Racial–Ethnic Socialization and Youth Ideological Formations in an Era of Diversity and Inclusion

Personal Reflexive Statement

What continues to fascinate me as a parent, educator, and observer of racial dynamics are the ways in which defenders and deniers of white supremacy have always been adept at manipulating the idea of race to serve their ends. Even as the myths of pure and fixed races have been exploded and a public discourse acknowledging the socially constructed nature of race and the institutionalized consequences of racism has emerged, narratives of the alleged divisiveness of race talk abound. Even those who never entertained the idea that we had entered a postracial utopia in 2008 harbor illusions regarding the pragmatism and fairness of not “making everything about race.” What is most interesting and frightening to me, though, is the way that such ideas are interpreted by young people and especially by racial and ethnic minority youth. Color-blind talk preys on the naiveté of youth who know it is wrong to judge a person by the color of their skin; and it leeches off the energies of those slightly older who are aware of the distant horrors of our racial past and look at our most recent racial antipathies as representative of some curmudgeonly grudge. At a moment characterized by silencing race talk, equating such talk with racism, and treating any reference to race-as-obstacle as an attempt to dodge one’s personal responsibility, normalizing the knowledge that race was developed purely to justify prevailing power relations that are now enshrined in our institutions has perhaps never been more necessary.

As we wind down the second term of the nation’s first black president, it is safe to say that the citizenship status of the person of color is no less precarious than at any other time since the formation of the Union. For any who questioned if the election of Barack Obama to the Office of the President of the United States would resolve the paradoxes of being a person of color and an American, they now have a clear answer: a resounding no. During the current president’s tenure, the use of state-sanctioned violence to control and destroy black and brown bodies soared (Kindy 2015; U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division [USDOJ] 2015), racist and xenophobic hate groups flourished (Potok 2016), and political and law enforcement officials at all levels appeared impotent in the wake. People of color in the United States have had to reconcile this brutal reality against another of equal validity—that a black man sits in the oval, that the Grand Old Party happily claims to grasp the mantle of diversity, that both Democratic candidates for Obama’s soon-to-be vacated office use the term “systemic racism” as staples in their stump speeches, and that we live in a moment when popular opinion suggests the seeds of a robust pluralism are stronger than ever (Pew Research Center [PRC] 2010, 2015). For the person of color, these dual realities create a unique challenge in terms of squaring one’s devalued status and orientations to societal institutions.

To the question, how does it feel to be a problem, Du Bois ([1903] 1994) offered his readers a sampling of the ways he saw American blacks struggling to define their relationship with the American society. Upon realizing the existence of a veil separating blacks from the white world, Du Bois “had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through”; he “held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows” until the time he realized that he, like his white counterparts, wanted to build an America capable of attaining its highest ideals. He goes on:

With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. (Du Bois [1903] 1994:2)

This ideological diversity can and, I argue, should be read as a reflection of the problematics that inhere in responding to the changing same at the core of American-style liberal racism—its notion of individualism as the basis for citizenship. Each of the broad responses sketched by Du Bois is a manifestation of a uniquely positioned black body negotiating with the specter of the archetypal American citizen—a figure who is for all intents and purposes, white, male, and financially secure but who, in the abstract and more potently, is autonomous and free to enter into competitive relations. While Du Bois’ dissipating contempt flows from his capacity to outdo his white counterparts at a number of activities characteristic of the white world, his brethren who lack such skills or do not develop a yearning for human progress consonant with that displayed in the white world are logically given to “sycophancy,” hatred and distrust, and self-loathing despair. And the results of these negotiations should not be taken for mere personality profiles; they speak more directly and poignantly to the generalized demands made of and expectations placed upon societal institutions by American blacks. Each sketch articulates a relationship with the nation that takes into account variations in how one has learned race and come to understand its relevance in shaping one’s personal destiny.

