For youth and adults of color, prolonged exposure to racial discrimination may result in debilitating psychological, behavioral, and health outcomes. Research has suggested that race-based traumatic stress can manifest from direct and vicarious discriminatory racial encounters (DREs) that impact individuals during and after an event. To help their children prepare for and prevent the deleterious consequences of DREs, many parents of color utilize racial socialization (RS), or communication about racialized experiences. Although RS research has illuminated associations between RS and youth well-being indicators (i.e., psychosocial, physiological, academic, and identity-related), findings have mainly focused on RS frequency and endorsement in retrospective accounts and not on how RS is transmitted and received, used during in-the-moment encounters, or applied to reduce racial stress and trauma through clinical processes. This article explores how systemic and interpersonal DREs require literate, active, and bidirectional RS to repair from race-based traumatic stress often overlooked by traditional stress and coping models and clinical services. A novel theory (Racial Encounter Coping Appraisal and Socialization Theory [RECAST]), wherein RS moderates the relationship between racial stress and self-efficacy in a path to coping and well-being, is advanced. Greater RS competency is proposed as achievable through intentional and mindful practice. Given heightened awareness to DREs plaguing youth, better understanding of how RS processes and skills development can help youth and parents heal from the effects of past, current, and future racial trauma is important. A description of proposed measures and RECAST’s use within trauma-focused clinical practices and interventions for family led healing is also provided.

Despite the proclamation of a “postracial” society, racism in the United States remains “alive and sick” (S. P. Harrell, 2000), negatively impacting the physical, psychological, and emotional well-being of Black Americans. Moreover, the complex impact of racism throughout the life span is inadequately understood. Coping with the insidiousness of racism in its myriad forms requires recognizing how it expresses across development. In this developmental overview, we apply a life-course perspective (Gee, Walsemann, & Brondolo, 2012) to investigate racism-related stress and coping over time. Within each period of development, we first explore how racism-related stress may present for Black Americans and then document what coping from this stress looks like, highlighting extant strategies and interventions where they exist. This work concludes with a set of definitional, methodological, and clinical future directions and recommendations for improving the field’s ability to mitigate the deleterious impact of racism-related stress.

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This study examined patterns of: (1) observed racial socialization messages in dyadic discussions between 111 African American mothers and adolescents (M age = 15.50) and (2) mothers’ positive emotions displayed during the discussion. Mothers displayed more advocacy on behalf of their adolescents in response to discrimination by a White teacher than to discrimination by a White salesperson. Mothers displayed consistent emotional support of adolescents’ problem solving across both dilemmas but lower warmth in response to the salesperson dilemma. Findings illustrate evidence of the transactional nature of racial socialization when presented with adolescents’ racial dilemmas. The role of adolescent gender in mothers’ observed racial socialization responses is also discussed. A framework for a process-oriented approach to racial socialization is presented.