I did not point out every omission or distortion I noticed (and I am sure that a lot got by me unnoticed), and sometimes my children didn’t agree with my observations. For example, when discussing with them my plans to talk about media stereotyping in this book, I offered the example of the Disney film The Lion King. A very popular family film, I was dismayed at the use of ethnically identifiable voices to characterize the hyenas, clearly the undesirables in the film. The Spanish-accented voice of Cheech Marin and the Black slang of Whoopi Goldberg clearly marked the hyenas racially. The little Lion King is warned never to go to the place where the hyenas live. When the evil lion (darker in shade than the good lions) takes over and the hyenas have access to power, it is not long before they have ruined the kingdom. “There goes the neighborhood!”
My sons, then ten and fourteen, countered that the distinguished Black actor James Earl Jones as the voice of the good lion offset the racial characterizations of the hyenas. I argued that to the target audience of young children, the voice of James Earl Jones would not be identified as a voice of color, while the voices of the hyenas surely would. The racial subtext of the film would be absorbed uncritically by many young children, and perhaps their parents. Whether we agreed or not, the process of engaging my children in a critical examination of the books they read, the television they watched, the films they saw, and the computer and video games they played was essential.
And despite my best efforts, the stereotypes still crept in. One Saturday afternoon, after attending choir rehearsal at our church, located in a Black section of a nearby city, my oldest son and I drove past a Black teenager running down the street. “Why is that boy running?” my son asked. “I don’t know,” I said absentmindedly. “Maybe he stole something,” he suggested. I nearly slammed on the brakes. “Why would you say something like that?” I said. “Well, you know, in the city, there’s a lot of crime, and people steal things,” he said. He did not say “Black people,” but I knew the cultural images to which he was responding. Now, this neighborhood was very familiar to us. We had spent many Saturdays at choir rehearsal and sat in church next to Black kids who looked a lot like that boy on the street. We had never personally experienced any crime in that location. In fact the one time my car was broken into was when it was parked in a “good neighborhood” in our own small town. I pointed out this contradiction and asked my son to imagine why he, also a Black boy, might be running down the street—in a hurry to get home, late for a bus, on his way to a job at the McDonald’s up the street? Then we talked about stereotyping and the images of urban Black boys we see on television and elsewhere. Too often they are portrayed as muggers, drug dealers, or other criminals. My sons knew that such images were not an accurate representation of themselves, and I had to help them see that they are also a distorted image of their urban peers.
Children can learn to question whether demeaning or derogatory depictions of other people are stereotypes. When reading books or watching television, they can learn to ask who is doing what in the story line and why, who is in the role of leader and who is taking the orders, who or what is the problem and who is solving it, and who has been left out of the story altogether.17
But not only do children need to be able to recognize distorted representations, they also need to know what can be done about them. Learning to recognize cultural and institutional racism and other forms of inequity without also learning strategies to respond to them is a prescription for despair. Yet even preschool children are not too young to begin to think about what can be done about unfairness. The resource book Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves includes many examples of young children learning to recognize and speak up against unfairness.18 The book suggests increasing levels of activism for developing children. Two- and three-year-olds are encouraged to use words to express their feelings and to empathize with one another. With adult guidance, four- and five-year-olds are capable of group activism.
When I was living in Massachusetts, I read about a group of seven-year-olds in a second-grade class in Amherst, Massachusetts, who wrote letters to the state Department of Transportation protesting the signs on the Massachusetts Turnpike depicting a Pilgrim hat with an arrow through it. This sign was certainly a misrepresentation of history and offensive to American Indians. The children received national recognition for their efforts, and more important, the signs were changed.19 I am sure the lesson that collective effort can make a difference will be remembered by those children for a long time. As early childhood educator Louise Derman-Sparks and her colleagues write:
For children to feel good and confident about themselves, they need to be able to say, “That’s not fair,” or “I don’t like that,” if they are the target of prejudice or discrimination. For children to develop empathy and respect for diversity, they need to be able to say, “I don’t like what you are doing” to a child who is abusing another child. If we teach children to recognize injustice, then we must also teach them that people can create positive change by working together.… Through activism activities children build the confidence and skills for becoming adults who assert, in the face of injustice, “I have the responsibility to deal with it, I know how to deal with it, I will deal with it.”20
When we adults reflect on our own race-related memories, we may recall times when we did not get the help we needed to sift through the confusing messages we received. The task of talking to our children about racism and other isms may seem formidable. Our children’s questions may make us uncomfortable, and we may not have a ready response. But even a missed opportunity can be revisited at another time. It is never too late to say, “I’ve been thinking about that question you asked me the other day…” We have the responsibility, and the resources available, to educate ourselves if necessary so that we will not repeat the cycle of oppression with our children.
