-esteem associated with social rejection. However, reductions in self-awareness in response to personal threat may also limit the individual’s ability to access self-related schemas (e.g., racial identity or ethnic pride) that might facilitate coping. Laboratory studies are needed to assess the effects of priming racial salience on responses to acute race-related stressors and to evaluate the effects of increasing versus decreasing self-awareness during these manipulations ( Baumeister et al. 2005 ).

The effects of racial centrality appear to be more variable than the effects of racial/ethnic pride and belonging. There may be circumstances in which drawing attention to race and heightening awareness of potential exposure to racism protect individuals from its harmful effects ( Fischer and Shaw 1999 ), but there is also evidence that racial centrality can intensify distress ( Sellers et al. 2006 ). The awareness that one may be targeted for racism may help individuals gather the strength they need to avoid being denied rights or misjudging their own competence, but this awareness can also be exhausting, elicit distress and anger, and erode some relationships. This is consistent with data on the use of avoidance coping in African Americans reported by Thompson Sanders (2006) . Further work is needed to identify the types and timing of the complex of racial socialization messages that increase awareness without destroying hope or inflicting a costly emotional burden. The nature of these messages may vary by socioeconomic status and parental involvement, and some personality dimensions ( Scott 2003 , 2004 ), and the role of these potential moderators has also not been adequately explored.

There is some evidence that racial identity buffers the effects of racism on self-esteem and some measures of academic performance (e.g., Oyserman et al. 2001 ; Wong et al. 2003 ). Failure to find substantial buffering effects for depression and distress may be a function of the need to match the type of coping strategy with the expected outcome. Racial identity is related to self-concept and pride, and as a consequence may have effects primarily on aspects of functioning that are tied to self-concept versus more global affective states.

The data on the effectiveness of racial identity as a buffer of the relationship of racism to BP or BP reactivity is too limited to support firm conclusions. The findings suggest, however, that measures of racial identity may tap psychological dimensions that influence coping with stressors on a day-to-day basis. These schemas may influence the degree to which individuals are able to engage in challenge or feel they must defend themselves from threat. Both engagement and defensiveness influence cardiovascular dynamics. Continued research on the ways in which racial identity affects appraisals of laboratory tasks and everyday events, and in turn influence cardiovascular and neuroendocrine responses, would be very useful.

Social support as a buffer of the effects of racism on mental and physical health

Social support has been defined as the presence or availability of network members who express concern, love, and care for an individual and provide coping assistance ( Sarason et al. 1983 ). Seeking social support involves communication with others (e.g., family, friends, and community members) about events or experiences. Within the Black community, seeking social support has sometimes been more specifically labeled as “leaning on shoulders” ( Shorter-Gooden 2004 ). This term refers to seeking out and talking to others as a means of coping with racial discrimination.

How might social support buffer the effects of racism on distress?

It is widely accepted that social support is beneficial for physical and psychological health ( Allgower et al. 2001 ; Barnett and Gotlib 1988 ; Symister and Friend 2003 ). A supportive social network promotes a sense of security and connectedness, helping the individual to understand that discrimination is a shared experience. Group members can serve as models, guiding the individual in effective methods for responding to and coping with discrimination. Placing the event in a collective context can also help the individual to feel more connected to his or her ethnic/racial group and can activate racial identity ( Harrell 2000 ; Mellor 2004 ). Greater participation in social activities may help to distract individuals and provide them with positive experiences that may buffer the negative impact of a range of stressors including racism ( Finch and Vega 2003 ).

Seeking social support is commonly used as a coping strategy following a racist incident ( Krieger 1990 ; Krieger and Sidney 1996 ; Lalonde et al. 1995 ; Mellor 2004 ; Shorter-Gooden 2004 ; Swim et al. 2003 ; Thompson Sanders 2006 ; Utsey et al. 2000b ). In Black college students, Swim et al. (2003) found that 68% of the sample discussed a racist incident with their family, friends, or others. In two separate studies, Krieger found that the vast majority of Black individuals sampled reported “talking to others” in response to racial discrimination ( Krieger 1990 ; Krieger and Sidney 1996 ). Furthermore, a majority of Black Canadians reported “seeking advice” and “telling others about the discrimination” in response to a hypothetical situation involving housing rejection based on ethnic discrimination ( Lalonde et al. 1995 ). Although social support is hypothesized to serve as an effective strategy for coping with racism, there has been surprisingly limited empirical research testing this hypothesis.

We are aware of only three empirical tests of the hypothesis that social support buffers the effects of racism on distress ( Fischer and Shaw 1999 ; Noh and Kaspar 2003 ; Thompson Sanders 2006 ), and four studies examining the hypothesis that social support buffers the effects of racism on physical health-related measures (i.e., self-reported health or cardiovascular reactivity to stress) ( Clark 2003 ; Clark and Gochett 2006 ; Finch and Vega 2003 ; McNeilly et al. 1995 ). Diverse ethnic groups were included in the studies. Some studies assessed the tendency to seek social support or guidance in response to racist events ( Noh and Kaspar 2003 ; Thompson Sanders 2006 ), whereas others examined the availability of support (i.e., size of network) or quality of general social support ( Clark 2003 ; Finch and Vega 2003 ; Fischer and Shaw 1999 ; McNeilly et al. 1995 ). Further details of the studies are presented in Table 2 .

Studies of the buffering effects of social support on the relationship of racism to mental or physical health indices

Note. sx = symptoms; discrim. = discrimination. SBP = systolic blood pressure; DBP = diastolic blood pressure. BP = blood pressure. SRE = Schedule of Racist Events ( Landrine & Klonoff, 1996 ). MHI = Mental Health Inventory ( Veit & Ware, 1983 ). CES-D-K = Korean version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale ( Noh et al., 1998 ; Radloff, 1977 ). CRI = Coping Responses Inventory–Adult Form ( Moos, 1993 ).

The three studies examining the buffering effects of seeking social support on the relationship of racism to distress failed to find positive effects ( Fischer and Shaw 1999 ; Noh and Kaspar 2003 ; Thompson Sanders 2006 ). However, two of these three studies found main effects of social support on depressive symptoms.

The effects are more mixed among the four studies examining the buffering effects of support on a health-related outcome. Finch and Vega (2003) found robust effects of instrumental support on perceived health in a population-based sample of Mexican Americans. Discrimination was not related to health among those with high levels of support, but was associated with poorer health for those with low levels of support. Two studies found buffering effects of support seeking, but only for those who were exposed to low levels of racism ( Clark 2003 ; Clark and Gochett 2006 ). Specifically, Clark (2003) reported that self-reported quantity and quality of social support were associated with reduced DBP reactivity to a non-racial stressor (i.e., mental arithmetic), but only for those who had experienced relatively low levels of racism over the course of their lives. Similarly, in a school-based study, Clark and Gochett (2006) found that youth who indicated that they would “talk to others” had a lower incidence of elevated BP (above 90th percentile) than those who did not endorse this item, but these effects were seen only among those who experienced low levels of racism. In contrast, among those exposed to high levels of racism, “talking to others” was associated with a higher prevalence of elevated BP. Finally, in a laboratory study, McNeilly et al. (1995) reported that providing support (in the form of a supportive confederate) did not reduce cardiovascular reactivity in response to racist provocation (i.e., debating about race-related topics), but did reduce self-reported anger. There are two additional studies that examined the relationship of support to race-related stress in African Americans, but they did not directly test the hypothesis that social support buffers the effects of racism on psychological distress ( Scott and House 2005 ; Utsey et al. 2000a, b ).

Despite the generally null findings of the quantitative studies, two qualitative reports about seeking social support in response to ethnic or racial discrimination suggest beneficial effects. In a diary study of perceived discrimination, participants reported that it was helpful to discuss racist incidents with another person ( Swim et al. 2003 ). Similarly, African American men participating in an African-centered support group for confronting racism reported decreases in levels of anger and frustration. They also reported engaging in fewer interpersonal conflicts with significant others after attending the support group ( Elligan and Utsey 1999 ).

What accounts for the mixed findings on social support?

Overall, the quantitative literature provides minimal support for the hypothesis that social support (either seeking social support or having a supportive network) buffers the impact of racism on psychological health. It also provides very mixed support for the notion that social support buffers racism effects on indices of physical health. There is some suggestion that social support may be helpful at low levels of stress exposure, but exacerbates difficulties at high levels of exposure. Yet, these results are contrary to anecdotal reports or findings from qualitative studies, and largely contrast with the findings from other literatures on the buffering effects of support in the face of other stressors (mostly medical illnesses). What accounts for these variations?

Measures and research design

General difficulties with the social support research have been outlined by Uchino (2006) . Variations in the conceptualization and measurement of social support make the results of studies examining the effects of support as a buffer of the effects of racism on distress or health difficult to interpret. In the studies reviewed, four separate support-related constructs have been studied: seeking support to obtain guidance for ways to manage racism; general support network size, general support network quality, and the proportion of relationships with people of the same ethnicity. The quality of the measurement instruments also varies, with some studies assessing social support seeking using two questions in a self-report survey or diary ( Noh and Kaspar 2003 ; Swim et al. 2003 ).

The research designs of some studies also have some limitations, as cross sectional correlational designs fail to reveal the direction of the effects. In the Clark and Gochett (2006) study, there are some correlations between exposure to higher levels of racism and seeking support, suggesting that the level of support seeking is in fact a function of the degree of stress exposure. Prospective cohort and laboratory studies may be necessary to more clearly distinguish the direction of the relationship between support and distress. Different types of support may be necessary at different points in time, and no studies have examined perceived needs for support at different stages in the experience of ethnicity-related maltreatment. For example, concrete advice and emotional support may be needed at the time of the incident, whereas support focused on meaning and hope may be needed as individuals confront the possibility of more sustained exposure.

