Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States (National Symposium on Family Issues, 14) 3031441141, 9783031441141

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National Symposium on Family Issues

Dawn P. Witherspoon Susan M. McHale Valarie King Editors

Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States

National Symposium on Family Issues Volume 14 Series Editors Susan M. McHale, Social Science Research Institute Penn State University Park, PA, USA Valarie King, Department of Sociology Penn State University Park, PA, USA

Each year, the Population Research Institute and Social Science Research Institute at Penn State hold a two-day symposium that focuses on a key problem of relevance to family studies. The symposium, known as the National Symposium on Family Issues, brings together 200 or more scholars, practitioners, and policy experts to: • Promote interdisciplinary dialogue to stimulate research on family issues. • Advance scholarly excellence by inviting leaders in the field to present their work. • Identify important issues that do not receive sufficient attention from researchers who study families. The symposium organizers – Professors Susan McHale, Valarie King, and Jennifer E. Glick – work to connect family scholars from diverse fields, such as demography, sociology, human development, psychology, education, economics, anthropology, law, and history. The National Symposium on Family Issues is a landmark event in ongoing efforts to understand more thoroughly the challenges facing contemporary families. At each annual symposium, nine or more leading scholars are convened to present and critique research on a focal topic and discuss implications for effective programs and policies for families. Books based on each symposium provide additional background and detail about current research and applications for evidence based policy and programs, allowing the research to reach a wider audience and impact the national conversation. Past volumes have received favorable reviews and are used as reference works by researchers, professors, students as well as clinicians and other professionals.

Dawn P. Witherspoon  •  Susan M. McHale Valarie King Editors

Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States

Editors Dawn P. Witherspoon Department of Psychology Penn State University Park, PA, USA Valarie King Department of Sociology Penn State University Park, PA, USA

Susan M. McHale Department of Human Development and Family Studies Penn State University Park, PA, USA

ISSN 2192-9157     ISSN 2192-9165 (electronic) National Symposium on Family Issues ISBN 978-3-031-44114-1    ISBN 978-3-031-44115-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44115-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgments

The editors gratefully acknowledge essential core support provided by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD; R13-HD048150), as well as ongoing advice from Regina Bures at NICHD. We also thank our Penn State sponsors: Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), Population Research Institute (PRI), Department of Sociology & Criminology, Department of Human Development & Family Studies, Department of Psychology, Prevention Research Center, Child Study Center, and Clinical & Translational Science Institute. Our sponsors’ support enabled us to attract outstanding scholars from a range of backgrounds and disciplines from the community of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers on whom the quality of the series depends. The efforts of many went into planning the 2022 symposium and producing this volume. We thank our Internal Advisory Board: Professors Sarah Damaske, Greg Fosco, Alyssa Gamaldo, Jennifer E.  Glick, Yolanda Jackson, Mary Shenk, Doug Teti, and Ashton Verdery for their continued help in developing the foci of our annual symposium. Professors Erica Frankenberg, Jose Soto, and Ashley Patterson served as moderators of the three sessions of the 2022 Symposium. Livestreaming and recording the family symposium was skillfully orchestrated by Mark Hixon from the SSRI/PRI IT Core. Finally, the symposium and book would not have been possible without Carolyn Scott’s organizational skills, commitment, and attention to the many details that go into developing an engaging conference and producing a scholarly volume. Dawn P. Witherspoon Susan M. McHale Valarie King

v

About the Book

This book, Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States, born out of Penn State’s 2022 National Symposium on Family Issues tackles a topic that affects all families—racial inequalities and the consequences. The symposium’s focus on race, ethnicity, racism, marginalization, and related systems of oppression is timely and critically important and may better family scholar’s understanding of family functioning, dynamics, behaviors, and the well-being and development of family members. Despite its significance for individuals, families, and the larger society, research on family socialization around race/ethnicity and racism remains limited. With a diverse set of interdisciplinary scholars, the symposium introduced little-studied concepts and novel research and generated critical and vital discussions, which are reflected in this book. Thus, the goal of this book is to draw scholars’, policymakers’, and public health professionals’ attention to family socialization pertaining to racial/ethnic inequalities and racism in the United States. This includes drawing attention to family-focused programs, practices, and policies that may help to address the national challenge of racial/ethnic inequalities and racism and the widespread deleterious consequences—many of which have been well-documented in both academic scholarship and public discourse. In short, the chapters in this volume shed new light on and begin to tackle these complex issues to advance understanding, spark and sustain dialogue, and promote knowledge application regarding racial and ethnic family socialization and racism toward addressing the inequalities that plague US society. This book includes four parts, each of which uses a critical lens to examine the ways in which families are able to address racial/ethnic inequalities and racism and the impacts on family and family member functioning. Part I focuses on race and racism in the United States, historically as well as within family scholarship. The three chapters provide broad overviews of how social stratification and its consequences, namely race and racism, have led to and perpetuate racial/ethnic disparities in the United States, which are often rooted in historical legacies coupled with socioeconomic forces and complicated by racial colorblindness. Chapter 1 (Baker) begins with a focus on structural racism as well as the historical legacy of slavery and how these social realities are inextricably linked to racial inequalities in poverty today. vii

viii

About the Book

Chapter 2 (Gallagher) interrogates empirically, using national statistics, the myth of racial progress in the United States and how this myth reifies racial inequalities through promoting a race-neutral, colorblind society. Chapter 3 (O’Connell) speaks to family researchers, highlighting the lack of meaningful consideration of race and racism in the field’s scholarship. The omission of race from our family scholarship has limited our understanding of family dynamics and the larger contexts in which they are embedded, but O’Connell provides potential to rebound in the form of recommendations for how to appropriately consider race in family research. Part II focuses on racial/ethnic socialization in families of color within the United States. The chapters provide a historical view on racial/ethnic socialization research, discuss racial/ethnic socialization practices in multiple contexts and groups, and provide recommendations for family-focused intervention, practice, and training. Chapter 4 (Hughes) provides a historical overview of the ethnic-racial socialization literature showing how this work began with Black families and has now burgeoned to include multiple ethnic, racial, religious, and immigrant groups. Chapter 5 (Stein et al.) presents a new model of the protective processes of racial-ethnic socialization among Latinx families, highlighting cultural resilience and coping. Chapter 6 (Clark et al.) describes how racial socialization can be used in clinical practice as a therapeutic strategy to dismantle racial inequalities through better training of mental health professionals who can meaningfully address racism-related stressors and provide tools (e.g., racial socialization) to families. Part III of this book focuses on a recent development in the field—antiracist socialization. Each chapter discusses such parenting practices among White families as well as the implications of such parental socialization for how youth understand racism, power, White privilege, and racial inequalities. Chapter 7 (Abaied) tackles how Whiteness has been centered in parenting and family research and offers recommendations for bettering research practices so as to shed light on racial processes in White families. Chapter 8 (Hagerman) explores the link between racial-­ ethnic socialization (or “racial learning”) and political socialization among White adolescents during the Trump presidency. Chapter 9 (Underhill and Clark) interrogates the idea and practice of antiracist White parenting and identifies four specific strategies that White parents currently use—consciousness raising, exposure practices, White accountability, and White privilege divestment—along with their potential implications for youth and ultimately for addressing inequalities. Part IV of this book (Chap. 10; Evans and McDonald) provides an overview of some common themes that emerged across prior chapters as well as a forward-­ thinking set of suggestions for future directions in research. The authors also draw conclusions about how family scholars invested in eradicating racial inequality may chart their course. These two young scholar authors end by expressing the hope that the expertise, experiences, and insights shared in this book will stimulate novel and translational research that improves the lives of diverse children, youth, and families as well as the broader society. Dawn P. Witherspoon Susan M. McHale Valarie King

Contents

Part I Race and Racism in the United States 1

The Role of Structural Racism for Inequality in Family Poverty: Why Context Matters����������������������������������������������    3 Regina S. Baker

2

 The Myth of Racial Progress in Post-Race America����������������������������   21 Charles A. Gallagher

3

 Race and Racism in Family Research����������������������������������������������������   39 Heather A. O’Connell

Part II Racial/Ethnic Socialization in Families of Color 4

 Research and Scholarship on Racial Socialization: Getting Here������   63 Diane L. Hughes

5

Racial-Ethnic Socialization in Latinx Families: Cultural Resilience and Coping��������������������������������������������������������������   93 Gabriela Livas Stein, N. Keita Christophe, Valerie Salcido, and Michelle Y. Martin Romero

6

Therapeutic Use of Racial Socialization for Families of Color and Clinicians����������������������������������������������������������������������������  117 Tanisha R. Clark, Ashanti Brown, Elayne Zhou, Monique McKenny, Akilah Patterson, Emily Ha, Isha W. Metzger, Chardée A. Galán, and Riana Elyse Anderson

ix

x

Contents

Part III Antiracist Socialization in White Families 7

 Upending White Normativity in Parenting Research��������������������������  149 Jamie L. Abaied

8

White Families’ Communications About Racism and Politics: Expanding Theories of White Racial Socialization and Racial Learning��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  175 Margaret A. Hagerman

9

Expert-Guided Antiracism Among Progressive White Parents: The Promise and Limits of Antiracist White Parenting ����������������������  191 Megan R. Underhill and Makenna K. Clark

Part IV Conclusions and Future Directions 10 Reconsidering  Family Ethnic-Racial Socialization: Challenges, Progress, and Directions for Future Research������������������  217 Megan Evans and Ashley McDonald Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  231

About the Editors

Dawn P. Witherspoon, Ph.D., is McCourtney Early Career Professor of Psychology at Penn State. Susan  M.  McHale, Ph.D., is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Human Development and Family Studies and Emeritus Professor of Demography at Penn State. Valarie King, Ph.D., is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Demography, and Human Development and an Associate in the Population Research Institute at Penn State.

xi

Contributors

Jamie  L.  Abaied  Department of Psychological Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA Riana Elyse Anderson  Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Regina S. Baker  Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA Ashanti  Brown  Department Atlanta, GA, USA

of

Psychology,

N.  Keita  Christophe  Department Quebec, Canada

of

Georgia

Psychology,

State

University,

McGill

University,

Makenna  K.  Clark  Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, VA, USA Tanisha  R.  Clark  Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Megan Evans  Department of Sociology, Penn State, University Park, PA, USA Chardée  A.  Galán  Department of Psychology, Penn State, University Park, PA, USA Charles  A.  Gallagher  Sociology and Criminal Justice Department, La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA, USA Emily Ha  Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA Margaret A. Hagerman  Department of Sociology, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA Diane  L.  Hughes  Department of Applied Psychology, New York University Steinhardt, New York, NY, USA xiii

xiv

Contributors

Michelle Y. Martin Romero  Department of Public Health Education, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA Ashley  McDonald  Department Park, PA, USA Monique  McKenny  Wellstar Marietta, GA, USA

of

Psychology,

Health

System,

Penn

State,

Psychological

University Services,

Isha  W.  Metzger  Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA Heather  A.  O’Connell  Department of Sociology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA Akilah  Patterson  Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Valerie  Salcido  Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA Gabriela  Livas  Stein  Department of Human Development and Family Science, University of Texas Austin, Austin, TX, USA Megan  R.  Underhill  Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina Asheville, Asheville, NC, USA Elayne Zhou  Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Part I

Race and Racism in the United States

Chapter 1

The Role of Structural Racism for Inequality in Family Poverty: Why Context Matters Regina S. Baker

