School-based Racial Experiences and Black Adolescents

Here I want to discuss three recent studies.The first study simply documents the relationship between experiencing microaggressions and having symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Abdullah et al. (2021) “After accounting for age, gender, and education, higher frequency of environmental, low achievement, and invisibility microaggressions were associated with increased endorsement of PTSD symptoms. Distress associated with invisibility microaggressions was also associated with increased PTSD symptoms above and beyond microaggression frequency. The link between racial microaggressions and PTSD symptoms in the current sample suggests that clinicians should pay particular attention to the ways in which these experiences could be linked to Black American clients’ symptoms in therapeutic contexts. Future research should focus on further exploring the relation between microaggressions and trauma-related symptoms, particularly determining the impact of racial microaggressions in relation to other traumatic life events that individuals may have experienced.” While the online study used adult participants and 75% were female, these data published in Traumatology may have important implications for therapists and for those who do diagnostic testing.

In a second study, Woods-Jaeger, et al. (2021) examined school-based racial microaggressions as a barrier to resilience among African American adolescents exposed to trauma. Their work is published in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. They begin by noting that African American adolescents experience disproportionate rates of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), which heightens their risk for negative social, behavioral, and health outcomes. On the one hand, schools may be a source of support for adolescents exposed to ACEs; on the other hand, for many African American adolescents, schools are a source of additional stress due to experiences of racial/ethnic microaggressions. They studied adolescents after violence exposure. At higher levels of endorsed microaggressive experiences – measured by academic inferiority and stereotypical misrepresentations scales – the larger the number of ACEs reported, the less resilient the adolescent was. 

A third study, published in Child Development examined ways to disrupt the tendency for Black adolescents who experience frequent discrimination to respond with emotional reactivity. Dunbar et al. (2021) asked mothers to discuss with their teens a hypothetical discriminatory experience. Some adolescents respond to discrimination with submissive reactivity (e.g., sadness or embarrassment) while some respond with dominant reactivity (e.g., anger or frustration). They found that submissive reactivity was the primary mechanism explaining the link between discrimination and both internalizing and externalizing symptoms. “Maternal advocacy combined with high levels of dyadic warmth and emotion expression reduced girls’ submissive reactivity, whereas a more directive ‘no-nonsense’ advocacy approach reduced boys’ submissive reactivity. Findings demonstrate how racial socialization can disrupt the pain of discrimination.”