Social constraint and facilitation

Some of the failure to find positive effects associated with social support may be a function of issues related to both social constraint and social facilitation. Lepore and Revenson (2007) propose that social constraints limit the effectiveness of certain social support interventions. Seeking support for race-related maltreatment may entail discussions that are anxiety provoking for both the seekers and givers of support. For members of stigmatized groups, discussions of racism may evoke recollections that feel uncontrollable and are stressful. For members of a majority out-group, stereotype threat may be evoked if individuals become concerned about appearing cruel, uncaring, or insensitive when discussing race-related conflict ( Richeson and Shelton 2007 ). Anxiety on the part of both the in-group and out-group members may inhibit effective communication about race-related incidents. When individuals receive messages that tend to minimize or deny aspects of their experience, support seeking may be ineffective and associated with increased versus decreased distress ( Badr and Taylor 2006 ). Research on the dynamics of interracial communication may provide guidance for further research on the types of communication that can minimize social constraints and facilitate inter-racial communication ( Czopp et al. 2006 ; Richeson and Shelton 2005 ).

As Utsey et al. (2002) points out, social facilitation may increase distress when individuals discuss discrimination with other members of their group. The experience of sharing episodes of ethnicity-related maltreatment may arouse greater anger as individuals exchange accounts of their experiences. If the situations appear hopeless or if individuals in the discussion have had negative experiences managing race-related interactions themselves, other negative emotions, including fear, frustration, grief, shame and loss, may also be evoked. Further research is needed to determine how variations in the circumstances in which support is sought and in the content of support message confer different costs and benefits to the target of discrimination. It will be important to understand how best to acknowledge the difficulties and pain associated with exposure to discrimination without eliminating hope or generating additional stress.

Confrontation and anger expression

Race-related maltreatment evokes anger ( Brondolo et al. 2008 ; Broudy et al. 2007 ; Landrine and Klonoff 1996 ). Consequently, many models of coping with racism recognize the need to address the anger evoked by ethnicity-related maltreatment ( Mellor 2004 ), and some of the seminal studies of the effects of racial stress examined anger coping ( Harburg et al. 1979 , 1991 ). Anger coping strategies used in response to ethnicity-related maltreatment may address two goals. The first involves using anger coping strategies, including confrontation, to influence the outcome of the race-related conflict. For example, the expression of anger can be used to motivate the perpetrator to change his or her behavior or to motivate others to take action ( Swim et al. 2003 ). The second goal of anger coping strategies is to manage the emotional burden created by the anger.

Researchers have used several different approaches to assess constructs related to anger expression and confrontation. In some cases, anger coping that involves directly protesting maltreatment has been subsumed under the term confrontation coping ( Noh et al. 1999 ). In other cases, researchers have directly examined the effects of different strategies for anger expression, including outward anger expression (Anger-Out) or anger suppression (Anger-In) (e.g., Dorr et al. 2007 ).

Despite the obvious importance of studying the effects of anger coping, there have been relatively few studies directly addressing these issues. Specifically, there have been two survey studies that examine the effects of confrontation coping as a buffer of the relationship of racism to distress ( Noh et al. 1999 ; Noh and Kaspar 2003 ). There have been five studies examining the effects of anger coping or confrontation as a means of managing racist interactions on BP ( Armstead and Clark 2002 ; Dorr et al. 2007 ; Krieger 1990 ; Krieger and Sidney 1996 ; Steffen et al. 2003 ). Details of these studies are presented in Table 3 .

Studies of the buffering effects of anger expression on the relationship of racism to mental and physical health indices

Note. HTN = Hypertension. ABP = ambulatory blood pressure. BP = blood pressure. SBP = systolic blood pressure. DBP = diastolic blood pressure. MAS = Multidimensional Anger Scale ( Siegel, 1986 ). PRS = Perceived Racism Scale ( McNeilly et al., 1996 ).

In two population-based samples of Asian immigrants, Noh and colleagues examined confrontation coping using measures which include an item assessing direct protests to the perpetrator. In the South Asian sample (i.e., composed largely of Chinese and Vietnamese), Noh and Kaspar (2003) reported no effects of confrontation on the relationship of perceived discrimination to depression. In contrast, in a study of Korean immigrants, the authors reported that personal confrontation coping (i.e., directly protesting or talking to the perpetrator) moderated the effects of discrimination on depression, such that those who were more likely to confront reported less depression in the face of discrimination than those who indicate they are less likely to confront ( Noh et al. 1999 ).

A recent diary study by Hyers (2007) examined costs and benefits associated with confrontation coping, although no measure was made of depression or health. She considered outcomes including rumination-related behaviors (i.e., feelings of emotional upset, regret, wishing to respond differently in the future) and experiences of self-efficacy (i.e., “the perpetrator was educated”) as well as interpersonal conflict. These intermediate outcomes may be predictors of depression over the long run, and potentially serve to maintain the stress associated with the episodes of racism. Hyers reported that when women responded to incidents of racism or sexism with confrontation coping, they were less likely to ruminate and more likely to feel they had been efficacious. Those who did not confront were more likely to report a benefit of avoiding interpersonal conflict; however, it is not clear if the women who did confront actually experienced more conflict.

In five studies using different methodologies, the effects of anger coping on BP levels or reactivity and recovery were examined ( Armstead et al. 1989 ; Dorr et al. 2007 ; Krieger 1990 ; Krieger and Sidney 1996 ; Steffen et al. 2003 ). The results were fairly consistent and are detailed in Table 3 . The main effects analyses indicate that suppressing anger in the face of discrimination is associated with higher levels of BP or poorer cardiovascular recovery from race-related stress exposure. However, there is also some evidence that, for African Americans, expressing anger may be associated with poorer cardiovascular recovery as well.

In two population-based samples, Krieger and colleagues examined the effects of exposure to discrimination and responses to discrimination, contrasting the effects of “doing something about it” with “accepting it as a fact of life”. Among a small sample of Black women, those who reported “doing something about it (discrimination)” were less likely to have a hypertension diagnosis than those who “accepted and kept quiet about it” ( Krieger 1990 ). In Krieger and Sidney (1996) , a large scale population-based study of Black and White individuals, the blood pressure levels of those who reported “doing something about it” were lower than those of individuals who reported “accepting it.” Statistical tests of moderation were not performed, making it difficult to determine if buffering effects were present.

Steffen et al. (2003) reported that trait anger suppression was independently associated with ambulatory DBP in a convenience sample of African Americans. However, neither anger suppression nor expression moderated the effects of racism on ambulatory BP. Armstead et al. (1989) and Dorr et al. (2007) conducted laboratory studies examining the relationship of anger coping to BP response to a racist stressor. Armstead et al. (1989) reported that for Blacks anger suppression was marginally associated with greater SBP at baseline. A style of anger coping in which anger is outwardly expressed was marginally associated with baseline levels of mean arterial pressure and reduced SBP and DBP reactivity to the racist stressor.

In the Dorr et al. study (2007) , African American and European American participants engaged in race and nonrace-related debates facing a European American confederate. Following the tasks participants were given opportunities to express versus inhibit anger. The authors reported that for both African Americans and European Americans, anger inhibition was associated with slower recovery of indices of total peripheral resistance, a measure of vascular response. For African Americans, BP and HR recovery was slower when they were allowed to express their anger than when they were asked to inhibit it, and recovery was also slower than the recovery of EA who were able to express their anger. These effects suggest that anger suppression exacerbates vascular recovery to stress for both groups; whereas outward anger expression exacerbates cardiac and other CV indices of recovery to stress for Blacks.

The authors suggest that one possible explanation for these findings is that anger suppression can lead to rumination if issues are not resolved satisfactorily. However, anger expression may lead to anxiety about retaliation or abandonment if social relations are threatened by direct expression of anger. Both rumination and persistent anxiety may be associated with sustained physiological activation following stress exposure ( Brosschot et al. 2006 ).

What accounts for the variations in the effects of confrontation as a buffer of the effects of racism on depression?

The specific effects of confrontation coping are difficult to interpret, since confrontation coping is subsumed under the general heading of approach coping or problem solving coping and includes items measuring social support seeking as well as “going to the authorities”. Second, the type of confrontation (i.e., hot and angry versus cold and unemotional) is generally not specifically examined, yet laboratory research suggests that the effects of the confrontation depend in part on the emotional quality of the confrontation ( Czopp et al. 2006 ).

Although the limited literature suggests that most Black and White individuals report trying to “do something” about racism ( Krieger and Sidney 1996 ; Plummer and Slane 1996 ; Thompson Sanders 2006 ), diary studies suggest that individuals report thinking about confrontation or indirectly or non-verbally expressing their anger more often than they actually engage in direct anger expression ( Hyers 2007 ). Measures are needed that separate intent from action or more explicitly identify the specific actions taken.

It is also necessary to consider the context in which the conflict occurs when evaluating the effects of anger coping or confrontation. Individuals will hesitate to express anger directly if they believe there will be retaliatory consequences for this anger expression. In any given interaction, individuals with relatively lower levels of power or status are more likely to suppress anger than high power individuals ( Gentry et al. 1973 ). The location of the conflict (i.e., work or social arena) may also influence the choice of coping strategies ( Brondolo et al. 2005b ). Cultural variations in the importance of maintaining relationships may also affect the outcomes associated with confrontation ( Noh et al. 1999 ; Suchday and Larkin 2004 ). Research is needed to clearly differentiate among different types of confrontation strategies and to identify situational and cultural variations in the types of strategies used and their effectiveness.