* With the exception of my own children’s names, all names used in these examples are pseudonyms.
FOUR
Identity Development in Adolescence
“Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?”
WALK INTO ANY RACIALLY MIXED HIGH SCHOOL CAFETERIA AT LUNCHTIME and you will instantly notice that in the sea of adolescent faces, there is an identifiable group of Black students sitting together. Conversely, it could be pointed out that there are many groups of White students sitting together as well, though people rarely comment about that. The question on the tip of everyone’s tongue is, “Why are the Black kids sitting together?” Principals want to know, teachers want to know, White students want to know, the Black students who aren’t sitting at the table want to know.
How does it happen that so many Black teenagers end up at the same cafeteria table? They don’t start out there. If you walk into racially mixed elementary schools, you will often see young children of diverse racial backgrounds playing with one another, sitting at the snack table together, crossing racial boundaries with an ease uncommon in adolescence. Moving from elementary school to middle school (often at sixth or seventh grade) means interacting with new children from different neighborhoods than before, and a certain degree of clustering by race might therefore be expected, presuming that children who are familiar with one another would form groups. But even in schools where the same children stay together from kindergarten through eighth grade, racial grouping begins by the sixth or seventh grade. What happens?
One thing that happens is puberty. As children enter adolescence, they begin to explore the question of identity, asking “Who am I? Who can I be?” in ways they have not done before. For Black youth, asking “Who am I?” usually includes thinking about “Who am I ethnically and/or racially? What does it mean to be Black?”
As I write this, I can hear the voice of a White woman who asked me, “Well, all adolescents struggle with questions of identity. They all become more self-conscious about their appearance and more concerned about what their peers think. So what is so different for Black kids?” Of course, she
is right that all adolescents look at themselves in new ways, but not all adolescents think about themselves in racial terms.
The search for personal identity that intensifies in adolescence can involve several dimensions of an adolescent’s life: vocational plans, religious beliefs, values and preferences, political affiliations and beliefs, gender roles, and ethnic identities. The process of exploration may vary across these identity domains. James Marcia described four identity “statuses” to characterize the variation in the identity search process: (1) diffuse, a state in which there has been little exploration or active consideration of a particular domain, and no psychological commitment; (2) foreclosed, a state in which a commitment has been made to particular roles or belief systems, often those selected by parents, without actively considering alternatives; (3) moratorium, a state of active exploration of roles and beliefs in which no commitment has yet been made; and (4) achieved, a state of strong personal commitment to a particular dimension of identity following a period of high exploration.1
An individual is not likely to explore all identity domains at once, therefore it is not unusual for an adolescent to be actively exploring one dimension while another remains relatively unexamined. Given the impact of dominant and subordinate status, it is not surprising that researchers have found that adolescents of color are more likely to be actively engaged in an exploration of their racial or ethnic identity than are White adolescents.2
Why do Black youths, in particular, think about themselves in terms of race? Because that is how the rest of the world thinks of them. Our self-perceptions are shaped by the messages that we receive from those around us, and when young Black men and women enter adolescence, the racial content of those messages intensifies. A case in point: When my son David was seven, if asked to describe himself, he would have told you many things: “I’m smart, I like to play computer games, I have an older brother.” Near the top of his list, he would likely have mentioned, “I’m tall for my age.” At seven, he probably would not have mentioned that he is Black or African American, though he certainly knew that about himself and his family. Why would he mention his height and not his racial group membership? As a child, when David met new adults, one of the first questions they asked was, “How old are you?” When David stated his age, the inevitable reply was, “Gee, you’re tall for your age!” It happened so frequently that I once overheard seven-year-old David say to someone, “Don’t say it, I know. I’m tall for my age.” Height was salient for David because it was salient for others.
When David met new adults, they didn’t say, “Gee, you’re Black for your age!” If you are saying to yourself, of course they didn’t, think again. Imagine David at fifteen, six foot two, wearing the adolescent attire of the day, passing adults he doesn’t know on the sidewalk. Would the women hold their purses a little tighter, maybe even cross the street to avoid him? Would he hear the sound of the automatic door locks on cars as he passes by? Would he be followed around by the security guards at the local mall? As he stopped in town with his new bicycle, would a police officer hassle him, asking where he got it, implying that it might be stolen? Would strangers assume he plays basketball? Each of these experiences would convey a racial message. At seven, race was not yet salient for David because it was not yet salient for society. But later it would be.
