Coping With Racial Battle Fatigue: Differences and Similarities for African American and Mexican American Students

• In Event: 63.041 - College Student Engagement and Experiences With Diversity

Abstract

While African Americana and Mexican American can thrive in higher education, they often have to divert energy from academic endeavors to responding to and coping with racial microaggressions that results in varying degrees of racial battle fatigue. Using a stacked structural equation modeling approach, this paper seeks to explore the similarities and differences of racial battle fatigue of African American and Mexican American/Latino students. Additionally, the paper seeks to understand how perceptions of campus racial climate and coping mechanisms impact RBF. Coping strategies helped mediate the relationship between racial microaggressions and psychological, physiological, and behavioral stress responses racial microaggressions on the physiological stress responses for both groups, but coping did not eliminate the effect of racial microaggressions.

Author

• Jeremy D. Franklin, University of Utah