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Racialized Labor, Racial Battle Fatigue, and Cultural Health
Length: 3.0 Hours
Note: If you attended this session live (February 5, 2021) and received credit, you cannot attend the on demand session for additional credit.
Although little may be new with respect to the lived experience of racialized labor for Black people navigating Whiteness and White spaces, the ability to name this phenomenon is key to understanding and intervention. This session includes a description of the first published study of racialized labor in everyday life, where racialized labor is defined as the ongoing process of navigating hostile environments steeped in a White racial frame. In addition to introducing racialized labor, this presentation will also include a discussion of racial battle fatigue—a likely outcome of all the racialized labor in people’s lives. Naming the unnamed, i.e., racialized labor, provides an important analytical tool for distinguishing the ongoing process of navigating racism from negative consequences such as racial battle fatigue. These concepts also have critical implications for creating spaces that facilitate cultural health, where scholars have criticized the individual psychotherapy framework as one-to-one counseling does not fully consider the person in the context of their environment. In fact, this may be one reason why Black and Latino communities tend to underutilize professional mental health services. Moreover, the interracial context of counseling and therapy represents a microcosm of the larger society. Hence, in this presentation Dr. Grier-Reed will integrate previous research findings to underscore the need for moving toward an orientation based in cultural health rather than simply mental health.
This session is at the intermediate level and is designed for psychologists and other mental health professionals.
Objectives:
Tabitha Grier-Reed Ph.D., LP, is a licensed psychologist and professor at the University of Minnesota whose mission includes creating generative, humanizing, and even healing spaces for Black students. Dr. Grier-Reed received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Counseling and Student Personnel Psychology (CSPP). In 2005 she co-founded the African American Student Network (aka AFAM)—a safe space for Black students on the University of Minnesota campus, and she continues to publish research on the network which has been connected to positive retention and graduation outcomes, traditional therapeutic factors, and increased social connectedness. Most recently, she has also identified AFAM as a space for “racialized labor”—a term she coined in trying to capture the lived experiences of students.
The speaker has indicated they do not have any conflicts of interest.