Although the United States is among the richest countries in the world, there are enduring inequalities across racial lines when it comes to economic well-being. It has been well-documented that on average, White individuals and families have typically fared better than their Non-White counterparts in terms of poverty, income, and wealth. Despite the salient history of race and racism that undergirds American society, prevailing explanations for racial disparities, particularly disparate poverty rates, have placed heavy emphasis on individual/family demographics/characteristics, (e.g., family structure, education level, employment status). For instance, racial differentials in poverty have been attributed to the racial differences in family structure (see Ellwood & Jencks, 2004; Haskins & Sawhill, 2016; Iceland, 2019; McLanahan, 1985). This reflects what Brady (2019) summarizes as a behavioral theory of poverty, which posits that poor people are poor “because they engage in counterproductive, poverty-increasing behavior or risks like single motherhood or unemployment” (p. 158). Of course, individuals and their actions are not inconsequential. Decisions, such as those regarding family and fertility, education, and employment, certainly can and do influence a family’s outcomes, which in turn, can impact inequality across families. However, the problem lies when studies of (and efforts to address) racial inequality consider only the role of individual-level factors. Focusing only on individual characteristics and circumstances presumes and/or gives the false impression that macro forces and broader circumstances do not matter. Yet both micro- and macro-level phenomena help shape individual outcomes. In this chapter, I draw on the “sociological imagination” (Mills, 1959) to make the case that in order to advance our understanding of racial inequalities in poverty (and other socioeconomic outcomes) across families in the United States, we must R. S. Baker (*) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. P. Witherspoon et al. (eds.), Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States, National Symposium on Family Issues 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44115-8_1

3

4

R. S. Baker

acknowledge the role of macrosocial and historical contexts in shaping individual outcomes and broader inequalities. I highlight contemporary racial inequality in socioeconomic outcomes to underline why we need to advance our understanding of racial inequality and the socio-historical context of race and racism in the United States. I then discuss the socio-historical origins of race and structural racism, highlighting the social construction of race and the U.S. racial regime. Next, I briefly summarize the conclusions from studies of racial inequality that focus on the role of family structure. In doing so, I highlight some recent examples in family scholarship that challenge the prevailing emphasis on individual-level family demographics. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of why more research on structural racism is warranted and the implications of this for family inequality scholarship and policy.

 he Sociological Imagination: The Significance of Macrosocial T and Historical Context The late sociologist C.  Wright Mills in his famous work, “The Sociological Imagination,” stated, “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” (1959, p. 3). Embracing this distinct viewpoint of sociology is more commonly known as possessing “the sociological imagination.” Though people’s lives are intricately connected to the broader society, they are seldom aware of the “interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them” (Mills, 1959, p. 4). Therefore, the valuable perspective of the sociological imagination encourages the recognition of how our individual experiences and everyday lives are powerfully shaped by broader/macrosocial forces, both of which are to be understood in a historical context. That is, the sociological imagination provides a useful framing to illuminate how micro- and macro-level phenomena are linked. Linking the micro- and macro phenomenon in our lives is essential to understanding that what we may perceive as a “personal trouble” concerning an individual is actually a “public issue” that affects a lot of people in patterned ways (Mills, 1959). Thus, the sociological imagination is a useful point of departure to better understand societal issues. Let us consider socioeconomic racial disparities in the United States. Specifically, in both research and policy efforts, poverty is too often seen as a personal trouble attributed to certain individual-level characteristics. However, a non-trivial number of Americans (37.9 million) live in poverty based on the Official Poverty Measure (OPM), and a disproportionate share of these individuals are Black and Hispanic (Creamer et  al., 2022). I argue that poverty is a pressing public issue impacting families and requires moving beyond an understanding of individual circumstances to fully understand and address it. In the section to follow, I briefly describe the levels and trends of poverty, income, and wealth in the United States to illustrate the persistent socioeconomic racial

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5

gaps. In doing so, I highlight the need for research to consider the socio-historical context to more adequately scrutinize socioeconomic differences that persist across racial lines in families.

Persistent Racial Disparities in Poverty, Income, and Wealth Despite the measures used, there are racial disparities in poverty in the United States. Fig. 1.1 shows U.S. Census Bureau poverty estimates using the official poverty measure (OPM) and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) by race/ethnicity for 2021 (Creamer et al., 2022). Across both measures, poverty rates are lowest for White individuals. OPM poverty rates in 2021 were 8.1% for White individuals, 9.3% for Asians individuals, 14.2% for individuals of two or more races, 17.1% for Hispanic individuals, 19.5% for Black individuals, and 20% for American Indian and Alaska Native individuals (Creamer et al., 2022). Although SPM rates are lower than OPM rates overall, racial disparities remain, with White Americans having the lowest poverty rate (5.7%), followed by individuals who are of two or more race (7.3%), Asian (9.5%), Black (11.3%), Hispanic (11.2%), and American Indian and Alaska Native (12.4%). Similarly, recent U.S. poverty studies incorporating different poverty measures (e.g., the OPM, the SPM, and a relative poverty measure) to examine racial disparities over time find that poverty rates for Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/ Alaska Native individuals have persistently been at least double those of White and Asian individuals (Baker et al., 2022; Iceland, 2019). Although these studies show these racial gaps in poverty have narrowed over time, they also show that sizable racial gaps remain. Even when employing higher-quality income data (accounting for underreporting of income) and better poverty measures to provide improved estimates of racial inequality these large racial disparities persist (Baker et al. 2022), further highlighting the significance of this issue. 30

% Poverty

25 20 15 10 5 0 White

Black

Asian

Official Poverty Measure

American Indian & Alaska Native

Two or More

Hispsanic

Supplemental Poverty Measure

Source for data is U.S. Census Bureau (Creamer et al., 2022)

Fig. 1.1  Poverty rates by race/ethnicity in the United States, 2021. (The source for data is the U.S. Census Bureau (Creamer et al., 2022))

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R. S. Baker

Given the racial disparities in poverty, it is not surprising that there are also racial disparities in income because income is the basis for poverty measurement. According to 2021 U.S. Census estimates, the median household income by race of the householder was highest among Asian households at $101,478, followed by White households at $74,246. Hispanic and Black households had much lower median incomes at $57,981 and $48,297, respectively (Semega & Kollar, 2022). Like poverty, these racial disparities in household income have endured over time. Given Black and Hispanic workers have seen little change in their earnings relative to White workers in recent years (Kochhar & Bennett, 2021) the racial disparities in income will inevitably persist. Wealth holdings further shed light on the socioeconomic racial disparities that persist in the United States. Like poverty, White households hold significantly higher wealth than Black and Hispanic households. According to statistics from the Survey of Consumer Finance, White households hold 87% of the overall wealth in the United States, despite accounting for only 68% of the households in the survey (Aladangady & Forde, 2021). In contrast, Black and Hispanic households each account for only about 3% of the total wealth while accounting for 16% and 11% of the U.S. population, respectively. Aladangady and Forde (2021) note that if wealth holding was commensurate with their proportion of the population, the amount of wealth held by Black households would be over 5 times higher, and for Hispanic households it would be nearly 4 times higher. Moreover, racial wealth gaps have endured and increased over time (Aladangady & Forde, 2021). This is important considering households lacking wealth can find themselves in a financially vulnerable position and potentially in poverty if they experience a job loss, an expensive medical emergency, or some other financial crisis that adversely impacts their income. After the Great Recession, Black households, and to a lesser extent, Hispanic households, were less likely than White households to financially recover, and wealth inequality grew (Addo & Darity, 2021). This suggests the financial crisis related to the COVID-19 pandemic will further exacerbate racial gaps in the long term. Indeed, research suggests that compared to White workers, Black and Hispanic workers face worse economic and health repercussions as a result of the pandemic, which serves to widen already existing racial gaps in wealth (Wilson, 2020). In sum, these statistics on poverty, income, and wealth paint a clear picture of enduring racial gaps. On average, White (and for the most part, Asian) families continue to fare socioeconomically better than Black and Hispanic families (and American Indian/Alaska Native families when included in the analysis). So, what accounts for these differences across races? Taking a socio-historical perspective is a useful approach for addressing this question. In the section to follow, I discuss the socio-historical context of race and racism in the United States, a focus I argue is necessary to truly understand racial inequalities across families today.

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Race and Structural Racism in the United States Contextualizing Race as a Social Construct To advance our understanding of what accounts for racial differences in poverty (and other types of socioeconomic inequality) across families, it is important to first acknowledge the conceptualization of race (or racial categories) as a social construct (see Bonilla-Silva, 1997). Understanding that race is socially constructed places emphasis on “the processes and mechanisms via racism that reproduce racial inequality in poverty” (Williams & Baker, 2021). Regarding the social construction of race, in her book, Fatal Invention, Dorothy Roberts (2011) offers the following summary: Like citizenship, race is a political system that governs people by sorting them into social groupings based on invented biological demarcations. Race is not only interpreted according to invented rules, but, more important, race itself is an invented political grouping. Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one. (p. 4)

Indeed, it has been proven that there is no biological basis for racial categories; no genetic differences exist between racialized groups. Rather, “race was literally manufactured by law” when officials established the categories of “White,” “Negro,” and “Indian” to distinguish indentured servitude from Black enslavement, with the goal of preventing Black and White servants from joining ranks against the elite class (Roberts, 2011, p.  9). The institutionalization of people in this way helped solidify racial boundaries that were defined by otherwise meaningless phenotypical characteristics and were used to justify unjust treatment along these boundaries (Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Omi & Winant, 2014). Hence, “the creation of racial categories required racism—the ideology or belief that human groups can be hierarchically structured” (Williams & Baker, 2021, p.  7). In other words, as shown in Fig. 1.2, that racism was a prerequisite for racial categories is a defining feature of the social construction of race. In turn, the establishment of racial categories gave way to what Bonilla-Silva (1997) describes as a racialized social system in which those racialized as White secure a privileged position at the top of the social hierarchy via ideologies, laws, and social practices. Thus, in a racialized social system, White individuals benefit economically, politically, and socially, often to the disadvantage of those at the bottom of the skin hierarchy (i.e., those racialized as Black; Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Mills, 1997). Consequently, racial inequalities, like poverty disparities, persist because such inequalities are inherent to a racialized social system (see Bonilla-Silva, 1997).

Racism

Racial Categories

Racialized Social System

Fig. 1.2  The social construction of race and racial inequality

Racial Inequalities

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R. S. Baker

The racialized social system in the United States can be characterized as a racial regime, which is a system of rule based on racial hierarchy (resulting from the social construction of race) that essentially functions to sustain racial inequality (Holden, 1995; Ivery & Bassett, 2015; Omi & Winant, 2014). Founded on ideals of White supremacy, the U.S. racial regime has been in place since the onset of African slavery, having endured despite being challenged and reconfigured (Omi & Winant, 2014). The U.S. racial regime is characterized by both macro-level, large-scale activities and micro-level, individual practices that together shape racial inequality (Omi & Winant, 2014). Individuals maintain a degree of agency within the racial regime, but their views and behaviors are fundamentally tied to a position within the regime that is characterized by benefit or disadvantage in the racialized system (Bonilla-Silva, 2015). Hence, “within the racial regime, the benefits of White privilege can impact individual actions, helping uphold White supremacy, and producing and maintaining racial inequalities, such as contemporary poverty disparities” (Baker, 2022b, p. 1725). As Fig. 1.2 illustrates, the social construction of race is inherently linked to racial inequality.

