Longitudinal Effects of the “Acting White” Accusation and Racial Identity Development Among Black College Students

Abstract

The “acting White” accusation (AWA) is a type of cultural invalidation that undermines the racial authenticity of Black youths. This study examines how the AWA and racial identity (RI) influence one another longitudinally during the transition to college for Black students. Findings were moderated by gender. For Black males, a negative feedback loop emerged for RI centrality where AWA experiences predicted lower centrality, which then predicted more AWA experiences over a 2‐year period. Additionally, AWA experiences in high school predicted lower RI private regard for Black males and lower RI public regard for Black females during the first year of college. Implications and policy recommendations to address forms of cultural oppression such as the AWA are further discussed.

Black Lives and Black Research Matter: How our Collective Emotions Continue to Drive a Movement

“…The collective anger, frustration, and pain of the Black community in response to anti‐Black oppression has propelled parallel BLM movements in the public realm and within social science. A powerful transition currently happening in Black youth development work is a move from studying resilience—the study of the ability to adapt or thrive in the face of adversity—to studying Black youth resistance (Glover et al., 2022 ; Smith et al., 2021 ). Distinct from resilience, resistance captures Black youth and families' exercise of agency to confront and dismantle anti‐Black systems of oppression.…”

“…Furthermore, the scholarship on Black youth development has engaged traditional phenomena in adolescent development, including pubertal timing (Carter & Flewellen, 2022 ), identity development (Durkee, Perkins, & Smith, 2021 ), and family conflict and autonomy seeking (Smetana & Rote, 2019 ) while simultaneously engaging contemporary challenges faced by Black youth such as online racism (Stewart, Schuschke, & Tynes, 2019 ) and the public health crisis of Black youth suicidality (Assari, Lankarani, & Caldwell, 2017 ). The scholarship on Black youth development, often conducted by Black and Brown scholars, has not only evolved internally, but we have also driven innovations in theory and methodology that have influenced the field of developmental science broadly to be more rigorous and nuanced in our asking and analysis of questions.…”

Spencer’s phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST): Charting its origin and impact.

“…More recent empirical evidence for a gendered dynamic of Black youth coping with cultural invalidation demonstrates further the impact of Spencer's theory on intersectional developmental science. Durkee et al (2022) investigated the longitudinal effects of "acting white" accusations (AWA) on Black late adolescents' racial identity when transitioning from high school to college and found unique patterns for males and females. Among Black males, AWA in high school predicted lower racial centrality in the first year of college and even more AWA in the second year of college.…”

Dismantling systems of racism and oppression during adolescence: An agenda for anti‐racist research

“…Most of the papers in this section focused on the learning and socialization of white racial attitudes in white families (Abaied et al, 2022; Cox et al, 2022; Freeman et al, 2022; Galán et al, 2022), with a conceptual paper on digital white racial socialization (Frey et al, 2022) and others on white racial identity (Moffitt & Rogers, 2022; Muñiz & Marshall, 2022). Other papers across the special series also highlighted ways that white supremacy operates to disadvantage adolescents of color in schools and neighborhoods (Durkee et al, 2022; White et al, 2022). The field of adolescent development does not yet have a robust tradition of focusing on the socialization of white power and privilege, but can certainly learn from other disciplines (Engles, 2006 and Guynes, 2019 for bibliographies of critical whiteness studies across counseling, education, sociology, philosophy, history, African American studies, and other humanities fields).…”