After Racial Stress and Before Racial Battle Fatigue

In this work, we examine the process of using QuantCrit methods to explore the academic decisions that Black and Latine graduate STEM students make to cope with racial climate at Predominantly White Institutions (PWI). We call this form of academic coping the Twice-As phenomenon, which describes Black and Latine students’ awareness of a need to over-perform in academically rigorous, elitist, and predominantly white settings as a means of managing stereotypes about their intellectual inferiority. Here, we aim to measure the academic coping that these students engage in after they experience racial stress but before they experience Racial Battle Fatigue. We used Factor Analysis to create this scale based on 100 student responses. We discuss how Critical Race Theory and QuantCrit informed every decision we made and how quantifying racialized academic coping is critical to communicating the real and potentially devastating impacts of subtle, discrete, and often hard-to-notice forms of modern racism.