Structural Racism Racism is often thought to be a result of individual action but thinking of racism only in terms of the individual obscures how racism is structural. Structural racism involves “macrolevel systems, social forces, institutions, ideologies, and processes that interact with one another to generate and reinforce inequities among racial and ethnic groups” (Gee & Ford, 2011, p. 116). Structural racism “can be perpetuated through conscious intent, unconscious bias, or policies and practices that privilege one group over another” (Ray, 2022, p. 18). Though racism (and thus racial inequality) is present at all levels of society, structural racism emphasizes the highly influential role of macro-level structures in society (Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Gee & Ford, 2011). Racism is so deeply embedded in macrolevel structures that the impact of structural racism is consequential, regardless of the role of individuals (Bonilla-­ Silva, 1997). Structural racism via societal institutions is one mechanism that can impact racial inequality across families. Institutions are essentially stable agreements and historical settlements that regulate and shape individual and collective behavior (Brady et  al., 2016). A rich literature describes how racial practices and racism embedded in everyday institutions in society produce and maintain racial inequality (see Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Feagin, 2014; Golash-Boza, 2016; Ray, 2019). Indeed, numerous studies underscore how contemporary everyday institutions can impact families differently across racial lines to produce inequality. Examples include (but are not limited to) studies on the labor market (Reskin, 2012; Pager et al., 2009), the housing market (Korver-Glenn, 2021; Taylor, 2019), schools, welfare state (Brown, 2013; Parolin, 2021), and the criminal legal system (Western & Pettit, 2010; Miller, 2021).

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Institutions can be influential even after they are formally dismantled, leaving legacies through the reproduction of material resources and cultural conditions that result from the institution having been in place (e.g., slavery; Ruef & Fletcher, 2003). Indeed, racially oppressive institutions have immediate harmful effects but also carry long-term effects that underlie social, economic, political, and educational resources and opportunities available to families for generations to come (Feagin, 2014). This exemplifies structural racism. At the same time, “structural racism doesn’t mean individual racism is inconsequential. It means individual racism is empowered through its incorporation into a system that can magnify its impact through biased patterns of resource allocation” (Ray, 2022, p. 18). Additionally, the systemic nature of structural racism affects the actions, views, attitudes, and emotions of individual actors (Bonilla-Silva, 2021). In other words, the micro and macro are mutually reinforcing. It is also important to note that having individual animus is not necessary for individuals to contribute to structural racism. This is because when part of a racialized system consisting of policies and laws that are inherently biased, structural racism can lead to individuals perpetuating racism without even purposely doing so (e.g., a test prompter administering a racially biased standard exam; Ray, 2022). Thus, all-in-all, the impact of structural racism cannot be understated. Critical to understanding the role of structural racism is understanding the historical foundations of the U.S. racial regime. As Omi and Winant (2014) state, “We cannot step outside of race and racism, since our society and our identities are constituted by them; we lie in a racial history” (p. 137). Consider the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow which reflect the historical racial regime (Baker, 2022b). They are examples of historical institutions explicitly created to conquer, oppress, and maintain subordinate positions in society that have had a lasting impact (Snipp, 1996). Slavery was a cruel institution of the domination and exploitation of Black people (Du Bois, 1994). Not only did slavery generate wealth for White people, but it also enabled them to define their superior social status, ensure social division, and influence race relations and racial inequality in the long term (Omi & Winant, 2014; Woodward, 1955) by limiting the economic rights and wealth accumulation of Black people (Oliver & Shapiro, 2013). Jim Crow followed the emancipation of slavery and Reconstruction. Jim Crow served as “a tripartite system of domination  (Morris, 1984), because it was designed to control Blacks politically and socially, and to exploit them economically” (Morris, 1999, p.  518). Examples of mechanisms of this tripartite are sharecropping, disfranchisement, and segregation, which all served as “major institutional mechanisms for maintaining racial inequality” (Biggs & Andrews, 2015, p. 417). A growing scholarship has empirically demonstrated the significance of structural racism via these historical institutions for contemporary outcomes. Much of this work has focused on the consequential legacy of slavery (e.g., Berger, 2018; Curtis & O’Connell, 2017; Levernier & White, 1998; Nunn, 2008; O’Connell, 2012; Reece, 2020; Ruef, 2014). For instance, O’Connell (2012) links the 1860 slave concentration to the contemporary Black-White poverty gap in U.S. Southern counties. Other scholars show a relationship between slavery concentration and

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unequal economic mobility (Berger, 2018), White socioeconomic gains (Reece, 2020), and political attitudes (Acharya et  al., 2018). Subsequent research builds upon this literature by conceptualizing and constructing a measure of the historical racial regime (HRR) which reflects different institutional manifestations of the U.S. racial regime across the historical periods of slavery and Jim Crow (Baker, 2022b). This research demonstrates that the HRR worsens Black poverty and racial inequality in poverty in the South (Baker, 2022b). Collectively, this growing scholarship underlines the value of considering the role of historical context, particularly regarding structural racism, in understanding racial inequality today.

I ndividual Context and Racial Disparities across Families in Research  mphasizing Single Motherhood as a Poverty & E Inequality Mechanism Despite the salience of race and racism in U.S. history and the multitude of ways that structural racism can influence individual lives, family inequality scholarship has not given as much attention to this important macro-level factor as it has to individual-level context (see O’Connell, Chap. 3 for more on this point). Generally, when it comes to understanding enduring racial differences in poverty among families, both scholarship and policy have emphasized the role of individual/family characteristics/behaviors. According to behavioral theories, engaging in behaviors or risks that are more susceptible to poverty is the reason people are poor (see Brady, 2019 for a review). The four major individual-level poverty risks that are typically given the most attention are single motherhood, low education, young headship, and unemployment (Brady et al., 2017). Although all four of these risks have been shown to increase the odds of poverty, single motherhood is perhaps the most studied risk in poverty literature. The logic behind the emphasis on single motherhood in explaining racial inequality in poverty seems straightforward. Poverty rates have been historically higher among single-mother families vs. married-parent families (Amato & Maynard, 2007; Lichter et  al., 2003; McLanahan, 1985; McLanahan & Percheski, 2008, Thomas & Sawhill, 2002). Black and Hispanic women have higher rates of single motherhood than White and Asian women (Sweeney & Raley, 2014; Damaske et al., 2017), and Black, Hispanic, and Native American women are more likely to be poor as single mothers as compared to White women (Damaske et al., 2017). Thus, research has identified single mothers as an important mechanism for the reproduction of poverty and the maintenance of racial gaps (see Amato & Maynard, 2007; Garfinkel & McLanahan, 1986; Haskins & Sawhill, 2016; McLanahan, 1985; McLanahan, 2009; Thomas & Sawhill, 2002).

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This line of reasoning is not new: “For the last several decades, social problems resulting from systemic injustices have been blamed on changes in family structure—namely, the rise in single-parent families” (Williams et al., in press). Indeed, the prevailing emphasis on family characteristics, namely family structure, is rooted in a long history that provides an important context for understanding this dominant viewpoint. In the 1920s, early sociologists theorized a “Negro pathology” of families that Moynihan (1965) popularized in his report on “The Negro Family.” Moynihan’s report deemed family structure, particularly non-marital childbearing and single motherhood among Black women, as “the fundamental problem” of intergenerational poverty in Black families and racial inequality. Moynihan (1965, p. 2) recommended that the solution was to establish “a stable Negro family structure,” which in turn, strengthened scholarly and policy focus on family structure. This focus on family structure only intensified over time with narratives of racial progress during the Post-Civil Rights era, the rise of neoliberal ideas of individualism and “welfare queen” tropes in the 1980s, and declining rates of marriage coinciding with increased nonmarital childbearing in the 1990s and 2000s (Williams et al., forthcoming). As follows, emphasis on single motherhood as a mechanism of poverty and inequality has meant that marriage has been deemed a practical solution to reduce poverty and poverty gaps (e.g., AEI-Brookings, 2015; Amato & Maynard, 2007; Thomas & Sawill, 2002; Waite & Gallagher, 2001). Even the first line of findings from the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996), which aimed to prevent welfare dependency by getting Americans off welfare and into work, states, “(1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. (2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children” (Sec. 101). More recently, the AEI-Brookings (2015) bi-partisan “Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream” emphasized encouraging marriage and delaying parenthood.

 hallenging the Emphasis on Family Structure in Explaining C Racial Inequality Despite the prevailing emphasis on family structure in reducing poverty and racial inequalities in families, a growing literature demonstrates that there are differences in how family structure impacts families. These differences indicate that marriage does not produce the same benefits equally across different groups and contexts. In general, studies demonstrate greater benefits/returns of marriage for White families than for Black families. This includes, for example, greater wealth accumulation (Shapiro et  al., 2013), higher upward mobility among women (Addo & Lichter, 2013), greater tax benefits (as opposed to higher tax penalties; Brown, 2021), and greater material advantages for children (Manning & Brown, 2006).

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The aforementioned studies highlight the racially disparate impact of marriage, but studies also underscore the disparate impact of single motherhood across racial lines. Some recent studies have found differences in the life chances of children living in a single-mother household. In general, these studies find that Black and more disadvantaged children experience smaller penalties for living with a single mother. For example, single motherhood has less of an adverse impact on Black children as compared to White children (Cross, 2020). Divorce has a negative impact on children from more advantaged backgrounds, but no impact on more disadvantaged children whose parents are at a higher risk of divorce (Brand et al., 2019). Regarding poverty specifically, a recent study examining single motherhood and child poverty finds there is ethno-variation in the poverty penalty of single motherhood (i.e., the increased probability of poverty associated with single motherhood; Baker, 2022a). Despite having the highest poverty rates and greatest likelihood of living with a single mother, Black children experience the lowest penalties for single motherhood, on average. Although Hispanic children have similar poverty rates as Black children and lower rates of single motherhood than Black children, they tend to experience the highest penalties of single motherhood. Meanwhile, White children tend to have single motherhood penalties that are lower than Hispanic children and marginally higher than Black children. Yet White children experience poverty rates that are substantially lower and more stable (Baker 2022a). These findings indicate ethno-variation in child poverty and the penalties that accrue to children if they live in households headed by a single mother. Relatedly, Williams and Baker (2021) examined various economic, health, and social risk factors associated with poverty (e.g., economic hardship, unemployment, adverse health conditions, and low social support) and assessed how the penalties for these risks (i.e., probability of poverty) varied across family structure and racial lines. In general, racial variation in poverty does not adequately correspond to racial differences in risk prevalence. Although single mothers experience higher poverty rates than married mothers, regardless of race, Black and Hispanic married mothers experience greater odds of being poor than White married mothers. Even when their number of poverty risk factors are lower, Black and Hispanic mothers still experience greater disadvantage than their White counterparts. Such findings support a racial stratification explanation for racial inequality across families as opposed to a behavioral explanation where marriage would be equally beneficial. That marriage is not equally beneficial across racialized groups suggests broader structural mechanisms are at play (Williams & Baker; 2021) and should be considered in family research. Altogether, these empirical studies focusing on the impact of family structure— specifically marriage and single motherhood—highlight the racially disparate impact of family structure across families. These prior findings demonstrate that focusing heavily on family structure (and marriage as a solution), as opposed to broader factors, has not helped move the needle much in advancing our understanding of the enduring racial inequality in poverty across families in the United States. This raises the question of what else could provide us with further insight. Considering the sociological imagination, the findings from the existing studies I

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have discussed thus far suggest that structural mechanisms matter for our understanding of racial inequalities across families. Thus, research on poverty and racial inequalities in poverty across families can benefit from a reorientation to a focus on both micro and macro explanations that consider socio-historical contexts, such as institutions. Speaking to this point, a recent study provides a rare empirical assessment of racial inequality in families that links historical structural racism to contemporary family outcomes (Baker & O’Connell, 2022). The authors argue that the overemphasis on an individual-level variable (i.e., family structure) has resulted in relatively less attention given to structural factors—factors that may be useful for understanding how race and family structure intersect in the context of poverty. They assess how an indicator of structural racism—the legacy of slavery—impacts racial inequality in poverty among individuals within the same family structure. Using the historical concentration of the enslaved population in 1860 as a proxy for the legacy of slavery, the analysis reveals that the slave legacy appears to be more consequential for Black-White inequality across married-with-children households than for single-mother households. Among married-parent households, the racial gap in poverty is more pronounced where the legacy of slavery is stronger (Baker & O’Connell, 2022). These findings suggest marriage does not have the same impact on Black and White families, particularly when considering the context of structural racism. Additionally, research on race heterogeneity among Black households suggests the legacy of structural racism in the United States lessens the socioeconomic benefits of marriage. For instance, unlike White children, living in a married two-parent household does not yield greater benefits in educational outcomes for Black children compared to those living in a single-parent household (Cross, 2021). These studies further call into question “the implicit belief that marriage is an anti-poverty mechanism that works equally across groups and context” (Baker & O’Connell, 2022, p. 35).

