Gendered Racism and Mental Health Among Black Women: The moderating role of gendered racial identity and coping in HBCUs and PWIs

Black women in the United States deal with racism and sexism at an institutional and individual level chronically, which we know foster damaging psychological responses leading to adverse health consequences. Black women attempt to navigate these circumstances in diverse ways, and yet research continues to give little attention to the intersectionality of gendered racism. In this study, we explored the relation between gendered racial socialization, gendered racial microaggressions, gendered racial identity, coping, and mental health symptoms among Black women attending Historically Black Colleges or Universities (HBCUs) and Primarily White Institutions (PWIs). We tested a moderated mediation model with gendered racial centrality and gendered racial public and private regard as moderators of the indirect association of gendered racial socialization and mental health symptoms through gendered racial microaggressions. Although we found no significant moderated mediation results; for Black women at HBCUs there was a significant negative association between gendered racial socialization and mental health symptoms and for Black women at PWIs, there was a significant negative association between gendered racial microaggressions and mental health symptoms.
We also tested a moderation model with various coping variables and gendered racial centrality as moderators to analyze the degree in which these moderators would affect the association between gendered racial microaggressions and mental health symptoms. For Black women at HBCUs, religious coping, religious support, and significant other support significantly moderated or weakened the effect of gendered racial microaggressions on mental health symptoms. For Black women at PWIs, gendered racial centrality with acceptance coping, family support, or shifting coping were significant moderators in weakening the effect of gendered racial microaggressions on mental health symptoms. Finally, when analyzing the data all together we found that acceptance coping, and friend support were significant moderators in weakening Strong Black Women (SBW) stereotype microaggressions and mental health symptoms. These findings highlight the multifaceted nature of gendered racial centrality and coping for Black women, and the importance of considering environment. Practitioners can use this information to apply an intersectional and ecological systems approach to therapy interventions that explore Black women’s intersecting of identities and environmental factors that influence their experiences of gendered racial microaggressions.