Black Americans experience diverse racism-related stressors throughout the lifespan. Disproportionately high trauma exposure, economic disadvantage, explicit racism and inequitable treatment are stressors faced by many Black Americans. These experiences have a cumulative negative impact on psychological and physical health. However, little is understood about how experiences of racism, such as discrimination, can mediate health outcomes via their effects on neurobiology. I will present clinical, behavioral, physiological and neurobiological data from Black American participants in the Grady Trauma Project, a longstanding study of trauma conducted in inner-city Atlanta. These data will be discussed in the context of both risk and resilience/adaptation perspectives. Finally, recommendations for future clinical neuroscience research and targets for intervention in marginalized populations will be discussed.

Over the past 50 years, sociolinguistic studies on black Americans have expanded in both theoretical and technical scope, and newer research has moved beyond seeing speakers, especially black speakers, as a monolithic sociolinguistic community (Wolfram 2007, Blake 2014). Yet there remains a dearth of critical work on complex identities existing within black American communities as well as how these identities are reflected and perceived in linguistic practice. At the same time, linguists have begun to take greater interest in the ways in which public figures, such as politicians, may illuminate the wider social meaning of specific linguistic variables. In this talk, I will present results from analyses of multiple aspects of ethnolinguistic variation in the speech of Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2019-2020 Democratic Party Primary debates. Together, these results show how VP Harris expertly employs both enregistered and subtle linguistic variables, including aspects of African American Language morphosyntax, vowels, and intonational phonology in the construction and performance of a highly specific sociolinguistic identity that reflects her unique positions politically, socially, and racially. The results of this study expand our knowledge about how the complexities of speaker identity are reflected in sociolinguistic variation, as well as press on the boundaries of what we know about how speakers in the public sphere use variation to reflect both who they are and who we want them to be.