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.