Implications for Research and Policy Racial inequality in poverty and other socioeconomic outcomes across families remains a persistent issue in the United States. Explanations of this gap have focused mostly on individual factors. Though prior research has provided valuable insights into families in poverty, and individual context indeed matters, there is great utility in applying the concept of the sociological imagination to examine enduring racial inequalities. Recognizing the meaningful role of macro context, such as social and historical forces and processes, is necessary to deepen the understanding of enduring racial inequalities, such as poverty, that impact families. As such, scholars and policymakers should place more emphasis on structural racism which undergirds racial inequality in the United States. Acknowledging the impact of structural

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racism would be a valuable and necessary step to advance research and policy aimed at illuminating and addressing racial inequality across families. In terms of research, existing scholarship has made valuable contributions to our understanding of racial inequality across families, and studies focusing on individual contexts have provided some useful insights into poor families. However, focusing only on individual/family characteristics is limiting both theoretically and empirically. As a look into the literature on racial inequality helps underscore, a reorientation to more structural theories can advance poverty research and cultivate a deeper understanding of why racial inequalities in poverty across families endure. This not only refers to considering structural explanations of inequality but also acknowledging and understanding that even variation in what may often be referred to as individual characteristics (e.g., family structure, educational attainment, work status) often reflect/are a product of structural factors, such as structural racism. It also coincides with recent studies arguing that research on poverty and racial inequality should place greater emphasis on historicizing racism and integrating structural racism, particularly when considering the role of family structure. Ultimately, research on poverty and racial inequality must seek to understand how racial ideologies work to maintain racial domination and maintain racial gaps (e.g., Cross et al., 2022; Williams, 2019; Williams et al., in press). Meaningfully incorporating structural racism into research also has important implications in terms of policy. The emphasis on family structure in poverty and racial inequality has led to policy recommendations and programs that focus on improving the “culture of marriage.” Marriage promotion programs are a prime example. Such programs increased in popularity during the Bush Administration in the 2000s. Additionally, states with higher concentrations of Black populations were more likely to allocate TANF funds designed to assist low-income families toward programs encouraging marriage instead of cash assistance (Parolin, 2021). However, there has been much debate on whether marriage promotion programs are ideal or even successful (Cherlin, 2003). Although there is empirical evidence that such programs can promote better communication skills for middle-class and White couples, findings from evaluations of marriage programs for unmarried racially or ethnically diverse groups, and couples with lower incomes fail to demonstrate efficacy (Heath et  al., 2016). Promoting greater financial stability in families, rather than marriage, would likely have a more positive impact on family economic well-­ being (Fremstad et  al., 2019), and thus, be more consequential in addressing racial gaps. To promote greater financial stability in families, it is imperative to focus attention on the macro structures and processes that impact family socioeconomic well-­ being. Various institutional domains (e.g., labor market, schools, housing, healthcare, the legal system, and the welfare state) play a role in shaping family economic outcomes and racial inequality across families. Moreover, part of the contemporary impact of these institutions reflects the racist legacies of historical institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow. Thus, to truly understand enduring racial inequalities across families, acknowledgment of these institutional realities as they impact families differently is critical.

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It is also imperative to consider and learn from international comparative literature which emphasizes the consequential role of the welfare state in reducing poverty among families and children (e.g., Chen & Corak, 2008; Gornick & Jäntti, 2012). Reflecting structural racism in the United States, race has a strong association with perceptions, support, spending, and implementation of welfare (Brown, 2013; Johnson, 2003; Parolin, 2021) that disadvantages Black and Hispanic families relative to White families. However, these families stand to benefit the most from such social support. The COVID-19 pandemic and its disproportionate impact on families across racial lines illuminated the significance of the welfare state in this regard. COVID-19 stimulus supports made a huge difference in the poverty outcomes for families, particularly among Black and Hispanic families (Parolin et al., 2022). This positive outcome underlines the potential for what policies can effectively do for families when there is not a lack of political will to do it. In sum, an emphasis on socio-historical context, particularly the role of structural racism, would provide a more comprehensive examination of socioeconomic outcomes and overall racial inequality across families. This deeper understanding of macro-level conditions that impact individual lives would, in turn, help produce findings that can better inform policies and help craft solutions to more effectively close enduring racial gaps across families.

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Miller, R. J. (2021). Halfway home: Race, punishment, and the afterlife of mass incarceration. Little, Brown, and Company. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. Oxford University Press. Mills, C. W. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell University Press. Morris, A. D. (1984). The origins of the civil rights movement: Black communities organizing for change. Free Press. Morris, A.  D. (1999). A retrospective on the civil rights movement: Political and intellectual landmarks. Annual Review of Sociology, 25(1), 517–539. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev. soc.25.1.517 Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family: The case for national action. Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action | U.S. Department of Labor (dol.gov) Nunn, N. (2008). The long-term effects of Africa's slave trades. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(1), 139–176. https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2008.123.1.139 O’Connell, H. A. (2012). The impact of slavery on racial inequality in poverty in the contemporary U.S. South. Social Forces, 90(3), 713–734. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sor021 Oliver, M.  L., & Shapiro, T. (2013). Black wealth, White wealth: A new perspective on racial inequality. Routledge. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial formation in the United States (3rd ed.). Routledge. Pager, D., Western, B., & Bonikowski, B. (2009). Discrimination in a low-wage labor market: A field experiment. American Sociological Review, 74(5), 777–799. https://psycnet.apa.org/ doi/10.1177/000312240907400505 Parolin, Z. (2021). Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Black–White child poverty gap in the United States. Socio-Economic Review, 19(3), 1005–1035. https://doi.org/10.1093/ ser/mwz025 Parolin, Z., Collyer, S., & Curran, M. A. 2022, February 7 Absence of monthly child credit leads to 3.7 million more children in poverty in January 2022 [Policy brief]. Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. Absence of Monthly Child Tax Credit Leads to 3.7 Million More Children in Poverty in January 2022—Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, H.R. 3734, 104th Congress. https:// www.congress.gov/bill/104th-­congress/house-­bill/3734/text Ray, V. (2019). A theory of racialized organizations. American Sociological Review, 84(1), 26–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122418822335 Ray, V. (2022). On critical race theory: Why it matters and why you should care. Random House. Reece, R. L. (2020). Whitewashing slavery: Legacy of slavery and White social outcomes. Social Problems, 67(2), 304–323. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spz016 Reskin, B. (2012). The race discrimination system. Annual Review of Sociology, 38, 17–35. https:// doi.org/10.1146/annurev-­soc-­071811-­145508 Roberts, D. (2011). Fatal invention: How science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century. The New Press. Ruef, M. (2014). Between slavery and capitalism: The legacy of emancipation in the American south. Princeton University Press. Ruef, M., & Fletcher, B. (2003). Legacies of American slavery: Status attainment among southern Blacks after emancipation. Social Forces, 82(2), 445–480. https://doi.org/10.1353/ sof.2004.0024 Semega, J., & Kollar, M. (2022) Income in the United States: 2021. Current Population Reports (P60–276), U.S.  Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/ p60-­276.html. Shapiro, T., Meschede, T., & Osoro, S. (2013, February). The roots of the widening racial wealth gap: Explaining the Black-White economic divide [Research and policy brief]. Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP). https://doi.org/10.13016/pvyx-­ebny.

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Snipp, C.  M. (1996). Understanding race and ethnicity in rural America. Rural Sociology, 61, 125–142. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-­0831.1996.tb00613.x Sweeney, M. M., & Raley, R. K. (2014). Race, ethnicity, and the changing context of childbearing in the United States. Annual Review of Sociology, 40, 539–558. https://doi.org/10.1146/ annurev-­soc-­071913-­043342 Taylor, K. Y. (2019). Race for profit: How banks and the real estate industry undermined Black homeownership. UNC Press Books. Thomas, A., & Sawhill, I. (2002). For richer or for poorer: Marriage as an antipoverty strategy. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 21(4), 587–599. For Richer or for Poorer: Marriage as an Antipoverty Strategy on JSTOR Waite, L. J., & Gallagher, M. (2001). The case for marriage: Why married people are happier, healthier, and better off financially. Crown Publishing Group. Western, B., & Pettit, B. (2010). Incarceration and social inequality. Daedalus, 139(3), 8–19. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_00019 Williams, D. T. (2019). A call to focus on racial domination and oppression: A response to “Racial and ethnic inequality in poverty and affluence, 1959–2015”. Population Research and Policy Review, 38(5), 655–663. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-­019-­09538-­x Williams, D. T., & Baker, R. S. (2021). Family structure, risks, and racial stratification in poverty. Social Problems, 68(4), 964–985. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spab018 Williams, D. T., Sanner, C., Jensen, T., & Simon, L. (in press). Racism, family structure, and Black families. In V. Rutter, K. Williams, & B. Risman (Eds.), Families as they really are (3rd ed.). Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. Wilson, V. (2020). Inequities exposed: How COVID-19 widened racial inequities in education, health, and the workforce. Testimony before the U.S.  House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/ covid-­19-­inequities-­wilson-­testimony/ Woodward, C. V. (1955). The strange career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press.

