EMBRace
Engaging, Managing and Bonding through Race
Meet the executive directors
Riana Anderson, Ph.D.
Developer and Director
Riana Elyse Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Children, Youth, and Families Department in the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California. She earned her doctorate in Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of Virginia, was a Clinical and Community Psychology Predoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s School of Medicine, and was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Riana investigates how protective familial mechanisms such as parenting and racial socialization operate in the face of risks linked to poverty, discrimination, and residential environment. She is particularly interested in how these factors predict familial functioning and subsequent child psychosocial and academic achievement, especially when enrolled in family-based interventions. Riana is the developer and director of EMBRace and loves to translate her work for a variety of audiences, particularly those whom she serves in the community via blogs, video, and literary articles. Finally, she enjoys all things food, sports, music, and travel, and is adventurous - except for the outdoors.
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Read more about Dr. Riana Anderson here.
Howard Stevenson, Ph.D.
Director
Dr. Howard Stevenson is the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education, Professor of Africana Studies, and former Chair of the Applied Psychology and Human Development Division in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Stevenson is an expert on psychology, racial literacy, and racial trauma. He is a nationally recognized researcher in independent and public K-12 schools and teaches how children can develop healthy racial identities through racial stress management. His book — Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools: Differences that Make a Difference — focuses on how educators, community leaders, and parents can emotionally resolve face-to-face racially stressful encounters that reflect racial profiling in public spaces, fuel social conflicts in neighborhoods, and undermine student emotional well-being and academic achievement in the classroom. Dr. Stevenson has served for thirty years as a clinical and consulting psychologist working in impoverished rural and urban neighborhoods across the country. He is an expert on African-American psychology, family and parental engagement, effects of at-risk neighborhoods on youth, violence prevention, racial rejection, racial/ethnic socialization, bullying and community leadership development. Stevenson directs the Racial Empowerment Collaborative (REC) within the Graduate School of Education.
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Read more about Dr. Howard Stevenson and the Racial Empowerment Collaborative here.
In order to address the need for programming around racial socialization among black families, EMBRace (Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race) was developed by Drs. Riana Anderson and Howard Stevenson at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in the 2015-2016 academic year. EMBRace is based out of Dr. Howard Stevenson's Racial Empowerment Collaborative (REC). The program offers racial socialization skills training to parents for processing individual and parent-child dynamics. This training includes skills development of racial socialization knowledge, stress management, and coping. EMBRace is the first reported racial socialization intervention for adolescents and their parents. Additionally, EMBRace uses RECAST as a culturally-relevant theoretical model to explain how racial socialization practices are both stressful for families to initiate and used to cope with the racial stress youth experience.