Gendered Racism, Coping, Identity Centrality, and African American College Women’s Psychological Distress

In this study, we examined how engagement and disengagement strategies for coping with discrimination might explain how gendered racism influences psychological distress among 212 African American women enrolled in an institution of higher education. Engagement strategies were coping with discrimination using resistance and education/advocacy. Disengagement coping strategies were detachment from the stressor, internalization/self-blame, and use of drugs and alcohol. In addition, we examined the potential moderating or buffering role of gendered racial identity centrality (i.e., how important being an African American woman is to one’s self-concept) in the links between gendered racism and psychological distress, and between gendered racism and strategies for coping with discrimination. Results from our online survey revealed that both coping with discrimination via detachment and internalization/self-blame uniquely mediated the gendered racism–psychological distress links. In addition, findings from the moderation analyses indicated that the direct effect of gendered racism and detachment coping and the conditional indirect effect of gendered racism on psychological distress were contingent on gendered racial identity centrality; these relations were only significant among African American women with moderate to high levels of identity centrality, suggesting that identity centrality does not play a buffering role. Our findings suggest the importance of applying an intersectionality framework to explore the experiences of gendered racism and gendered racial identity centrality in African American women’s lives. Our results also lead us to recommend future work that helps African American women reduce the use of disengagement strategies to cope with discrimination. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available to PWQ subscribers on PWQ's website at pwq.sagepub.com