Study: In Black Men, Internalized Racism Speeds Up Aging

racism 2In the U.S., national studies have found that 70 percent of respondents have an implicit anti-black bias—and roughly half of African-Americans do. It’s seen as a rough proxy for determining unconscious bias, and depending on the subject, internalized racism.

“Racism and racial discrimination is an assault on one’s self-concept,” Chae explains. “And it involves not only physical acts but also the internalization of an ideology that posits that some groups are better or worse than others.” Scientists theorize that when a black person has strong anti-black attitudes, the racism they encounter in their daily life can feel deserved, and that cumulative psychological toll can impact telomere length.

But it’s not helpful to think of internalized racism as simply an individualized symptom of structural racism, says Brian Smedley, director of the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. It’s deeply embedded in the larger apparatus of racial inequity, and is its own layer of oppression. Think, for instance, of the classic, heartbreaking doll study originally conducted by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in 1939. Researchers put a white doll and black doll in front of black children and asked them to identify the dolls’ race, and point to which was the nice one, and which was the mean one. Children as young as three years old identified the white doll as good, and the black doll as bad.

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