The study focuses on the relationship between racial identity and academic achievement for African American college students. The Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity (MMRI) was used to assess the relationship between racial centrality, racial ideology, and academic performance. A total of 248 participants were recruitedfrom a predominantly Black college and a predominantly White college and were administered the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI) to assess their racial ideology and racial centrality. Participants also were asked to report their cumulative grade point averages (GPAs). Consistent with the MMRI, racial centrality moderates the relationship between racial ideology and academic performance such that assimilation and nationalist ideologies were negatively associated with GPA and a minority ideology was positively associated with GPA for students who scored high on racial centrality. Racial ideology was not a significant predictor of GPA for participants who scored low on racial centrality.

C. Wright Mills would be a friendly critic of service learning, acknowledging its benefits for providing students with experiential learning opportunities to connect personal troubles with social issues. Yet he would be critical of service-learning practices that perpetuate institutional power inequalities and that do not advance the social change objectives of community-based organizations. We offer an innovative approach that helps to address some of these concerns which, when used in conjunction with “best practices” of service learning, has the potential to make a greater impact on the community than most service-learning projects. This paper highlights how two sociology programs in two urban universities—a large, elite university and a smaller, minority-serving university—have completed significant community-based research projects by having classes of students at both universities work on projects both consecutively and simultaneously across several semesters to complete substantial research projects with and for community partners. We use a case study approach to identify five key practices that have enabled the two universities to effectively collaborate across institutions.

Positive youth development is critical for African American youth as they negotiate a social, political, and historical landscape grounded in systemic inequities and racism. One possible, yet understudied, approach to promote positive youth development is to increase African American youth consciousness and connection to their Africentric values and culture. The primary purpose of this article was to investigate the degree to which cultural and group consciousness factors (i.e., cultural orientation, Africentric values, and racial socialization) predicted positive youth development (i.e., future orientation, prosocial behavior, political/community, and social justice/equality civic mindedness) and how these might differ by gender. This article utilized survey data from 1,930 African American youth participants of the Pen or Pencil™ mentoring program. Results generally indicated that cultural orientation, Africentric values and, to a lesser degree, racial socialization, predicted positive youth development variables, with these effects varying by gender. These findings suggest that enhancing cultural consciousness may support the positive development of African American youth, although male and female youth may respond to these efforts in different ways.

This study uses a person-oriented approach to examine gender differences in the meaning of race in the lives of a sample of African-American college students. Seven hundred twenty-four self-identified African-American students from two universities completed the ideology subscales of the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity. Cluster analysis was used to group students into five groups with distinct patterns of responses to the ideology subscales. Results showed relatively few gender differences in cluster distribution, in separate male and female cluster solutions, or in the relationship between cluster membership and racial background and race-related behavioral outcomes. Overall, clusters did not vary in terms of SES, but did reflect the racial context of participants' upbringing and race-related choices made in college.

Historically, racial identity research has focused on either the process by which identity develops or the content of the identities that individuals hold. This paper investigates the nexus of these approaches. Specifically, cluster analysis was used to locate 204 African American college students in one of four statuses of development outlined by Phinney (1989) and examine movement across clusters over time. Mean differences in the content of individuals' racial Centrality, racial Regard, and racial Ideology beliefs across clusters at both time points were then assessed. Results indicate some relationship between process and content such that higher levels of development are associated with higher levels of identification with and more positive attitudes toward one's racial group.