Chapter 2

The Myth of Racial Progress in Post-Race America Charles A. Gallagher

Racial Progress: Fact and Fiction The United States likes to boast that we are a nation of continual social, economic, and especially racial progress. This narrative of progress, grounded in classic political liberalism of maximizing individual liberties, announces to successive generations that our system of governance, while at times flawed or temporally misdirected, is, in the long run, self-correcting. We tell ourselves that every generation is provided with greater measures of equality, opportunity, and civil rights than the previous one. One core facet of this American exceptionalism is that the United States possesses an ethical and moral compass that ultimately leads to institutional enlightenment regarding civil rights. Our system eventually rights its wrongs, which culminates in a socioeconomic opportunity for all. The progress narrative tells us that the rule of law is, or soon will be, applied to all citizens without regard to race, religion, or creed. The “Cliff Notes version” of American racial history and progress (soon to be removed from our public schools) tells us the Civil War ended slavery in 1865, the Brown decision dismantled Jim Crow in 1954, and the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s leveled the socio-economic playing field by outlawing racial discrimination in voting, housing, and employment. The Bakke decision in 1978 acknowledged that given centuries-long discrimination in access to higher education, universities could use race as one factor among many in college admissions. Electing Barack Obama as president, the highest office in the United States, not once but twice, confirms and validates the progress narrative. The 2022 appointment of Katanji Brown Jackson as the first African American female on the Supreme Court provides even C. A. Gallagher (*) La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. P. Witherspoon et al. (eds.), Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States, National Symposium on Family Issues 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44115-8_2

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further evidence of the racial progress narrative. In a nod to the adage that progress is seeing “Black faces in high places,” the positioning of extremely accomplished African Americans at the pinnacle of American politics and in popular culture does much to create the impression among many Whites that we are now a post-racial, colorblind nation. This racial progress narrative is supported by national polling data. In one recent Pew Research Center (Pew) survey, a majority of White Americans, fifty-six percent, responded that “a lot” of progress has been made on racial issues (Pew, 2021). While the concept of “progress” is relative, the Pew survey was conducted shortly after police officers murdered Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Breonna Taylor’s death was the result of a no-knock warrant mistakenly executed and illegally obtained by officers who lied to get authorization to raid her apartment. The world watched the barbaric spectacle of Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for 9 min and 29 s, literally squeezing the life out of him. The killing of both African Americans by White police officers was a high-profile, media firestorm that occupied the news cycle for weeks. The 2021 Pew survey was also conducted long enough after the start of the COVID pandemic that the general public was very much aware from health researchers and media reports that because of systemic and institutional racism, racial minorities were more likely to be exposed to and die from the coronavirus. The Pew survey was also conducted months after the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, which was led by White nationalist groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters. These racist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant groups stormed the U.S. Capitol building in an attempt to stop the formal certification of Joe Biden as the President of the United States. Five officers were killed in the insurrection, several officers committed suicide in the weeks following, and almost 150 officers were injured (Cameron, 2022) In the year prior to the 2021 Pew survey, there was a steady stream of racist incidents that dominated the news including the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, an African American who was chased down and murdered by three White men for the “crime” of jogging through their White neighborhood. The murder of unarmed African Americans at the hands of police officers, the disproportionate number of racial minorities killed by COVID because of systemic racism, and the rise and political mainstreaming of White supremacy as witnessed in the U.S. Capitol insurrection should give pause to the racial progress narrative. This, however, is not the case. As the survey research I will discuss in this paper suggests, much of White America believes in the racial progress narrative. This account of progress is a juggernaut relentlessly crushing racial inequalities, prejudices, and discriminatory actions that would deny groups their civil rights. The racial progress storyline is, however, empirically false. There remain significant decades-long gaps in dozens of quality-of-life measures between Whites and racial minorities, and in some instances, these disparities in socioeconomic indicators have widened (See Gallagher, 2022, Appendix 1–47 for a detailed list of disparities by race). These racial socio-economic gaps for Blacks, Latinos, and Whites are asymptotic. That is, these trend lines have never converged to the point of intersecting; the gaps in socio-economic measures of inequality remain constant over

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several decades. This progress narrative also serves an ideological function by erasing or ignoring the vast inequalities between racial groups and the systemic racism that continues to shape our nation’s institutions (Gallagher, 2020). We have on one hand a Pollyannaish, distorted, and inaccurate account of race relations championed by politicians, broadcast by the media, and glorified in popular culture where the myth of racial progress is celebrated (Ray et al., 2017). On the other hand, social scientists draw on an extensive scholarship on racial inequality, institutionalized racism, and discrimination that demonstrate racial progress has been uneven, illusory, and in many social contexts, moving backward (Onyeador et al., 2020). This chapter examines these two accounts of racial progress by juxtaposing the narrative of racial progress with quality-of-life indicators by race that tell a starkly different story of socio-economic racial progress. I examine how this culturally dominant narrative of racial progress has resulted in the perception by many Whites that the socioeconomic gains made by racial minorities have come at the socioeconomic expense of Whites. This race-based zero-sum game view of race relations by Whites (Norton & Sommers, 2011) and the link to the growth of reactionary politics and the rise of White nationalism will be explored. The Black Lives Matter movement and the backlash against it by those on the far right and by politicians who saw attacks on BLM as a useful political tool provides an example of how racial progress can quickly be rebranded and result in White resentment, White racial backlash, and perceptions by Whites that they are now the victims of racial identity politics.

Quality of Life Indicators: One Step Forward… Income: Chasing the White Dollar From 1940 to 1950 the income gap in mean wages between Black men and White men narrowed. Black male workers saw their incomes rise from 48 cents on the White dollar to 61 cents (Maloney, 1994). This gap would continue to narrow until the late 1970’s when Black men on average earned about 80 cents for every dollar White men earned. Adjusting for inflation this translates to Black men earning $15 per hour compared to White men earning $19 per hour. These wage gains were, however, short-lived. In 2016, the wage ratio of Black workers compared to White workers slipped from 80 cents on the White dollar to 70 cents. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco shows that similar reversals of fortune plagued Black women as well. The authors write, “In 1979, the average Black woman earned about 95% of [what] the average White woman [earned]. But nearly continuous divergence in earnings since that time has opened a more sizable gap; in 2016, the average Black woman earned about 82% of what the average White woman earned” (Daly et al., 2017, p. 2). The Federal Reserve found that from “1979 to 2016, wages for Black women fell from roughly 95% of what White women earned ($11 an hour versus $12 an hour) to about 82 percent ($16 versus $20).”

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Black median household income tells an even more grim story of economic backslide rather than one of economic racial progress. A report from The Joint Economic Committee Democrats states: The median annual household income for Black households in 2018 (the last year for which household data are available) was $41,692, more than $21,000 less than all households and nearly $29,000 less than for White households, which had a median income of $70,642. In other words, for every dollar earned by the typical White household, the typical Black household earned only 59 cents. This is significantly worse [emphasis added] than in 2000, when the typical Black household earned about 65 cents for every dollar earned by a White household (Beyer, 2020, p. 9)

Median household income by race provides a typically optimistic Rashomon effect of racial progress; income trends can be defined and celebrated as rising if one suspends comparative or historical examples. A typical example of racial progress being lauded by a think tank is a recent Brookings Institute report titled “Black Household Income is Rising Across the United States” (Berube, 2019). On the face of it, this statement is true. Black household income is rising, but those gains in Black household income were “catch up” from the crippling losses experienced by Black families due to the economic collapse in 2008. The so-called “rise” celebrated in the title of the Brooking Institute article was in fact income recovered from the financial losses incurred from the 2008 economic recession. It would not be until 2018 that Black household income would return to 2006 levels (Berube, 2019) In addition, Black households were disproportionately hurt by the economic meltdown in 2008, taking more than a decade to return to past household income levels (Berube, 2019) While increased household income levels for Black families is welcome news, the notion that racial progress is being made is thoroughly inaccurate in the face of more nuanced and comparative data. In the very same Brookings report that announced rising median Black household incomes, the author concedes: Substantial gaps remain between Black and White median incomes in most major metro areas. In 2018, the typical White household in Sunbelt areas such as Phoenix, Riverside, and Tampa had an income 20% to 40% higher than the typical Black household. In Northern metro areas including Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Cleveland, that median income gap was much higher: between 120% and 140%. Chicago, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh registered high Black-White disparities as well. Many of these metro areas exhibit extremely high rates of racial and economic segregation which limits upward mobility for low-income families, in part by reinforcing racist structures that devalue Black neighborhoods. (Berube, 2019, p. 6)

Income loss, economic and residential segregation, a lack of mobility for low-­ income families, and racist structures that hurt Black neighborhoods; these descriptions undercut the optimism suggested in the “rising” income storyline and most certainly call into question the racial progress narrative. What is not discussed is that the economic meltdown in 2008 hit Black and Latinos harder than it hit Whites. The median net worth of Black households dropped by 53% but dropped by only 17% for White households between the years 2005 and 2009 (Famighetti & Hamilton, 2019). The Economic Policy Institute found that a full decade after the start of the recession in 2007, African Americans’ median income had still not recovered. The average median Black household

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income was down $781 per year while White median household income saw a gain of $755 (Wilson, 2018). The Brookings study focuses on the fact that Black household income did rise at a faster rate compared to Whites in some parts of the country, but regardless of what city you look at, the differences in household income for Whites and Blacks are significant. The Brookings Institute reported that the median household income in the Philadelphia metro area in 2018 for White households was $84,958 compared to $41,772 for Black households. White households, on average, make twice the income of Black households. Almost every one of the 20 metropolitan areas in this study had income ratios where White household’s income was twice that of Black households (Berube, 2019, Table 2). National data on income tells a similar story. According to the U.S.  Census Bureau, real median household income in 2020 was: $94,903 for Asians, $74,912 for White non-Hispanics, $67,521 for all races, $55,321 for Hispanics, and $45,870 for Blacks (Shrider et al., 2021). Of note is that while the median household income has risen for all groups the racial gap between groups has been relatively constant for over four decades. Stagnant Black household income is not a measure of racial progress.

I nheriting Wealth, Inheriting Poverty, and the Consequences of Education Income data has been massaged or at least selectively presented over the last several decades to advance a picture of racial socioeconomic progress. Wealth data, however, paints an unflinching and unambiguous picture of economic racial inequality. Recent research by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that the median wealth gap between White and Black families was 12 cents per dollar of White wealth (Kent & Ricketts 2021). The report notes that this ratio has been relatively unchanged over the last thirty years. Decades-long racial wealth disparities, basically a Black dime on the White dollar, are not racial progress. It should be noted that there has been racial progress in wealth accumulation, but the benefits have disproportionately gone to White households (Kent & Rickets, 2021). Looking at median and average household wealth presents an even more distorted picture of wealth inequality. The median family wealth for Whites was $184,000, for Latinos $38,000 and Black families $23,000. White families had about 8 times the wealth of Black families. The average amount of wealth held by White families was $962,000, while Blacks and Latinos had $143,000 and $249,000, respectively (Kent & Ricketts, 2021). As a measure, the average is skewed by very wealthy families (e.g., Bill Gates) but the reality is that Whites are significantly overrepresented among those families in the one-tenth of one percent (0.01) households. Households in the 0.01 percent category have annual incomes of at least $35 million. The minimum amount one needs to enter the 1 percent of annual income is $845,000. Within the group of one-percenters, Whites make up 88% of this

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population while Blacks and Latinos make up 4 and 2 percent respectively (Yavorsky et al., 2020). Blacks make up 13.6% of the U.S. population and Latinos 18.9%. The racial wealth gap exists at every income level, and there is a significant racial gap within each of the levels. Among those in the top 10 percent of all income groups, Black families, which make up only 3.6% of this group, have $343,160 in wealth, while Whites in the same income group have $1,789,300 (McIntosh et al., 2020). In 1992, 7% of White families had financial assets that defined them as millionaires. By 2017, that number had risen to 15% or 1 in 7 White households. In 1992, 2% of Black families had financial assets that defined them as millionaires. In 2017, twenty-five years later, that number was still 2% (Kent & Ricketts, 2021). In terms of generating more millionaires over the last several decades, there has most certainly been racial progress. Unfortunately, that racial progress has not included African Americans. It would be a reasonable assumption that a two-parent household would have greater income-earning potential and consequently a better ability to generate wealth than a single-parent household. Extending that logic, one might assume that a two-parent household of any race would have more income than a single-parent household. This however is not the case. A survey of Consumer Finances found that once again race plays a significant factor in wealth assets. The median wealth for a single White parent household was 2.2 times larger than that of a two-parent Black household and 1.9 times larger than a two-parent Latino household. Two-parent Black and Latino households had $16,000 and $18,800 respectively in wealth, while White single-parent households had $35,800 (Traub et al., 2017). Negative wealth or having more debt than assets is also skewed by race. The St. Louis Federal Reserve found that in 2019, 18% of Black families, 12% of Latino families, and 8% of White families were in debt (Kent & Ricketts, 2021). Not only are African Americans more likely to have debt, but they are also twice as likely as Whites to have no financial assets. More than a third (35%) compared to 14% of Whites had no financial assets (Tippet et al., 2014). Having wealth provides households with the ability to pass on assets to children and grandchildren. Intergeneration transfers of wealth in the form of inheritances have been identified as a key factor in greater race-based wealth disparities (Batchelder, 2020). Those households that can expect an inheritance and have over one million dollars in income are likely to receive an inheritance of three million dollars. Those households earning $50,000 or less could expect an inheritance of $62,000. High-income families received over 48 times the inheritance of households with lower incomes. In the case of the rich getting richer, “Inheritances thus increase within-generation inequality on an absolute basis, conferring much larger benefits on high-income families than on low-income families” (Batchelder, 2020, p.47). Inheritance by race provides a stark example of how wealth disparities can grow over time. White households are twice as likely as Black families to receive an inheritance, and with an inheritance, median household wealth increases by $104,000 for Whites but only $4000 for Black families (Batchelder, 2020). Drawing on social mobility literature Batchelder concludes that “by some estimates, financial

