Racial Oppression Research Articles

FOBism Unveiled: Quantifying Assimilative Racism within Asians in the United States.

FOB (fresh-off-the-boat) is a term used to refer to unassimilated immigrants or sojourners, which has created a divide within the Asian community. In this study, we coined the term FOBism, a form of internalized racism (or appropriated racial oppression) that intersects with assimilation, and we developed a measure of FOBism. We created a 14-item, 3-factor FOBism Scale and evaluated its psychometric properties among a sample of 296 Asians in the United States. Exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) was utilized to select items and evaluate the factorial validity. Results yielded a strong factor structure, internal consistency reliability, and construct validity. Construct validity was demonstrated through FOBism scores' positive correlations with measures of within-group discrimination and internalized racism, and negative associations with an Asian cultural orientation. The FOBism Scale is a promising measure that could be used as an assessment tool and to raise awareness of the phenomenon.

Driven by Purpose: Exploring Spirituality in Black Mothers’ Coping with Loss of Children to Gun Homicide

The death of a Black child to gun homicide presents unique and ongoing coping challenges for Black parents. Current studies have provided insights into the role of spirituality in facilitating adjustment after homicide loss. However, the extent to which spirituality serves as a viable coping resource for Black mothers, who are disproportionately affected by gun homicide deaths of their children, remains unexplored. This exploratory phenomenological study explored the role of spirituality as a healing resource in 15 Black mothers’ grief experiences following the loss of their children to gun homicide. Thematic analysis revealed the role of spirituality in helping Black mothers find purpose in their loss. Following the loss of their children, mothers’ spiritual values enabled them to come to the realization that the deaths served a purpose. Spirituality served as the fuel to strengthen and renew their purpose in their grief journey. Gun homicide grief experience is an entanglement of systemic inequality and racial oppression. Exploring spirituality as a coping resource in the grieving experiences of Black survivors serves as an opportunity for enhancing community-based, culturally relevant, and spiritually-informed interventions, to adequately meet their coping needs.

The “People’s Tour” as Conflict Pedagogy: Using Site Visits to Engage Students with the Struggle for Civil Rights

Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has a rich history of Civil Rights struggles and its people continue to resist racial oppression in systems of housing, labor, education, policing, transportation, and others. Dating to 1892, Winston-Salem State University (WSSU), a historically Black college/university (HBCU), has attracted students who have become organizers and activists in the fight for social justice in the local community. These include Theodosia Simpson, a leader of the radical Black women-led tobacco workers union; Carl Matthews, who started the first victorious lunch counter sit-in in North Carolina; and Dr. Larry Little, who co-founded the first official Black Panther Party chapter in the South. In that tradition, I have developed a “People’s History Tour of Winston-Salem” that takes current WSSU students outside the classroom to learn about the Civil Rights struggle at a variety of important sites. This critical pedagogy has students apply key sociological concepts that bolster their understanding of racial stratification and efforts to eradicate it. The goals of this assignment are for students to explore classroom curriculum about White supremacy, racial capitalism, and social movements at relevant historical and contemporary sites in Winston-Salem. By doing so, I aim for students to have transformative experiences that tie their readings and classroom discussions to the community spaces where that material comes alive.

We are a miraculous mess and that is the only way we can be

This article introduces the second issue of Stolen Tools by exploring the concept of the love and ‘the erotic’ as described by Audre Lorde. The erotic is a deep, non-rational life force rooted in creativity, self-knowledge, and authentic emotional connections. The erotic embraces a chaotic plurality of identities; creative, free and authentic expression; and meaningful, nurturing solidarity. It is crucial for resisting racial oppression and something that Stolen Tools aspires to, even in the face of institutional and personal blocks. The second half of this piece presents the papers that constitute this issue and build on its theme. The papers in this issue include fictional stories and a poem exploring the complexities of identity, resilience, and racism, as well as articles analysing the limitations of equality, diversity, and inclusion initiatives in academic and clinical settings. Thank you to everyone who worked on and contributed to this issue including Ricardo Twumasi, Gabi Nieuwoudt, Rubbia Ali, and Hannah Abdalla. Particular thanks to Ebony Burke, who has been seconded from the King’s College London Library and Collections to support our project and is indicative of the creative institutional support that we survive on. I dedicate this issue to my daughter Nika, who inspired the opening article and is one year old at the time of writing.

