The impact of racism to the individual is arguably immeasurable; however, the impact on psychotherapists who themselves have personally had either one or multiple experiences of racism and work with clients in therapy who have also experienced racism is an area with very little research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with black cognitive behavioural therapists who have personally experienced racism and have also worked with clients who have experienced racism; data were analysed using interpretive phenomenological analysis. As this was a pilot study, only two participants were recruited to the study. Superordinate and subordinate themes were identified from the data and explored. The study highlighted that the impact of racism, racist experiences and microaggressions can lead to mental health problems, and there is need for further support for therapists, especially within the contexts of clinical supervision and from their organisation leadership. In addition, the need for further research was also identified, as well as improved training in working with disclosures of racism, and racial trauma within a therapeutic context was considered as important to the therapists of this pilot study.

Racism is a pervasive problem in Western society, leading to mental and physical unwellness in people from racialized groups. Psychology began as a racist discipline and still is. As such, most clinical training and curricula do not operate from an anti-racist framework. Although most therapists have seen clients with stress and trauma due to racialization, very few were taught how to assess or treat it. Furthermore, clinicians and researchers can cause harm when they rely on White-dominant cultural norms that do not serve people of colour well. This paper discusses how clinicians can recognize and embrace an anti-racism approach in practice, research, and life in general. Included is a discussion of recent research on racial microaggressions, the difference between being a racial justice ally and racial justice saviour, and new research on what racial allyship entails. Ultimately, the anti-racist clinician will achieve a level of competency that promotes safety and prevents harm coming to those they desire to help, and they will be an active force in bringing change to those systems that propagate emotional harm in the form of racism.

This article highlights three epistemic practices, which, taken together, create conditions that worsen the problem of ‘bisexual erasure.’ Though bisexual people constitute a significant portion of the larger LGBTQ+ community, their identities and experiences and routinely erased — in queer communities and broader society alike. This article argues that we have both an epistemic and a moral obligation to attend to the epistemic conditions created for bisexual people, and to work to make those conditions more just. Specifically, I highlight the detrimental influence of testimonial injustice, testimonial smothering, and epistemic microaggressions on bisexual people's ability to challenge and resist their own erasure.

Efforts to understand racial microaggressions have focused on the impact on targets, but few studies have examined the motivations and characteristics of offenders, and none has examined microaggressions committed by members of racialized groups. The purpose of this study is to determine if racial microaggressions should be conceptualized as a form of aggression when committed by racialized individuals by examining the relationship between propensity to commit microaggressions and aggressive tendencies to help inform interventions. This nationwide survey recruited 356 Asian, Black and Hispanic American adults. Participants completed measures of likelihood of committing anti-Black microaggressions, aggression, negative affect, and ethnic identity. There was a significant negative correlation between ratings by diversity experts of microaggressive interactions being racist and participants’ likelihood of engaging in those same interactions. For each ethnoracial group, likelihood of committing anti-Black microaggressions was significantly positively correlated with all measures of aggression examined. The correlation between microaggressions and aggression was strongest for non-White Hispanic participants and weakest among Asian participants. A linear regression showed that aggression uniquely predicted microaggression likelihood, after controlling for respective co-variates within groups. Among non-White Hispanic participants, there was a significant positive correlation between negative affect and propensity to commit microaggressions, but this association disappeared in the regression analysis after accounting for aggression. A positive ethnic identity was not correlated with microaggression likelihood among Black participants. Findings indicate that microaggressions represent aggression on the part of offenders and constitute a form of behaviour that is generally socially unacceptable. Implications and cognitive behavioural treatment approaches are discussed.

The traumatic stress experienced by our black healthcare colleagues is often overlooked. This work contextualizes workplace racism, identifies some interpersonal barriers limiting anti-racist growth, and calls for solidarity.

Since the 1980s, everyday racism has gained ground within the social sciences. However, the theory of everyday racism has not been properly adopted and, consequently, varies across different research fields. The main goal of this study is to improve the scientific rigor within research on everyday racism in the human and social sciences. Following a review of the ground-breaking work of Philomena Essed, three main components in everyday racism literature are theoretically distilled and conceptualized: (1) repetitiveness and familiarity, (2) racism and (3) the interdependent link between micro-interactions and macro-structures. This is followed by a critical assessment of what everyday racism means and how it is assessed in research today, by performing a systematic electronic review of qualitative-methods papers. We make three suggestions towards a more complete and sophisticated understanding of everyday racism. Firstly, the concepts of everyday racism and microaggressions need to be disconnected from each other. Secondly, research should focus more on the symbiotic relation between micro-interactions and macro-structures and should also identify relevant situational features at the spatial meso-level. Lastly, it is important to be cautious of the pitfall of cultural determinism that is still a popular perspective in today’s field of (everyday) racism.