A seminal attempt to chart this ideological diversity was made by Michael Dawson in his Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Ideologies (2001). In describing what is quintessentially black in black ideologies, Dawson suggests that all variants of black ideologies address the following questions/concerns:

What attributions are made about the nature of American society and the state?

The first three questions open up consideration of the nation’s core features—its institutions, core values, and opportunity structure. The others address how one describes and understands competitive relations to function and what strategies to take in navigating racially hostile competitive spaces. Based on historical trends in how the black masses responded to these concerns, Dawson developed a typology of six major black ideologies: radical egalitarianism, disillusioned liberalism, black Marxism, black conservatism, black feminism, and black Nationalism. Beyond charting the ideologies that have emerged over time, and the multilevel social forces that have contributed to their relative popularity at any moment, Dawson’s work offers a conceptualization of black ideologies that clarifies and asserts the core issues to which analysts must attend, as they attempt to understand how black Americans (or any racial or ethnic minority) interpret the role of racial and ethnic status in shaping their life chances.

With this broadened sense of what constitutes ideological positions among racial and ethnic minority individuals, the literature that can be said to address ideological development among racial and ethnic minority youth is expansive. As “ideology” has often been linked to electoral politics, much of the literature on the topic has been conducted with voting-age samples. Still, many studies include or focus on youth under the age of 18 and are concerned primarily with how youth respond to some version of one or more of the key ideological concerns noted earlier. Studies of the schooling experiences of racial and ethnic minority youth have been particularly instructive, as they most often offer insights into how young people link everyday experiences to impressions of the overall social structure. ¹

A recurring theme in studies of racial–ethnic minority youth ideological development has been that these youth have a distinct worldview when compared to their dominant group peers. Racial and ethnic minority youth, as a group, tend to recognize that U.S. society is characterized by two sets of rules—one for them and one for whites. Evidence of this distinctive worldview has been developed by assessing orientations to mainstream normative aspirations and notions of success. Gurin et al. (1969) establish the individual system blame construct, demonstrating that among racial–ethnic minority college students, possessing higher employment aspirations was associated with greater recognition of systemic race-based discrimination as an obstacle to mobility. Ogbu (1978) took racial and ethnic minority youths’ views of the labor structure to be central to their subsequent school-based behavioral patterns and more general views of the fairness of U.S. society. These youths’ exposure to their parents’ failings despite hard work were associated with views of U.S. society as fundamentally unfair, subsequently lowering school and career aspirations. The acting white thesis (Fordham and Ogbu 1986) extended this argument, asserting that variations in the felt need to maintain one’s cultural bonds to other blacks moderated the extent to which negative views of the opportunity structure would lower racial and ethnic minority students’ aspirations. Mickelson (1990) documents the impact of abstract and concrete attitudes to explain what appear as otherwise contradictory orientations to the dominant achievement ideology and attendant mechanisms of success. She demonstrates that students maintain interesting combinations of both sets of attitudes—the former reflecting varying degrees of acceptance of the American Dream and the latter reflecting lived experiences that highlight the hypocrisy of systemic racism. More recent developments in the literature linking variations in school-based experiences to the ability of racial and ethnic youth to penetrate dominant ideologies have built upon the positing of dominant and nondominant cultural capital as lenses through which youth make sense of the role of racial and ethnic minority status in their mobility trajectories (P. L. Carter 2003). In short, Carter puts the sophisticated cultural logic of these youths on display, illustrating how they parse the social world into dominant spaces and nondominant spaces, each characterized by a unique set of normative demands. Moreover, this partitioning of social and symbolic space flows from the recognition that each of these worlds offers valued goals and aspirations. Reaching those aspirations in either or both spaces requires considerable ideological flexibility.

