Spotlighting Black Adolescent Development in the Shadow of Racism: A Commentary

Abstract

The special issue brings together scholarship that expands our understanding of the adverse effects of interpersonal, online, and vicarious racial discrimination on Black adolescents’ psychosocial well‐being and sociocultural factors (e.g., racial socialization and positive racial identity) that mitigate these effects. It also focuses attention on ways that adolescents’ behavior and characteristics shape racial socialization. Some of the critical tasks that lie ahead include elevating a developmental perspective, documenting developmental pathways, directly assessing proximal mediating processes, giving more attention to the robustness and replicability of findings, and expanding levels of analyses and outcomes to include both macro‐structural indicators and indicators of physiological and neuropsychological functioning.

Critical race theory in human development and family science

“…This limitation led Coll and colleagues (1996, p. 1892) to call upon family scholars to recognize the “importance of racism, prejudice, discrimination, oppression, and segregation on the development of minority children and families.” But even before Coll et al.’s (1996) recommendations, and likely limited due to patterns of racism within the field, HDFS scholars have produced special issues on the topic of race, child development, and family systems since the late 1970s and early 1980s (Comer, 1985; Peters, 1978) and from that point continued to do so about once per decade until recently (Leman et al., 2017; McLoyd, 1990; Quintana et al., 2006). Although slow, HDFS has increasingly heeded the call to recognize and eradicate racially oppressive assumptions, a push that HDFS scholars of color have long been advocating for (Coll et al., 1996; McLoyd & Randolph, 1984; McLoyd, 2006a, 2022; Umaña‐Taylor & Hill, 2020).…”