In addition to the changes taking place within school, there are changes in the social dynamics outside school. For many parents, puberty raises anxiety about interracial dating. In racially mixed communities, you often begin to see what I call the birthday party effect. Young children’s birthday parties in multiracial communities are often a reflection of the community’s diversity. The parties of elementary school children may be segregated by gender but not always by race. However, at puberty, when the parties become sleepovers or boy-girl events, they become less and less racially diverse.
Black girls, especially in predominantly White communities, may gradually become aware that something has changed. When their White friends start to date, often they do not. The issues of emerging sexuality and the societal messages about who is sexually desirable can leave young Black women feeling they are in a very devalued position. One young woman from a Philadelphia suburb described herself as “pursuing White guys throughout high school” to no avail. Since there were no Black boys in her class, she had little choice. She would feel “really pissed off” that those same White boys would date her White friends. For her, “that prom thing was like out of the question.”16
Though Black girls living in the context of a larger Black community may have more social choices, they too have to contend with devaluing messages about who they are and who they will become, especially if they are poor or working-class. As social scientists Bonnie Ross Leadbeater and Niobe Way point out, “The school drop-out, the teenage welfare mother, the drug addict, and the victim of domestic violence or of AIDS are among the most prevalent public images of poor and working-class urban adolescent girls.… Yet, despite the risks inherent in economic disadvantage, the majority of poor urban adolescent girls do not fit the stereotypes that are made about them.”17
Resisting the stereotypes and affirming other definitions of themselves is part of the task facing young Black women in both White and Black communities. That task has been made more complicated for Black adolescent girls because they are continually confronted with hypersexualized and other negative representations of Black women in the popular culture. Access to a broad range of cable stations, magazines, music videos, and web-based media catering to African Americans has given the hip-hop generation of young people wide exposure to Black people on the screen. Yet the familiar stereotypes of the past “have been transformed into contemporary distortions: the welfare queen, who is sexually promiscuous and schemes for money; the video vixen, a loose woman; and the gold digger who schemes and exploits the generosity of men.”18
Black girls, who may experience puberty as young as nine or ten, are bombarded with these sexualized images of Black women “all of the time.”19 They have to struggle with coming to terms with their own changing bodies and how others, particularly male peers, are responding to those changes, even as they try to make sense of what the world expects them to be, a cognitively challenging task for an early adolescent. Again, proactive, race-conscious parenting can make a positive difference during this developmental period. “Black girls who receive protective and affirming racial/ethnic socialization and beauty messages at home may be less likely to accept negative stereotype images as reflective of all black women or themselves.”20
As was illustrated in the example of David, Black boys also face a devalued status in the wider world. The all-too-familiar media image of a young Black man with his hands cuffed behind his back, arrested for presumed criminal activity, has primed many to view young Black men with suspicion and fear. In the context of predominantly White schools, however, Black boys may enjoy a degree of social success, particularly if they are athletically talented. The culture has embraced the Black athlete, and the young man who can fulfill that role is often pursued by Black girls and White girls alike. But even these young men will encounter experiences that may trigger an examination of their racial identity.
Sometimes the experience is quite dramatic. Lawrence Otis Graham, a prominent New York attorney and author, wrote an essay, published in the Washington Post, about an encounter his son had that left both of them shaken. Here’s an excerpt:
It was a Tuesday afternoon when my 15-year-old son called from his academic summer program at a leafy New England boarding school and told me that as he was walking across campus, a gray Acura with a broken rear taillight pulled up beside him. Two men leaned out of the car and glared at him.
“Are you the only nigger at Mellon Academy*?” one shouted.
Certain that he had not heard them correctly, my son moved closer to the curb, and asked politely, “I’m sorry; I didn’t hear you.”
But he had heard correctly. And this time the man spoke more clearly. “Only… nigger,” he said with added emphasis.
My son froze. He dropped his backpack in alarm and stepped back from the idling car. The men honked the horn loudly and drove off, their laughter echoing behind them.21
Even though the writer had imagined his privileged socioeconomic status would protect his son from such experiences, the incident forced the teen (and his dad) to think about his racial identity in a new way.
Malcolm Little, later to be known as Malcolm X, was just a little younger, thirteen perhaps, when he had his own identity-shifting encounter. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a classic tale of racial identity development, and I assigned it to my Psychology of Racism students for just that reason. As a junior high school student, Malcolm was a star. Despite the fact that he was separated from his family and living in a foster home, he was an A student and was elected president of his class. One day he had a conversation with his English teacher, whom he liked and respected, about his future career goals. Malcolm said he wanted to be a lawyer. His teacher responded, “That’s no realistic goal for a nigger,” and advised him to consider carpentry instead.22 The message was clear: you are a Black male, your racial group membership matters, plan accordingly. Malcolm’s emotional response was typical—anger, confusion, and alienation. He withdrew from his White classmates, stopped participating in class, and eventually left his predominantly White Michigan town to live with his sister in Roxbury, a Black community in Boston.