Some of the health effects of different individual-level coping strategies are likely to be a function of the efficacy of the coping strategies themselves. If the strategies for confrontation and anger coping are effective on some dimensions (e.g., reducing overt expressions of prejudice), but costly on others (e.g., social relations), individuals may not perceive themselves as having appropriate coping resources, making it more likely that they will perceive interracial or race-based maltreatment as stressful. Evaluating a broad range of outcome measures from the target’s perspective (e.g., mental and physical health, rumination, satisfaction with outcome, perceived benefits) is critical. Investigating the perceptions of these different coping strategies from the perspective of others is also important. The growing literature on other’s perceptions of confrontation and other coping strategies ( Czopp et al. 2006 ; Kawakami et al. 2007 ) can provide guidance for future studies on anger coping. More knowledge regarding the perceptions of different coping strategies by individuals of other ethnicities/races can help guide individuals as they weigh the costs and benefits of various responses.

Summary and future directions

The strongest and clearest conclusion that can be drawn from this review is that there is a significant need for further research on strategies for coping with racism. No coping strategy has emerged as a clearly successful strategy for offsetting the mental or physical health impacts of racism. Instead, each approach has some demonstrated strengths, but also considerable side effects or limitations.

Ethnic and racial identity develop to meet multiple needs, including enhancing one’s pride and commitment to one’s cultural group as well as helping individuals develop meaningful strategies for managing discrimination based on racial or ethnic bias. Studies suggest that racial identity, particularly racial or ethnic pride and belonging may have beneficial effects in some circumstances. But these components of identity are not sufficient to ameliorate the effects of racism on the development of depressive symptoms and may increase the detection of threat and the perception of harm.

Involvement with only one type of identity may restrict the individuals’ ability to consider multiple perspectives and learn a range of coping options. Instead, in an increasingly multicultural society, it will be important to understand the best ways to help individuals master the complex psychological tasks involved in maintaining individual, group and national identities, particularly when the values at one level contrast with the values at another. Oyserman has specifically suggested that a “possible selves” approach, encouraging individuals to incorporate aspects of different types of group identities, may be of benefit ( Oyserman et al. 2007 ).

It may be that the strength of this approach is not only in gaining the benefits of having multiple roles, but in the process of mastering the underlying cognitive-affective processes that subserve these identities. Learning to think about oneself as a member of many different groups requires considering multiple perspectives and developing the ability to shift the focus of one’s attention even when experiencing strong emotion. Additionally, individuals must learn to integrate specific individualized information (e.g., about stressors and resources specific to the individual) with larger category-based information (e.g., about stressors and resources conferred because of group membership). In the process of developing an awareness of many possible identities, individuals may also strengthen their own capacity for effective coping in a range of circumstances and increase their ability to draw support from a number of different groups. Similarly, social support appears to be beneficial in a variety of circumstances, but the available data do not support a direct role for non-specific social support as a buffer of the effects of racism on distress. A greater understanding of the types of support beneficial for different phases and dimensions of the experience of racism will be needed to facilitate the development of support-based interventions including, for example, group based stress-management programs.

The clinical literature ( Elligan and Utsey 1999 ; Utsey et al. 2002 ) may provide some guidance for the specific types of support that may be valuable at different points in time. It may be necessary to include communication that is aimed at validating the individual’s experience (i.e., the perception that race-based maltreatment may have occurred), while also offering opportunities to review the circumstances and identify factors that elicited perceptions of threat. This type of support is needed to decrease defensiveness and increase the capacity to clearly articulate specific concerns and develop appropriate strategies to manage the specific threat. But acute problem-focused support may not be sufficient. Support may also be needed to address and ameliorate the painful nature of racism, providing an opportunity to address not only the feelings of anger, but of shame and anxiety as well. Finally, still other forms of support may be needed to provide hope and the motivation and direction to reduce racism and its effects over the long term.

The psychobiological effects of anger suppression among African Americans are among the most consistent findings in the literature on coping with racism. These data suggest that suppressing anger in the face of discrimination is associated with elevated BP or greater BP responses, but the studies have included only African Americans or European Americans. Other data suggest that there may be cultural moderators of these effects, since the association between anger suppression and distress varies depending on the individual’s ethnicity or race.

Yet, it is unclear what the effective alternatives to anger suppression and aggressive confrontation might be. We need better and more detailed answers to the questions: What is the most effective method to protest ethnicity-related maltreatment? How can anger be used to effectively communicate the seriousness of injustice without exhausting the targets of injustice? If individuals suppress anger at the time of the maltreatment, how can they reintroduce the discussion and communicate their concerns and remedy the injustice later? Understanding the predictors of anger suppression and confrontation both at the time of the incident and over the long run is likely to yield insight into the costs and benefits of these different approaches and to suggest more effective strategies.

Since racism and strategies for coping with racism occur within an interpersonal context, it is important to understand how different behaviors are perceived by others. Czopp et al. (2006) indicates that confrontation coping can be very effective in changing a perpetrator’s beliefs and behavior. The different features of the confrontation (e.g., the ethnicity of the confronter, the emotional tone of the message) are associated with variations in the effectiveness of the confrontation in changing behavior and eliciting negative reactions. The literature on coping with racism must be closely integrated with the empirical literature on the perceptions of targeted individuals by members of other racial or ethnic groups ( Kawakami et al. 2007 ). With this knowledge, individuals can make better predictions about the likely outcomes of their efforts to combat racism and to become increasingly effective in their communication.

Cultural norms have changed regarding the acceptability of overtly discriminatory behavior. Social modeling via the media and other methods has been used to communicate more egalitarian values and to deride racist behavior. It may be useful to use similar methods to generate and model strategies for communicating concern and anger about more subtle discriminatory or stigmatizing actions.

There are conceptual and methodological problems with the existing literature that are common to a new research area confronting a complex and disturbing problem. Some difficulties are related to problems in conceptualizing racism-related coping, and developing models that incorporate the different types of strategies needed to accommodate variations in demand across time and across contexts. To date, very few studies have examined the degree to which the effects of racism-related coping strategies vary by context or timing, and very few have examined the degree to which individual difference variables, including the presence of other background stressors or personality dimensions, shape the type of coping choice ( Brondolo et al. 2008 ; Scott 2004 ) or moderate its effectiveness ( Danoff-Burg et al. 2004 ; Scott 2004 ).

Surprisingly, almost no studies have examined variations in the effectiveness of the strategies by the stage of the incident (i.e., in preparation for future difficulties, at the time of the incident or following the termination of the conflict). Additionally, investigations have not adequately separated out the types of strategies most effective for managing the practical consequences of exposure versus the emotional consequences of confronting unjust social exclusion. The development of new measures of racism-related coping that incorporate issues of timing, context, and intent are needed.

Research is also needed to investigate the differential effects of any particular strategy on functioning, affect and health. Some coping strategies, for example, may be effective in limiting exposure to racism, but may have detrimental effects on mental and physical health. Outcomes must also include assessments of the target’s perceptions of effectiveness as well.

Because coping strategies may have side effects, there is a need for more research involving multiple outcome measures. Confrontational coping may have the side effect of creating or exacerbating interpersonal conflict. Anger suppression may have the side effect of increasing rumination. Social support seeking can be distracting or confusing. The results of studies reporting effects that are limited to one or two outcome domains may be misleading regarding the overall effectiveness of the coping responses examined.

In this review, we have chosen to consider a coping strategy as effective if it ameliorates some of the deleterious health effects of racism, specifically effects on depression symptoms or risk factors for hypertension. However, there may be other dimensions of effectiveness worth considering: Does the strategy for coping with racism reduce the incidence of racism over the long run? Does it achieve the personal goals of the target (i.e., to get a job, to avoid exclusion) even it if incurs some consequences as well? Does it decrease fear?

A fuller understanding of the potential benefits of strategies for coping with racism will be facilitated by intervention research. Ultimately, these will have the broadest impact if delivered and evaluated on a community, institutional, or national scale. Public education messages and school-based health promotion activities have the potential of reaching a large and diverse audience. But they will only be as effective as the coping responses that they attempt to promote.

We focused on stress-buffering, which is only one model of the manner in which coping responses may ameliorate the effects of exposure to racism. As shown in Fig. 1 , other plausible models include mediational models that posit simultaneous causal effects of stress on coping and of coping on outcomes. Some of the strategies that we have examined, such as anger expression or racial identity development, may be better considered as responses that emerge as a function of discrimination rather than as coping responses that develop independently of exposure. Developing different strategies may require a substantial effort on the part of the target. Both buffering and mediational models are best examined in large-scale, longitudinal studies, which are in short supply in the published literature.

Early models of coping may have reflected the more general societal view that racial and ethnic discrimination were an immutable feature of life. As legal, economic, and social conditions change, the possibilities for coping with ethnic and racial discrimination will change as well. As new solutions and opportunities develop, the models of these coping strategies will also evolve.

Research on strategies for coping with racism is necessary to empower targeted individuals to develop and choose methods that are effective at reducing discrimination, increasing hope, and buffering the impact of racism on health. As we come to understand a fuller range of consequences of each strategy, we can provide better guidance to help individuals make more informed choices about the ways they wish to cope with racism and protect their health. We hope that this knowledge and the detailed description of the ways in which racism is experienced by the targets will contribute to the elimination of discriminatory behavior.