Taken together, these studies, with their unique takes on how racial and ethnic minority youth form ideas related to core ideological issues, are revealing in terms of the critiques that are made of U.S. society as well as for those critiques that are omitted. The college-aged students in the Gurin et al.’s research and the high school-aged youth in Ogbu’s work characterized U.S. society by its unfair and hypocritical applications of the rules of meritocracy, and they recognized that as the stakes grow, this tendency is doubled. Fordham and Ogbu’s depiction assumed youth who view society as a zero-sum game with predetermined losers, where the least worst option requires the dismissal of the idea that race creates an uneven playing field. We see other youth who find the racial landscape navigable but requiring considerable cultural, cognitive, and emotional work beyond that which is required of whites (P. L. Carter 2003). It seems fair to suggest that these youth, whose views represent snapshots of U.S. society over the span of almost 40 years, characterize U.S. society as having come as far as it can with little hope for further progress. The ultracompetitive nature of our society is not problematic but merely descriptive of “how things are.” Moreover, these views reveal just how committed these young people are to the institutionally sanctioned goals and means of U.S. society. This begs the question, what aspects of the socialization process create such an investment in these norms, even as young people mature and develop an awareness of these dual realities?

The above-mentioned studies and many others have tapped into various ideological views held by racial and ethnic minority youth, revealing increasing levels of racial knowledge, sophistication, and performativity and underscoring the tensions created by the simultaneous embrace and rejection of American individualism. They help reveal the variations among these youth in how they characterize economic and educational institutions (and to a lesser degree, governmental institutions in regard to their roles in ameliorating disparities in education and labor) but also in how they think about and decide how to interact with whites. Interestingly, very little of this work has explored the roles of adult caregivers in shaping these ideas (see O’Connor 1997 for an exception). Despite scholarly recognition that race and ethnic socialization is a distinguishing and defining feature of the racial–ethnic minority experience, surprisingly little research has attempted to link race and ethnic socialization to the ideological development of racial and ethnic minority youth. Given the families’ primary role and concern with preparing young people to encounter the world, we might expect to see connections between these processes and the ways in which young people understand race and ethnic status to shape how they experience American society. Of particular import would be how the lessons parents and other elders try to impart implicitly or explicitly critique the individualistic ethos underlying the racialized social structure that is the cause of their concern.

Race socialization as a field emerged largely in response to the “culture of poverty”-inspired explanations of black youth academic failure. The wisdom of the day suggested that black youths’ motivation adjusted downward, as they were exposed to their families’ dependency on welfare, poor work ethic, and inability to make use of whatever academic gains they had made (Moynihan 1965). Pioneering work in this field probed assumptions linking the purported pathologies afflicting black families and black youths’ consequent lack of academic motivation. That at the time, research among whites found the link between attitudinal motivation and intergenerational mobility to be tenuous (Hill and Ponza 1983), did not deter the application of this logic to American blacks. Ultimately, work in this nascent field revealed that far from the depiction of pathological and passive acquiescence to a blocked opportunity structure, most black families proactively groomed their youth to recognize the realities of racial and ethnic inequalities (Peters 1985; Stevenson 1994; Stevenson et al. 2002; Strmic-Pawl and Leffler 2011). Given the impetus of this groundbreaking work, its limitations with regard to linking elders’ lessons on living with inequality to what could be conceptualized as ideological developments among youth are warranted.

Despite the needed focus on black family dynamics, the core questions and assumptions of the field were founded in the recognition that even after the Civil Rights revolution, racial and ethnic status continued to be major force in society, reproducing unbalanced access to and control of crucial symbolic and material resources. Issues of race socialization then go to the heart of the reproduction of racial–ethnic stratification—specifically, the roles racial and ethnic minority individuals play in maintaining and reshaping racial inequalities through what they teach their younger charges about race in society. As the field has matured, it has offered numerous insights into what subsequent generations of American blacks and similarly situated people of color have sought to teach concerning what it means to be a racial–ethnic minority and what those lessons say about how people of color aim to conform to or deviate from dominant U.S. norms and values. This extensive list includes the content, prevalence, and frequency of specific socialization themes; the agents and modalities by which these messages are conveyed; the demographic, contextual, and individual-level traits (of parents and children) that predict race and ethic socialization practices; and the direct and indirect impacts of these practices (Huges et al. 2006; Lesane-Brown 2006; Priest et al. 2014). Some consensus has emerged regarding the main thematic content found in parents’ socialization messages. And to date, the literature has given most attention to how race socialization impacts academic achievement, identity, and self-esteem, coping with discrimination and related psychosocial outcomes such as resilience. Subsequently, I focus on the outcomes associated with the transmission of particular types of race socialization messages in order to highlight the ways in which outcomes associated with racial and ethnic socialization processes may be indicative of links between these processes and youth ideological development. In particular, I read these messages as ways of confronting the individualism inherent in the racialized social systems parents are trying to prepare their children to encounter.