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inheritances are a more important predictor of a child’s future earnings than are the child’s IQ, personality, and education combined” (2020, p. 47). In their research on race, wealth accumulation, and inheritance, Hamilton and Darity come to a similar conclusion concerning the degree to which an inheritance shapes the life chances of future generations. “Careful economic studies actually demonstrate that inheritances, bequests, and intra-family transfers account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic and socioeconomic indicators including education, income, and household structure” (Hamilton & Darity, 2010, p. 212).

 he Wealth–Education Nexus: Qualified Progress, T Racialized Debt More than 200 years ago educational reformer Horace Mann said, “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of social machinery” (Growe & Montgomery, 2003, p. 23). It is a matter of faith in much of the social sciences and society at large that investments in human capital, specifically formal education, result in socioeconomic mobility. Education, particularly a college degree, is often described as the “great equalizer” (Cremin, 2023). Increased access to and graduation from high school and college for African Americans is indeed a story of racial progress. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that among college students in 2020, 53% were non-Hispanic White, 20% were Hispanic, 15% were Black, and 10% were Asian (Beyer, 2020). What is exceptional in these numbers is that racial minorities are overrepresented in today’s college classrooms relative to their size in the total U.S. population. In 1940, less than five percent of all adults and about one percent of Blacks graduated from college (Beyer, 2020). In 1940, only seven percent of Blacks had graduated from high school. In 2020, 88% of African American students graduated from high school making this cohort almost identical to the general population which stands at a high school graduation rate of 90%. There remains a small gap between all students and Black students attending college (41% compared to 38%), but the number of Black students attending college more than doubled from 1968 to 2018 (Beyer, 2020). This is an astonishing measure of racial progress when we consider that most universities did not allow racial minorities on their campuses until the 1970s. On the face of it, the doubling of the number of Black high school students attending college over the past fifty years is clearly a measure of racial progress and, as Horace Mann pointed out two centuries ago, investment in formal education is indeed a socioeconomic leveler for all groups (Growe & Montgomery, 2003). The Social Security Administration (2015) found that on average, men with a bachelor’s degree earn $900,000 more over their lifetime than a high school graduate. On average, women with bachelor’s degrees earn $630,000 more than a high school graduate. Graduate degrees confer even greater lifetime earnings with men making $1.5 million and women $1.1 million more than those with only a high school degree. (Social Security Administration, 2015).

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While these trends are grounds for optimism in addressing a long history of race-­ based inequalities in higher education, when college completion rates, college debt incurred, income returns for college graduates, and wealth accumulation are considered, the idea that education is the great equalizer needs significant qualification. The qualifier here is the race of the student. The benefits of formal education disproportionately accrue to college graduates who are White and Asian. The St. Louis Federal Reserve’s analysis of median household wealth points to significant disparities in wealth accumulation in families with similar levels of educational attainment (Kent & Rickets, 2021). The median household wealth for Whites with a bachelor’s degree was $298,000. Blacks and Latinos had $51,000 and $77,000 in household wealth on average, respectively. The gap is even wider when we examine households with post-graduate levels of education. The median household wealth for Whites with post-graduate levels of education was $597,000. For Blacks and Latinos, those numbers were $115,000 and $243,00. The St. Louis Federal Reserve survey also found trends in the wealth accumulation data that completely undermine the idea of education being the great equalizer. The median household wealth for White families who only completed high school was $115,000. Coincidently, this is the same amount of median wealth for Black households where a member had a post-graduate level of education. Recall that White household wealth in this category was almost $600,000 or five times what Black families earned with the same education credentials. In fact, White household wealth in families with less than a high school degree was almost as much as that of Black families who had obtained a bachelor’s degree; $47,000 for Whites and $51,000 for Blacks (Kent & Rickets, 2021). According to Hamilton and colleagues, “Black families whose heads graduated from college have about 33% less wealth than White families whose heads dropped out of high school…The average Black household would have to save 100 percent of their income for three consecutive years to overcome the obstacles to wealth parity by dint of their own savings activity” (Hamilton et al., 2015, p. 3). Summing up this trend, Federal Reserve researchers state, “Education does not close racial wealth gaps  – Black and Hispanic families have less median family wealth than White families with the same education” (Kent & Ricketts, 2021, p. 5). In absolute numbers, the returns of education for Black households over the last fifty years is a story of racial progress. Comparing the returns of education for White households to that of Black households changes that story of racial progress to one of intergenerational race-based inequalities.

Education, Wealth, and Racialized Debt There is currently 1.75 trillion dollars in student debt held by 48 million Americans who have taken out college loans (Kinery & Tanzi, 2022). Blacks with bachelor’s degrees have an average of $52,000 in debt, $25,000 more debt than Whites with bachelor’s degrees. Four years after graduation, close to half (48%) of Black

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students owe 12% more than they borrowed. In contrast, a near majority of Whites (83%) owed an average of 12.5% less than they borrowed four years out from their college graduation (Hanson, 2023). Looking twenty years out from college graduation, racial college debt disparities between White and Black graduates are even more pronounced. Twenty years after graduation the typical Black borrower still owes 95% of the original debt balance, while the typical White borrower owes only 6% of the original debt (Beyer, 2020). This debt that students incur is directly tied to parents’ wealth. Black students take out more college loans than White students because their parents have fewer assets (i.e., wealth) to draw on to aid with paying college tuition. Not only does this debt follow Black student borrowers for decades but research suggests “among young adults, education debt explains nearly one-­ quarter of the Black-White wealth gap” (Percheski & Gibson-Davis, 2020, p. 3).

 ptimistic Distortions: How White People Perceive O Wealth by Race There now exists extensive literature on income, wealth, and educational disparities by race detailing the extent to which to systemic racism and discrimination have created historical and ongoing obstacles to achieving financial parity between racial groups. Wealth inequality and how to address these glaring disparities is now recognized as a significant social problem. To revisit an observation made by the Kerner Commission in 1968, unless wealth inequality is addressed, we will become even more “separate and unequal” than we currently are (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968). Increasingly, think tanks, NGOs, academics, and politicians have acknowledged the depth of this problem and the long-term consequences to our country if policies are not put in place to address these growing socioeconomic disparities. The central problem here is not a lack of data. Nor is it a lack of understanding of the root causes of wealth disparities and how asset accumulation shapes educational attainment, health, or homeownership. The problem is that most White Americans significantly overestimate the wealth they believe Black families hold. As most Whites see it, White and Black families are, financially speaking, not so different. Americans vastly underestimate wealth inequality in the United States. This misperception of financial equality comes at a time of near-record income inequality and while the United States has shifted from a country having one of the highest rates of intergenerational social mobility historically to having one of the lowest (Kraus & Tan, 2015). When asked to estimate perceptions of racial economic equality, White respondents “overestimated average Black-White wealth equality by 60 percentage points” (Onyeador et al., 2020, p. 762). The average Black household wealth was 10% of Whites’ household wealth. In another study examining perceptions of wealth inequality, respondents believed there was less wealth inequality in 1963 than in 2016. Respondents estimated the wealth gap as 40% smaller than it was in 1963 but 80% smaller than it was in 2016 (Kraus et al., 2019).

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What these studies demonstrate is a lack of understanding of race-based inequality. The perception that there is greater wealth equality between Blacks and Whites points again to the myth of racial progress. The perception that racial groups are close to social and economic parity suggests to many Whites that race no longer shapes life chances nor that race shapes household finances. As many Whites see it, we are now a post-race, colorblind society where merit, not one’s race, shapes social mobility. When social scientists use the term colorblind to describe race relations it is generally understood to mean “the tendency to claim that racial equality is now the norm while simultaneously ignoring or discounting the real and ongoing ways in which institutional racism continues to disadvantage racial minorities” (Gallagher, 2015, p. 46). A colorblind perspective of race relations also has social policy implications. “If Americans are overly optimistic about our achievement of racial equality…then they are unlikely to consider equity-enhancing policies with the seriousness and urgency they deserve” (Kraus et al., 2019, p. 900).

 lack Lives Matter: Racial Progress and the Reckoning B That Wasn’t Somewhere between 15 and 26 million people took part in demonstrations in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin (Tesler, 2020). Described as the single largest protest in our nation’s history the protest came to be defined as a “racial reckoning.” This racial reckoning was understood to mean that systemic racism, particularly in the area of criminal justice, would be addressed. Millions of Americans, the majority White, took to the streets in a show of solidarity, empathy, and in some cases enlightenment with organizers who had been agitating for racial justice for decades. These events can only be described as the “racial progress narrative” in action. Spearheading this call for sweeping reform in our criminal justice system was Black Lives Matter (BLM). In this section of the chapter, I suggest that what was initially a narrative of racial progress was quickly co-­ opted by a political agenda of organizations that defined BLM as a racist organization that is both anti-White and anti-police. In effect, a racial backlash emerged, at least in part, because the racial progress narrative was called into question. BLM not only exposed police brutality. The movement opened the door for a conversation on the extent to which systemic racism shapes every institution in the United States. BLM created a space for academics and activists to expose the institutional racism that results in underfunded public schools, the racist implications of restrictive voting bills, the deadly race effects of COVID, and the threat posed by the rise of White nationalism. Support for the racial reckoning among White Americans was short-lived. BLM went from initially having broad support from White Americans in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to support by Whites for BLM being mostly evaporated. Not only did support for BLM by Whites drop precipitously, but the perception that race was a social problem in the United States also fell just three months

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after the spectacle of watching George Floyd murdered by a police officer. On June 14–16, 2020, a YouGov poll asked White respondents, “How big a problem is racism in our society today?” Among Whites, 45% said it was a “big problem.” That poll was conducted about two weeks after George Floyd was killed (YouGov, 2020a). The same poll was conducted again on August 2–4 (a little over two months after the first poll), and 33% of White respondents said racism was a “big problem” (YouGov, 2020b). In only two months, 12% fewer White respondents felt that racism was a “big problem” even though what happened to George Floyd, the protests for racial justice, and the fate of the officers involved in the killing were broadcast daily in the media. A year after the death of George Floyd not only did White support for BLM decline but support for BLM was even lower than before the death of George Floyd (Chudy & Jefferson, 2021). BLM, a social justice organization with legitimate grievances about police brutality was reconstituted as a hate group. The reframing of BLM provides an example of how movements that challenge the racial progress narrative or the dominant belief in colorblindness are discredited or pushed to the political margins. Once these organization have been dispersed or discredited the status quo progress narrative can reemerge as the dominant discourse of race relations. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement started in 2012 in the wake of the killing of a 17-year-old African American, Trayvon Martin, by a White and Latino town watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, in Sanford, Florida. Trayvon Martin was unarmed when he was detained and questioned by Zimmerman in the gated housing community where Trayvon was staying with his father. Zimmerman called 911 to report a “suspicious person” and was instructed by police to stay in his car and not engage Martin. Instead, Zimmerman approached and questioned Martin. A fight ensued and Zimmerman shot the unarmed Martin. Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin. BLM initially emerged as a decentralized social protest organization whose mission was to raise awareness of race-based discrepancies in the criminal justice system, the documented racist and discriminatory treatment of Blacks by the police, and the effects of mass incarceration on African Americans (Ghandhoosh, 2015). The movement gained national and international prominence when several high-profile killings of unarmed Blacks by White police officers took place following the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The partial list of unarmed African Americans killed by White police officers includes Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, and Breonna Taylor (Giorgi et al., 2020). It was the murder of George Floyd though, at the knee of Officer Derek Chauvin that raised the profile and status of the BLM movement. The shock of the video of Officer Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for 8  min and 46  s, literally squeezing the life out of him, created what was described as a national “racial reckoning” regarding the mistreatment of African Americans by the criminal justice system. A wave of interracial, interfaith, and intergenerational protests, marches, and vigils took place throughout the nation following the death of George Floyd. The BLM movement was thrown back into the spotlight and brought their call to address racial inequities in the criminal justice system to a national and international audience.

