Reverberation Theory: Stress and Racism in Hierarchically Structured Communities

Abstract

In the 21st century, historians of the social sciences and particularly psychology might look back and conclude that two research topics, stress and racism, received an exorbitant amount of attention in the 20th century. They might argue that this scientific interest reflected the fact that these two issues — stress and ethnic and racially based conflicts — were of central personal, social and political significance in this era. While researchers engage in specific, relatively isolated analyses of these issues, however, a person living in the 20th century will not experience these two problems in the neatly compartmentalized way that researchers treat them. Quite the contrary, on a personal as well as on a community level, stress and racism are uniquely intertwined. In this chapter we propose that it is time for social scientists to recognize the intimate intermingling among community stress, racial and ethnic conflict, and racism and to bring together these concepts in one theoretical framework.