528 Prejudice, Racism, and Discrimination
paradigm, Dion and Earn (1975) found that when they made
attributions to prejudice for a severe failure, Jewish men
showed evidence of heightened in-group identification as
well as a stress response on mood measures: namely, feeling
more aggression, greater sadness, higher anxiety, and height-
ened self-consciousness. Similar, Crocker et al. (1993) found
that women, especially obese ones, reported more negative
moods when they received negative feedback from an attrac-
tive man as opposed to positive feedback.
Correlational studies concur strongly with experimental
studies in documenting a link between perceived discrimina-
tion and stress. Perceptions of discrimination in Black
Americans correlate with psychiatric symptoms. Landrine
and Klonoff (1996; Klonoff & Landrine, 1999) developed a
reliable 18-item measure of perceived racial discrimination
called the Schedule of Racist Events (SRE) and validated it in
two separate studies with samples of Black American com-
munity respondents. In the most recent study with more than
500 respondents sampled from middle- and lower-class sec-
tions of San Bernardino, California, they found that 96%
reported discrimination in the past year and 98% at some
time during their lives. For 95% of the respondents, these
discrimination experiences were labeled as stressful. Black
American men reported more experiences of discrimination
than did their female counterparts. In both studies, frequency
of discrimination experiences correlated positively with psy-
chiatric symptoms, accounting for about 10% of the variance.
In the 1996 study, the frequency of discrimination experi-
ences was also linked to cigarette smoking.
Other researchers have highlighted the cumulative and
chronic stressfulness of perceived discrimination among
Black Americans. Feagin (1991) emphasized that for Black
Americans, even those well ensconced in the middle class, the
cumulative effect of racist encounters over a lifetime becomes
potentially more potent than a simple sum of frequency count
of such experiences might suggest. Branscombe, Schmitt, and
Harvey (1999) showed the negative effects upon well-being
of chronic perceptions of discrimination in Black American
respondents. Branscombe and her colleagues emphasized that
chronic perceptions of discrimination and stable attributions
of pervasive prejudice have quite different effects on self-
esteem and well-being than do attributions to prejudice for a
single event, such as is typically explored in laboratory stud-
ies of perceived prejudice or discrimination.
A Biopsychosocial Model
Clark, Anderson, Clark, and Williams (1999) proposed a
biopsychosocial model of racism as a stressor for Black
Americans. Its underlying assumption is that perceived
racism leads to heightened psychological and physiological
stress responses from Black Americans. In this model, con-
stitutional, sociodemographic, psychological, and behavioral
factors are proposed to moderate the relationship between an
environmental stimulus and its perception as being racist.
Perceptions of racism are then linked to coping responses,
psychological and physiological stress responses, and health
outcomes.
The links between perceived racism and health outcomes
among Black Americans are perhaps the most intriguing and
important aspect of Clark et al.’s (1999) model. The authors
suggested that racism and its perception (or denial) relate
to cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and immune system re-
sponses by Black Americans. Hypertension among Black
Americans may well be associated, albeit in complex ways,
with experiences of racism and methods of coping with them.
For example, Krieger (1990) found that Black American
women who indicated that they passively accepted racist ex-
periences were over four times more likely to report hyper-
tension than were those indicating a more active response to
unfair treatment. Moreover, those Black American women
reporting no instances of unfair treatment were more than 2^1 2
times more likely to report hypertension than were those re-
porting one or more experiences of racism. If one assumes
that Black women reporting no instances were denying or in-
ternalizing racist experiences, this finding and other studies
(Krieger & Sidney, 1996) suggest that as a coping mecha-
nism, denial may have unfortunate health correlates or conse-
quences for Black Americans. The specific links between
perceptions and experiences of racism and hypertension in
Black Americans of both sexes, however, remain to be firmly
established and better understood.
Like racism, sexism also has pernicious consequences
for individuals experiencing and perceiving it. Landrine,
Klonoff, Gibbs, Manning, and Lund (1995) correlated life-
time and recent experiences of sexist events from their
Schedule of Sexist Events (SSE) with scores from anxiety
and depression scales, the Hopkins Symptom Checklist
(HSC), and a measure of premenstrual tension syndrome
(PMTS). Hierarchical regression analyses were performed in
which generic stress measures for life events and hassles
were entered at the first step, followed by lifetime and recent
SSE scores in the second step. SSE scores accounted for ad-
ditional variance beyond the generic stress indexes. Sexist
discrimination emerged as an especially important and better
predictor than generic stress for symptoms from the PMTS
and HSC measures including premenstrual, somatization,
obsessive-compulsive, depressive, and total psychiatric
symptoms. Moreover, the ability of SSE scores to predict
symptoms varied as a function of the U.S. women’s ages and