1 Two additional studies report buffering effects on perceived stress, but not depressive symptoms ( Sellers et al., 2003 ; Sellers et al., 2006 ). Four studies reported buffering effects of racial/ethnicity identity on self-esteem or academic orientation, achievement or efficacy, even when the authors reported that they did not find buffering effects on measures of distress or depression ( Sellers et al., 2003 ; Wong et al., 2003 ) or did not examine effects on depression ( Oyserman & Fryberg, 2006 ; Romero & Roberts, 2003 ). There are also laboratory studies examining the effects of identity on emotional responses to racism-type manipulations ( Ellemers, 1997 ). These provide important insights into the nature of group and individual processes on identity development, but it is not clear that the measures used in these studies are of relevance to the hypothesis that racial/ethnic identity buffers the effects of exposure to racism on clinically significant distress.

Contributor Information

Elizabeth Brondolo, St. John’s University.

Nisha Brady, St. John’s University.

Melissa Pencille, St. John’s University.

Danielle Beatty, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Richard J. Contrada, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

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Limited-Government Values and the Subtlety of “New Racism”

Reviewed by Becky Mer

A Review of

The New "New Racism" Thesis: Limited Government Values and Race-Conscious Policy Attitudes

Jason Gainous

By considering white Americans’ limited-government values, policy attitudes, and levels of racial prejudice, this research explores how policy opinions can subtly mask underlying racism.

Introduction

This study responds to the public debate on why some white people oppose large-scale government programs. Several researchers argue that “old racism” may influence some white Americans’ policy attitudes. This theory holds that some white people oppose race-conscious policy, or any policy explicitly intended to benefit Black people because they perceive Black people to be biologically inferior. Examples of these race-conscious policies include affirmative action and government spending on aid for Black communities. In contrast to these perceptions, other researchers argue that “old racism” may have diminished over time, revealing a more subtle, yet still present, form of “new racism.” Proponents of this theory argue that, rather than opposing race-conscious policy on the grounds of overt racism, some white people object to such policies on the basis of promoting traditional American values, such as individualism and self-reliance. 

Dr. Jason Gainous suggests there is another more subtle objection to race-conscious policy which, unlike individualism, does not rely on descriptions of people or their personal characteristics. This theory, termed  “new racism” focuses on limited-government values, or opposition to big government, as a cover for some white people’s opposition to race-conscious policy. In this study, the author examines whether the effect of limited-government values in guiding white people’s attitudes about race-conscious policy is conditional on white people’s levels of racial prejudice. His findings suggest that this conditional effect does indeed exist. 

Dr. Gainous is a Professor and Department Chair at the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. His areas of expertise include research methods, political psychology, public opinion, and political behavior. Dr. Gainous is the co-author of two books, including, “Rebooting American Politics: The Internet Revolution” (2011). He has also authored and co-authored more than 35 journal articles, five book chapters, and numerous other academic publications.

Methods and Findings

To assess if the effect of limited-government values in determining white people’s perceptions regarding race-conscious policy is conditional on racial prejudice, Dr. Gainous used survey data from the 2008 American National Election Studies (ANES). The unit of analysis was the individual, and there were 1,667 white respondents in the sample, although several questions were not asked to the full cohort. Each of the study models includes a series of control variables, including feelings toward the beneficiaries of government aid programs. 

Before performing the main multivariate test, Dr. Gainous contextualized his test by first assessing differences in limited-government values and racial prejudice across a series of demographic variables, such as gender, age, income, education, and political party identification. This initial assessment resulted in several findings: 

1. Regarding both limited-government values and racial prejudice measurements, respondents identifying as either Republicans or males have significantly higher results than their respective counterparts. This implies that if there is, in fact, subtle racism in how limited-government values are applied to race-conscious policy attitudes.

2. White respondents at or above the median income tend to have stronger limited-government values but show no signs of heightened racial prejudice. Similarly, those above the mean age tend to have stronger limited-government values but do not show elevated signs of racial prejudice.

Dr. Gainous’ multivariate test directly assesses whether the effect of limited-government values on race-conscious policy opinions is conditional on levels of racial prejudice. The interactive results of this assessment confirm this relationship and provide persuasive evidence in support of the author’s “new racism” theory. However, the findings suggest that the effect of limited-government values on white people’s attitudes about racially ambiguous social welfare policy is not conditional on racial prejudice. Such policies seek to alleviate social and economic disadvantages generally rather than on the basis of race. This suggests that the way in which limited-government values are conditionally applied depends on the policy beneficiaries being explicitly Black.

Conclusions

“New racism” may operate with greater subtlety than previously understood. This study suggests that by relying on limited-government values, some white Americans have found a way to make racially based objections to race-conscious policy without expressing overt racism. This implies that white people’s policy opinions mask underlying racism in even subtler ways than claims of “by-your-bootstraps” individualism. 

The findings of this study indicate that white Americans are not absent of principle, values, and beliefs when developing an opinion pertaining to race-conscious policy. In fact, values may not be the only factor in such attitudes. Racial prejudice plays a key role and appears to work together with values.

It is important to note that the author is not contending that limited-government values are not a meaningful source of policy opinions and attitudes. Rather, the author claims it is possible that, for some white Americans, the way in which limited government values are applied to race-conscious policy attitudes may be rooted in racial prejudice.

• Institutional Change and Accountability
• Political Representation

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The Study Blog :

5 examples of thesis statements about racism for your next paper.

By Evans Apr 28 2021

Racism is a hot topic worldwide. It is one of the topics that never lack an audience. As expected, racism is also one of the most loved topics by teachers and even students. Therefore, it is not a surprise to be told to write an essay or a  research paper  on racism. You need to come up with several things within an incredible paper on racism, the most important one being a thesis statement. The term thesis statement sends shivers down the spine of many students. Most do not understand its importance or how to come up with a good thesis statement. Lucky for you, you have come to the right place. Here, you will learn all about  thesis statement  and get to sample a few racist thesis statements.

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Tips to writing a strong racism thesis statement

Keep it short.

A thesis statement is supposed to appear in the first paragraph of your essay. However, this does not mean that it should be the entire paragraph! A strong thesis statement should be one sentence (not an annoyingly long sentence), usually placed as the last sentence in the first paragraph.

Have a stand

A thesis statement should show what you aim to do with your paper. It should show that you are aware of what you are talking about. The thesis statement prepares the reader for what he or she is about to read. A wrong thesis statement will leave the reader of your paper unsure about your topic choice and your arguments.

Answer your research question

If you have been tasked with writing a  research paper  on why the Black Lives Matter movement has successfully dealt with racism, do not write a thesis statement giving the movement's history. Your thesis statement should respond to the research question, not any story you feel like telling. Additionally, the thesis statement is the summary of your sand and answer to the question at hand.

Express the main idea

A confused thesis statement expresses too many ideas while a strong, suitable one expresses the main idea. The thesis statement should tell the reader what your paper is all about. It should not leave the reader confused about whether you are talking about one thing or the other.

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Thesis Statements About Racism Samples

Racism in workplace thesis statement examples.

Racism is so rampant in the workplace. Thousands face discrimination daily in their workplaces. While this is definitely bad news, it gives us more data to choose from when working on an essay or research paper on racism in the workplace. Here are a few examples of thesis statements about racism in the workplace:

1.       Despite being in the The 21st century, racial discrimination is still rampant in the workplace. The efforts made by governments and world organizations have not helped to do away with this discrimination completely.

2.       Even with the unity that comes with digitalism, colour remains the one aspect of life that has continually caused a rift in this life. A lot of efforts have turned futile in the war against racism. The workplace is no exception. It is infiltrated with racial ideologies that remain within man's scope despite the professionalism within the workplace.

3.       Systemic racism is no new concept. It remains the favoured term with the tongues of many after food and rent. This is an indicator of how rooted the world is when it comes to the issue of racism. The now world has been configured to recognize racial differences and be blind to human similarity. Organizations have been established upon this social construct, and more often than it has led them into a ditch of failure. The loot that comes with racism is of great magnitude to bear.

Thesis statement about Racism in schools

Many academic institutions have been recognized for producing students who have passed with distinctions. Unfortunately, behind these overwhelming results lies a trail of many students who have suffered racism and have missed the honors board because of the color differences. Let's look at some of the examples of thesis statements on racism in schools:

1.       Merit should be the S.I unit upon which humanity is graded. Unfortunately, this is not the case, especially in schools, for the new merit score is the person's color. Many have found their way to the honour's board not because of merit but because they of the same color affiliation as the teacher.

2.       Enlightenment and civilization have found their way to the world through one important institution called schools. We owe that to it. Unfortunately, even with the height to which the world has reached civilization and enlightenment, one area has been left out and remains unaddressed- the world view of color. Despite the light and glamour, we see globally, one predominant view is called race. We continue to paint the world based on human color, even in schools.

3.       Bullying falls among the vices that have dire consequences to the victim. One of the spheres to which bullying exists is the sphere of color and race within the context of schools. Many student's confidence and esteem have been shuttered only because they are black or white. Many have receded to depression because they feel unwanted in the schools. One of the prominent times within American History is the Jim Crow Era, where racial segregation in schools within North Carolina was rampant. We saw schools have a section for white students and a separate section for black students within this era. The prevailing flag was black and white, and racism was the order of the day.