Understanding community hate crimes as an incorrigible proposition: Local political attitudes, path dependence, and the ceremonious reporting of hate crime statistics

AbstractThe Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA) of 1990 requires the federal government to publicly release official hate crime statistics annually; the HCSA does not, however, mandate that local agencies submit hate crime reports to the government in the first place. Although research has evaluated the reporting of hate crime statistics in a dichotomous fashion (compliance vs. noncompliance), the current study suggests that the consistent and invariable reporting of zero hate crimes in a particular jurisdiction over time is unlikely and thus better conceptualized as a third response strategy: ceremonious compliance. We examine this strategy as a potentially unique institutional behavior, structured by local political and historical contexts, including discursive differences in the identification of hate crime as an important social problem, and localized histories of racial oppression. This research then uses multilevel multinomial logistic regression models to estimate variation in the likelihood of differential compliance strategies (i.e., true compliance, ceremonious compliance, noncompliance), according to several political and historical factors, including Republican vote share, location in the Confederate South, and historical lynchings. Findings reveal that political and historical contexts are important predictors of agency responses to hate crime, with a particular tendency toward ceremonious compliance in Republican‐leaning locales.

A Comparative Analysis of Dramatic Structure in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and August Wilson’s Fences (1986)

This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the dramatic structures in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and August Wilson’s Fences, utilizing Freytag’s Pyramid as a framework. Despite differences in scene and act composition, both plays share a similar narrative structure marked by multiple climactic points rather than a single one. Each play presents the lives of African American families in mid-20th century America, grappling with themes of racial oppression, economic hardship, and personal aspirations. Hansberry’s work primarily addresses the relationship between African Americans and White society, while Wilson’s focuses on intergenerational conflicts within a Black family. Both playwrights weave moments of heightened tension throughout the narratives, surprising audiences with new inciting incidents just as the action seems to be falling. This study reveals that although Fences was written nearly 30 years after A Raisin in the Sun, the two plays mirror one another in their exploration of socio-economic struggles and racial dynamics. Ultimately, the paper illustrates how both works encapsulate a continuous struggle for dignity and self-actualization within the constraints of a racially discriminatory society.

Poetry as Gift to Articulate Oppression Across Transdisciplinary Health Scholarship

Those of us on the 'fringes' of society find ourselves there because of crises that happen in our communities—housing crises, colonization, and many more crises that intersect to make up our human condition. What happens now on the 'fringes' of society directly connects to past and on-going legacies of oppression in systems of health because such systems marginalize folks as part of systemic strategic plans. It is important to trace and articulate these historical and on-going legacies of violence so that we can build something more useful. This manuscript weaves liberatory social theory throughout a collection of poems on class struggle and racial oppression for movement toward just futures. This collection of poems traverses disciplinary boundaries and uses poetry as a buffer against being burned down for people engaged in the work of liberation and justice with desire to confront legacies of colonialism and enslavement in our everyday practice.

Expanding Bystander Behavioral Approaches to Address Racial Violence in Health Research, Pedagogy, and Practice.

A bystander to racial violence is conventionally thought of as someone who witnesses an overt act of racial oppression at the interpersonal level, such as police brutality. However, racial violence in health research, pedagogy, and practice often shows up more covertly, like through epistemic injustice, deficits-based framing, and racial essentialism. We aim to expand how we think about bystanders and perpetrators of racial violence within health institutions, and how antiracism bystander behavioral approaches can be deployed to intervene against such violence. Existing public health antiracism frameworks, such as the Public Health Critical Race Praxis and the PEN-3 Cultural Model, offer valuable constructs and processes through which health practitioners, researchers, and academics can disrupt racial violence. Such antiracism frameworks are well suited to provide individuals within public health and health care with the knowledge, skills, and efficacy to intervene as engaged bystanders against racism within their contexts. To illustrate how constructs within antiracism frameworks can be applied by bystanders in various health settings, we outline case examples of antiracism bystander interventions across three scenarios. The more bystanders there are within health institutions that are equipped with antiracism tools, the more likely normative behaviors uplifting White supremacy within these institutions can be disrupted and health equity can be actualized.

Decolonisation and Downshift-Knowledge Reproduction in Africa

Colonialism established a system of racial oppression, both mentally and physically, by impeding pre-colonial African education, which was originally intended to reflect the realities of pre-colonial African societies. Before the colonial administration, Africans were already developed people with different educations for different age groups, making them functional and inclusive within the larger political sphere. Decolonisation only reflects a shift in political power and the withdrawal of colonialists from African territories, but it has not resulted in any fundamental shift in the mentality of political leaders and nation-building in the decolonised nations. The education curriculum left behind by colonial governments was designed to make African nations economically and technologically dependent on developed nations. Such a pattern of education was not geared toward African technological development, but rather conditioned African nations to be consumers rather than producers, with the resulting loss of initiative among the Africans. The curriculum is insidious in terms of principles and implementation across all levels of educational institutions, slowly destroying the economies of African nations that were once ahead of European nations during the pre-colonial epoch. Instead of accelerating the socio-economic development of decolonised African nations, the curriculum based on Western principles and ideas further subjugates African economies to imperialist influence and hegemony through the instrumentality of international financial institutions, which frequently dictate exploitative asymmetric relationships between the developed and developing African nations. African nations must therefore look inward for an African-oriented and culturally appropriate educational curriculum to meet the demand for socioeconomic advancement and growth.

