Strategies and Considerations for Addressing Race and Racism in Quantitative Family Planning Studies.

OBJECTIVE: Family planning researchers have not critically engaged with topics of race, racism, and associated concepts like ethnicity. This lack of engagement contributes to the reproduction of research that reifies racial hierarchies rather than illuminates, and interrupts, the processes by which racism affects health. This research practice support paper lays out considerations and best practices for addressing race and racism in quantitative family planning research. STUDY DESIGN: We are scholars with racialized identities and expertise in racial health equity in family planning research. We draw from scholarship and guidance across disciplines to examine common shortcomings in the use and analysis of race and racism and propose practices for rigorous use of these concepts in quantitative family planning research. RESULTS: We recommend articulating the role of race and racism in the development of the research question, authorship and positionality, study design, data collection, analytic approach, and interpretation of analyses. Definitions of relevant concepts and additional resources are provided. CONCLUSION: Family planning and racism are inextricably linked. Failing to name and analyze the pathways through which structural racism affects family planning and the people who need or want to plan if, when, or how to become pregnant or parent may reproduce harmful and incorrect beliefs about the causes of health inequities and the attributes of Black, Indigenous, and other people racialized as non-white. Family planning researchers should critically study racism and race with procedures grounded in appropriate and articulated theory, evidence, and analytic approaches. IMPLICATIONS: Family planning research can better contribute to efforts to eliminate racialized health inequities, and avoid perpetuating harmful beliefs and conceptualizations of race, by ensuring that they study race and racism with procedures grounded in appropriate and articulated theory, evidence, and analytic approaches.

Community Psychology's abuse of empowerment to further a white supremacist agenda.

When White people are predominantly in power and the discipline has yet to grapple with its own involvement in oppressive and racist ideologies, the concept of empowerment has the potential of being misused, or worse, abused. This is my experience and observation within Community Psychology (CP). In this paper, I interrogate the history of CP, especially the interplay of colonized knowledge production practices and the concept of empowerment, and uncover the use and abuse of well-meaning community psychological principles by scholars and leaders without the critical racial awareness to apply them to communities to which they do not belong. Lastly, I offer a "slash and burn" approach to starting over.

The Sociostructural-Intersectional Body Image (SIBI) framework: Understanding the impact of white supremacy in body image research and practice.

White supremacy and racial inequities have long pervaded psychological research, including body image scholarship and practice. The experiences of white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender (predominantly college) women from wealthy, Westernized nations have been centered throughout body image research and practice, thereby perpetuating myths of invulnerability among racialized groups and casting white ideals and experiences as the standard by which marginalized bodies are compared. Body image is shaped by multiple axes of oppression that exist within systemic and structural systems, ultimately privileging certain bodies above others. In this position paper, we highlight how white supremacy has shaped body image research and practice. In doing so, we first review the history of body image research and explain how participant sampling, measurement, interpretive frameworks, and dissemination of research have upheld and reinforced white supremacy. Next, grounded in inclusivity and intersectionality, we advance the Sociostructural-Intersectional Body Image (SIBI) framework to more fully understand the body image experiences of those with racialized and minoritized bodies, while challenging and seeking to upend white supremacy in body image research and practice. We encourage other scholars to utilize the SIBI framework to better understand body inequities and the body image experiences of all people, in all bodies.

Racism, Activity, and Passivity in the Analytic Dyad: A Fanonian Meditation.

Frantz Fanon's reception within psychoanalysis has been hindered by an interpretive "snag" that vexes discussions of his work and relevance. This "snag" misleadingly situates Fanon's clinical approach as necessarily outside, or antithetical to, treatment as conceived and practiced in the Freudian tradition. As a result, analytic educators, students, and therapists are prone to position Fanon on one side of a conceptual boundary and "analytic neutrality" on the other. This reading is not only misguided but detrimental to the healing potential and continued development of psychoanalysis. A closer look at one of Fanon's oft-repeated rallying cries, in which its context is examined and its intent unpacked, allows for a disambiguating of "analytic neutrality" and affords a number of takeaways that can help readers recognize the stakes of Fanon's contributions to psychoanalysis and appreciate their pertinence for dyadic clinical treatment. A major implication is the importance for psychoanalysis, in both pedagogy and clinical practice, to take coloniality (the continued legacies of colonial domination, including especially white supremacy) far more seriously.

Teaching the Legacy of Slavery in American Medicine and Psychiatry to Medical Students: Feasibility, Acceptability, Opportunities for Growth.