Final Thought

Coming up with a thesis statement does not have to difficult. No, not at all. Evaluate the topic or question and express yourself through the thesis statement from your stance or the answer. Mastering this one key in writing exams or assignments is one of the keys to scaling up the ladder of lucrative grades. However, practice is a discipline that will see you become a pro in writing a prolific strong, and catchy thesis statement. Henceforth, regard yourself as a pro, regard yourself as the best in thesis statement writing. If you are still having trouble with coming up with an excellent thesis statement, do not beat yourself up because of it.  Paper per hour  has the  best writers  who can help you with all your racism thesis statement needs.

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Racism and Education in Britain

Addressing Structural Oppression and the Dominance of Whiteness

• © 2023
• Gill Crozier 0

School of Education, Froebel College, University of Roehampton, London, UK

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

• Interrogates the nature of processes and the impact of racism in education
• Examines the societal and policy contexts around 'race' and the rise of right wing populism
• Utilises intersectionality, Whiteness Theory and Critical Race Theory to analyse young people's educational experiences

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Race, Inequality and Social Justice in Education (PSRISJE)

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

Front matter, introduction: racism in twenty-first-century britain—like a pendulum swinging.

Gill Crozier

Racism: History, Theories and Concepts

Reflexivity and the role of the white researcher in the field of ‘race’, anti/racism and education, ‘race’, policies and politics: managing diversity, from policy to practice: teaching and the curriculum—the process of racialisation and othering, reproducing racism and maintaining white supremacy: experiences in school and university, blinded by whiteness: problems and possibilities for teachers in the fight against racism and white supremacy, defend, rescue and protect: parents as social agents, conclusion: anti-racism or post-race—where are we now in the struggle against racism, correction to: racism and education in britain, back matter.

• racism in education
• higher education in britain
• white supremacy
• white privilege
• educational discrimination
• social class

About this book

 – Kalwant Bhopal , Professor and Director, Centre for Research in Race and Education, University of Birmingham, UK

  ‘Race and education have become big business once again, mostly through the efforts of government and right-wing think tanks to shift blame, normalise White supremacy and portray anti-racists as divisive troublemakers. This book offers a passionate, clear and thoroughly researched answer to the lies that pretend we live in a post-racial or colourblind world. Gill Crozier is one of the UK's leading antiracist scholars and this book pulls together different strands of her work to present a challenging and compelling analysis of the racism at the heart of education policy and practice. The book has many strengths, including an important account of Whiteness within the research process and a crucial discussion of the importance of both race and class, without falling into the trap of allowing class conscious research to silence a focus on racism. The voices of parents play a major role in the book, providing perceptive and powerful insights into the everyday processes that give racism such a central role in the education system.’ 

 –   David Gillborn , Emeritus Professor of Critical Race Studies, University of Birmingham, UK, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal 'Race Ethnicity and Education'. 

‘This inspiring, insightful and thought-provoking book uncovers how racism operates in and through education in the British context and beyond – and why so little has changed despite the pressure of obvious inequalities and discrimination. Using Critical Race Theory and Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of symbolic violence as analytical tools, Gill Crozier comprehensively traces how racism and White dominance permeate education policymaking, curriculum and teachers' practice and how they shape educational experiences, trajectories and outcomes in school and university. The central thesis is carefully and convincingly underpinned by disturbing evidence of the existence and experiences of racism from her own academic research, that of others and a wide range of political reports. Also, in view of the corrosive effects of neoliberal statehood on the possibilities of combating racism, an outlook on collective perspectives for action is given. The book is clearly writtenand has a reader-friendly structure. Beyond its important contribution to international academic discourse, it is also recommended reading for policymakers, practitioners and other interested parties.’

 – Mechtild Gomolla , Professor of Intercultural Pedagogy and Educational Justice, University of Education Karlsruhe, Germany

‘Racism and Education in Britain: Addressing Structural Oppression and the Dominance of Whiteness is a timely book. It comes at a juncture when the British government continues to rage against and seeks to silence educators daring to bring a focus on race within English classrooms.  A culmination of the author’s longstanding commitment to anti-racism in schools and higher education, this book offers a unique opportunity to engage with critical Whiteness, race and intersectionality theories as they are critically applied to the educational experiences of ethnically diverse students from the 1970s to present day, and parents from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds in England. For anyone in doubt about the entrenchment of Whiteness and White knowledge in British education, analyses of literature and art alongside educational policy analyses dispel such misgivings. Crucially, the book demonstrates that the responsibility for challenging institutional racism in education is not confined to Minority Ethnic communities and cannot be done without shining the lens on Whiteness. As such, the book has much to offer educators, graduates, researchers and policymakers alike.’

 – Uvanney Maylor , Professor at the Institute for Research in Education, University of Bedfordshire, UK

‘In Racism and Education in Britain: Addressing Structural Oppression and the Dominance of Whiteness , Gill Crozier invites us to think beyond what we take for granted by exploring the subtle, hidden and multiple ways in which education, from teaching to policy,disadvantages BAME people in the UK. Written in a very accessible style, this book brings together decades of critical, educational research on race and ethnic inequalities, focusing on highly contemporary issues, such as the decolonisation of the curriculum, the role of racialisation in doing research, the resistance of BAME parents and the importance of including social class and gender in developing an understanding of race and ethnic inequalities in education. Although focusing on the UK, it offers a wealth of inspiration for critical researchers working in different national contexts. A great starting point for anyone interested in this field.’

–     Peter Stevens , Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Ghent University, Belgium

Authors and Affiliations

About the author, bibliographic information.

Book Title : Racism and Education in Britain

Book Subtitle : Addressing Structural Oppression and the Dominance of Whiteness

Authors : Gill Crozier

Series Title : Palgrave Studies in Race, Inequality and Social Justice in Education

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18931-9

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Education , Education (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-031-18930-2 Published: 06 March 2023

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-031-18933-3 Published: 06 March 2024

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-18931-9 Published: 05 March 2023

Series ISSN : 2524-633X

Series E-ISSN : 2524-6348

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XVIII, 284

Topics : Higher Education , Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Crime , Sociology of Education , Social Justice, Equality and Human Rights

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How to Write a Racism Thesis Statement: A Step-by-Step Guide (With Examples)

Jul 20, 2023

Jul 20, 2023 | Blog

As a student, you will handle many subjects and assignments.

One topic that is popular for essays and research papers is Racism.

Many resources are on the topic, so students assume a racism essay is easy.

The challenge you will face with a racism essay is not content but a thesis statement.

The racism thesis statement should be powerful and something your audience can understand and relate to.

This article will provide helpful guidelines and tips on writing a racism thesis statement and examples of powerful racist thesis statements.

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What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement is the backbone of a persuasive paper.

The thesis states your position or opinion as a factual claim and guides readers through their journey with you in this essay.

I am informing them on how they will navigate through it.

A good thesis statement is the equivalent of a preacher giving a sermon or a politician making an announcement.

As you craft your paper’s introduction, your goal will be to pique interest by announcing what you’re going to say in-depth throughout the rest of your essay.

Do you know how a preacher or politician might say, “Here’s what I’m going to tell you”?

The thesis statement is your announcement of what you’re trying to convey.

Difference between a TOPIC and a THESIS STATEMENT

A topic is a subject or good idea you would like to explore further.

A thesis statement is a specific argumentative stance you will take on the subject.

For example, Racism is a topic, while a thesis statement about Racism could be:

“While racism remains a problem in America, it can be reduced or potentially eliminated through the effective implementation of diversity training programs in schools and corporate institutions.”

How do I get started with writing a thesis statement on racial discrimination?

Use these three steps:

(1) brainstorm what you think

(2) refine your idea

(3) rewrite your idea in the form of a central claim

Let’s use a hypothetical sociology class assignment asking you to construct a response to the racism problem on our college campus.

Step 1: Brainstorm what you think 

You start by writing, “Racism is a prominent issue on our college campus.”

Even though this is a great starting point, it is not well-defined. It’s’ simply restating the assignment.

At this point, what you need to do is to brainstorm. On this given topic, what do you think about it?

What’s your opinion on the given topic?

How will you support your opinion?

What examples and facts can you provide?

Try putting these questions on paper and writing down your answers. You will then use the solutions you wrote down to formulate a stronger racism thesis statement.

Step 2: Refine your idea

One of the proven best methods of doing this is using the following model:

On a piece of paper, write this: “I think that ____________.

Using your initial brainstorming idea, fill in the blank.

In our case, it will be this: “I think that racism remains a problem on our college campus.”

While you have rewritten your rough idea at this stage, it is starting to form a thesis.

Next, complete this model as you continue building your thesis: I think racism Racism remains a problem on our college campus because __________.

Then you write: IRacism Racism remains a problem on our college campus because it does not require mandatory diversity training for all of its students.

Okay, now you are progressing and heading in a good direction.

Let’s reword the thesis to make it appear more “academic.”

Step 3: Rewrite your idea in the form of a central claim 

We need to replace the word “you” to make the thesis statement appear less personal and like the main claim.

To achieve this, delete the “I think that” from the sentence:

“Racism remains a problem on our college campus because the college does not require mandatory diversity training for all of its students.”

Hurray! You now have your thesis statement—many congratulations.

Essential details to keep in mind when writing a racism thesis statement

1) your racism thesis statement should appear at the beginning of the paper.

When writing a Racism essay on Racism, the thesis statement is important.

Readers should be given a clear idea of what your essay will cover and how it will unfold.

The racism thesis statement is an outlook for the rest of your paper in the introductory paragraph.