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BLM’s message regarding racism in the criminal justice system was well received here in the United States. In 2021, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center reported, “Amid protests, majorities across ethnic and racial groups express support for Black Lives Matter movement” (Pew, 2021). The nationally conducted survey of 9654 U.S. adults by Pew found that 67% of respondents support the BLM movement with 38% of that population saying they “strongly support” BLM. Pew reported that “Most adults say tensions between Black people and police and concerns about the treatment of Black people in the U.S. – in addition to anger over Floyd’s death – have contributed a great deal to the protests” (Pew, 2021, p. 2–3). As the BLM Movement gained national recognition a new slogan and hashtag emerged and gained political traction: All Lives Matter. The message of All Lives Matter (ALM) was ostensibly meant to suggest a shared humanity and collective understanding that all lives matter equally and that everyone, regardless of skin color, should be valued, respected, and treated with dignity and equality in the eyes of the law. This appeal to a shared humanity was, however, quickly co-opted by a political message that sought to undermine the core message of the BLM movement that Black lives in the United States have not been valued or protected in the same way as White lives. The subtext of ALM is that White’s and Black’s experience with the criminal justice system and encounters with police are the same; that is both groups are treated equally and fairly by the criminal justice system. As an extensive literature on racial disparities in the criminal justice system documents, this assumption is patently false. Drawing on a recent study from Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania scholars found: There were 5,367 fatal police shootings during that five-year period [2015 to May 2020], according to the [Washington] Post’s database. In the case of armed victims, Native Americans were killed by police at a rate three times that of White people (77 total killed). Black people were killed at 2.6 times the rate of White people (1,265 total killed); and Hispanics were killed at nearly 1.3 times the rate of White people (889 total killed). Among unarmed victims, Black people were killed at three times the rate (218 total killed), and Hispanics at 1.45 times the rate of White people (146 total killed). (Beilli, 2020)

The takeaway from this article, aside from the racial disparities in police shootings, is that these disparities have remained constant from 2015 to 2020. Beyond inequities in criminal justice, almost every quality-of-life measure (e.g., educational and health outcomes, homeownership, residential segregation) varies significantly by race with Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) populations faring poorly compared to Whites. The refrain All Lives Matter is an attempt to delegitimize, diminish, demean, and redirect the core concern of the BLM movement that systemic racism is a central feature in America’s criminal justice system (Stollznow, 2021). The ALM movement serves to negate the simple fact that race shapes life chances in every sphere of American society by employing a colorblind view of race relations. National polling data confirms this colorblind narrative is normative in that a plurality of White Americans believe that Whites and Blacks have equal access to society’s resources. (Gallagher, 2020). In his analysis of ALM, sociologist Joshua Paul points out how the ALM narrative frames ALM as inclusive, universalistic, and race-neutral; that is, a movement

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that is colorblind (Paul, 2019). The slogan “All Lives Matter” is predicated on the idea that the movement has transcended race. Within this narrative, it is the BLM movement that is framed as being racist because BLM is focused on Black racial inequality to the exclusion of other racial groups. This colorblind narrative of ALM, as Professor Paul explains, “functions discursively as the universalist alternative to the racialized BLM” (Paul, 2019, p. 4). Bringing attention to the racial disparities that have existed for centuries and have been exacerbated by Whites through racist and punitive public policing policies is viewed as racist within the ALM narrative. The ALM movement as a racially neutral counter-protest to BLM was seized upon by politicians and by 2015 was used as a rhetorical device in political rallies and on right-wing news outlets to dismiss the BLM movement’s claims concerning police brutality. The ALM also sought to paint BLM as racist because of the organization’s particular focus on injustices suffered by the Black community. In his analysis of the discourse regarding ALM as a race-neutral, post-race organization in contrast to BLM racist particularism, Professor Paul observed: President Donald Trump echoed a boisterous Radford University crowd when he declared “All Lives Matter.” Deafening chants from the crowd accompanied the ejection of a BLM protester at the hands of security personnel. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Texas Senator Ted Cruz used ALM as a corrective to “a new antipolice culture” attributable to President Obama and his Justice Department’s “vilification of police officers.” ALM becomes a post-racial truism levelled at Obama’s policies which endanger the lives of law enforcement and create a climate of “chants and rallies that fixate on racial division.” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson used ALM to rebuke BLM’s “sickening” and “bullying” interest group politics. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul similarly described BLM as “bullying people” remarking, “I think they should change their name maybe  – if they were All Lives Matter, or Innocent Lives Matter.” Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee invoked the post-racial legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. concluding King would, “be appalled by the notion that we’re elevating some lives above others” (Paul, 2019, p. 4).

According to some politicians, as well as many pundits in the media, the BLM agenda is not to raise awareness of racial mistreatment of Blacks in the criminal justice system but is instead a racist, exclusive, anti-police, bullying organization engaged in the type of racial identity politics that serves to divide the nation. Nowhere do these politicians acknowledge the legitimate and documented concerns of systemic racism in the criminal justice system as raised by the BLM movement. The political, rhetorical, and racist strategy of ALM, as seen in the comments by national political leaders is, as I referenced earlier, how ALM delegitimizes, diminishes, demeans, and redirects the core concern of the BLM movement that systemic racism is a central feature in America’s criminal justice system. Researchers found that those who agree with statements associated with racism are linked to greater support for ALM (West et al., 2021). Support for ALM was also associated with a color-blind view of race relations that diminishes or ignores discrimination and racism toward Blacks. In their study of 287 White adults, the researchers concluded that “A pre-registered cross-sectional study found that anti-­ Black racism predicts White participants’ support for All Lives Matter, even when controlling for political affiliations (p. 1147).

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In her analysis of tweets that used the hashtag #AllLivesMatter and #BlackLivesMatter, Carney found that: Based on the Twitter profile information available, well over half of those arguing against the #BlackLivesMatter movement on Twitter in my sample appeared to be young White women. The argument generally centered on a color-blind politic, accusing #BlackLivesMatter protesters of being exclusive and privileging Black lives over any other lives. This group of social media users at times made explicitly racist claims, such as implying that Black men are disrespectful and dangerous, while masking their objection to #BlackLivesMatter in color-blind terms. (Carney, 2016, p. 12)

In addition, Carney found that: Although #AllLivesMatter claims a certain universality that is inclusive of all, in practice, it worked to collapse the specificities of different groups’ experiences in favor of a color-­ blind ideology that favors White supremacy. (p. 15)

What the literature suggests is that those who support All Lives Matter tend to hold racist and stereotypical views of Blacks while also ignoring or discounting the perseverance and persistence of racial inequality in the United States.

 egression to the Racial Norm: Progress, Backlash, R and Status Quo The number of times “racism” or “Black Lives Matter” were mentioned in the media skyrocketed after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020: from under 100 mentions of each term prior to Floyd’s murder to more than 2000 mentions of racism and over 1000 mentions of BLM after (Tesler, 2020). By the beginning of August 2020, the number of mentions of both terms had dropped to the 100 s. This is likely an example of the issue-attention cycle where the media has 24/7 coverage of a shocking or horrific event (e.g., the Sandy Hook shooting) but within a few weeks, the focus is shifted to the next big story. The urgency or shock of the event dissipates, and people shift their focus to more current events. Similarly, The Economist/YouGov survey discussed earlier reported a decrease in White Americans who saw race as a big problem from 43% to 33% between June and August 2020 (YouGov, 2020a, b). By the summer of 2020, support from Republicans and Whites for BLM had lessened from where it was before the murder of George Floyd (Chudy & Jefferson, 2021). As media attention around George Floyd waned, the protests dwindled, and BLM was demonized by right-wing politicians, White Americans could slip back to the views they had about race relations prior to the events in the summer of 2020. It appears that as discussions in the news shifted away from police brutality, systemic racism, and racial reckoning, the issues ceased to exist for many Whites. “Out of sight, out of mind” seems to be how many Whites attend to issues of race in the United States. A Pew Research Center poll conducted in July 2021, more than a

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year after the killing of George Floyd, provides some insight into how deeply embedded the myth of racial progress is and how strongly some White Americans do not wish to engage about issues of race because they see our country as being colorblind. Pew asked a question regarding how to ensure equal rights to all Americans regardless of their race. A majority of Whites, 58%, responded that “little or nothing needs to be done” (Horowitz et al., 2019). In a 2019 Pew study, 50% of Whites said that “too much” attention was paid to race and racial issues. Fifty-­ two percent of Whites said that when it comes to racial discrimination “people see racial discrimination” where it “really does not exist” (Horowtiz et al., 2019). When it comes to “giving Black people equal rights with Whites in our country” a majority of Whites, 59%, say it has “been about right” (43%) or “gone too far” (19%; Horowitz et al., 2019) The phrase “gone too far” is consistent with the perception that the racial progress for Blacks comes at the expense of Whites (Norton & Sommers, 2011). This zero-sum game mentality frames Whites as being the victims of Blacks’ socioeconomic progress. Research demonstrates “that not only do Whites think more progress has been made towards equality than do Blacks, but Whites also now believe that this progress is linked to a new inequality – at their expense (Norton & Sommers, 2011, p. 217). If society is perceived to be race-neutral, if systemic racism is believed to now be a thing of the past, or if we are now a colorblind society because we have had a Black president, it seems logical that little needs to be done to ensure civil rights because equality has been achieved. In the same poll, Norton and Sommers (2011) found almost a third of Whites (32%) responded that “increased public attention to the history of slavery and racism in America” was either “somewhat bad” or “bad” for society. These responses may be tapping into the recently invented controversy over Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the belief by some Whites that elementary and high school teachers are indoctrinating their students with an anti-White, anti-­ American pedagogical agenda. It may also be the case that for many Whites, racism is always viewed in the rear-view mirror; that is, racism is framed and understood in the past tense. It is likely that many Whites acknowledge the racist sins of our nation’s past, but many do not see the need for corrective action such as teaching CRT. Furthermore, attention to the past victimizes Whites living today who were not responsible for slavery, for example, and who believe equal rights for racial minorities have already been achieved. In fact, another Pew (2016) study taps into the extent to which Whites believe racism is systemic or not; that is, built into our institutions or is instead the result of individual actions. When asked if the prejudice of individuals was “a bigger problem than discrimination that is built into our laws and institutions,” 70% of Whites replied that individual rather than institutional racism was a bigger problem concerning discrimination directed at African Americans (2016). A sizable part of the White population has views of racial inequality that are disconnected from reality. Whites wildly overestimate the amount of wealth Black families hold relative to their own wealth. Based on polling data, Whites believe that the United States has been true to its commitment to racial progress and is now, or is on the verge of, being a truly colorblind society. Until there is a true racial

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reckoning where Whites are made aware of these glaring race-based inequalities, developing, proposing, and implementing policies that would address current racebased inequalities will be rejected because in an age of colorblindness and continued racial progress they are no longer needed. Indeed, there is reason to believe that if such race-based policies were proposed today, a sizable segment of the White population would see these recommendations as racist anti-White measures.

