Thursday, February 27, 2014

Searcher: Perceived Racism


For this week’s searcher post I decided to further research a topic that was brought up in class about the effects of perceived racism among individuals. More specifically, how perceived racism and stress levels are correlated. In a study conducted by Sellers et al, 2003, it was concluded that people of certain ethnicities that had strong racial ties to them (i.e Black, Latino, Asian) were more prone reporting ethnic discrimination in their everyday lives. In a broader sense, they stated the more one believed that his/ her race was a core component of his/ her identity, the more they would attribute ambiguous statements about race as being racist. The effects of perceived racism as well as how frequently it occurs, ultimately leads to higher levels of stress. In as study by Din-Dzietham et al, 2004, “found that rural African–American male workers who perceived ‘race as hindrance to job success’ had an 8 mm Hg higher [blood pressure] than those who perceived that race helped them.” This study was also interesting as it compared the stress levels of African Americans when subjected to racism from non-African Americans as well as from other African Americans. It was reported that higher rises in blood pressure were seen in the latter than in the former- suggesting that intra-group discrimination was more distressful than inter-group discrimination.


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