The introductory paragraph should clarify that you’re approaching this topic from all angles and know how complicated this issue can be in today’s society.

2) Your theRacismatement on Racism should give direction to the rest of your paper

A thesis statement on Racism gives your reader direction and provides several reasons for elaborating on a specific claim.

If you wish to accomplish this, your statement should expRacismhe the idea of Racism in-depth with different examples that will persuade readers.

For example: ”Racism does not exist” while still, an argument is insufficient as it has a false sense of structure.

However, if your thesis is that “racism does not exist because antiracist movements have grown in power and number over the years,” you can provide two reasons to support this claim within one sentence.

Such shapes the rest of your paper while leaving much time for evidence discussion later.

Such gives the paper the needed shape as evidence is discussed in detail to support this claim.

3) Ensure that you have a debatable argument

Although it’s important to question any information you are given, there is a certain knowledge that the public already values.

For exampRacismeryone, he knows Racism is a social and moral vice.

This means coming up with such a topic would not interest their audience.

Your argument becomes a racism thesis statement once you add an aspect.

For instance, oRacismld says, “Racism is the most harmful social and moral vice on earth. we might lose our unique identities and multicultural features if not eradicated soon enough.”

4) Keep your Racism thesis statement short!

It’s effortless to make your racism essay more interesting if you keep it short.

If you pick a broad topic, the magnitude of information will almost certainly give you trouble.

A good thesis statement should be small and localized rather than large or generalizing.

For example: “White police brutality on black people among many other things shows that Racism still exists in the United States” would make a powerful claim about something that was happening more often now than before

Tips On How To Write A Racism Thesis Statement

Before writing your thesis statement on Racism, consider the following guidelines.

Find a racism topic or issue to write about

Racism is a broad issue that continues to plague the world even today.

Therefore, finding an informative topic from which you can develop a thesis statement shouldn’t be difficult.

You can see Racism approach Racism through other social issues such as art, politics, economy, equitability, poverty, and history.

2. Pick a topic that is interesting to you

You might not be familiar with all the Racism surrounding Racism.

As asRacismoned earlier, Racism is a broad topic; there are many approaches you can take in your paper.

Therefore, to have an easier time developing a thesis, pick a racist topic that interests you.

For instance, if you are conversant with the history of America, your thesis statement could focuRacismhe the effects of Racism during the Civil Rights Movement that began in 1954 and ended in 1968.

3. Hook your reader

As you write your thesis statement, try to include a hook.

A hook is a statement that grabs the attention of a reader.

Try hooking your reader by relating your thesis to popular culture.

You could even refer to current issues on the news or relate to popular television programs, movies, or books.

4. Avoid offensiveRacismage

Remember, Racism is a personal issue; it is open to bias depending on your thinking.

Therefore, most of the issues surrounding this topic are controversial.

Avoid offensive and rude language when discussing a controversial topic in an academic paper.

Examples Of Racism Thesis Statements

It would help if you had a well-thought-out and well-constructed thesis statement to get a good score in your racism-related research paper or essay.

The following are examples of thesis statements on different racism topics.

Existence of Racism

Such an essay tries to prove that racial segregation is still a significant social problem.

Therefore, your thesis statement should focus on the problems racial segregation causes.

Consider the following example:

It is a fact that police killings involving people of color are more than white people. Joshua Correll of the University of Colorado confirmed this when he designed a game where the participants played cops. The game results indicated that, despite the people playing cop, they were more willing to kill a person of color and showed hesitation when the suspect was a white persRacismis. Racism continues to plague society.

Use our free Thesis Statement Generator Tool Here .

Workplace-related Racism

Racism is a form of prejudice often experienced in a workplace environment.

A workplace powerful racism thesis statement could read as follows:

Prejudice in a workplace environment is a backward practice that undermines productivity. In the professional sphere, white people are considered mentally superior, and therefore they get the top jobs that pay higher wages. Blacks are considered physically endowed and land physical labor jobs, which generally pay lower.

Anti-racism movements

Anti-racism is a phrase coined by people who formed movements to fight Racismnsequences of Racism.

Martin Luther King Jr led the greatest antiracist movement between the early 50s and the late 60s.

Another key antiracist figure was Nelson Madiba Mandela of South Africa.

Anti-racism also covers the beliefs and policies set to combat racial prejudice.

An anti-racism essay thesis statement should evoke emotion from a reader.

The following is an example:

Anti-racism movement leaders were treated inhumanely; Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years, and Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated. But, society today would not be as egalitarian as it is without them. Their sacrifices are the sole reason blacks and whites can walk on the same street and work together to create a brighter future.

Cause and effect

You can choose to write about Racism and the effect of Racism.

For example, ignoRacismis a cause of Racism that results in fear and eventually extreme violence.

The following is an example of a thesis statement that focuses on ignorance and fear as thRacismary causes of Racism.

Undoubtedly, Racism has negative consequences, the key among them being fear and violence, resulting from a need to protect themselves. Racism major cause of Racism is ignorance. Uneducated and unexposed feel threatened by people of a different race. Such people condone and practice this prejudice without considering its negative effects and consequences on the individuals they discriminate against and society.

Racism Thesis statements based on art and literature

Books, music, and movies cover a wide variety of racist topics.

The following are examples of literary artworks you can base a racism essay on:

Othello is a play by Shakespeare that addresses some delicate sociRacismssues such as Racism.

You could develop a thesis statemeRacismhlighting Racism in the play.

Othello, who was black, was highly disrespected by Lago and other characters such as Emilia, Roderigo, and Brabantio. These characters labeled him ”Barbary horse,” ”an old black ram,” ”thick lips,” and other demeaning names. He was also abused for marrying a Venetian woman. All this shows a strong conviction that one race is superior and a barbaric intolerance towards the ”inferior” race.

2. To kill a mockingbird

This book by Harper Lee is popular because it portrays the struggles of a black man in the southern states in the early 20 th century.

The book is a good source for Racism essays as it depicts Racism and its effects easily and comprehensibly.

The following is a good example of a racist thesis statement from To Kill a Mocking Bird :

Tom Robinson was suspected of murdering Mayella Ewell, a white woman, and was sentenced not because of any evidence but because he was black. Like Atticus Finch, Scout, and Jem, who tried to defend him, White characters were given shaming names such as ”Nigger lovers.” The story in the book clearly shows the tribulations a black man went through and how his word meant nothing.

3. Disney films

Disney films are popular for their fascinating stories and world-class acting and production.

However, scrutiny of several films will realize a certain degree of racial prejudice in how the films portray characters.

The following is an example of a thesis statement focusing on racial prejudice in Disney films:

There is a significant degree of racial prejudice in how Disney portrays characters in their films. For example, in Jungle Book, the gorillas communicated in an African vernacular language. Another example is Lady and the Tramp, where the cat villains had slanted eyes and spoke with an East Asian accent. The film production company portrays protagonists as white and antagonists as people of color.

4. Advertisements

The advertisement sector also depicts racial prejudice.

To demonstrate, consider this thesis statement:

Several surveys show that black people are underrepresented in commercials, mainstream media, and online ads. According to the US Census Bureau 2010 records, blacks  and other racial minorities represent 30%. Yet, only 7% of ads involve black people, while other racial minorities are hardly ever represented.

Racism is a fairly easy subject for an essay and research paper .

However, it has so many sources and different points of view that selecting one idea to focus on in creating a thesis statement can be problematic.

But, with the guidelines shared above, developing a thesis statement for your racism essay will not be as difficult.

Remember, you need to let the reader know your point of view and demonstrate your objectiveness on the issue.

Examples of thesis statements on Racism

• Racism worldwide can end if the global collaboration and interracial and intercultural communication continue to increase.
• Racial minorities in America still face covert prejudice despite America’s institutional and societal changes in the sixties.
• Multiculturalism has failed as an institutional practice in Europe, which can be determined by the increase in hate crime cases and racial minority issues.
• Despite the significance of affirmative action in countering racial prejudice, there are concerns that it promotes racial differences.
• There exists a misconception that affirmative action is a women’s agenda.
• Racial prejudice founded on a single person’s actions but taken to be the general state of affairs for the given race is wrong.
• Racism in the workplace adversely impacts workers’ productivity as it affects their aggressiveness.
• It costs nothing to point out racist actions in the workplace.
• The majority of Racism in the world relies on Racism as a means of garnering votes and grabbing power.
• The rate of racial hatred and related crimes is high in Australian universities.
• Students’ diversity can play a significant role in reducing racial crimes and related issues.
• Embracing diversity in the workplace can help reduce incidences of racial intolerance.
• Transgender, bisexual, gay, and lesbian Americans have experienced prejudice from society.
• In the thirties, the Blacks lived in hatred and poverty, which was the cause of death of many innocent lives.
• It was considered strange to show affection to Black Americans in the past.
• Despite the frowning among most citizens in America, racial prejudice is a common practice, especially in the brave home.
• Racial equality is a social barrier that Americans are yet to overcome.
• There are wide geographical and psychological distances between Asians and Blacks in America. Such distances can be attributed to the segregation by the American society government or the white-centric media.

I am dedicated to creating engaging blog posts that provide valuable insights and advice to help students excel in their studies. From study tips to time management strategies, my goal is to empower students to reach their full potential.

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Motion Picture Academy Vows to 'Thoughtfully' Address Criticism of 'Antisemitic Tropes' in Exhibit on Jewish Founders | Exclusive

T he Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has pledged to "move quickly and thoughtfully" to address criticism of a new Academy museum exhibit dedicated to the Jewish founders of Hollywood as perpetuating "antisemitic tropes" and focusing on the founders' flaws rather than their achievements. 

