Psychological Bulletin, Vol 151(12), Dec 2025, 1448-1485; doi:10.1037/bul0000508
Internalized racism refers to the process by which individuals from marginalized ethnoracial groups internalize and accept beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes that reinforce the superiority of the dominant ethnoracial group and the inferiority of their own. Using theory-driven conceptualizations of internalized racism, we conducted the first meta-analysis examining its relationship with personal self-esteem. The analysis included k = 117 correlation effect sizes from 54 independent cross-sectional samples, involving 15,548 ethnoracial minority participants from 51 records published between 1982 and 2024. Findings revealed a statistically significant small-to-moderate negative correlation between internalized racism and self-esteem (r = −.22, p