Learning About Race and Racism Together In Adolescence

This is the third post of a three-part segment (see part 1 and part 2) that contains excerpts edited for length and clarity from the book, Below the Surface: Talking With Teens about Race, Ethnicity, and Identity (2019, Princeton University Press), which I coauthored with my colleague and long-time collaborator, Dr. Adriana Umaña-Taylor. Adriana is a Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Kids need opportunities to talk about race with their peers to learn how to do so productively. We won't get there if the only time they broach the subject is when racism rears its ugly head in school or online, as in the Owatonna, Minnesota high school recently profiled here.

Putting aside what youth learn at home, we concur with social scientists Adriana Aldana and Christy Byrd that a great deal of ethnic-racial socialization occurs in school halls, cafeterias, and classrooms in adolescence, and on college campuses in later years. Everywhere one turns, it seems there is evidence of how race and ethnicity shape the daily experience of youth in school: who they learn with, who they sit with at lunch, and who they hang out with.

It makes a lot of sense that youth turn to each other to pick up signals about what is expected when it comes to racial and ethnic identity.

And it turns out that the question posed by Beverly Tatum almost twenty years ago—“Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?”—is one that can be and has been asked more broadly, for instance, in Ananthi Al Ramiah and colleagues’ work mapping out social divisions among White and South Asian students in a UK high school.

Flocking Together For Good Reasons

One reason the kids sit together literally and figuratively is to figure out who they are and where they belong, and it is the case that friends tend to be alike in their ethnic-racial identities. In a study of college students, Moin Syed and M.J.D. Juan found that pairs of friends were similar in the extent to which they explored and felt strongly connected to their ethnic-racial groups. The similarity of pairs in which both students were ethnic minorities was explained in part by how much students said they typically rely on friends as a sounding board for thinking through ethnic and racial issues. This suggests that, for young people, friendships are important contexts for the evolution of their views regarding ethnicity and race. Their work suggests that not only are friends similar in their ethnic and racial identities, but that they may shape each other’s thinking about those identities over time.

Indeed, this is just what we have found in our studies of middle school students in US communities in the Midwest and Southwest (with collaborators Carlos Santos, David Schaefer, Olga Kornienko, and Michael Medina). In these studies of ethnically and racially diverse students attending diverse schools, we found that students become even more similar in their ethnic-racial identities over the course of one year. Although many adolescents indeed flocked together along ethnic-racial lines, as is typical, members of each “flock” significantly influenced each other’s subjective, psychological sense of identity, too. In other words, youths’ views evolved as a function of their friendship.

Friends, simply put, matter a great deal in the ethnic-racial identity process among adolescents, just as they do for myriad issues during this period of life. This is not surprising, given their increasingly greater reliance on peers, more generally, as harbingers of what is good, acceptable, and desirable in a particular social and cultural context, such as school. Classic studies by Prudence Carter, Stacey Lee, Susan Rosenbloom and Niobe Way, and Natasha Warikoo, among others, have shown how young people pick up and negotiate information about language, style, and dress from peers in school in ways that help them to construct their own ethnic and racial identities.

Yet peers not only serve as models of what particular ethnic-racial identities can look and sound like in school, but they also regulate each other to maintain conformity to particular identity ideals and social hierarchies.

The social cues to which youth are exposed range from ones that are relatively innocuous (what’s cool) to ones that can inflict psychological harm.

Just Jokes?

Studies by education researcher Mica Pollock and psychologist Sara Douglass and colleagues, respectively, show that kids in school use humor to convey their expectations to one another regarding norms concerning race-based behaviors. Seemingly innocuous hallway humor and teasing is often seen as a way to communicate suggestively racist messages while minimizing the extent to which one is accused of being racist, because perpetrating youth can safely claim that they were “just making jokes” or “JK” and, worse, that those expressing offense or discomfort “can’t take a joke.”

Meanwhile, target and bystander youth must decide what to do in such situations, leading to a host of questions: What does it mean that they laughed—or didn’t? Will challenging the joke incur a social penalty, such as ostracism? What do they do with the feelings brought on by racist jokes and the circumstances surrounding them?

Race and Ethnicity Essential Reads

Does Black History Matter for Black Americans’ Wellness?

Is Racial Colorblindness a Good or Bad Thing?

Indeed, there are several blogs about how to navigate the often hurtful minefield of racialized humor among targets and bystanders (some examples are provided here, here, and here). An important note here is that Douglass and her colleagues found that, in general, these experiences of ethnic-racial teasing are not harmless and do have negative consequences for adolescents’ mental health.

Another way for youth to regulate each other’s identities is to accuse each other of wanting or trying to be of a different ethnic or racial group, or of not "really" belonging the group in the first place. In other words: you're not [whatever] enough. Never mind that there is no single way to “be” part of a group.

What matters is that, in their accusations, it is understood that youth have the authority to regulate one another and stigmatize those who deviate from arguably arbitrary, and often locally defined, norms for particular social identities. And they are well versed in the discursive practices (e.g., making jokes, hurling accusations) that establish and maintain norms.

Positive Norms Matter, Too

Yet, kids will also conform to positive norms about diversity. My colleagues and I examined youths' friendship networks to understand the potential benefits of wanting to befriend peers from other ethnic and racial groups.

We found that youth with positive intergroup contact attitudes were more sought after as friends than those with less positive attitudes about such contact. These students were also more likely to have friends who shared their positive attitudes and reported more friends from ethnic and racial groups other than their own.

In essence, kids who were more inclined to befriend peers from different ethnic and racial backgrounds were more popular and more likely to actually have diverse friendships.

Making Sense of It All

As youth receive multiple, sometimes conflicting messages within and across each of their everyday contexts, they necessarily make choices about what to internalize as they craft their own individual identities. It is overwhelming, no doubt, and young people need adults in their lives to help them to unpack, interpret, and process all of these messages.

If you avoid the process of sorting out all the ethnic and racial knowledge that society sends every day, it leaves them in an uninformed, insecure place. Attempting to pursue interactions with others who are from different ethnic-racial groups from such a place makes youth vulnerable to emotional states that often take over, namely, fear and anxiety.

It is critical for us, the adults in kids' lives, to have plunged into potentially socially and politically tense situations, so we have so-called brave conversations from steady, not shaky, ground.