Anti-racism training in adolescents and emerging adults
Hope, Volpe, Briggs, & Benson (2022) published “Anti-racism Activism Among Black Adolescents and Emerging Adults: Understanding the roles of racism and anticipatory racism-related stress” in Child Development. This is a longer than usual post and the article is available as full text. Previous work had suggested that anticipatory racism-related stress can be either a catalyst and consequence of engagement in anti-racism activism.
Individual racism experiences are typical for Black adolescents and emerging adults – up to 88% of Black adolescents and up to 80% of Black emerging adults reporting experiences of individual racism within the past year. The Biopsychosocial Model of Racism (Clark et al., 1999) proposes that chronic bodily overactivation or underactivation in response to the stress of racism will condition future responses to acute racial stressors, which will erode health over time. They go on to cite research finding effects including difficulty sleeping, more depression, more rumination, and cardiovascular disease. Their community sample included 443 self-identified Black adolescents and 447 emerging adults who resided in 43 different states in the United States, mostly from urban (45.8%) or suburban (44.1%) settings with more females (67.6%) and only 0.3% non-binary.
Their measures included the Index of Race-Related Stress (Seaton, 2003), the Black Community Activism Orientation Scale (Hope, Pender, et al., 2019), two subscales from The Prolonged Activation and Anticipatory Race-Related Stress Scale (Utsey et al., 2013) were used to assess anticipatory racism-related stress in psychological responses to future expectations of racism via four items (e.g., “When I am around White people, I expect them to say or do something racist”) and physiological responses to expected racism (e.g., “I can feel my hands start to shake whenever I think I am about to experience racism”) via four items. Demographic variables included gender, LGBTQ identity, income, and employment; they also controlled for volunteering as an important source of individual variation in activism.
Their findings include:
In emerging adults, more exposure to individual racism was associated with more engagement in high-risk activism and more engagement in high-risk activism was in turn associated with more physiological anticipatory stress;
also for young adults, more exposure to individual racism was associated with more engagement in low-risk activism and more engagement in low-risk activism was in turn associated with more psychological anticipatory stress.
For adolescents, more exposure to individual racism was associated with more engagement in low-risk and high-risk activism;
engagement in low-risk activism was associated with more psychological anticipatory stress, and engagement in high-risk activism was associated with less psychological anticipatory stress.
The association between high-risk activism and psychological anticipatory stress was significant for adolescents but not for emerging adults. For emerging adults, a significant indirect effect of psychological anticipatory stress in the association between individual racism and engagement in low-risk activism was detected in that more exposure to individual racism was associated with more psychological anticipatory stress, and more psychological anticipatory stress was in turn associated with more engagement in low-risk activism.
Also for young adults, physiological anticipatory stress was a significant mediator of the association between individual racism and engagement in high-risk activism in that more exposure to individual racism was associated with more physiological anticipatory stress and more physiological anticipatory stress was in turn associated with more engagement in high-risk activism.
For adolescents, in support of our second competing hypothesis, both physiological anticipatory stress and psychological anticipatory stress were significant mediators of the association between individual racism and engagement in high-risk activism. More exposure to individual racism was associated with more physiological and more psychological anticipatory stress.
Also, more physiological anticipatory stress and less psychological anticipatory stress were associated with more engagement in high-risk activism.
As hypothesized, we found that anti-racism activism and racism-related stress were both important mediators to consider in the associations between experiences of individual racism, racism-related stress, and anti-racism activism. Anticipatory race-related stress is a prolonged and chronic psychological and physical response to racism that carries health risk (Turan et al., 2015) and that may shape decisions about whether or not it is safe, feasible, or desirable to engage in activism.
For emerging adults, high-risk anti-racism activism was connected to physiological stress and low-risk activism to psychological stress. It may be that high-risk activism is especially physiologically stressful for Black emerging adults because high-risk actions may have distinct adult consequences (e.g., loss of employment, arrest), thus heightening the anticipatory stress and corresponding rumination and vigilance to more noticeable physiological levels. Activism of any kind may be connected to anticipation of future racism-related stress (i.e., psychological anticipatory stress) for Black adolescents, which may be an adaptive response in the context of the intractability of racism in their everyday lives. This anticipatory stress may be helpful if it catalyzes engagement in activism, but only if it does so without subsequently exacerbating stress after such engagement.
They conclude that their findings suggest that strategies for supporting anti-racism activism and mitigating anticipatory racism-related stress may be different for adolescents and emerging adults. For example, biofeedback and mindfulness techniques have been found to be associated with better physiological functioning during anticipatory stress, as a method of proactive coping with stress (Schlatter et al., 2021). Work with Black adolescents might focus on strategies for reducing psychological anticipatory stress that may help adolescents continue to feel prepared for racism, maintain their agency, and determine if, when, and how to pursue racial justice through activism.