Bowman and Howard (1985) developed the first formal measures of the contents of race socialization messages by categorizing responses to two open-ended questions:

When you were a child, were there things your parents, or the people who raised you, did or told you to help you know what it is to be black? (If yes) What are the most important things they taught you? Are there any (other) things your parents or the people who raised you told you about how to get along with white people? (If yes) What are the most important things they taught you? (Bowman and Howard 1985:136)

Recent reviews offer similar schemas consisting of three (Lesane-Brown 2006) to four (Hughes et al. 2006; Priest et al. 2014) major themes. One theme is labeled culture messages or cultural socialization, which is similar to racial pride and commitment in its promotion of “cultural pride, teaching cultural knowledge, and practicing cultural traditions” (Priest et al. 2014:140). Preparation for bias and promotion of mistrust attempt to distinguish between indicators of racial barrier awareness/blocked opportunities; the former focuses on alerting youth to the potential of racially and ethnically based prejudice and discrimination and suggesting effective coping mechanisms, while the latter emphasizes the need for caution in interpersonal interactions with racial and ethnic others. Alternatively, these categories are lumped together and referred to as messages on “minority experience” (Lesane-Brown 2006:409). Finally, egalitarianism is said to “focus on shared commonalities rather than racial, ethnic or cultural differences” (Priest et al. 2014:141). Lesane-Brown (2006) refers to these messages as “mainstream experience” (2006:409). This theme reflects the original goal of conceptualizing messages about the need to avoid judging or ostracizing white individuals on the basis of their relative privilege and the need to be cognizant of and ready to take advantage of improvements in the opportunity structure, but by subsuming messages regarding self-development and individual achievement, this label might deracialize content that is indeed taken by racial and ethnic youth to be coupled with lessons they have been taught with specific reference to their racial and ethnic status. The impacts of each of these themes can be read in terms of their implications for how racial and ethnic minority youth orient themselves to the individualistic ethos lying at the core of our racialized social system.

Bowman and Howard (1985) attempt to unpack the relationships between race socialization, efficacy, and academic achievement. They found that college students who reported being taught about self-development and individual achievement had higher levels personal efficacy, compared to students who reported that they were taught nothing. This study also found that reporting being taught about racial barriers increased achievement independent of any relationship with personal efficacy. This implies that seeing achievement as constitutive of one’s racial–ethnic status might make one feel better prepared to negotiate a success-oriented system (Oyserman, Harrison, and Bybee 2001). Moreover, learning about the historical entrenchment of systemic racism might serve as a buffer when faced by seemingly race-related obstacles or as a form of motivation to outperform expectations (Akom 2008; D. J. Carter 2008).

