We first review current literature on three ethnic-racial dynamics that are considered to be resources and stressors in the lives of ethnic-minority youth: ethnic-racial identity, socialization, and discrimination. Next, we propose that a more contextualized view of these ethnic-racial dynamics reveals that they are interdependent, inseparable, and mutually defining and that an ecological/transactional perspective on these ethnic-racial dynamics shifts researchers' gaze from studying them as individual-level processes to studying the features of settings that produce them. We describe what is known about how identity, socialization, and discrimination occur in four microsystems-families, peers, schools, and neighborhoods-and argue that focusing on specific characteristics of these microsystems in which particular types of identity, socialization, and discrimination processes cooccur would be informative.

No abstract

Youth in the United States receive countless messages about the meanings and consequences of racial group membership. The processes through which these racialized messages are transmitted, known collectively as ethnicracial socialization, are known to influence youths' psychosocial and academic development-especially their ethnic-racial identity. However, most studies have focused exclusively on parents' roles in the ethnic-racial socialization process. In the present study, drawing on semistructured interviews with 64 Black adolescents, we examined youths' descriptions of their experiences with (and understandings of) race to provide an "up-close" view of the sources and processes involved in ethnic-racial socialization. In addition to providing further evidence of the roles of parents and school curricula in shaping youths' racial beliefs, results suggested that ethnic-racial socialization messages frequently emerged from youths' direct and vicarious exposure to racial discrimination and inequality in the schools they attended, the public places they visited, and in the media they consumed.

A substantial literature has focused on how ethnic‐racial socialization from parents shapes youths' racial identities and the meanings they attach to their own and others' racial group membership. We argue that a critically important source of information to youth about the meaning and significance of race, and therefore a key source of ethnic‐racial socialization, resides in youths' exposure to repeated patterns in the relative social experiences, opportunities, roles, and outcomes experienced by two or more racial groups across levels of the ecological environment. Drawing on Seidman's concept of a “social regularity” we propose the concept of a “racial regularity” to name, describe and define pervasive and repeated intergroup patterns that youth observe through their daily transactions across settings. Additionally, drawing from the socio‐cognitive developmental literature, we consider why and how racial regularities may inform youths' racial knowledge. Finally, we illustrate our perspective using existing ethnographies of racial dynamics in schools and neighborhoods vis‐à‐vis youths' racial knowledge.