In a statement to TheWrap on Monday, the Academy acknowledged the criticism from multiple Jewish members and promised to make adjustments: 

"Some members of the Jewish community have come forward to express some concerns, and [we] are looking at how to address those concerns best while continuing to share an authentic understanding of these complex individuals and the time they lived in," the statement read. "As part of this process, we are continuing to engage with the community members who have come forward with constructive feedback and welcome these conversations. We hope to move quickly and thoughtfully in this process." 

A series of explosive letters to AMPAS leadership by prominent Jewish members in the last two weeks criticized the exhibit for taking pains to point out Jewish founders' flaws with terms like "oppressive," "tyrant" "predator" and "frugal." 

The permanent exhibit "Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital" debuted in mid-May. It deals with studio founders including the Warner brothers, led by Jack (ne Jacob) and Harry (ne Hirsch Wonsal) Warner, and also includes Harry Cohn at Columbia, Marcus Loew and Louis B. Mayer at MGM and Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor at Paramount, among others. The exhibit was created in  response to criticism that  the $480 million museum that opened in 2021 had entirely omitted the Jews who had founded the industry. 

"The focus is not on the founder's achievements, but on their sins," reads one of the letters addressed to AMPAS CEO Bill Kramer, Academy Museum President Jacqueline Stewart, who exited last week, and the exhibit's curator, Dara Jaffe. 

The letter by Patrick Moss, co-chair of the WGA Jewish Writers Committee, provided to TheWrap continued: "The words used to describe these men are the following: 'frugal,' 'nepotistic,' 'harmful,' 'womanizing,' 'oppressive,' 'brash' 'tyrant,' 'cynical,' 'white-washed,' 'predator…' and on it goes. 

"THIS VERY EXHIBIT IS COMPLICIT in the hatred of American Jews, by using antisemitic tropes and dog-whistles."

The scathing critique is one of six letters or articles obtained independently by TheWrap from prominent members of the Hollywood community, including Moss, filmmakers Kimberly Peirce, who is a member of the museum's inclusivity committee,  and Alma Ha'rel, who has resigned from the same committee, along with showrunner Keetgi Kogan and television writer Michael Kaplan. Kogan and Kaplan, in separate letters, reached remarkably similar conclusions about the exhibit. Andy Lewis similarly wrote about the issue in The Ankler over the weekend.

"You effectively lay the prejudice, racism and misogyny of the 20th century at the feet of the Jewish founders of the movie business," wrote Kogan. "Your thesis seems to be that these Jewish immigrants were grasping social-climbers who chose to assimilate into American society on the backs of exploited women and people of colour. What's more, you assert that it is these Jewish immigrants alone who created a fictitious version of America, whitewashed free of discrimination, for their own personal gain." 

She concluded: "It is almost as if, instead of celebrating the birth of the industry, the Academy is apologizing to the public for having to reveal a dark corner of its history it wishes it could have kept hidden."

Ha'rel declined to comment for this story. Peirce did not respond to attempts to reach her for this article.

The Academy declined a request to speak to Jaffe about the intention behind the exhibit.

A visit to the exhibit reveals a narrow 30-foot gallery with panels dedicated to each of the studios that were founded in the first decades of the 20th century: Warner Bros., MGM, RKO, Universal, Paramount, Fox and Columbia, with descriptions of the Jewish men behind each of them. The letter-writers took issue with the text of the panels, which are in English and Spanish.

"It was a period of oppressive control," reads the introductory panel on "Studio Origins," explaining the studio system where eight majors "dominated the industry." 

Also in the exhibit:

* In a description of less than 100 words, Harry Cohn is described as "a tyrant and predator," with an office modeled on "Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, built to intimidate anyone who entered."  

* Jack Warner is described "brash and irreverent" and a "womanizer" who was "frugal" in shaping the Warner Bros. culture. 

* In the Universal panel, Carl Laemmle is described as rising from errand boy to running the studio, "where his kindness and nepotism earned him the moniker "Uncle Carl."

* The 1927 movie "The Jazz Singer" starring Al Jolson is highlighted as the first widely released feature with synchronized sound. But the brief description calls out the movie's "blackface, perpetuating a century-long tradition in the United States that caricatures and dehumanizes Black people." 

"I think there's a certain amount of antisemitism, whether conscious or not, but also a presentism," said Kaplan, in visiting the gallery with a reporter. "Some of this is valid, but the double standard and lack of context is infuriating to many of us." 

Kaplan pointed out that none of the other exhibits call out their subjects for criticism in this way. "This exhibit shows the villains," he said. "Every other part of the museum shows the victims." 

Another critic who declined to be named was upset that the exhibit did not name any Jewish filmmakers who fled antisemitism, like director Billy Wilder, who became a legend of classic Hollywood cinema after fleeing Europe in 1934.

Even more ironic, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the parent organization behind the museum, was originally conceived by Louis B. Mayer and created by a group of moguls and industry leaders in 1927.

As in many areas of the museum, a consciously progressive tone dominates, reminding the visitor of the ways that marginalized communities were absent from the movie industry, and where stereotypes perpetuated racist norms. For example, a brief, three-sentence panel that mentions the advent of Western movies makes sure to note: "However, most Westerns -- some referenced in this gallery -- featured offensive depictions of Indigenous characters, often portrayed by non-Indigenous actors."  

A documentary narrated by TCM host Ben Mankiewicz plays in a connecting space, and a large video map displays where the studios were built as they began to transform Los Angeles. 

The documentary traces the humble beginnings of the Jewish studio founders, and notes the antisemitism that was widespread at the time. But it also notes that the moguls perpetuated racism, saying: "Hollywood films… generally excluded, stereotyped or vilified people of color and LGBT+ characters and perpetuated ableism and sexism with rare exceptions. In Hollywood, to become American was to adopt and reflect oppressive beliefs and representations." 

Hollywood philanthropist Haim Saban, whose name is on the main museum building after he and his wife Cheryl made a $50 million gift, the museum's largest, said he was "very happy" with the exhibit and not bothered by its language or message.

"These people should say thank you to the Academy for recognizing the contribution of Jews to Hollywood," he told TheWrap.  

But Oscar-nominated producer Lawrence Bender also visited the galleries and emerged exasperated. The Jewish moguls who built Hollywood "loved movies, they loved making movies," he said. "There's no sense of that here."

In a climate of rising antisemitism , he said, the exhibit seems to be an additional slap. "It feels like one more thing," he said. "Are there more important things in the world? Sure. Is it the most important? Maybe not. But -- it's one more thing. And this museum is presenting history. What's missing is a true love of cinema. Where does it say that they loved making movies?" 

Editor's note: This story was updated on June 3 at 9 pm.

The post Motion Picture Academy Vows to 'Thoughtfully' Address Criticism of 'Antisemitic Tropes' in Exhibit on Jewish Founders | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap .

Employer Tuition Assistance

Does your employer offer assistance with financing education for employees? The answer may surprise you. Many organizations financially contribute to their employees’ education as part of a competitive benefits package, and yours might be one of them. Tuition remission, tuition benefits, or tuition reimbursement, is when an employer provides some form of financial support for educational coursework. It can have many forms and your employer will stipulate the terms of the benefit, including how much they cover, how to apply, when you are eligible to begin receiving the benefit, and what coursework is covered.  

If you are considering going back to school for a degree like the  NYU School of Global Public Health Master of Public Health (MPH), here are some ways to get started:

First, research whether your employer regularly offers education benefits, or if you will be blazing a new trail. If your company has an existing policy, you can often find information about it in your employee handbook or human resources (HR) website. If an employer reimbursement plan is not something that has been offered in the past, that does not mean it is not possible. 

Whether your employer has a set policy or not, you will want to gather a variety of materials before approaching anyone, so that you know exactly what your needs will be throughout your program. Spend some time gathering information on how many courses you need to take, what the tuition and fees for the program are, and what deadlines the program has for financial aid applications and payments. For cost information on NYU School of Global Public Health’s degree programs, visit our  tuition and financial aid page .

Once you have decided to apply to a part-time MPH program, you will want to inform your boss of your plans. However, HR is the best first stop for information on fringe benefits like tuition reimbursement programs.

More than anyone else at a company, HR understands the benefits that are available to employees and can help you strategize the best way to use them. Make sure you are upfront with them about the program and how many courses you are expected to take in a year. Your employer may only cover a certain number of credits, so letting them know the details of the program can help them make sure that you are able to best utilize your tuition remission.

Although many organizations have a tuition reimbursement benefit, some may require you to make a case for why you are eligible. For example, your company may only cover your tuition if your degree is in the same field as your organization, or if it will better prepare you to do your job. 

To make a business case for tuition reimbursement, find ways to link your current and future role and responsibilities to your organization’s strategic priorities. Being able to explain the specific additional value you can add with a degree from NYU GPH is critical to gaining support.

Laying out all you hope to gain from the degree, and how it will directly benefit your employer, can help you make a case to HR and your boss for why they should provide some tuition assistance. For example, as healthcare becomes more and more competitive and transitions from a fee-for-service to a value-based model, leaders will be required to have a broader understanding of the business. In particular, healthcare leaders will need to be very well-versed in the relationship between payer and provider. It is exactly this sort of broad understanding that an MPH can help provide.

Most organizations understand that offering tuition reimbursement benefits help to reduce turnover and improve employee morale, but you can focus on how what you are learning will allow you to do more for the company and move ahead in their ranks.

