How discrimination, class, and gender intersect to affect Black Americans’ well-being
IMAGE:
TEKISHA RICE AND BRIAN OGOLSKY.
view moreCREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS.
URBANA, Ill. – Black Americans experience racial discrimination as a chronic stressor that influences their quality of life. But it exists in conjunction with other social factors that may modify the impact in various ways. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explores how discrimination, gender, and social class affect individual well-being and relationship quality for Black Americans.
“It’s well documented that discrimination negatively impacts individual quality of life, but research on how it affects relationships is mixed. Some studies find it has a negative effect, others that it has no effect, and some even find a positive effect, such as more partner support. We were interested in how intersecting dimensions of sexism and classism could provide more insights,” said lead author TeKisha Rice, now an assistant professor at Virginia Tech. Rice conducted the research as a doctoral student at the U. of I. Brian Ogolsky, professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at U. of I., is a co-author on the paper, which is published in the Journal of Family Psychology.
Rice and Ogolsky found that racial discrimination and financial strain were associated with lower levels of psychological well-being. However, the anticipated interaction between factors varied by gender.
“We found that among women who had higher levels of financial strain, racial discrimination predicted lower levels of quality of life, but this association did not show up for men in the study,” Rice said. “There is a gender dynamic in the way discrimination affects psychological and relational well-being. This aligns with other research indicating that Black women, in particular, may take on more of the emotional labor of their relationships.”
The researchers used data from the Survey of Midlife in the United States (MIDUS), a large-scale, longitudinal study that measures health and psychological well-being in individuals across the U.S. They included respondents who identified as Black or African American, and who were married or cohabitating. Participants ranged from 27 to 83 years old, with an average age of 53, and all were in heterosexual relationships.
The findings also speak to the potential resilience of Black individuals in the face of discrimination, the researchers said.
“One of the theories we use to understand the results is the Mundane Extreme Environmental Stress (MEES) model, which states that racial discrimination is mundane because it is common, but also extreme because of the negative impact that it can have on people's lives,” Rice noted. “As people get older, the way they respond to discrimination may be different. Perhaps they have gotten used to ignoring it, or they have effective coping mechanisms in place already.”
This can help explain the non-significant findings for Black men in this dataset, which had a large proportion of middle-aged respondents.
In addition, there are different types and levels of discrimination, Ogolsky added. “A single, major discriminatory event could influence well-being differently than low-level chronic discrimination. We need to think about these events with a fine-toothed comb, looking at both frequency and salience of discrimination.”
As the MEES theory indicates, Black Americans may come to expect discrimination as a part of life. But the chronic stress of financial strain might be felt in material ways that impact relationship experiences.
“For example, a couple may have to talk about bills and figure out how to ration expenses. It’s not that financial strain is more negative than discrimination, but it may be felt more directly on a day-to-day basis,” Ogolsky stated.
Future studies should explore the gender differences in how Black Americans are navigating or experiencing racial discrimination. For practitioners who work with couples, it’s important to be attentive to how each partner might be responding differently to discrimination and the ways it can generate potential distress, the researchers concluded.
The paper, “Discrimination, Gender, and Class: An Intersectional Investigation of Black Americans’ Personal and Relational Well-Being,” is published in the Journal of Family Psychology [DOI: 10.1037/fam0001173].
This research was completed as a part of the first author’s dissertation, funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (Grant No. DGE -1144245).
JOURNAL
Journal of Family Psychology
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Data/statistical analysis
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Discrimination, gender, and class: An intersectional investigation of Black Americans’ personal and relational well-being.
Moving “beyond Mendel” in genetics education can reduce racism, new study suggests
Data from a series of randomized trials in the United States suggests that if teachers move genetics instruction toward more complex genomics concepts, they can help students have a more scientifically accurate understanding of race. This can protect students from believing in unscientific notions of genetic essentialism, including the idea that inequality is genetic. People who believe in genetic essentialism believe – among other ideas – that most racial differences are determined by genes. Essentialist beliefs are a biological misconception. Around the world, students receive a basic genetics education that focuses on single-gene in-heritance; students learn Mendel’s laws of heredity, and how different versions of a gene (i.e., alleles) are inherited across generations through probabilistic mechanisms that are easily modeled by a Punnett square. This is a risk factor for the development of genetic essentialism during adolescence, say Brian Donovan and colleagues in their Policy Forum. They advocate for teaching genomic concepts in a way that refutes genetic essentialism in a framework they call “humane genomics education.” The authors point to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in the U.S. that already demonstrate that teaching 8th- to 12th-grade students about key related concepts can cause a reduction in students’ genetic essentialist beliefs about race. One of these concepts is that most genetic variation occurs within geographic populations, rather than across them. Results of related studies show students taught such concepts are more likely to disbelieve genetic essentialism because they are more likely to develop the perception that races are not that genetically different. However, these past RCTs have had key limitations, say the authors. To overcome them, they designed new cluster-randomized crossover trials – in which all participating clusters receive both intervention treatments (human genomics education) and control treatments (basic genetics education) consecutively, in separate time periods. Their studies were the first to explore how these two instruction styles affect racial conceptualization.
Between December 2019 and May 2022, the authors recruited 15 teachers and 1063 biology students from six U.S. states (Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts). Participating teachers received 40 hours of professional development to learn how to implement humane genomics intervention. According to results, students participating in the humane genomics classroom setting exhibited greater knowledge of genomics and less belief in genetic essentialism. Importantly, as students begin to disbelieve genetic essentialism, they also appeared to gravitate toward the belief that race is a social concept and that racial disparities are caused by prejudice. Basic genetics instruction, by contrast, yielded none of these benefits to students. To address concerns about scalability of their approach, the authors described results of an additional preregistered person-randomized trial they conducted with about 1000 under-graduates in the University of California system. Results suggest that humane genomics instruction can be scaled in a relatively cost-effective, time-efficient manner through an online platform, the authors say. “Several humane genomics learning experiences spread over many years of biology instruction will be needed to reduce the prevalence of genetic essentialist beliefs,” say the authors.
