Welcome to Grandma Knows Best
Rooted in Black love and legacy, Grandma Knows Best is a home for storytelling, healing, and intergenerational wisdom.
Here, stories become medicine, lived experience becomes wisdom, and care is treated as something we build together.
Racism &
Mental Health
Racism is not just an opinion, insult, or bad moment. It can affect how safe we feel, how clearly we think, how tired we become, how much we trust, and how long we can keep going.
This section gathers readings that help us ask a simple question:
What does racism do to the mind, body, spirit, and sense of safety — especially when it happens in places that claim to educate, support, or care for us?
1
Black Doctoral Students’ Mental Health: Unmasking Student Experiences Carmen M. McCallum
Black Doctoral Students’ Mental Health: Unmasking Student Experiences
Carmen M. McCallum, Allison Boone, Susanna Long, Kellyn Mackerl-Cooper, Elijah Vasquez, and Gloryvee Fonseca-Borlin, 2022
This reading helps connect Black doctoral student life with mental health, race, belonging, and the pressure to keep going in academic spaces that may not fully see or support you.
Question it helps us ask:
What happens to Black students’ mental health when school keeps asking them to survive what it refuses to name?
Read the article: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/currents/article/id/1778/
2
The highs and lows of being a Black grad student
This is useful because it is Canadian and public-facing. It discusses The Good and the Bad of Black Grad, a webinar series that created space for Black academic voices across Canada to talk about graduate school.
Read here: https://universityaffairs.ca/features/the-highs-and-lows-of-being-a-black-grad-student/
What do Black grad students say when they finally get a space to speak honestly?
3
Navigating racism: Black graduate students need support” — Anita Jack-Davies, University Affairs
This piece is not only about racism; it is about support, belonging, and the need for care while navigating graduate school. It names experiences of racism and exclusion and discusses support through “other-mothering. Read Here: ”https://universityaffairs.ca/opinion/navigating-racism-black-graduate-students-need-support/
Who helps Black students carry what the institution pretends is not heavy?
4
Social predictors of doctoral student mental health and well-being
This one is broader, not only about Black students, but it also helps show that doctoral student mental health is not just an individual issue. It points to social conditions around doctoral life and cites work on graduate students of colour.
Read here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9462740/
What if the problem is not just the student’s stress, but the conditions around the student?
5
"Racial discrimination as race-based trauma, coping strategies, and dissociative symptoms…”
This is not specifically about doctoral school, but it is a useful theory for the section. It frames racial discrimination as potentially traumatic and connects it to mental health symptoms and coping.
Read here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4982826/
What happens when racism is not only remembered but carried in the body?
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