Complex and beautiful: Distinct black history knowledge types drive interpretative similarity of, and emotional responses to, modern and historical racism among black people.

Black history knowledge (BHK) is considered a powerful tool for Black people in the United States. Although scholars have proposed theoretical subdomains of BHK, little experimental work has investigated these different components, in tandem, to understand their benefits. Here, we investigate how two of these components-critical BHK (knowledge of historically documented anti-Black racism) and celebratory BHK (knowledge of historically documented Black achievement)-may facilitate Black people's interpretative similarity of, and adaptive emotionality in response to, depictions of anti-Black racism in distinct temporal contexts. We examined the impact of preexisting critical and celebratory BHK on Black people's (N = 118) written interpretations and emotional responses to two video clips showing salient depictions of anti-Black racism in modern versus historical contexts (between-subjects). Latent semantic analysis-based representational similarity analyses were used to map correlations between similar interpretations and similar BHK scores; follow-up Linguistic Inventory and Word Count analyses determined the effects of BHK on racism language in interpretations and emotion language in emotional responses. Similar critical (but not celebratory) BHK predicted interpretative similarity of modern anti-Black racism-with higher critical (but not celebratory) BHK related to the explicit naming of racism. Although similar, accurate knowledge of both BHK types predicted interpretative similarity of the historical clip, neither BHK type was related to racism language. While neither BHK type affected negative emotions elicited by either clip, those with higher celebratory BHK expressed fewer positive emotions after witnessing the modern clip, which may be considered adaptive. Our results suggest dissociable benefits of preexisting critical versus celebratory BHK for Black people. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).