Introduction: Understanding the legacy of slavery in the United States is crucial for engaging in anti-racism that challenges racial health inequities' root causes. However, few medical educational curricula exist to guide this process. We created a workshop illustrating key historical themes pertaining to this legacy and grounded in critical race theory. Methods: During a preclinical psychiatry block, a second-year medical school class, divided into three groups of 50-60, attended the workshop, which comprised a 90-minute lecture, 30-minute break, and 60-minute small-group debriefing. Afterwards, participants completed an evaluation assessing self-reported knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, and satisfaction with the workshop. Results: One hundred eighty students watched the lecture, 15 attended small-group debriefings, and 132 completed the survey. Seventy-six percent (100) reported receiving no, very little, or some prior exposure to the legacy of slavery in American medicine and psychiatry. Over 80% agreed or strongly agreed that the workshop made them more aware of this legacy and that the artwork, photographs, storytelling, and media (videos) facilitated learning. Qualitative feedback highlighted how the workshop improved students' knowledge about the legacy of slavery's presence in medicine and psychiatry. However, students criticized the lecture's scripted approach and requested more discussion, dialogue, interaction, and connection of this history to anti-racist action they could engage in now. Discussion: Though this workshop improved awareness of the legacy of slavery, students criticized its structure and approach. When teaching this legacy, medical schools should consider expanding content, ensuring opportunities for discussion in safe spaces, and connecting it to immediate anti-racist action.

White privilege and teacher perceptions of teacher-child relationship quality.

In this study, we investigated differences in teachers' perceptions of the teacher-child relationship from kindergarten through second grade as a function of child race and gender from the perspective of critical race theory and the cultural synchrony hypothesis. Given the extensive evidence of White privilege and anti-Black racism in the US education system, we expected that teachers, particularly White teachers, would perceive their relationships with White children more positively than with Black children. Controlling for family SES and child gender, results supported this hypothesis. Black boys had the highest risk of being perceived by teachers as having poor relationships with teachers in kindergarten (highest conflict and lowest closeness) and White girls had the lowest risk. In addition, teachers perceived relationships with Black boys as increasing in conflict across first and second grades at higher rates than with White and female children. These findings remained after examining teacher-child racial match as a moderator. Our results indicate that racism and sexism work together to explain the perceptions teachers have of children in the early elementary grades. Implications for training teachers and school psychologists on anti-racism and cultural competency are discussed.

Power Redistribution and Upending White Supremacy in Implementation Research and Practice in Community Mental Health.

This Open Forum explores how implementation research and practice may sustain White supremacist ideas, perpetuate unequal power dynamics, and maintain mental health care inequities. The following questions were considered: What information is valued and considered evidence? and How do power differentials within implementation research and practice manifest? The implementation of evidence-based interventions within community mental health clinics is used as an example to explore these questions. Recommendations are provided to envision a future that centers collaboratively developed and community-led approaches to foster equity in mental health care.

Investing in Black LGBTQ+ liberation as white people: A call to action for community psychology.

Due to systemic racialized homophobia and transphobia, Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people continue to experience worse life outcomes in comparison to both their Black cisgender and heterosexual, and White LGBTQ+ counterparts. Community psychologists have the tools and training to address these disparities. Using a critical whiteness studies lens, we draw on qualitative data with 17 White LGBTQ+ people to describe how white supremacy manifests in LGBTQ+ spaces. Our research indicates White LGBTQ+ people want to create intersectional spaces but lack the necessary skills to effectively confront anti-Black racism. This resulted in actions which upheld and reinforced white supremacy, despite stated commitments to Black LGBTQ+ liberation. We conclude with recommendations for community psychologists, including engaging in intersectional coalition-building, training centered around queer critical race theory, working to address racialized homophobia and transphobia alongside existing efforts to deconstruct anti-Black racism within community psychology, and consciousness-raising work with White people involved in LGBTQ+ equality movements to dismantle white supremacist structures within their organizations.

The WEIRD Microcosm of Microaggression Research: Toward a Cultural-Psychological Approach.

Microaggression research has made great strides over the past decade while steadily pushing itself into mainstream psychological science. Yet the field remains firmly situated within the Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultural context. Correspondingly, recurring criticisms against the validity of microaggressions are often rooted in individualist, decontextualized understandings of behavior, and critics' rebuttals are often grounded in a philosophical and reflective understanding of the cultural context. In this article, I put forward that (a) the enactments and appraisals of microaggressions are the behavioral results of the cognitive salience of cultural schemas; (b) cultural schemas are informed by cultural ideologies, underlining their methodological and empirical relevance for future research; and (c) cultures are dynamic by highlighting the effects of geopolitical events on the content of cultural schemas that may moderate the perception and enactment of microaggressions. For these reasons, I argue that a cultural psychology of microaggressions may help to depathologize the individual by situating behavior in its cultural context while at the same time necessitating the inclusion of communities residing in non-WEIRD societies.

