Cultural Mistrust

Paul E. Priester & Jose Eluvathingal

Cultural mistrust is an adaptive attitudinal stance in which a person of color is suspicious and guarded toward European Americans, particularly European American authority figures. It is adaptive in that if one accepts the contention that the current social paradigm is inherently racist, then a person of color cannot assume that a European American person has his or her best interests at heart. This attitudinal stance was first described in William Grier and Price Cobbs's classic book, Black Rage . Grier and Cobbs called this survivalistic stance cultural paranoia . Many writers later changed the term to cultural mistrust in an effort to emphasize that it is an adaptive strategy rather than a form of psychopathology. A review and meta-analysis by Arthur Whaley indicates that there is a significant correlation between cultural mistrust in ...

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