Raising Super Women… And Emotional Eaters (?): Exploring the Relationship between Socialized Coping Responses to Discrimination and Eating Pathology Behaviors for Collegiate Black Women

ABSTRACT

Black American collegiate women encounter microaggressions. The need to constantly regulate intense emotions in a sanctioned way to avoid further gendered-racial ramifications may increase emotional distress and lead to the use of high effort coping, such as the Strong Black Woman (SBW) schema. This anonymous online mixed-data study explored the relationships among discrimination, the superwoman schema, and emotional eating for college enrolled self-identified Black American women. Further, this study also examined the advice these women recalled receiving about how to navigate discrimination from their maternal figures. A hierarchical linear regression was run on 102 women (F (6, 94) = 6.24, p = .001) and revealed that the SBW was the most impactful predictor of emotional eating (R² = 0.29, p = .001). The women concurrently recounted receiving messages from their mothers urging them to persist through discrimination and racism while being strong Black women.

KEYWORDS:

• Black American women
• college students
• emotional eating
• strong black woman
• racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).