Critical examination of resilience and resistance in African American families: Adaptive capacities to navigate toxic oppressive upstream waters

Abstract

African American families navigate not only everyday stressors and adversities but also unique sociocultural stressors (e.g., “toxic upstream waters” like oppression). These adverse conditions are consequences of the historical vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow laws, often manifested as inequities in wealth, housing, wages, employment, access to healthcare, and quality education. Despite these challenges, African American families have developed resilience using strength-based adaptive coping strategies, to some extent, to filter these waters. To advance the field of resilience research, we focused on the following questions: (1) what constitutes positive responses to adversity?; (2) how is resilience defined conceptually and measured operationally?; (3) how has the field of resilience evolved?; (4) who defines what, when, and how responses are manifestations of resilience, instead of, for example, resistance? How can resistance, which at times leads to positive adaptations, be incorporated into the study of resilience?; and (5) are there case examples that demonstrate ways to address structural oppression and the pernicious effects of racism through system-level interventions, thereby changing environmental situations that sustain toxic waters requiring acts of resilience to survive and thrive? We end by exploring how a re-conceptualization of resilience requires a paradigm shift and new methodological approaches to understand ways in which preventive interventions move beyond focusing on families’ capacity to navigate oppression and target systems and structures that maintain these toxic waters.

The Psychosocial Health of Black/African Americans Compared with People of Other Races/Ethnic Origins during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Although media reports have shared that Black/African Americans are reporting disproportionate challenges and disruptions to their psychosocial health due to being impacted by the "double pandemic", this study identified Black/African American respondents as having lower levels of psychological distress than other groups [32,[38][39][40][41][42].…”

Emergence and evolution of developmental resilience science over half a century

“…Research on the neurobiology of resilience blossomed when the tools for reliable assessments of processes within the human body became more feasible, including assessments of stress biology, gene methylation, immune function, and brain function (Feder et al, 2019;Feldman, 2021;Gunnar, 2020;Masten & Cicchetti, 2016;McEwen, 2020;McLaughlin et al, 2020;Shonkoff et al, 2021). Research focused on sociocultural processes, acculturation, discrimination, social justice, and historical trauma gained more attention (e.g., Jones et al, 2023;Marks et al, 2020;Murry et al, 2023;Panter-Brick, 2023;Spencer, 2023;Motti-Stefanidi, 2023;Suárez-Orozco et al, 2018;Wilbur & Gone, 2023). Multisystem measures of protective factors became prominent, such as the Child and Youth Resilience Measure (Ungar & Liebenberg, 2011) and indices of positive (rather than adverse) childhood experiences, such as the Benevolent Childhood Experiences scale (Narayan et al, 2023).…”