Racial Identity and the Development of Body Image Issues among African American Adolescent Girls

Abstract

As readers, children with dyslexia are vulnerable to becoming academically, socially, and emotionally detached from education. Traditional educational practices tend to use quantitative measures to diagnose children to better serve their needs and researchers, who study students with special needs often focus on a deficit model that quantify just how far a child is from the norm. This practice, while full of good intentions, often creates emotional scars and feelings of inferiority in a child. This reductionist view of a disability is most likely different from the lived experience of the person with the disability. To get a complete picture, we must use qualitative methods to reveal children’s words, their interactions, and the entire context within which their disability is nested. In this study, I use qualitative methods to unpack the educational experiences of a group of students with dyslexia. Data were gathered from four sources: interviews with students and teachers, field notes, and journal entries. The words of the participants are presented to convey the emotional impact that a reading disability brings and to remind educators and researchers that quantitative methods do not always provide a complete picture of a child’s experience in school.

Longitudinal relations between skin tone and self-esteem in African American girls.

“…Moreover, boys in the sample reported that they, themselves, perceived the lighter-skinned women as more beautiful (Stephens & Few, 2007). In other research, African American girls ranging in age from late childhood to late adolescence reported that lighter skin was more desirable in dating relationships (Hesse-Biber et al, 2004).…”

“…Light skin tones and Eurocentric facial features figure prominently in evaluations of the attractiveness of Black girls and women (Breland-Noble, 2013;J. C. Hall & Crutchfield, 2018;Hesse-Biber, Howling, Leavy, & Lovejoy, 2004;Hunter, 2002Hunter, , 2011Maxwell, 2013;Stephens & Few, 2007), and physical attractiveness is highly salient to most girls as they enter adolescence (Oney et al, 2011).…”

“…There are several reasons to expect that the importance of skin tone for self-esteem may increase during adolescence. First, with the onset of adolescence, youth—especially girls—become more focused on physical appearance (Hesse-Biber et al, 2004). During adolescence, youth also show more advanced perspective-taking and introspective abilities (Van der Graaff et al, 2014).…”

Understanding disordered eating in Black adolescents: Effects of gender identity, racial identity, and perceived puberty.

“…In terms of femininity, the interaction suggests that girls who spent less time exploring their racial identity, who also had more strongly established feminine gender identities, engaged in more disordered eating. These girls ascribe to a feminine ideal but likely not the more positive Black constructions of femininity, such as larger body ideals (Hesse-Biber et al, 2004; Makkar & Strube, 1995). As such, they mirror the negative effects of femininity for White girls (Williams & Ricciardelli, 2003).…”

“…However, research is scant on associations between racial identity and DEB (Abrams, Allen, & Gray, 1993;Shuttlesworth & Zotter, 2011). The work that has been conducted suggests strong racial identity is protective for Black women and girls in a number of ways, such as higher self-rated attractiveness, appreciation of wider variety of body ideals, and a low drive for thinness (Fujioka, Ryan, Agle, Legaspi, & Toohey, 2009;Hesse-Biber et al, 2004;Hesse-Biber, Livingstone, Ramirez, Barko, & Johnson, 2010;Makkar & Strube, 1995). To date, no study has examined racial identity as indicated by the valuing of and com-This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”