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Key Terms
- 1940s Doll Study was a groundbreaking psychological study by Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark which proved that young children receive messages from a racially segregated society about Black children being bad and white children being inherently good.
- Akan Personality Model is an African personality construct based on the Akan people group stating that a person is both a physical being and a spiritual entity and that a person exists in collective relationship to others in their community.
- Allostatic Load is the collective persistent physiological load, psychological load and emotional load of constant stress and daily life events such as environmental stressors, physiological stressors and traumatic experiences.
- An Afrocentric Worldview, also known as an Afrocentric paradigm, is a perspective and belief system that centers on the history, collective culture, and experiences of African people and the African diaspora.
- Apartheid was a racist segregated system of oppression and control in South Africa which lasted from 1948-1994 under an all white government.
- Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi) was founded in 1968 and is a professional organization dedicated to addressing and promoting the psychological well-being and mental health of Black individuals and communities.
- Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (BITCH-100) is an intelligence test designed by Dr. Robert Williams in order to test his hypothesis that Black students would outperform white students when taking an intelligence test that supported their own cultural knowledge and intelligence.
- Black Psychology, which can also be referred to as African American Psychology or Africana Psychology, is the branch of psychology that focuses on the experiences, viewpoints, and mental health of people of African descent in the United States.
- Code Switching is the changing of ones own cultural vernacular, behavior and/or appearance for the benefit of being more accepted in various social settings and places of employment etc.
- Cultural Misorientation represents a person who has cognitive distance and psychological barriers around identifying with their cultural values and belief resulting in cultural assimilation, self hatred and the person accepting the dominant cultural beliefs about their own racial group.
- Cultural Mistrust Theory codifies the dynamics of marginalized populations’ perceptions of dominant culture systems, where historical oppression and discrimination have occurred resulting in a collective sense of skepticism rooted in their experiences and interactions with systems of oppression.
- Eurocentric paradigm is a perspective and belief system that centers on the history, individualistic culture, and experiences of people of European descent as the dominant belief.
- Imposter syndrome is when a person feels like a fraud, second guesses themself, attributes their success to luck as opposed to their hard work and these components have negative mental health effects on the individual experiencing this phenomenon.
- Institutional/Systemic/Structural Oppression is when negative stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination infiltrate social systems such as the educational system, the health care system, criminal justice system, the employment sector, the forming of government sanctioned neighborhoods and communities and access to fair banking practices.
- Intelligence Quotient Testing is a standardized assessment used to measure a person's cognitive abilities and intellectual potential which has been proven to be inherently racist by Black psychologists.
- Intergenerational Cultural Trauma Theory states that trauma is transferred from generation to generation within a community with lasting impacts and that it is experienced collectively within the community group.
- Internalized Oppression is when a person believes the negatives stereotypes, accepts the generalized prejudices and discriminates against their own identified social group.
- Internalized racial oppression, also known as internalized racism, is a psychological phenomenon where people from racially marginalized or oppressed groups may adopt and internalize negative racial stereotypes, racial biases, and beliefs about their own racial or ethnic group.
- Interpersonal Oppression is discrimination between people where one person exudes power over another via their negative beliefs and assumptions about the other person promoting the idea that one group of people should be able to control another.
- Intersectionality is the idea that there are multiple overlapping forms of discrimination such as race, gender, class and sexuality and oftentimes these overlapping categories compound their effect on those experiencing the discrimination.
- Medical Apartheid as defined by Harriet Washington refers to the collective history of the medical field in the United States experimenting on Black bodies without their consent during colonial times to present day. Her book is aptly titled "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present."
- Mental slavery refers to the mental bondage that occurs when a person believes the oppressive beliefs, attitudes, and values of the dominant society at the cost of them giving up their own beliefs which is also known as mental oppression.
- Minority Stress Model of Health is a model of health that focuses on how minority discrimination based on social group identification affects the mental and physical health of minority groups.
- Mundane Extreme Environmental Stress (MEES) refers to the effects of everyday subtle and chronic exposure to stress in an environment in the form of racism and discrimination on the mental, emotional and physical health of minority populations.
- Nigrescence Stages of Racial Identity Development is a racial identity development theory that was developed by William Cross wherein he proposed that African Americans pass through stages of racial identity development called pre-encounter, encounter, immersion, immersion/emersion and internalization-commitment.
- Negro is a historical term used to codify Black people on the United States Census which is no longer presently used. At various times throughout history and according to varying scholars it has had positive, negative and neutral connotations but presently the preferred term to classify a Black person in the United States would be Black or African American. For more information on the context of how the meaning of the word Negro has changed throughout history please read this article on A Note on Historical Language: 'Negro,' 'Colored,' 'Black,' and 'African American.'
- Optimal Conceptual Theory (OTC) was a philosophy created by Dr. Linda James Meyers which provides a culturally responsive framework to understand the behaviors, thoughts, feelings and worldviews of oppressed populations.
- Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS) is a theory developed by Dr. Joy DeGruy that proposes slavery has left lasting mental, emotional, physical and genetic affects on those who suffered through the TransAtlatic Slave Trade.
- Race-Based Traumatic Stress (RBTS), also known as racial stress, is a term that describes the psychological and emotional distress that can result from exposure to racial discrimination, racism, and racial violence.
- Racial Battle Fatigue (RBF) is the cumulative and long-term psychological and emotional toll that people of color experience as a result of regularly facing racism, discrimination, and microaggressions.
- Racial Gaslighting or racelighting is a form of psychological manipulation and emotional abuse in which individuals or institutions deny, trivialize, or distort the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities, making them question their own perceptions, experiences, and reality.
- Racial Socialization is the process by which messages are communicated to children to bolster their sense of identity in light of the fact that their life experiences may include racially hostile encounters.
- Racial spotlighting is when a person in racial group is put on the spot and asked to represent the entire racial group.
- Racialized aggressions are aggressions that occur due to discrimination based on someone’s racial group which occur as micro-small (microagressions) or macro-large aggression (macroagression). These aggression are overt or subtle derogatory racial slights/attacks that might even seem harmless but are actually very damaging to the victim’s mental state.
- Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) is a model of health that focuses on the effects of larger systemic challenges on a persons’ health based on the categories of access to quality education, economic stability, access to quality health care, social and community support, safe neighborhoods.
- Stereotype threat is when a person from a minority group is afraid that they will confirm a negative stereotype or characteristic about one’s own racial group which could increase the cognitive load and impair the mental functioning of the individual.
- Systemic Racism, also known as institutional or structural racism, is present in the institutions, social systems, laws, policies and practices of society wherein these entities perpetuate racist and discriminatory beliefs about minority populations.
- The Head on a Swivel Phenomenon signifies an oppressed persons’ extreme energy-consuming hypersensitivity to their physical environment, heightened mental alertness and possibly the physical need to always be on the lookout.
- Ubuntu is a South African cultural framework purported by Nelson Mandela that supports the notion that “I am because we are and we are because I am,” which emphasizes the interconnectedness of community.
- Unconscious/Implicit Bias is a subconscious subtle belief or prejudicial assumption about a people group that a person is unaware that they are exuding which feeds into racism in society.
- W.E.I.R.D. is an acronym standing for Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic which refers to the nature of the field of psychology that reflects the values of the western world as dominant and has historically chosen limited non-representative sampling of people for research.
- White Privilege is/are the unearned benefits or advantages received or experienced due to being a part of the socially constructed concept of the white race.
