"What Do I Do With This Thing?"
An Interview with Dr. Riana Anderson About Helping Black Kids Navigate Racist Encounters
Earlier this year, after I wrote in the New York Times about racist humor among teens, I heard from a couple of people who could offer actual solutions to the problem. One of them was Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson, a clinical psychologist and 2023-24 Fellow at Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, who has made it her life’s mission to combat the impacts of racial stress. Dr. Anderson is developing an app called Teens Navigating the Talk (TNT) which is designed to help teens of color combat the negative mental health effects of racism. (The app is now in the testing phase.)
The impacts of those daily racist encounters are growing as social media amplifies the reach of racist discourse. Last year, researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public found that the suicide rate in Black children and teens aged ten to seventeen increased by 144% between 2007 and 2020, more than any other ethnic group. A 2024 study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that online racism contributed to the development of symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in Black adolescents. Those symptoms can include feeling isolated, hyper-vigilant, and having intrusive thoughts, as well as more general symptoms of depression, anxiety, and sleeplessness.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.
Dashka Slater:
A lot of my work has been focused on trying to get kids who aren't Black to not be imposing discriminatory experiences on Black kids. You’re coming at the problem from the other side. So tell me a little bit about the skills you're trying to build for Black teens and other teens of color who are recipients of discrimination.
Riana Elyse Anderson:
What our lab and our work is trying to say is: it's really hard to prevent racism or discrimination writ large; it’s very hard to protect your child from all the dangers of society; but we can keep them emotionally safe. And these are some of the strategies that we try to practice with them.
Dashka Slater:
I sometimes hear from schools that are worried about even raising the topic of racialized harm with their students for fear of contributing to it. So how do you help kids name their experiences and support them in a way that cultivates resilience?
Riana Elyse Anderson:
The biggest challenge with respect to race and racism is that we try so desperately not to talk about it. So when you think about what victimization can be, if you're not willing to talk about such a central identity for young people and something bad happens with that identity and they're left to their own devices to try to figure it out, that might lend itself more to victimization. Because the question might be, “Well, how come this isn't happening to anyone else? Why is it just me? Why can't I figure out what to do with this?”
Dashka Slater:
What are the skills that you want young people to have, given that the average black teen is experiencing five instances of discrimination per day. That’s a lot that they have to figure out how to navigate while they're doing all their other developmental tasks!
“The biggest challenge with respect to race and racism is that we try so desperately not to talk about it. If you're not willing to talk about such a central identity for young people and something bad happens with that identity and they're left to their own devices to try to figure it out, that might lend itself more to victimization.”
Riana Elyse Anderson:
So the app that we developed is essentially looking at, for young people, if they didn't have a parent or a clinician or anyone else in the world to talk to them, and if we wanted them just to have a set of things that they're going to go through the world doing, what would we want those things to be? And we boiled it down to Knowledge, Awareness, and Skills, which are coping strategies.
Dashka Slater:
Can you explain more about what those words mean in this context?
Riana Elyse Anderson:
So the Knowledge piece is knowing that they're not the only one. Knowing the history, knowing prevalence rates, knowing that this is not a unique phenomenon. Having definitions, having terms, having words.
Dashka Slater:
Being able to name their experience, in other words, or put it context.
Riana Elyse Anderson:
When you work with young people and you ask, have you experienced discrimination? They often say no. And then when you give examples, they say “Oh, yeah, yeah, that happened to me yesterday.” So once once they have words, terms, definitions, they understand this is part of a greater sphere. It's not just the KKK burning a cross on your lawn, which is what you might get taught in schools. So once they have a language around it and a knowledge around prevalence, terms, experiences, history, they seem to be able to have that internal dialogue a bit better for themselves as well. So Knowledge is the first thing. Taking that Knowledge and applying it to the self is Awareness.
Dashka Slater:
Can you give me an example of Awareness?
Riana Elyse Anderson:
Where do you experience it in the community? What happens to your body when you do experience it? What's bubbling up? Is your jaw clenching? Is your fist tightening? Is your leg shaking? What are the things that are happening to your mind and your body as you become more aware of this phenomenon? And then what are those Skills that you're going to use once you're aware.
Dashka Slater:
How do you cope, in other words.
Riana Elyse Anderson:
What are you going to do about it? That could be for yourself—mindfulness, breathing, et cetera. Or it could be externalizing. Are you going to engage in activism? Are you going to write a letter? Are you going to talk to your family? What does it look like either within or outside of you to do something about that growing Awareness, that growing Knowledge that you have? So that's what our app helps young people to navigate as they're experiencing this inevitable encounter.
Dashka Slater:
I'd love if you could talk a little bit about the cortisol activation that's happening when a child or teenager experiences discrimination. We’ve seen the research about weathering, as Dr. Arline Geronimus has called the impacts of discrimination on Black women, but that's mostly looking at adults. So what does it mean when kids are in this stressed-out state as they go through their days and particularly their school days?