A master’s degree is a big undertaking, and your employer will want to know you can handle the challenge on top of your usual workload. Make sure to address these concerns head on, by showing how you have been able to multitask at work in the past, and explaining all the ways that your graduate degree will benefit the company in the short- and long-term.

Another issue that might arise? Your loyalty to the company. Organizations sometimes worry that they may invest in an employee who then leaves for another opportunity. To help address these concerns up front, you may formally commit to a number of years post-graduation. For example, if you receive $20,000 in tuition support, you might commit to staying at the organization for a minimum of two years post-graduation. 

If, after taking all the steps above, the answer is “no,” do not lose hope. There are  other options for financial aid and you can always try again next semester, in case anything has changed. Some employers may not offer tuition reimbursement programs, but can help you obtain your degree in other ways, like providing tuition assistance in the form of low-interest education loans or giving you a more flexible schedule.

If the answer is yes, now is the right time to work with HR in order to figure out exactly how your education benefits work. Make sure you understand how the benefit funds are disbursed, when it is processed, and if it is taxed—and if so, how much will come out of your paycheck and when. Studying the benefit terms and conditions will help you utilize the benefit effectively, and starting early will allow you time to figure everything out before you begin classes. 

Investing in an MPH degree can be a wise decision with an excellent ROI for both you and your employer. From an organization’s standpoint, offering tuition reimbursement helps reduce turnover and improves their workforce, by helping employees build their knowledge and skills in the field. For an individual, it is a higher education degree that can be obtained while they continue to work and move forward in their healthcare careers.

If you are interested in pursuing your MPH, please  contact us with any questions you may have. Our Admissions Ambassadors are here to help you with your questions about tuition assistance and financing your degree.

The Age of the Rhinestone Cowgirl: How Beyoncé brings glitz to the Wild Wild West

How beyoncé's 'cowboy carter' punctuates (and interrogates) a growing western aesthetic..

Cowboy hats are everywhere right now. You see them on artsy posters in college rooms. They're a bachelorette must-have. And, perhaps most importantly, a cowboy hat sits atop Beyoncé's blond tresses on the cover of her latest album "Cowboy Carter."

A harbinger of something bigger, the hat signifies a cultural reckoning disguising itself as a fashion moment. Don't look now, but the cowgirl is remaking herself.

This "new" Western chic is not exactly Jessie from "Toy Story." Instead, it’s fiercely feminine, heavily accessorized, and dipped in glitz. A Rhinestone Cowgirl™, if you will. While Beyoncé's latest work certainly punctuates it, the aesthetic has been steadily gaining traction for over half a decade.

In January 2018, the same year Lil Nas X rode "Old Town Road" to the top of the charts, British Vogue ran a story with the subhead “Less Rodeo Cowboy, More Rodeo Drive.” It was that same year that internet archivist Bri Malandro coined the term "Yeehaw Agenda."

Where the worn leather quality of country music’s signature cowboys (think George Strait and Willie Nelson) once contrasted against a rhinestoned flashiness in their female counterparts (think Shania Twain and Dolly Parton), the new cowgirl challenges the notion that they should be separate. It bedazzles the Stetson and makes women worthy interlocutors of the Wild Wild West. 

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“Country music, so much of it has been in the gender binary – men are like this, women are like this,” Kinitra Brooks , a professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in the study of Black women, genre fiction, and popular culture said. "I think that the glitzy glam, she’s taking it and playing with it but also in some ways possibly blurring the gender lines and saying you can be both/and instead of either/or," Brooks said of Beyoncé's latest work.

While "Cowboy Carter" deals in more "classic" Western fare, its precursor "Renaissance" also featured Beyoncé atop a horse, only this time bedecked in shimmering metallics. The aesthetics, together, read as a powerful statement about who gets to assume the costumery of frontiersmen. “All these looks are very much in conversation with each other” Brooks reminds.

The Genuine Article

On a cover for W Magazine to promote the album, Knowles dawned a custom Louis Vuitton tan suit with golden brown and turquoise detailing reminiscent of Porter Wagoner. The headline read "In Beyoncé's Country, All Are Welcome." The word country does double duty here − referring not only to America but to the country music genre.

When announcing "Cowboy Carter," Beyoncé said the album was born out of an experience where she felt unwelcome (read: the 2016 CMAs when her performance of "Daddy Lessons" received backlash online.) Country music is a business notoriously hostile to outsiders, every bit as stringent about what makes for an authentic American experience as the tropes that govern its songs. But Ms. Knowles' chilly reception would be hard to blame on anything but racism given she's a Texas native, a veteran act of the Houston Rodeo , and the song she chose to perform was a toe-tapping banjo ballad built around bible-toting, gun-slinging imagery. Her bonafides were hardly counterfeit.

On "Cowboy Carter's" opening track, Knowles fires back, singing "They used to say I spoke too country\then the rejection came said I wasn't country 'nuff\said I wouldn't saddle up\If that ain't country tell me what is\plant my bare feet on solid ground for years."

That Beyoncé is the genuine article, a maverick and a frontiersman, a daughter of the American South and a certified rodeo queen invites an authenticity that has long lay at the center of the debate over Western iconography. Fans aren't "dressing up" as John Wayne when they don the Stetson, they're dressing up as her − every bit a cowboy.

Only hers is a cowboy that brings to light buried truth. It pays homage to the Black cowboy, a figure largely scrubbed from popular Western lore. Smithsonian magazine reports an estimated one in four cowboys were Black and as Malandro has chronicled , the rodeo and westernwear have long been part and parcel of Black culture. “For a goodly number of Black folks in the South, this isn’t a costume – this is their everyday wear,” Brooks, who grew up in New Orleans and has childhood memories of Black cowboys in the parades, says.

"There hasn’t been ever in the history of mainstream country music a record that dominates the narrative that comes from a feminized, marginalized and radical position," Marcus Dowling , a country music reporter at The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY network told the New York Times' Popcast . Perched atop Beyoncé's head, the cowboy hat screams of a new chapter. The American Requiem (track one on the album) vibrates not only in the music but in the symbolism. "Them old ideas, yeah, are buried here, yeah" she croons as if willing her audience to stretch their imaginations wider. Any and all can sidle up to the saloon counter, push forward an empty glass and demand to be served.

Beyoncé's opus and its accompanying artwork do not mimic, they reinvent. They take the twine of what came before and rework it in new hands, warming it to a modern world and making of it a brand new symbol− Cowboy Carter: lone ranger, siren for the American story.

Rhinestoned Cowgirl™

"When you think about the cowboy aesthetic it was really historically associated with men," Dayna Isom Johnson, a trend expert for Etsy said, "so now this is a style that is being embraced by all in their own unique way and really kind of blurring those traditional lines."

That blurring gestures at a larger thesis behind the aesthetics: for all that the cowboy is in modern lore: a renegade, a boundary-breaker, a certified main character − a woman can be that too.

“She is assuming the camouflage of the guys.” Vanessa Friedman, the New York Times' chief fashion critic wrote recently , pointing out Knowles' western ode doesn’t exactly lean into prairie skirts. She keeps the chaps and ten-gallon hats but is sure to add a certain pageantry −booty shorts with a bolo tie for example, or rhinestone-encrusted leather pants. She's conjuring the image of the masculine cowboy, then painting herself within its outline with just enough flourish to assert that embodying the spirit of such a figure does not require shirking your feminized markers.

“That’s the beauty of Beyoncé right, we all know and love her for her pop star glam and now that she is merging into this new western-themed look you kind of have the best of both worlds,” Isom Johnson says. The products flying off Etsy's virtual shelves demonstrate that marriage, she reports. Metallic threading through a suede jacket, for example, or a cowboy hat with rhinestone embellishments.

“Cultural icons like Beyoncé, she kind of sets the bar for what people are going to be inspired by and there’s so many different ways that that can be translated,” Isom Johnson said. In the first 3 months of 2024 compared to last year there was a 428% increase in searches for horseshoe charms on Etsy and a 124% increase for cowboy boots, she reports.

E-commerce accelerator  Pattern previously shared with USA TODAY that in the weeks following the album release, there was an 86% increase in demand for black cowboy hats and a 38% increase for bolo ties.

American Requiem: For love of country

Expanding the Stetson's brim so more can find a home underneath it is no small project − and it starts with the music. To do it Beyoncé enlists prophets of country's past and frontierswomen of its future.

“I think because she’s Beyoncé there can be some disregard for her being a true student of music and it’s so clear that she does her research,” Brooks said. The album features a cover of Dolly Parton's "Jolene," reworked from "please don't take my man" to "take my man, I dare you." It also traffics in plenty of the genre's signature tropes: the scorned, maybe murderous lover in "Daughter," and the lonesome blues in "16 Carriages."

Use of the American Flag is another key choice Beyoncé makes on "Cowboy Carter." She holds a flag on the cover and is draped in its colors. On "Ya Ya," a mid-album boot-stomper, she sings "My family lived and died in America\Good ol' USA\whole lotta red in that white and blue\history can't be erased."

If the greatest act of love is honesty, the entire work − music and imagery, is about love of country.

"I think she’s saying in a way that I’m American too, I’m country too and if you can’t acknowledge this America will die. A requiem is a funeral,” Brooks says, referring to the album's opening track.

“She is speaking for those who have come before, speaking for the ancestors, speaking as an inheritor of the traditions that came before her and is saying that it is open to me as well. And if America is unable to deal with these sort of multiplicities it will die,” Brooks said.