Study on Space and Identity in Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea mainly tells the tragic fate of the white Creole woman Antoinette Cosway, dealing with problems of identity and inequality arising from French and British colonisation in the Caribbean. This novel serves not only as a narrative of personal tragedy but also as a spatially oriented exploration where the space is instrumental in shaping characters and reflecting colonial history. Based on the Space Theory and Homi K. Bhabha’s Postcolonial Theory, this paper endeavours to trace Antoinette’s journey across three significant spaces, explore how these spaces impact her identity and self-reconstruction under the patriarchal and racial oppression, and reveal the complex interactions between space and Antoinette’s identity in the novel, aiming to break down the binary oppositions in colonial discourse and understand the multiplicity and fluidity of identity.

The Helper or the Help: Co-Transference Between Black Female Therapists and White Clients

This paper examines how the identities of Black female therapists and their White clients may contribute to enactments stemming from what this author calls a Black Nanny-White Charge co-transference. The roots of the Black Nanny-White Charge co-transference can be traced to the intergenerationally transmitted roles both therapist and client have inherited from the racial oppression Black women have been subjected to in the United States, the historic role Black women have played in caring for White children, and the experience many middle-class and wealthy White children have had of being cared for by a Black woman. Though much of the literature on racial dissimilarity between therapists and clients features White therapist-BIPOC client dyads, drawing on psychoanalytic theories of intersubjectivity and the framework of intersectionality, this paper explores the unique, mostly unconscious features of the dynamic interactions between Black female therapists and their White clients. The meta psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity allows for recognition of a racialized co-transference among White clients working with Black female therapists and helps avoid the potential pitfalls that could forestall mutual recognition. The author coins the term nurture hesitancy to describe the reluctance Black female therapists may experience when engaging White clients. Using two clinical vignettes, the author illustrates how the developmental achievement of mutual recognition between Black female therapists and White clients demands resolution of the Black Nanny co-transference and nurture hesitancy.

Venciendo la Desesperación Cristalizada

Racism and xenophobic discrimination in the Dominican Republic, especially state policies against black people of Haitian origin, oppress a community with a long history of exploitation and resistance in the country every day. This oppression affects, in multiple ways, the life and health of those who engage in social activism and the defense of human rights, and who do so under constant threat of repression and even death, in a context where far right organizations frequently work in coordination with authorities to block protest and public action. Although racism is institutionalized and structural in nature, state authorities advance negationist discourses, minimizing or denying grave historical facts such as the massacre of 1937, the racist campaign against the late politician José Francisco Peña Gómez, the law 168-13 that retroactively removed the nationality of more than four generations of person of Haitian origin. The combination of a struggle that is increasingly better endowed with theoretical tools and politics to change this reality of racist oppression and the realization of studies on the wear and tear that racism imposes on our health, enable us to deepen perspectives of liberation for new generations of activists.

Shifting systems of racial inequity: Applying critical race psychology to advance racial justice

AbstractSince the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a renewed and more mainstream attention to systemic racism emerged. Critical Race Theory (CRT) has permeated the larger public discourse around race more than ever before. Yet, social, scientific, and political backlash intended to silence conversations about the systemic and power‐driven nature of racism have also characterized these years. 30+ years have passed since CRT's introduction as a critical analysis of how the legal system fails minoritized groups; 20+ years have passed since CRT's introduction into the social psychological field. Although psychology provides a strong foundation for the CRT tenets, incorporating CRT into the field of psychology has lagged behind many other fields (e.g., sociology, education). In two installments, this special issue (re)introduces psychological researchers to CRT and Psychological Critical Race Theory (PCRT), underscores CRT's importance and limitations in the context of psychological research, features novel applications and directions in CRT, and addresses the current political climate of opposition to discussions of CRT. This second installment looks outward highlighting psychological research applying (P)CRT frameworks to advance racial justice. We conclude with reflections on the history of CRT and PCRT and the shifts necessary in our scholarship‐activism to dismantle systems of racial oppression.

Categorizing the Racist Oppression of African-Americans in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems

Categorizing the Racist Oppression of African-Americans in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems

Reconsidering vulnerability, history, and our postmodern condition in Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys

AbstractThis paper analyzes Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys (2019) by exploring the consequences of an uneven distribution of vulnerability in relation to both historical and contemporary contexts. This study emphasizes the significance of this depiction in comprehending the enduring effects of racial oppression and institutional disparities. This means that while all humans are inherently vulnerable, systemic inequalities make some people more vulnerable and less protected than others. Whitehead depicts the experiences of the young black boys at the Nickel Academy as heightening their vulnerability, the more they embrace resistance. The novel points to the notion that political structures not only establish hierarchies and inequalities among individuals but also place them in a position of inherent vulnerability, judged by preconceived notions of permanent inferiority and inequality. Ultimately, Whitehead depicts vulnerability as a method of uncovering the truth and fighting for justice by giving voice to the black perspectives that have been marginalized and silenced throughout history.

