John Henryism

John Henryism is a strategy for coping with prolonged exposure to stresses such as social discrimination by expending high levels of effort, which results in accumulating physiological costs.

[3] One of the people he interviewed was a Black man, who, despite being born into an impoverished sharecropper family and having only a second grade education, could read and write.

The man had freed himself and his children from the sharecropper system, had 75 acres (30 ha) of farmed land by age 40, but by his 50s, he had hypertension, arthritis, and severe peptic ulcer disease.

[contradictory] James believed that educational achievement and the John Henryism construct score may have a positive correlation with autonomic arousal in African Americans when these individuals have encounters with everyday stressors.

African-American college students with high John Henryism scores were less likely to have carried a weapon on campus for self-defense, more likely to have been arrested for driving under the influence, and more likely to have missed a class due to alcohol use.