Examining the White Supremacist Practices of Funding Organizations for Public Health Research and Practice: A Composite Narrative From Female, BIPOC Junior Researchers in Public Health.

Background. It is challenging for junior public health investigators who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) to secure funding for projects and research. We used a narrative inquiry approach to understand and present the funding cascade from the perspectives of female, junior BIPOC researchers and provide funders with actionable recommendations to advance their antiracist goals. Approach. We applied a Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework to guide our narrative inquiry approach. The participants were the four co-authors and we each drafted individual narratives around our experience with the funding cascade and subsequently the five stages of narrative analysis. Results. We created a visual representation of key activities for funders and applicants organized by our perceived magnitude of inequities in a journey map, an interpreter table that describes common phrases and barriers encountered, and a composite counternarrative presented as a group text message conversation, elevating common themes including feeling pressured to have our research agendas conform to funders' interests and receiving limited key information and support in the funding process. Discussion. We discussed how our findings represented manifestations of White supremacy characteristics like power hoarding and paternalism. Implications for practice. We offered specific antidotes for funding organizations to make their processes more antiracist and invited leaders of public health funding organizations to join us to further identify antidotes and share lessons learned in Fall 2023.

The contribution of research to racial health equity? Blame and responsibility in navigating the status quo of anti-black systemic racism.

Thirty-seven years ago, the Secretary's Task Force on Black and Minority Health called attention to a "national paradox" of persistent Black-White health disparities despite overall health improvements for the nation (HHS, 1985). Subsequent updates to the "Heckler Report" came to the same conclusion; Black Americans continued to exhibit poorer health in comparison to White Americans (Satcher et al., 2005). Current population health statistics demonstrate Black-White health disparities comparable to 1985 (AHRQ, 2018; Shiels et al., 2021; Wall et al., 2018). Although psychological, behavioral, social, and economic factors all contribute to Black-White differences in health, there is a noticeable increase in discussions about the importance of systemic racism in producing racial health disparities. This article addresses three questions relevant to research on racism and the health of Black Americans: (1) Why has academic public health research on racism failed to reduce racial health disparities? (2) What can academic public health scientists do differently to reduce the impact of systemic racism on inequities among Black and White Americans? (3) What can Black Americans do in the face of present-day anti-Black systemic racism? We argue that to convert the vision of health equity into a visible reality, health equity research scientists must move beyond discussion, observation, and description. We also argue that to demonstrate progress in reducing racial health disparities, health equity scientists will need to work much more directly on eradicating racism as a fundamental cause of health differences between Black and White Americans. As scientists, the challenge we face is how to accomplish this mission without leaving the realm of science. Racism is a social determinant of Black health and social determinants are political problems. Political problems require political solutions.

The Return of Race Science and Why It Matters for Family Science.

Race science attributes differences in human populations to biology and genetics that reflect a hierarchy of human races with whiteness at its pinnacle. This article examining the history of race science and current family scholarship and practice contends that race science matters for family science. We discuss 1) white supremacy, the development of race science, and the eugenics movement in the U.S.; 2) racism, racialized experiences, and oppression of Black families in the U.S.; 3) the construction of whiteness in family science and re-envisioning theories to make racism's impact visible; 4) racial reckonings for professional organizations; and 5) why race science matters for family science and a call to action. Clarity about the meaning of race can ensure that family science addresses white supremacy and racism embedded in scholarship, training, and practice, and promotes work that supports the well-being of families that are most vulnerable and marginalized.

The Color of Child Protection in America: Antiracism and Abolition in Child Mental Health.

This article illuminates the color of child protection by exposing the risks of racist and white supremacist harm intrinsic to the child welfare, public education, and juvenile injustice systems, specifically when they intersect with the child mental health system. Relying on bold and radical frameworks, such as abolition, critical race theory, and decolonization, it positions child mental health providers to confront the color of child protection while protecting minoritized children against these systems of harm. These frameworks inspire a daily antiracist practice whereby child mental health providers challenge racist inequities and the historical arcs driving them; protect minoritized children and families against the systems of care designed to harm them; and work toward the longer-term goal of abolishing these systems altogether. In a white supremacist society, child mental health providers have no choice but to engage in such antiracist practices in order to uphold their fundamental oath to first do no harm. The failure to do so amounts to negligence and malpractice.

Differences between antisemitic and non-antisemitic English language tweets.

