How to Reduce Racial Stress

And Collectively Dismantle Systemic Racism

In the late 1990s, most likely as a way to make meaning out of the racial isolation I felt as the only black professor in our psychology department, I became interested in the ways race was considered a source of stress. My negative experiences had been frequent enough for them to be annoying, but not serious enough to warrant a discrimination complaint. For example, I wore my hair in braids for over a year and when I changed hairstyles was told by an colleague that I was now “more approachable and professional looking.” My research program was racial identity development and I had a number of articles published in the Journal of Black Psychology. The quality of the journal was seriously questioned by my department’s promotion review committee and only deemed acceptable after I pointed out that the publisher was the same publisher as some of the journals where their articles had been published. For the most part, I shrugged these incidents off and vented with trusted White colleagues in the department and with Black colleagues in other departments who had similar experiences.

Still, the cumulative impact of these incidents took their toll and I continued to wonder if one’s coping pattern for dealing with racial stress differed from how one managed general stress. My curiosity led me to solicit…