Black Canadians' Coping Responses to Racial Discrimination

Abstract

On the basis of a cultural coping framework, the present study examined coping responses to racial discrimination among 190 Black Canadians. The study assessed the respondents' coping with both general (i.e., problem-and emotionfocused coping) and Africultural coping strategies (i.e., spiritual-centered, collective, and ritual-centered coping) across three different racial discrimination vignettes (i.e., interpersonal, institutional, and cultural discrimination). Furthermore, three individual and cultural difference variables, African self-consciousness, social desirability, and past race-related stress, were controlled in the analyses. As predicted, the results of the profile analysis and multivariate analyses showed that both general and Africultural coping were used by the participants in responding to all three types of discrimination. Additionally, differential coping patterns were found depending on the context of racial discrimination. Overall, the study suggests that Black Canadians are exposed to multiple race-related stressors that require them to adopt a flexible repertoire of general and culture-specific coping strategies.

Dimensions of Race-Related Stress and African American Life Satisfaction

“…Indeed, prior research that has examined race-related stress as a multidimensional construct has found that cultural racial discrimination contributes the greatest proportion of variance to adverse mental health outcomes (Carter & Reynolds, 2011), and that individuals are more likely to perceive discrimination as directed toward one's ethnocultural group than to themselves (Taylor et al, 1990). Joseph and Kuo (2009) observed that African Americans were most likely to endorse problem solving, cognitive/emotional debriefing, and collective coping as responses to cultural discrimination. Stigmatization due to cultural discrimination is less likely due to the actions of a specific perpetrator, and thus less amenable to direct coping strategies.…”

Comparison of African American college students' coping with racially and nonracially stressful events.

“…In such a situation, making a plan or filing a formal complaint may be seen as impractical because the perpetrator is a stranger, has little responsibility to the victim, and is unlikely to be encountered again. Interpersonal forms of racial discrimination may yield fewer opportunities for more contemplative forms of coping responses such as planful problem solving coping and instead pull for more immediate coping responses (Joseph & Kuo, 2009).…”

Collectivism and coping: Current theories, evidence, and measurements of collective coping

“…In a Canadian study, Joseph and Kuo (2009) examined Black Canadians’ coping responses with three racial discrimination situations (interpersonal, cultural, and institutional). The study found that Black Canadians adopted a mixture of both Africultural and conventional coping strategies (e.g., problem‐ and emotion‐focused coping) in dealing with discrimination in a context‐dependent fashion.…”

“…As a whole, the advent of these measures represents a significant step forward to counterbalance the individualistic and “acontextual” biases in the conventional measurement approach used to assess coping. While this development is highly encouraging, a review of the literature also showed that only four studies were published in the past five years (Horn, 2008; Joseph & Kuo, 2009; Kim, 2009; Wei et al., 2010) based on any of these six cultural coping measures. Clearly, more extensive research to discern the validity, the utility, and the generalizability of these coping measures is needed.…”

“…Prevailing research has identified collective coping behaviors in studies of international, racially and ethnically diverse individuals, including Asian nationals (e.g., Heppner et al., 2006; Yeh, Inose, Kobori, & Chang, 2001), Asian Americans/Canadians (e.g., Kuo, Roysircar, & Newby‐Clark, 2006; Yeh, Inman, Kim, & Okubo, 2006), African Americans/Canadians (e.g., Joseph & Kuo, 2009; Utsey, Adams, & Bolden, 2000), and, to a lesser extent, Latino Americans (e.g., Chiang, Hunter, & Yeh, 2004; Constantine, Alleyne, Caldwell, McRae, & Suzuki, 2005). As a core component of coping repertoire, collective coping has also been found to hold implications for the physical and psychological wellbeing of culturally diverse individuals (Inman & Yeh, 2007; Utsey, Adams, & Bolden, 2000; Wester, Kuo, & Vogel, 2006), and to be closely related to the religious identity of diverse groups (e.g., Muslims and Christians) (Fischer, Ai, Aydin, Frey, & Haslam, 2010; Kuo et al., 2006).…”