Study Finds Discrimination a Threat to Emotional Health

Tallahassee, FLAccording to a recent report, racial discrimination and other violations of discrimination law have been found to constitute a major threat to the mental and emotional health of African American women.


Dr. Verna Keith and her colleagues at Florida State University found that a determining factor in the overall mental and emotional well-being of the women they studied was whether or not the participants viewed themselves as capable of exercising some degree of control over their life circumstances.

African American women who felt they had some degree of control in their lives reported a lower incidence of depression, whereas those who were subjected to higher levels of unfair treatment through discrimination experienced more depressive symptoms.

Day-to-day discrimination—whether racial or workplace-based, or a combination of the two—served to undermine their overall confidence in their ability to manage life challenges such that they were left feeling powerless and depressed.

2300 African American women participated in the study, which also included data from the National Survey of American Life: Coping With Stress in the 21st Century, a project sponsored by the Program for Research on Black Americans at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Keith and her team looked at whether personal mastery—the belief that one can control important circumstances affecting one's life—explained the intensity of the women's psychological response to discrimination, and whether experiences of discrimination differed by skin complexion. The effects of age and education were also assessed.

Their analysis revealed that skin tone was not linked to level of discrimination, mastery or depressive symptoms. Older women of African American decent reported slightly fewer experiences of discrimination than younger women. It was also found that women with a greater level of education felt more in control of their lives.

"Our results show that perceptions of unfair treatment, like other chronic stressors, are psychologically burdensome to African American women," concluded the authors of the study. "Our findings confirm that mastery mediates the relationship between discrimination and depressive symptoms and plays a major role in explaining why some African American women are more vulnerable to discrimination than others."

While such things as level of education, self-awareness and self-esteem contribute to an individual's overall response to discrimination, the continued presence of discrimination today suggests that there is much more progress to be made.