No teacher would say such a thing now, you may be thinking, but don’t be so sure. It is certainly less likely that a teacher would use the n-word, but consider these contemporary examples shared by high school students. A young ninth-grade student was sitting in his homeroom. A substitute teacher was in charge of the class. Because the majority of students from this school go on to college, she used the free time to ask the students about their college plans. As a substitute she had very limited information about their academic performance, but she offered some suggestions. When she turned to this young man, one of few Black males in the class, she suggested that he consider a community college. She had recommended four-year colleges to the other students. Like Malcolm, this student got the message.
In another example, a young Black woman attending a desegregated school to which she was bused was encouraged by a teacher to attend the upcoming school dance. Most of the Black students did not live in the neighborhood and seldom attended the extracurricular activities. The young woman indicated that she wasn’t planning to come. The well-intentioned teacher was persistent. Finally the teacher said, “Oh come on, I know you people love to dance.” This young woman got the message, too.
Though I have described single episodes in these examples, the growing racial awareness characteristic of this adolescent stage can be triggered by the cumulative effect of many small incidents—microaggressions—that the young person begins to experience.23 Sometimes the awakening comes vicariously through a highly publicized racial incident involving someone with whom the adolescent identifies, like the shooting of Trayvon Martin or Jordan Davis.24 Sometimes it comes through online experiences of racial discrimination.
Increasingly, online racial discrimination is impacting adolescents of color. According to a Pew Research Center study of teens and technology, at least 95 percent of Ame
rican youth have access to the internet, and adolescents of color spend a lot of time using it—four and a half more hours per day on average than their White peers.25 In a large comprehensive study of a diverse group of adolescents over a three-year period (2010–2013), more than half of the adolescents of color had experienced an act of online racial discrimination directed at them, defined as “denigrating or excluding individuals or groups on the basis of race through the use of symbols, voice, video, images, text and graphic representations.… These experiences include racial epithets and unfair treatment by others due to a person’s racial or ethnic background, such as being excluded from an online space.”26 More than two-thirds had witnessed an act of online racial discrimination directed at someone else.
Though the adolescents of color in the study included a mix of African American, Latinx, Asian, and biracial teens, researchers found that African American youth experienced “a particularly virulent form of online racial discrimination” on such popular online platforms as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For example, one student shared, “The worst thing that happened to me on the internet is that someone threatened to kill me because of my race.” Another reported, “Almost every day on Call of Duty: Black Ops [a video game involving other online players] I see Confederate flags, swastikas and black people hanging from trees in emblems and they say racist things about me and my teammates.” Another game-related incident was this one: “Me and my friends were playing Xbox and some kid joined the Xbox Live party we were in and made a lot of racist jokes I found offensive.”27
Another well-publicized example is the targeting of Black freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania in the days immediately following the 2016 presidential election. Online hackers in Oklahoma added the Penn students to a social media account that included racial slurs and a “daily lynching” calendar. Among the messages the students received was a photo of people hanging from a tree. The response of those who were targeted by the messages (and their friends who experienced the incident vicariously) was visceral. Wrote one, “Quite honestly I just can’t stop crying. I feel sick to my stomach. I don’t feel safe.”28
In these examples, the intrusion of racism into young people’s lives comes uninvited and across all physical boundaries into their own homes through an Xbox or computer, or into the palms of their hands through their smartphones, often from unknown sources. The online expression of overt racial prejudice of the kind too often seen in real life during the pre–civil rights era is disturbing, and it has an adverse impact on its recipients. Tynes reports that online racial discrimination is linked to depressive symptoms, anxiety, lower academic motivation, and increased problem behavior.29 These are all characteristics one might see in young people struggling with core questions of REC identity in a world that devalues their group identity.
Coping with Encounters: Developing an Oppositional Identity
What do these encounters have to do with the cafeteria? Do experiences with racism inevitably result in so-called self-segregation? While certainly a desire to protect oneself from further offense is understandable, it is not the only factor at work. Imagine the young eighth-grade girl who experienced the teacher’s use of “you people” and the dancing stereotype as a racial affront. Upset and struggling with adolescent embarrassment, she bumps into a White friend who can see that something is wrong. She explains. Her White friend responds, in an effort to make her feel better perhaps, and says, “Oh, Mr. Smith is such a nice guy, I’m sure he didn’t mean it like that. Don’t be so sensitive.” Perhaps the White friend is right and Mr. Smith didn’t mean it, but imagine your own response when you are upset, perhaps with a spouse or partner. Your partner asks what’s wrong and you explain why you are offended. In response, your partner brushes off your complaint, attributing it to your being oversensitive. What happens to your emotional thermostat? It escalates. When feelings, rational or irrational, are invalidated, most people disengage. They not only choose to discontinue the conversation but are more likely to turn to someone who will understand their perspective.
