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Reframing Internalized Racial Oppression and Charting a way Forward
Author(s) -
Banks Kira Hudson,
Stephens Jadah
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
social issues and policy review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.798
H-Index - 35
eISSN - 1751-2409
pISSN - 1751-2395
DOI - 10.1111/sipr.12041
Subject(s) - oppression , racism , identity (music) , sociology , gender studies , cognitive reframing , context (archaeology) , ideology , social psychology , psychology , political science , politics , law , aesthetics , paleontology , philosophy , biology
Experiences of racism, a form of oppression, have lasting negative psychological and physical effects on Black Americans. Identifying underlying mechanisms is necessary to minimize these deleterious outcomes and potentially mitigate health disparities. Internalized racial oppression, the ways in which a member of a target group is in relationship with the dominant group's ideology and the extent to which they accept their subordinate status as deserved, natural, and inevitable, has in particular been understudied and inconsistently defined. We argue that shifting language from internalized racial oppression to appropriated racial oppression more fully centers our understanding of the negative impact systemic oppression can have on individuals. This shift counters psychology's tendency to over‐focus on individuals and or their internal processes without taking the broader context into consideration. While racial identity development models conceptualize appropriated racial oppression as a potential aspect of identity development, the field has yet to offer models of how to extract appropriated racial oppression from the development of identity. We put forth a framework for psychological liberation from the negative content related to racial oppression, in addition to offering implications for training programs, leaders in key positions in society, and researchers.