Antisemitism is a global phenomenon on the rise that is negatively affecting Jews and communities more broadly. It has been argued that social media has opened up new opportunities for antisemites to disseminate material and organize. It is, therefore, necessary to get a picture of the scope and nature of antisemitism on social media. However, identifying antisemitic messages in large datasets is not trivial and more work is needed in this area. In this paper, we present and describe an annotated dataset that can be used to train tweet classifiers. We first explain how we created our dataset and approached identifying antisemitic content by experts. We then describe the annotated data, where 11% of conversations about Jews (January 2019-August 2020) and 13% of conversations about Israel (January-August 2020) were labeled antisemitic. Another important finding concerns lexical differences across queries and labels. We find that antisemitic content often relates to conspiracies of Jewish global dominance, the Middle East conflict, and the Holocaust.

Holy Water.

Holy Water explores the infiltration of colonization on my home island, Belau, and the impact that it has had on our relationships to each other, our health, and our indigenous ways of knowing and being. I intentionally use baptism and Western Christianity as a metaphor for colonization to highlight the effect White supremacy has had on my people, while also challenging the ways in which we take part in continuing our colonial reality. I often run into contradictions about what Western culture deems we should be and who we actually are as Palauans-birthing this story of struggle into reclamation. This piece continually addresses the subject "unko," to highlight the tensions between myself, a queer femme diasporic micronesian, and the elder men in my community who have been forced into Westernization, and therefore enforce those same values and societal norms on my expression of self. I believe in radical self love and community care. I honor my ancestors and their fight for our liberation, and carry their legacy into my own journey. The health of my community depends on our ability to think critically about where we've been, who we are, and where we want to be. Holy Water is a testament to the reclamation of our stories, our history, and our collective power. To view the original version of this poem, see the supplemental material section of this article online.

Taking up the tiki torch: Understanding alt-right interest using internet search data.

The alt-right is a white supremacist social movement that operates primarily online. Its broader constituency has not been studied systematically. Participants in white supremacist movements tend to join in response to threats to their social and economic status. Quantitative work suggests they come primarily from working- and lower-middle class backgrounds. Alt-right leadership, however, argues their movement successfully mobilizes a more affluent population of college-educated professionals. In this paper, we examine predictors of county-level Internet search volume for alt-right content. Results indicate that counties with larger percentages of college graduates, of highly educated non-white and immigrant groups, and higher poverty levels for college graduates tend to have a higher search volume for alt-right content. We interpret this as evidence that the alt-right appeals to college-educated whites experiencing real or perceived threats to their economic and social status.

How Neanderthals Became White: The Introgression of Race into Contemporary Human Evolutionary Genetics.

AbstractHuman evolutionary theory has a history rife with racial biases in what might be considered its distant past that can appear glaringly obvious from our current vantage point. Despite the recognition that as a social activity science is always vulnerable to such biases (and science that attempts to uncover human origin stories all the more so), commitment to the scientific method can lead us to believe that we have improved on, overcome, or otherwise escaped these tendencies in our contemporary practices, whether through scientific contrition, changing social context, or better training and composition of research teams or as a result of advances in technologies and methodologies. This article adapts the evolutionary biology concept of introgression, which refers to the hybridization and repeated bidirectional backcross exchange of information between species, as a metaphorical frame to examine science itself and to trace the ways in which historic race biases from earlier, disowned human evolution research have been retained and selected for beneath the surface of current genomic research today. It takes as its focus the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, first announced in 2006 and refined since, and the explosion of scientific research comparing that sequence to present-day human DNA from individuals around the world to illustrate the ways in which current research questions and findings in comparative evolutionary genomics draw on and dredge up earlier biases, albeit adapted to and disguised within contemporary social relations and power differentials.

Studying Ethnic-Racial Identity among White Youth: White Supremacy as a Developmental Context.

As developmental scholars increasingly study ethnic and racial identity among white youth, careful reflection is needed regarding its framing, implementation, and interpretation. In this three-part conceptual paper, we offer a foundation for such reflection. First, we discuss the sociocultural context of white supremacy that shapes U.S. society, psychology, and adolescent development, and situate the study of ethnic and racial identity among white youth within this context. Second, we consider Janet Helms's White Racial Identity Development model, reviewing theory and research building on her argument that race-and whiteness, specifically-must be centered to achieve racial justice-oriented scholarship on white identity. We conclude by offering four guiding insights for conducting critical research on racial identity development among white youth.

Nurturing Children's Mental Health Body and Soul: Confronting American Child Psychiatry's Racist Past to Reimagine Its Antiracist Future.

This paper unpacks the legacy of racism and white supremacy in American child psychiatry, connecting them to current racist inequities, to reimagine an antiracist future for the profession, and to serve all children's mental health body and soul. History reveals how child psychiatry has neglected and even perpetuated the intergenerational trauma suffered by minoritized children and families. By refusing to confront racial injustice, it has centered on white children's protection and deleted their role in white supremacist violence. An antiracist future for the profession demands a profound historical reckoning and comprehensive reimagining, a process that this paper begins to unfold.