Understanding Racial-Ethnic-Cultural Identity Development
Psychologist William Cross, author of Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American Identity, offered a theory of racial identity development that I found to be a very useful framework for understanding what is happening not only with David but also with those Black students in the cafeteria.3 Since the publication of that model in 1991, Cross and other researchers from the Ethnic and Racial Identity in the 21st Century Study Group have deepened our collective understanding of the central importance of the development of a group identity among youth of color. As William Cross and Binta Cross assert, it is clear that “racial, ethnic, and cultural identity overlap at the level of lived experience” to the point that there is little reason to discuss them separately.4 What in the past (including in previous editions of this book) were referred to as models of racial identity development are now better understood as racial-cultural identity or racial-ethnic-cultural (REC) identity models.5
Most children of color, Cross and Cross point out, “are socialized to develop an identity that integrates competencies for transacting race, ethnicity and culture in everyday life.”6 But how does that identity development take place in the life of a young Black adolescent? From early childhood through the preadolescent years, Black children are exposed to and absorb many of the beliefs and values of the dominant White culture, including the idea that Whites are the preferred group in US society. The stereotypes, omissions, and distortions that reinforce notions of White superiority are breathed in by Black children as well as White. Simply as a function of being socialized in a Eurocentric culture, some Black children may begin to value the role models, lifestyles, and images of beauty represented by the dominant group more highly than those of their own cultural group. On the other hand, if Black parents are what I call race-conscious—that is, actively seeking to encourage positive racial identity by providing their children with positive cultural images and messages about what it means to be Black—the impact of the dominant society’s messages are reduced.7
In either case, in the prepuberty stage, the personal and social significance of one’s REC-group membership has not yet been realized, and REC identity is not yet under examination. Before puberty, David and other children like him could be described as being in a pre-awareness state relative to their REC identity. When the environmental cues change and the world begins to reflect their Blackness back to them more clearly, they begin to develop a new social understanding of their own REC-group membership and what that means for them and others. During adolescence their understanding evolves to include not just more about themselves but also more about their group, including an “understanding of a common fate or shared destiny based on ethnic or racial group membership and that these shared experiences differ from the experiences of individuals from other groups.”8
Transition to this new understanding is typically precipitated by an event or series of events that force the young person to acknowledge the personal impact of racism. As the result of a new and heightened awareness of the significance of race, the individual begins to grapple with what it means to be a member of a group targeted by racism. Research suggests that this focused process of examination of one’s racial or ethnic identity may begin as early as middle or junior high school.9
In a study of Black and White eighth graders from an integrated urban junior high school, Jean Phinney and Steve Tarver found clear evidence for the beginning of the search process in this dimension of identity. Among the forty-eight participants, more than a third had thought about the effects of ethnicity on their future, had discussed the issues with family and friends, and were attempting to learn more about their group. While White students in this integrated school were also beginning to think about ethnic identity, there was evidence to suggest a more active search among Black students, especially Black girls.10 Phinney and Tarver’s initial findings, and the findings of more than two decades of subsequent studies,11 are consistent with my own study of Black youth in predominantly White communities, where the environmental cues that trigger an examination of REC identity often become evident in middle school or junior high school.12
Some of the environmental cues are institutionalized. Though many elementary schools have self-contained classrooms where children of varying performance levels learn together, many middle and secondary schools assign students to different subject levels based on their perceived ability, a practice known as tracking. Though school administrators often defend their tracking practices as fair and objective, there usually is a recognizable racial pattern to how children are assigned, which often represents the system of advantage operating
in the schools.13
For example, in a study of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina, Roslyn Mickelson compared the placements of Black and White high school students who had similar scores on a national standardized achievement test they took in the sixth grade. More than half of the White students who scored in the ninetieth to ninety-ninth percentile on the test were enrolled in high school Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) English, while only 20 percent of the Black students who also scored in the ninetieth to ninety-ninth percentile were enrolled in these more-rigorous courses. Meanwhile, 35 percent of White students whose test scores were below the seventieth percentile were taking AP or IB English. Only 9 percent of Black students who scored below the seventieth percentile had access to the more-advanced curriculum.14
This disproportionate access to the most rigorous college preparatory curriculum is so common that in 2014 the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to school districts across the country “to call your attention to disparities that persist in access to educational resources, and to help you address those disparities and comply with the legal obligation to provide students with equal access to these resources without regard to race, color, or national origin.”15
Because Black children are much more likely to be in the lower track than in the honors track in racially mixed schools, such apparent sorting along racial lines sends a message about what it means to be Black. One young honors student I interviewed described the irony of this resegregation in what was an otherwise integrated environment, and hinted at the identity issues it raised for him. “It was really a very paradoxical existence, here I am in a school that’s thirty-five percent Black, you know, and I’m the only Black in my classes.… That always struck me as odd. I guess I felt that I was different from the other Blacks because of that.”
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 15