Riana Elyse Anderson:
Actually, we just did a WebMD podcast about this. When we become hypervigilant, when we become more aware of discrimination as a threat, then we activate different systems to attend to that threat. And so our heart rate and our breathing changes. It's going into the sympathetic nervous system or it's changing the way that food is digested or that we're sleeping. You can go into any area of the body or the brain, and it's a different triggering for racism for Black people in particular than other types of stressors or for other people.
Dashka Slater:
So it’s a different response for Black people than to other populations, and it’s a different response for this stressor than for other stressors.
Riana Elyse Anderson:
And what our bodies are saying is that this is a greater threat than other things, and we need to be attentive to it, and we need to expend more resources to abate this process. So it's taking more from our body. So people effectively are tired. They're very tired of having to expend so much energy attending to this thing, which is why we go back to, if we're not talking about it, we really are letting young people tire themselves out trying to conquer it, when it's really a systemic issue that we need to be focusing on outside of the individual, outside of that person.
“If we're not talking about it, we really are letting young people tire themselves out trying to conquer it.”
Dashka Slater:
The New York Times recently sent that article I wrote about racist jokes into their Learning Network, which goes to schools. They asked kids to weigh in on what should be done. The responses were fascinating because there’s a split among kids from the same school, where some kids will say, “Racist jokes are just jokes; you should only take it seriously if it bothers somebody because people bond that way and everybody knows you're just joking.” And then there's another group of kids who are saying, “I used to laugh along and I didn't realize it was affecting me, but now I know and it should not be tolerated at all.”
And so my question is, if you were talking to kids, how would you explain to them what the impact of racist jokes are? Given that there are all sorts of categories where, for example, if you're among friends and you're joking about your own ethnic group, there's a big difference in how a remark might land than if you’re among strangers who are joking about an ethnicity they don’t share.
Riana Elyse Anderson:
Oh, it's such a rich question. I'll start with one element and then I'll kind of swing to the other. So my mentor, Howard Stevenson, has incorporated humor into responses
that we use. So this doesn't have to be a super serious thing all the time. I'm not going to take every single one of the five incidents per day seriously. So yes, this is a very serious thing. And, to your point, kiddos are going to be kiddos and they're going to be trying to navigate and figure all of this out. And that includes people taking shots or making jokes.[1]
But I really want to zoom in on what those students said about bother, which I think is really important and accurate on the one hand to say, if something is bothering you, then we need to attend to it 5000%. Where Dr. Riana gets concerned is that so much of this is not tracked in our awareness and that it's physiological and neurological. It’s in our sleep; it impacts us so many ways. So much of it is unconscious, and when we don't have it in our awareness, that's where my concern bubbles up.
That’s five or six times someone has made a joke about your hair not fitting into your hat, and you're just trying to get along, just trying to make sure that you're not creating any hiccups or disturbances in your classroom or the changing room or whatever. But now your heart rate is starting to change and now maybe you don't want to eat as much, and maybe you want to put a relaxer on your hair. Which —the formaldehyde in hair relaxer is in the news right now about how it’s impacted girls for years and years.
“That’s five or six times someone has made a joke about your hair not fitting into your hat, and you're just trying to get along, just trying to make sure that you're not creating any hiccups or disturbances in your classroom or the changing room or whatever.”
Dashka Slater:
When I think about how all of the developmental tasks—all the things that are going on in a teenager's mind and body as they're moving through their day and all the millions of decisions that they're making in the moment—I get why you would just not say anything because there are so many things going on in your head.
Riana Elyse Anderson:
You're so right. And I love how you phrased it throughout our conversation today, that there are so many tasks that adolescents have to do writ large. So to be of color and there’s one more, oh, man, it feels burdensome. And I think it is really important to be able to say that you can attend to it whatever way you want. You can use humor, you can decide to brush it off, or you can decide to do things about it. It's the awareness piece that we want to be able to help you with. You can handle it however you want after you're aware of it. What we just don't want happening is these seeds are dropping on you and you're like, oh, are they going to bloom into something else? Are they going to be harmful? I don't know what's going to happen to me. I haven't done any thought about what I want to do with this stuff. I'm just trying to let it fall off me. But sometimes it doesn't fall off.
“I think it is really important to be able to say that you can attend to it whatever way you want. You can use humor, you can decide to brush it off, or you can decide to do things about it. It's the awareness piece that we want to be able to help you with.”
Dashka Slater:
And that's when they're carrying that little bit of stress into their math test or whatever is the next thing they have.
Riana Elyse Anderson:
That’s when you see this explosion two weeks later and you're like, what on earth just happened? Why did this kid just get upset or go off or go inward? Why is this happening weeks, months, years later? And —as we're building on this metaphor—it's dropping on you and it's growing and you're carrying it, and now you're off balance and you have to unload it at some point, right? How how do we help young people to observe it and make the decision? Do I take it off of me? Do I place it somewhere else? What do I do with this thing?
Dashka Slater:
This has been an amazing conversation. I'm so grateful to you.
If you want to learn more about Dr. Riana Anderson’s work, visit her website or check out her TEDx Talk or her APA Talk on Vaccinating Children Against the Virus of Racism.
[1] Dr. Stevenson talks about the importance of young people finding a way to deflect the racist remark, to say to themselves, “I reject your rejection of me.”
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