Rethinking Community Cultural Wealth

In this essay David Shuang Song uses Bourdieusian theory and its contemporary reapplications to address theoretical problems in Tara Yosso's concept of community cultural wealth and to propose a rethinking of the influential model. He argues for redirecting attention to how agents both make exchangeable and exchange the legitimized practices and objects in a marginalized ethnic/racial community with those of the formal education system. Song illustrates this reconceptualization through a sketch of his ethnographic research on a community school in one large city's Chinatown. His approach emphasizes key Bourdieusian concepts that are sometimes missing in education research and sociology of education, resituates Bourdieusian theory as capable of offering insights into racialization and racial oppression in the United States, and offers insights for the study of community-based education projects among people of color.

Spatiotemporal Changes in the Slavery–Inequality Relationship: The Diffusion of the Legacy of Slavery

Despite the persistence of relationships between historical racist violence and contemporary Black–White inequality, research indicates, in broad strokes, that the slavery–inequality relationship in the United States has changed over time. Identifying the timing of such change across states can offer insights into the underlying processes that generate Black–White inequality. In this study, we use integrated nested Laplace approximation models to simultaneously account for spatial and temporal features of panel data for Southern counties during the period spanning 1900 to 2018, in combination with data on the concentration of enslaved people from the 1860 census. Results provide the first evidence on the timing of changes in the slavery–economic inequality relationship and how changes differ across states. We find a region-wide decline in the magnitude of the slavery–inequality relationship by 1930, with declines traversing the South in a northeasterly-to-southwesterly pattern over the study period. Different paces in declines in the relationship across states suggest the expansion of institutionalized racism first in places with the longest-standing overt systems of slavery. Results provide guidance for further identifying intervening mechanisms—most centrally, the maturity of racial hierarchies and the associated diffusion of racial oppression across institutions, and how they affect the legacy of slavery in the United States.

Exploring Black parents’ critical consciousness in relation to their engagement with their children's schools

AbstractDespite consensus that parent involvement is integral to children's educational success, Black parents’ involvement remains largely characterized from a deficits‐based perspective. Using critical race and critical consciousness theories, this study explored parents’ analysis of educational inequities and their school engagement. Using interview data from a sample of Black parents (n = 20), emergent understandings of parents’ thoughts, motivations, and actions to engage with their child's school were explored. Findings revealed that Black parents held both critical and traditional views, expressed themes of internal and external efficacy in their motivation, and engaged critically and traditionally in their child's education. Results are consonant with literature on Black parents’ engagement and to the nascent understanding of how parents' beliefs about structural racial oppression within schools impacts how they engage in that space.

In spirit and in truth: (re)searching Christianity and racial liberation in education

As educational justice scholarship addressing racial oppression continues to name the role of the spirit, there is a need for Black and Brown Christian educators and researchers to locate ourselves as grounded in the epistemologies and pedagogies of Christ as our spiritual home. This paper brings together eight Black and Brown Christian educators and researchers to grapple with what it means to be Christians committed to racial justice in education against the backdrop of centuries of religious corruption. Through collaborative autoethnography, we turn to our spiritual and religious lives situated within our racialized identities to challenge the disciplinary and material boundaries of what critical qualitative research counts as “knowing.” In doing this, we give ourselves, and all educators and researchers, permission to make evident the unseen forces that shape our ways of being in research and teaching.

On Seeing Long Shadows: Is Academic Medicine at its Core a Practice of Racial Oppression?

Suggestions that academic medicine is systemically racist are increasingly common in the medical literature. Such suggestions often rely upon expansive notions of systemic racism that are deeply controversial. The author argues for an empirical concept of systemic racism and offers a counter argument to a recent suggestion that academic medicine is systemically racist in its treatment of medical trainees: Anderson et al.'s(Academic Medicine, 98(8S), S28-S36, 2023) "The Long Shadow: a Historical Perspective on Racism in Medical Education." Contra the authors of "The Long Shadow," the author argues that racial performance disparities in medical education cannot be validly attributed to racism without careful empirical confirmation; he further argues that standards of assessment in medical education cannot be properly deemed racist merely because minority trainees are disproportionately disadvantaged by them. Furthermore, the history of medicine and society in the Anglo-European West is not, as argued by the authors of "The Long Shadow," best viewed as one long tale of racial oppression culminating in the present day pervasive racism of academic medicine in the United States. Racism is a deplorable stain on our history and our present but it is not the historical essence of Christianity, European civilization, Western medicine, or contemporary academic medical institutions.