JOURNAL
Science
ARTICLE TITLE
Human genomics education can reduce racism
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
23-Feb-2024
Study finds guided parent-child discussions are effective at addressing subtle racism
When parents discuss racism with their children, negative biases toward Black people are significantly reduced in both parent and child
Study finds guided parent-child discussions are effective at addressing subtle racism
When parents discuss racism with their children, negative biases toward Black people are significantly reduced in both parent and child
EVANSTON, Ill. --- Experts have long pointed out the need for white parents to have conversations that directly address racism with their children to reduce racial bias. But many parents fail to have these crucial discussions.
Psychology researchers at Northwestern University have published the first study to demonstrate the immediate effectiveness of a guided discussion task to promote parent-child conversations about racial bias in white U.S. families.
The researchers created a discussion guide that would support parents to have “color conscious” conversations with their children that would explicitly acknowledge the existence and history of racism, and its continued presence.
According to the study, parents who engaged in color conscious discussions with their 8- to 12-year-old child showed a significant decrease in anti-Black bias, and so did their children. However, even in conversations in which parents made comments that downplayed the importance of race or deflected blame away from white perpetrators of racism, the researchers saw reductions in bias.
“A lot of parents worry that talking to their kids about racism could increase their children’s biases, and they also feel like they don’t know how to do it,” said corresponding author Sylvia Perry. “Our key finding, however, was that when parents used color conscious language while discussing interpersonal racism, it was associated with a significant decrease in their child’s negative implicit biases toward Black people.”
Perry is an associate professor of psychology and principal investigator for the Social Cognition and Intergroup Processes Laboratory at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern.
Perry said two questions prompted the research. First, if white parents and their children participated in a guided racism discussion task, would they have color conscious conversations? Second, if white parents and their children did have color conscious conversations, would children show a measurable decrease in their anti-Black biases following the conversation?
Guided discussion as a tool
The researchers recruited 84 self-described white parent-child pairs to participate in the study.
Parents were asked to start a conversation with their child after watching videos that depicted interactions between a white child and a Black child. The series of scenes featured overt prejudice, subtle prejudice or neutral interactions between the children. Parents were provided with suggested discussion prompts such as, “Why did the white child do what they did?” and “How do you think the Black child felt after it happened?” — intended to encourage parents and children to articulate whether racial prejudice had occurred and to consider the negative impact of racism on Black children.
Parents and children individually completed implicit association tests to measure their degree of anti-Black bias before and after the guided discussion task.
Study findings
The researchers were surprised to find that even when parents used colorblind language in discussing the videos with their children, for example, saying, “Black and white people are all the same,” their children still showed reductions in their biases; the effects were just smaller.
Perry noted, however, that the observed decreases occurred while parents and children were participating in a guided racism discussion task designed to mitigate prejudice. While some families used colorblind language at some point during their discussion, most of those families also used color conscious language. Overall, 92% of parents and 95% of children, used color conscious language during the discussion.
The children's anti-Black biases showed a significant decline after completion of the discussion task. Children showed a moderate preference for white over Black individuals, with an implicit bias score of 0.41 before the task. After the discussion task, the score was reduced to 0.16, bringing them closer to little or no bias. Parents’ anti-Black biases also decreased significantly, from 0.53 to 0.34, after the discussion task.
Addressing subtle prejudice
Because subtle forms of prejudice have negative effects on the mental and physical health of Black individuals the researchers said it is a lost opportunity for parents to engage only in conversations about blatant racism.
“We specifically found beneficial effects of parents’ language on their children’s anti-Black biases when they were discussing subtle instances of racism,” said Deborah Wu, an assistant professor of psychology at Stonehill College, and a co-author of the study. “Our results suggest that having these specific color conscious conversations, as well as refraining from explaining away racism is especially helpful when discussing subtler forms of racism. This is especially important, as subtle forms of racism are far more common than overt racism and more likely to be dismissed by white individuals.”
The researchers found that parents who made clear to their children that the white child’s racial prejudice was influencing the white child’s attitudes or behaviors toward the Black child, such as feeling uncomfortable around Black children, had children who were most likely to show a reduction in negative biases towards Black people.
Two-way influence
The researchers also looked at the influence children had on their parent’s attitudes. They found that when children made external attributions, such as saying a child might be prejudiced because they learned it from their parents, their parents showed bigger reductions in their anti-Black biases.
“Another key takeaway of this study is that it demonstrates the utility of family-level racism interventions to reduce racial bias in both adults and children,” said Jamie L. Abaied, an associate professor of psychological science at the University of Vermont and a co-author of the study. “The experience of viewing and discussing vignettes depicting racism alongside one’s child may be particularly eye-opening for white parents, and it may help them grapple with the idea that if they do not take steps to prevent it, their own child could potentially engage in racist behaviors like the white children in the videos.”
"White Parents' Racial Socialization During a Guided Discussion Predicts Declines in White Children's Pro-White Biases" will be published by the journal Developmental Psychology on Feb. 22. Access it online here.
JOURNAL
Developmental Psychology
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
White Parents' Racial Socialization During a Guided Discussion Predicts Declines in White Children's Pro-White Biases
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
22-Feb-2024
