“We Have to Be in Fear”: Racism-Related Vigilance Among Older Black Mothers

Abstract

Racism-related stress has detrimental effects on the health of Black women. However, there is a gap in understanding of how this stress manifests in the lives of Black women at the intersection of gender, age, and motherhood identity. Using a constructivist research paradigm, we employed a phenomenological approach to examine how a sample of 24 Black mothers aged 46–71 from a large, urban Midwestern city reacted to the 2020 racial unrest as a specific yet universal macro-level racist event in the USA. Descriptive and thematic analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews suggests this event was associated with the experience of racism-related vigilance. These results provide first-hand evidence of racism-related vigilance among older Black mothers, further depicted by two distinct subthemes: gendered racism-related vigilance and mind-body distress. The findings fill an important gap in the extant literature on the experience of racism-related vigilance specific to older Black mothers. These data suggest that the phenomenon of racism-related vigilance is experienced as gendered, shaped by motherhood identity, and is experienced as mind–body distress. These findings expand theory on the embodied experience of racism among Black mothers and have implications for Black mothers’ health and psychological well-being.