“I also experience racism when White people talk about Black people around me. I’m very light skinned so they don’t always know I’m Black and I often hear them say rude things to Black people they don’t say to White people. I just have to listen and be quiet. It makes me sad but there’s nothing I can do about it,” he lamented.
Black teenagers experience daily racial discrimination, most frequently online, which can lead to negative mental health effects, according to a new study.
Researches surveyed 101 Black youth between the ages of 13 and 17 from predominantly Black neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., every day for two weeks about their experiences with racial discrimination and measured changes in their depressive symptoms during that period. Eighty-eight percent of participants identified as African American or Black, one percent identified as African, one percent identified as Afro-Latino, two percent identified as biracial/multiracial, and eight percent identified as “other,” noted the study.
Published in December in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, the study examined how often Black teens experience racial discrimination each day—either personally or vicariously and online or offline. The teens reported more than 5,600 experiences of racial discrimination in total—an average of more than five experiences per day. The title of the study is, “Daily multidimensional racial discrimination among Black U.S. American adolescents.”
“This research reflects what researchers and activists have asserted for years: Black adolescents are forced to face anti-Black microaggressions on a daily basis. Importantly, this study expands the research on the many ways that discrimination happens, whether it is being teased by peers, asked to speak for their racial group in class or seeing a racist post on social media,” lead author Devin English, an assistant professor at Rutgers School of Public Health, told The Final Call.