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

By E. Brondolo, Nisha Brady ver Halen, Melissa Pencille, Danielle L. Beatty, Richard J. Contrada. Journal of behavioral medicine, 2009

804 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43a14771b77aa892749bc98d69c85b984dbfdc00

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Citations in the corpus

Discrimination Against Latina/os (2012, methodology): “Some researchers have identified ethnic identity and acculturative processes as protective factors against the negative outcomes of discrimination (Brondolo et al., 2009; Umaňa-Taylor et al., 2008).”
STRUCTURAL RACISM AND HEALTH INEQUITIES (2011, background): “…Healthy People 2020 lists discrimination and residential segregation as examples of social determinants of health.2 Reviews consistently find that persons who self-report exposures to racism have greater risk for mental and physical ailments (Brondolo et al., 2009; Williams and Mohammed, 2009).”
SELF-REPORTED EXPERIENCES OF DISCRIMINATION AND HEALTH: SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES, ONGOING CONTROVERSIES, AND EMERGING ISSUES (2015, background): “Future research on discrimination needs to more clearly delineate the triggers, levels, and consequences of denial and how denial relates to the broad range of coping strategies used in responding to discrimination (Brondolo et al. 2009, Noh & Kaspar 2003).”
Racial Discrimination and Asian Mental Health: A Meta-Analysis (2011, background): “Although these aforementioned reviews (Brondolo et al., 2009; Pascoe & Smart Richman, 2009) are helpful in summarizing the literature on how people cope with discrimination, there are several notable limitations.”
Vicarious racism: a qualitative analysis of experiences with secondhand racism in graduate education (2016, background): “Existing literature on coping with racism suggests that racial identity may play an important role in how people of color experience and respond to racism and racism-related stress (Brondolo et al., 2009; Stevenson, 2003).”
Gendered Racism, Coping, Identity Centrality, and African American College Women’s Psychological Distress (2016, background): “Few researchers have examined the potential mediating functions that coping may play in better understanding the link between discrimination and mental health outcomes among individuals from marginalized groups (Pascoe & Smart Richman, 2009).”
Responding to Racism and Racial Trauma in Doctoral Study: An Inventory for Coping and Mediating Relationships. (2012, positive): “Second, the findings of the current study not only reinforce how situational factors can play an important role in individuals’ responses to racism and racial trauma (Branscombe et al., 1999; Brondolo et al., 2009; Bynum et al., 2007; Carter, 2007; Cheng, 2003; Harrell, 2000), but also add to the li”
Racism on the Internet: Conceptualization and Recommendations for Research (2018, background): “The coping literature on racism have documented that some choose to avoid the situation or express their anger toward the perpetrators (Brondolo et al., 2009).”