Walking the story of my Indo-Mauritian indentured ancestry: An arts-based inquiry into voiced resistance and conflict with reconciliation

Reconciliation is a contested term often associated with postcolonial discourses, contending with global histories of injustice, racial discrimination and dispossession that affect diverse groups (slaves, indentures or Indigenous people). Reconciliation stories mainly encounter resistance when problematized by individual experiences. As a woman of Indo-Mauritian indenture descent, I explore my ancestral stories from gendered dimensions: hailed by hardships, discrimination and patriarchal norms from colonialization and its legacies. I discuss my perceived subalternity and disempowerment in defining my positioning and identity. From an arts-based inquiry, I use bricolage to combine art·I/f/act·ology, evocative auto-ethnography and emotional reflexivity in framing emotion-based writing. Intersectionality as a theoretical lens situates the influences of race, culture, ethnicity, caste, gender and identity processes within my narratives. The discussion emphasizes a voiced resistance and conflict with reconciliation. My visual narratives display and are rooted in the listening and co-ownership of ancestral stories as mine, wherein I find voice and agency.

Perceived Discrimination, Experiential Avoidance, and Mental Health among Hispanic Adults in Primary Care

The Hispanic population is the largest minority group in the United States and frequently experiences racial discrimination and mental health difficulties. Prior work suggests that perceived racial discrimination is a significant risk factor for poorer mental health among Hispanic in the United States. However, little work has investigated how perceived racial discrimination relates to anxiety and depression among Hispanic adults. Thus, the current study evaluated the explanatory role of experiential avoidance in the relation between perceived racial discrimination and anxiety/depressive symptoms and disorders among Hispanic adults in primary care. Participants included 202 Spanish-speaking adults ( Mage = 38.99, SD = 12.43, 86.1% female) attending a community-based Federally Qualified Health Center. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that perceived racial discrimination had a significant indirect effect on depression, social anxiety, and anxious arousal symptoms as well as the number of mood and anxiety disorders through experiential avoidance. These findings suggest future work should continue to explore experiential avoidance in the association between perceived racial discrimination and other psychiatric and medical problems among the Hispanic population.

Unravelling Racist Ideological Attitudes in Texts for EFL Students’ Consciousness Awareness

The present paper seeks to raise students‘ consciousness about how language can be used to encode ideological meanings. It also aims to enhance their critical thinking about how social structures- notably racist practices- implicitly impact their behavior and attitudes. In that sense, it draws on critical discourse analysis (hereafter, CDA) to disentangle the meanings of a set of texts dealing with racial discrimination in Go for English Tle used to teach upper sixth students English in Benin. The study basically focuses on van Dijk (1993)‘s and Fowler & Kress (1979)‘s analytical methods to disclose the transparent and hidden situated meanings conveyed in/by the texts at stake. The results of the analysis reveal that racism, as a social practice, is not peculiar to any specific group or community; rather, it is expressed through discourse in all continents. It is concluded from the findings that CDA can serve as a potent theoretical and emancipatory tool for the analysis of important sociolinguistic, linguistic, educational, and multiracial issues facing students.

The Relational Wear and Tear of Everyday Racism Among African American Couples

The wear and tear of adapting to chronic stressors such as racism and discrimination can have detrimental effects on mental and physical health. Here, we investigate the wider implications of everyday racism for relationship quality in a sample of 98 heterosexual African American couples. Participants reported on their experiences of racial discrimination and positive and negative affect for 21 consecutive evenings. Using dyadic analyses, we show that independent of age, gender, marital status, income, racial discrimination frequency, neuroticism, and mean levels of affect, participants’ relationship quality was inversely associated with their partner’s negative affective reactivity to racial discrimination. Associations did not vary by gender, suggesting that the effects of affective reactivity were similar for men and women. These findings highlight the importance of a dyadic approach and call for further research examining the role of everyday racism as a key source of stress in the lives of African American couples.

Does an Increased Share of Black Police Officers Decrease Racial Discrimination in Law Enforcement?

Based on representative bureaucracy theory, the current study investigates whether increasing Black representation in police forces is negatively associated with racial discrimination in law enforcement. This study additionally investigates how associations may differ according to the organizational or environmental contexts of the forces. Results show that an increased share of Black officers is associated with decreased police-involved deaths of Black residents, but is not significantly associated with a change in order maintenance arrests of Black suspects. In addition, the negative association between Black representation and police-involved deaths of Black residents disappears when the percent of Black officers surpasses about 15 percent, especially in organizations where White officers comprise a larger share. These findings support the potential negative role of organizational socialization on the effectiveness of increasing the share of Black officers in policing, implying that additional long-term efforts to change organizational culture are needed to realize the benefits of enhancing Black representation.