By Mikiah Moore

As a teenager, James Ockimey was regularly beat up and chased down the street while walking home from football practice – simply because he was a Black person passing through a white neighborhood in 1980s Philadelphia. 

He knew that the discrimination he was experiencing was born out of deep-seated racist stereotypes – “that other races don’t mix with Black Americans,” he said.

Decades later, Ockimey’s 15-year-old daughter, Erin, is also grappling with the effects of stereotypes in her own life. “Teenagers are still not allowed in the Fashion District,” she pointed out, since the city began enforcing a policy requiring anyone under 18 to be accompanied by an adult after 2 p.m. following  a series of disturbances by teens at the Center City mall.

But the curfew and policies like it stem in part from stereotypes of young Black men as hostile and unfriendly, Erin said – and they result in teenagers like her being barred from public spaces.

Erin pointed to a time when she wanted to go to the movies with friends at the District but was denied access to the mall because they were underage. “We couldn’t just walk around in the mall,” she said. 

Discrimination against Black people invokes negative psychological effects, and the effects on mental health begin early in life. Many Black people recall being exposed to discrimination at a young age – either through personally experiencing it themselves, witnessing it happen to others, or encountering it on social media, such as TikTok.

Harvard University social scientist David Williams wrote in a 2018 study that it’s common for a Black person to witness racism at a young age, because stereotypes are normally enforced in an academic setting. Sometimes, even parents’ generational trauma from discrimination can affect their children, Williams writes. Or, like the Ockimeys, parents and children can face harm from stereotypes decades apart.

Sometimes these harmful stereotypes are centered around both race and gender, such as the sexualization and adultification of Black girls. “As soon as you hit your teenage years, white America sees you as an older Black woman, like a grown woman,” said 16-year-old Tamia Gregg.

Other teens say that social media allows stereotyping and microaggressions to spread widely and even be considered humorous. 

“The amount of times that I hear [people of] other races talk about the n-word [on social media] and saying, ‘Oh, I want to say it,’ or, ‘It just sounds like a cool thing to say,’ is absolutely insane,” said Maya Leclerc, a student at Central High School.

Discrimination can cause depression, anxiety, psychological distress, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other psychiatric disorders.

Internalized racism is a modern concept of racism, where people of the same race hold a stereotypical agenda for each other, William writes. For example, Erin Ockimey recalled being told that she was “talking white” because she had a broader vocabulary than some peers at her predominantly Black school.

Another example of internalized racism is colorism. For instance, a light-skinned Black person could assume that a dark-skinned Black person is a criminal simply based on the tone of their skin.

In recent years, role models and movements have challenged harmful stereotypes. Movements such as Black Girl Magic and legislative actions like the CROWN Act – a California law that prohibits discrimination based on hair style and texture – have pushed back against the narrative that Black people, especially Black girls, can’t be themselves. The Black Girl Magic movement enforces collective empowerment, beauty, and resilience among Black women and girls.

These movements are a step towards improving mental health for Black people and for non-Black people who’ve also grown accustomed to stereotypes.

And role models such as Grammy winner Doechii have countered these ways of thinking by giving hope to other Black women and girls on some of pop culture’s biggest stages. At this year’s Grammy Awards, after becoming just the third woman to win rap album of the year, Doechii used her acceptance speech to speak directly to Black girls.

“Don’t allow anyone to project any stereotypes on you that tell you that you can’t be here, that you’re too dark, that you’re not smart enough, or that you’re too dramatic, or that you’re too loud,” she said. “You are exactly who you need to be to be right where you are.”