In the realm of identity, among both young children and adolescents, cultural socialization has been associated with an increased tendency to question mainstream narratives of success, greater knowledge of one’s racial–ethnic historical background, active identity exploration, more positive in-group attitudes, and preferences for in-group ethnic practices (Demo and Hughes 1990; Lee and Qunitna 2005; Marshall 1995; Quintana and Vera 1999; Stevenson 1995). Cultural socialization messages fall into what Stevenson, Reed, and Bodison (1996) have conceptualized as proactive messages—messages meant to affirm one’s sense of self—as opposed to protective messages that warn youth about racism and discrimination. The outcomes associated with cultural socialization messages might suggest that youth are responding positively to what amounts to on-the-job training to value one’s racial–ethnic background when doing so requires extraordinary effort. In everyday experience, racial and ethnic minority youth are not likely to be bombarded with images of success and authority that look like them. Being regularly engaged in seeking out such images might be particularly appealing in a competitive space marked by the absence of such images.

When it comes to self-esteem and coping with discrimination, there is evidence for the positive impacts of racial and ethnic socialization. In a study of adolescents, Constantine and Blackmon (2002) found that messages which emphasized preparing for bias and cultural pride were associated with higher self-esteem, while reporting receiving messages that emphasized fitting in with the mainstream and playing down the relevance of race lowered self-esteem. Among Mexican American elementary and middle school-aged youth, preparation for bias messages increased ethnic knowledge and understandings of prejudiced (Quintana and Vera 1999). Other studies of adolescents also find that when youth report being taught about the potential for bias, they enact more proactive and constructive coping mechanisms when confronted with discrimination (Brown and Tylka 2011; Fischer and Shaw 1999; Phinney and Chavira 1995; Scott 2003). Here, it seems that emphasizing one’s cultural background coupled with an awareness that people of that background have and continue to face unique obstacles likely fosters pride and perhaps an urgency to withstand and overcome the barbs of prejudice and discrimination that are taken as a permanent feature of social existence.

Unsurprisingly, race and ethnic socialization messages tend toward conformity, adaptation, awareness of, and subservience to the rules of the game. For adult caregivers of racial and ethnic minority youth, to not take this position might appear antithetical to their roles as caregivers. Even in this period marked by the murders of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Miriam Carey, Tanisha Anderson, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and countless other, the challenge of protecting youth of color but not fomenting fatalism is not lost parents and other adults (Thomas and Blackmon 2015). The irony is, as we prepare our young to survive, we also run the risk of limiting how they may live. Even the relative successes of racial and ethnic socialization reinforce the taken-for-granted nature of our ultracompetitive social system. Once we have been well trained for a particular sport, it is not likely we will seek out ways to alter its rules and basic premises.

Cultivating racial and ethnic minority youth requires a careful combination of prudence and visionary exuberance. For that reason, it is imperative that we redouble our attempts to link the content and delivery of messages about race to the ways in which youth develop deeper insights into the workings of our social system. This need not mean shifting from a stance of preparation to rash and unbridled opposition, but at the very least, it must mean creating and sustaining informal and formal channels through which young children can share their views on racial and ethnic issues but also receive information about the ways race and ethnicity have shaped the world they live in. This charge is particularly crucial in a time when the pervasiveness of color-blind norms prompts feelings of reluctance in children of color to even reference obvious racial difference (i.e., skin color) in neutral situations (Pauker, Apfelbaum, and Spitzer 2015) and privileges culture of poverty-like explanations of racial and ethnic inequalities (Risman and Banerjee 2013).

Mirroring the oppression attendant upon the incorporation of racial and ethnic others into the body politic, the social sciences have been slow and uneven in incorporating research that takes for the granted the humanity of people of color, often failing to recognize areas of research need, ghettoizing those that are recognized, and marginalizing others. As a result, fields of inquiry that would allow us to consider the intersection of how people of color learn race and how such learnings inform ideological orientations to any number of societal institutions and processes have developed along parallel lines. But now this is changing. We are seeing bridges being built between micro-oriented perspectives that take on the classical sociological concern with the development of the self and macro-oriented approaches primarily taking on the determinants of political beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. The articles in this special issue seek to be a part of that bridge building. Taken together, pieces aim to contribute to and sustain an already robust discussion on how minority racial and ethnic status influences the negotiation of individualism dominant in discourses of race and citizenship.