In much the same way, the eighth-grade girl’s White friend doesn’t get it. She doesn’t see the significance of this racial message, but the girls at the “Black table” do. When she tells her story there, one of them is likely to say, “You know what, Mr. Smith said the same thing to me yesterday!” Not only are Black adolescents encountering racism and reflecting on their identity, but their White peers, even when they are not the perpetrators (and sometimes they are), are unprepared to respond in supportive ways. The Black students turn to each other for the much-needed support they are not likely to find anywhere else.
In adolescence, as race becomes personally salient for Black youth, finding the answer to questions such as, “What does it mean to be a young Black person? How should I act? What should I do?” is particularly important. And although Black fathers, mothers, aunts, and uncles may hold the answers by offering themselves as role models, they hold little appeal for most adolescents. The last thing many fourteen-year-olds want to do is to grow up to be like their parents. In their view, it is the peer group, the kids in the cafeteria, that holds the answers to these questions. They know how to be Black. They have absorbed the stereotypical images of Black youth in the popular culture and are reflecting those images in their self-presentation.
Based on their fieldwork in US high schools, Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu described a psychological pattern they observed among African American high school students at this stage of identity development.30 They theorized that the anger and resentment that adolescents feel in response to their growing awareness of the systematic exclusion of Black people from full participation in US society leads to the development of an oppositional social identity. This oppositional stance both protects one’s identity from the psychological assault of racism and keeps the dominant group at a distance. Fordham and Ogbu wrote:
Subordinate minorities regard certain forms of behavior and certain activities or events, symbols, and meanings as not appropriate for them because those behaviors, events, symbols, and meanings are characteristic of white Americans. At the same time they emphasize other forms of behavior as more appropriate for them because these are not a part of white Americans’ way of life. To behave in the manner defined as falling within a white cultural frame of reference is to “act white” and is negatively sanctioned.31
Certain styles of speech, dress, and music, for example, may be embraced as “authentically Black” and become highly valued, while attitudes and behaviors associated with Whites are viewed with disdain. The peer group’s evaluation of what is Black and what is not can have a powerful impact on adolescent behavior.
Reflecting on her high school years, one Black woman from a White neighborhood described both the pain of being rejected by her Black classmates and her attempts to conform to her peers’ definition of Blackness:
“Oh you sound White, you think you’re White,” they said. And the idea of sounding White was just so absurd to me.… So ninth grade was sort of traumatic in that I started listening to rap music, which I really just don’t like. [I said] I’m gonna be Black, and it was just that stupid. But it’s more than just how one acts, you know. [The other Black women there] were not into me for the longest time. My first year there was hell.
Sometimes the emergence of an oppositional identity can be quite dramatic as the young person tries on a new persona almost overnight. At the end of one school year, race may not have appeared to be significant, but often some encounter takes place over the summer and the young person returns to school much more aware of his or her Blackness and ready to make sure that the rest of the world is aware of it, too. There is a certain in-your-face quality that these adolescents can take on, which their teachers often experience as threatening. When a group of Black teens are sitting together in the cafeteria, collectively embodying an oppositional stance, school administrators often want to know not only why they are sitting together but what can be done to
prevent it. We need to understand that in racially mixed settings, racial grouping is a developmental process in response to an environmental stressor, racism. Joining with one’s peers for support in the face of stress is a positive coping strategy. What is problematic is that the young people are operating with a very limited definition of what it means to be Black, based largely on cultural stereotypes.
Oppositional Identity Development and Academic Achievement
Unfortunately for Black teenagers, those cultural stereotypes do not usually include academic achievement. Despite that fact, the majority of Black students (more than 85 percent) express a desire to go on to college or other postsecondary education.32 Certainly their families want that for them, with almost 90 percent of low- and moderate-income African American parents indicating a desire for their children to earn a college degree, according to a recent UNCF study.33 In fact, according to a Pew Research Center survey, African American and Hispanic parents are significantly more likely than White parents to say that it is essential that their children earn a college degree.34 As has been the case historically, these parents of color see college education as the ticket to their children’s life chances, yet too often their children’s academic performance lags behind that of their White counterparts. Does the fear of being accused of “acting White” by one’s peers play a role in the academic behavior of Black adolescents in the process of defining their REC-group identity?
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 16
