Racial Injustice and Self-Care

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Racial minorities take extra steps to survive and navigate racially conditioned culture to be perceived as an individual instead of racial stereotype and secure their safety.

Self-Care

Below are six things you can do now to take care of yourself while dealing with racial injustice.

1. Utilize social support

  • Create a support network with people who understand your racial reality.
  • Minimize contact with potential racism (if you can.)
  • Take time to process emotion associated with current racial issues.
  • Share racial experiences and thoughts about racial climate with people whom you can trust.

2. Create an optimally positive lifestyle for yourself

  • Remember to engage in basic self-care through eating, sleeping and having some sense of routine.
  • Develop racial pride by recognizing resilience in your own community.
  • Engage in activities that you find to be peaceful and relaxing.
  • Find activities that comforts you and make you happy.
  • Find peace from religion and spirituality.

3. Understand your internal process

  • Identify and name emotions that you experience within cultural context.
  • Establish your own position on racial issues.
  • Recognize your power, strengths, and resilience.
  • Develop perspectives on current issues.

4. Acknowledging cultural context

  • Recognize external factors such as microaggression, unfair treatment, and racial profiling that contribute to your feelings and overall psychological concerns.
  • Make a conscious effort to not internalize negative social messages/images toward your racial and cultural group.
  • Acknowledge overt, covert, and unintentional forms of racism in our society and develop a clear understanding about how different forms of racism affect us psychologically.

5. Taking an action

  • Express your racial concerns in constructive way.
  • Develop functional coping skills for stress associated with racial issues.
  • Pay attention to opportunities for change and improvement.
  • Engage in positive activism.

6. Seeking help

Seek chances to talk about your experiences and perspectives on racial issues in a safe environment (individual counseling or support group can be helpful).

Coping with Stigma-Based Stress

A useful concept to understand racial groups way of coping with stigma-based stress.

  • Proactive Coping: coping based on anticipation of racial biases.
  • Reserved Judgment: Withhold judgement on others attitude toward one’s race until obtaining more information.
  • Cognitive reappraisal: Attempts to perceive others in a more positive light.
  • Individuating information: Intentional self-disclosure in order to help others perceive you as individual rather than as negative group stereotype.
  • Information seeking: Seeking information about others racial biases throughout the interaction as a coping effort.