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Coping with Racial Trauma in Doctoral Study

By Kimberly Truong, Ed.M.'04, and Samuel Museus
09/04/2012 1:32 PM
2 Comments

Let us introduce you to John. He was the first in his family to graduate from college and came from a low-income background. John’s advisors, a White couple, recruited him into his graduate program. They promised him four years of full funding and touted the fact that he would be the first Vietnamese American to graduate from their doctoral institution. After John’s arrival, his advisors proactively mentored one of his White peers and gave her many opportunities to conduct and publish, but did not offer John the same assistance. He was forced to seek out these opportunities on his own with the help of other faculty. Two weeks before the end of the fall semester of his second year, his advisors ended their advising relationship and told him that they were going to cut off his funding immediately because they felt he was not passionate about . As a result, John was left on his own to look for funding sources. At the time of this decision, he had already published five peer-reviewed journal articles.

This is one example of numerous -related encounters experienced by John and other participants in our study, which examines strategies for coping with racial trauma in doctoral programs. These encounters caused symptoms of racism-related stress and racial trauma such as depression, dissociation, anxiety, nausea, stomach cramps, headaches, rashes, and internalization of the racism. In addition to dealing with the daily stresses of doctoral studies, John had to cope with racism and racial trauma and figure out how to respond to it.

What did John do? He suppressed his reactions, remained cordial to his former advisors, and sought other prospective advisors. More specifically, John responded by seeking social support, seeking treatment, achieving as a form of resistance, advocating for peers of color, and reflecting on racism. He also sought medical attention for his rashes and therapy from a colleague pursuing her degree in mental health counseling.

To read more, visit ’s Voices in Education blog.

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  • Already been raced

    Racism-related seems to be a bit of a stretch. Couldn’t these issues all just be related to him not knowing how graduate school works? If you want to publish with faculty, then they should be the ones funding you; why would any faculty member fund a student who is doing work with other people, regardless of race? Understanding the culture of graduate programs seems to be more of the problem, not that these White mentors could have been racist in their decision-making…

  • authors

    Thank you for sharing your thoughts about John’s experience. Due to space limitations, we could not present all of the many racialized experiences that John was forced to navigate throughout his graduate program and we understand that sharing one isolated and ambiguous incident opens the doors to such critiques.

    First, it is important to note that there is a substantial amount of research indicating that doctoral students of color may experience racism and sexism during the process of being socialized into the culture of graduate education because this evidence provided the context for our analysis (Ellis, 2001; Gardner, 2008a, 2009; Gay, 2004; Gildersleeve, Croom, & Vasquez, 2011; Gonzalez, 2006, 2009; Gonzalez, Marin, Figueroa, Moreno, & Navia, 2002; Margolis & Romero, 1998; Patterson-Stewart, Ritchie, & Sanders, 1997; Poon & Hune, 2009; Solórzano, 1998; Solem, Lee, & Schlemper, 2009; Turner & Thompson, 1993). Now, in John’s specific case, the sequence of events is most important in understanding whether he was responsible for the (mis)treatment that he received from his advisors, as your comment implies, or whether his advisors were responsible for treating him differentially and negatively. John did not begin graduate school working with other faculty and prompting his advisors to deny him research opportunities, as your response suggests. Rather, he enrolled in this particular doctoral program specifically because he believed that he would have the opportunity to work with his advisors (not other faculty). However, upon entering and beginning his program, John’s advisors failed to provide him with access to research opportunities that they had led him to believe that he would receive during the recruitment process, which ultimately led to him being forced to look for support elsewhere. One could certainly argue that this was not race-related or that John’s advisors treated him differently for reasons other than racism, which is often the case when racial factors lead to differential treatment absent of overt racial slurs or harassment, but John definitely interpreted this mistreatment as a race-related experience due to the fact that his White peers were given opportunities that he was not afforded. Moreover, we found no evidence that he had a lack of understanding regarding how to navigate and negotiate graduate school and the experiences that he shared actually would suggest the opposite. He has been very productive in the scholarly arena, he is preparing to defend his dissertation during his sixth year, and his time-to-degree will be less than the national median time to degree in his field according to data provided by the National Science Foundation.

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