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Ghandhoosh, N. (2015, February 3) Black Lives Matter: Eliminating racial inequality in the criminal justice system. The Sentencing Project: Research and advocacy for reform. Black Lives Matter: Eliminating Racial Inequity in the Criminal Justice System – The Sentencing Project Giorgi, S., Guntuku, S.  C., Rahman, M., Himelein-Wachowiak, M., Kwarteng, A., & Curtis, B. (2020). Twitter corpus of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and counter protests:2013 to 2020. ArXiv. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.4056563 Growe, R., & Montgomery, P (2003) Education equity in America: Is education the great equalizer? The Professional Educator, XXV(2), 23–29. D:\xxv-­2\TOC-­PGS.wpd (ed.gov) Hamilton, D., & Darity, W., Jr. (2010). Can ‘baby bonds’ eliminate the racial wealth gap in putative post-racial America? The Review of Black Political Economy, 37, 207–216. https://link. springer.com/article/10.1007/s12114-­010-­9063-­1 Hamilton, D., Darity, W., Jr., Price, A. E., Sridharan, V., & Tippett, R. (2015, April). Umbrellas don’t make it rain: Why studying and working hard isn’t enough for Black Americans. The New School. http://www.insightcced.org/wp-­content/uploads/2015/08/Umbrellas_Dont_Make_It_ Rain_Final.pdf Hanson, M. (2023, June 13). Student loan debt by race. Education Data Initiative. Retrieved September 4, 2022, from https://educationdata.org/student-­loan-­debt-­by-­race Horowitz, J. M., Brown, A., & Cox, K. (2019, April 19). Race in America 2019. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-­trends/2019/04/09/race-­in-­america-­2019/ Kent, A.  H., & Ricketts, L.  R. (2021, January 5). Wealth gaps between White, Black, and Hispanic families in 2019. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://www.stlouisfed.org/ on-­the-­economy/2021/january/wealth-­gaps-­white-­black-­hispanic-­families-­2019 Kinery, E., & Tanzi, A. (2022, April 30). Biden’s $1.75 trillion student-debt problem by the numbers. Bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-­04-­30/ biden-­s-­1-­75-­trillion-­student-­debt-­problem-­by-­the-­numbers Kraus, M. W., Onyeador, I. N., Daumeyer, N. M., Rucker, J. M., & Richeson, J. A. (2019). The misperception of racial economic inequality. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(6), 899–921. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619863049 Kraus, M.  W., & Tan, J.  X. (2015). Americans overestimate social class mobility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 58, 101–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2015.01.005 Maloney, T. N. (1994). Wage compression and wage inequality between Black and White males in the United States, 1940–1960. The Journal of Economic History, 54(2), 358–381. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0022050700014522 McIntosh, K., Moss, E., Nunn, R., & Shambaugh, J. (2020, February 27). Examining the Black-White wealth gap. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-­front/2020/02/27/ examining-­the-­black-­white-­wealth-­gap/ Norton, M.  I., & Sommers, S.  R. (2011). Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(3), 215–218. https://doi. org/10.1177/1745691611406922 Onyeador, I. N., Daumeyer, N. M., Rucker, J. M., Duker, A., Kraus, M. W., & Richeson, J. A. (2020). Disrupting beliefs in racial progress: Reminders of persistent racism alter perceptions of past, but not current, racial economic equality. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47(5), 753–765. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220942625 Paul, J. (2019). ‘Not Black and White, but Black and red’: Anti-identity identity politics and #AllLivesMatter. Ethnicities, 19(1), 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796818791661 Percheski, C., & Gibson-Davis, C. (2020). A penny on the dollar: Racial inequalities in wealth among households with children. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 6. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023120916616 Pew Research Center. (2016, June 27). 3. Discrimination and racial inequality. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. http://www.pewsocialtrends. org/2016/06/27/3-­discrimination-­and-­racial-­inequality Pew Research Center. (2021, August 12). Deep divisions in Americans’ views of nation’s racial history  – And how to address it. Pew Research Center  – U.S.  Politics & Policy. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/08/12/deep-­d ivisions-­i n-americansviews-­of-­nations-­racial-­history-­and-­how-­to-­address-­it/

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Ray, V. E., Randolph, A., Underhill, M., & Luke, D. (2017). Critical race theory, Afro-pessimism, and racial progress narratives. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 3(2), 147–158. https://doi. org/10.1177/2332649217692557 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. (1968). Kenner Commission report on the causes, events, and aftermaths of the civil disorders of 1967. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Porgrams. Report (hud.gov) Shrider, E. A., Kollar, M., Chen, F., & Semega, J. (2021, September 14). Income and poverty in the United States: 2020 (Report No. P60-273). U.S. Census. https://www.census.gov/library/ publications/2021/demo/p60-­273.html Social Security Administration. (2015, November). Research, statistics and policy analysis: Education and lifetime earnings. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-­summaries/ education-­earnings.html Stollznow, K. (2021, January 13). Why is it so offensive to say ‘all lives matter’? The Conversation. Why is it so offensive to say ‘all lives matter’? (theconversation.com). Tesler, M. (2020, August 19). Support for Black Lives Matter surged during protests, but is waning among white Americans. FiveThirtyEight. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/support-­for-­ black-­lives-­matter-­surged-­during-­protests-­but-­is-­waning-­among-­white-­americans /. Tippett, R., Jones-DeWeever, A., Rockeymoore, M., Hamilton, D., & Darity, W. (2014, April 21). Beyond broke: Why closing the racial gap is a priority for national economic security. Center for Global Policy Solutions. http://globalpolicysolutions.org/report/beyond-­broke/ Traub, A., Sullivan, L., Meschede, T., & Shapiro, T. (2017, February). The asset value of whiteness: Understanding the racial wealth gap. Dēmos. The Asset Value of Whiteness: The Asset Value of Whiteness: Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap | Demos West, K., Geenland, K., & van Laar, C. (2021). Implicit racism, colour blindness, and narrow definitions of discrimination: Why some White people prefer ‘All Lives Matter’ to ‘Black Lives Matter’. British Journal of Social Psychology, 60(4), 1136–1153. https://doi.org/10.1111/ bjso.12458 Wilson, V. (2018, September 12). 110 years after the start of the great recession, Black and Asian households have yet to recover lost income. Economic Policy Institute https://www.epi.org/ blog/10-­years-­after-­the-­start-­of-­the-­great-­recession-­black-­and-­asian-­households-­have-­yet-­to-­ recover-­lost-­income/ Yavorsky, J., Keister, L., & Qian, Y. (2020). Gender in the one percent. Contexts, 19, 12–17. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1536504220902196 YouGov. (2020a). Problem of racism in society, June 14–16, 2020 [Table 4, p. 6]. The Economist/ YouGov poll. econTabReport.pdf (yougov.com) YouGov. (2020b). Problem of racism in society today, August 2–4, 2020 [Table 50, p. 128]. The Economist/YouGov poll. econTabReport.pdf (yougov.com)

Chapter 3

Race and Racism in Family Research Heather A. O’Connell

The centrality of race in shaping life outcomes in the United States is well known. Baker (Chap. 1) and Gallagher (Chap. 2) demonstrate the foundational role of race and racism in the United States through their own discussions of the literature. So, I reiterate briefly that evidence suggesting race matters is found in every subfield of the demographic and social sciences, for example, education (e.g., Ramsay-Jordan, 2020); health (e.g., Ashby et al., 2022; Yearby, 2018); incarceration (e.g., Pettit & Western, 2004); migration (e.g., White et  al., 2005); residential patterns (e.g., Howell & Emerson, 2018); and poverty (e.g., Baker et al., 2022); Family research is no exception. When people say, “race matters” or that there is a “race effect”, they are saying there is an association between a measure of race and an outcome. However that association can be the result of many different processes. We need to think carefully about whether the association stems from someone’s identity (i.e., how they see themselves) versus how others view them (i.e., identification). Similarly, the presence of multiple forms of racism – ranging from micro-aggressions (e.g., Skadegård & Horst, 2021; Sue et al., 2007), to individual racial discrimination (e.g., Ghoshal, 2019; Korver-Glenn, 2018), to institutionalized racism (e.g., Bonilla-Silva, 1996; Faber, 2020) – requires that we be more specific about what we mean by “racism” when suggesting its role in explaining why race matters. Greater attention to race and racism (and the corresponding ideas of ethnicity and ethnocentrism) as specialty areas has enhanced our understanding of these foundational pieces of society. Yet the increased separation among all demographic and social science sub-fields as we become more specialized has made it challenging to bring this enhanced understanding to other areas of research. I aim to facilitate the integration of race and H. A. O’Connell (*) Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. P. Witherspoon et al. (eds.), Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States, National Symposium on Family Issues 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44115-8_3

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racism into family research through a systematic review of recent family research and a synthesis of key ideas from race and racism research. I am a demographer by training, but primarily a race scholar. As I have gotten farther and farther away from my graduate training, my understanding of trends in family research has become outdated. That is why I took this opportunity to refamiliarize myself with how race is treated in the family literature. I reviewed all articles from the three most recent issues of the Journal of Marriage and Family for this analysis. I used key search terms – detailed in the methods section – to identify how many of the articles mention race; a targeted reading then determined how race is treated when present. Based on this data I created a typology that highlights where family scholars can strengthen their treatment of race and subsequently improve their understanding of family dynamics. Similar studies of the use of race in research have focused on research published in different journals (e.g., American Sociological Review; Martin & Yeung, 2003) and subfields (e.g., leisure studies; Floyd et al., 2008) than what I examine here. Comparisons to those studies suggest the conclusions I draw are not exclusive to family research, and some criticisms have been around for decades. There is reason to be optimistic though, as this is a unique moment for reassessing the foundation of family studies. There has been increased attention to race brought on in part by several special journal issues focusing on a clearer integration of race into various social science subfields (see e.g., Carrillo et al., 2021; Dow et al., 2022; O’Connell, 2021). I am honored to be part of this discussion on race and racism in family research as we work to move the field forward. Ultimately, I find that the standard in family research is a cursory level of attention to race and related dynamics. In thinking about why this is the case, I hypothesize that the minimization of race and racism within the literature is the result of the stronger theoretical emphasis on gender dynamics combined with journal word limits. In addition, some authors point out that they are limited by small and/or homogenous samples, often coming from international (i.e., non-U.S.) contexts. These are valid concerns. Yet I argue that they highlight the deeply rooted nature of shallow treatments of race in family research. The issue is systemic and replicated through a reliance on scholarly precedent. The remedy, in part, is changing/adding new theoretical perspectives that center on race and racism. However, we also need to think about fundamental changes that will affect sampling, methods, and even the structure of our journals (Buggs et al., 2020; also see Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008). I develop this argument in the remainder of the chapter through the following sections. First, I describe the methodology I use to examine how race is treated in recent family research and present the findings. Second, I review some key themes within the race and racism literature that set the stage for understanding the ways race and racism enter into family dynamics. Third, I showcase several examples of how family scholars can and have incorporated the various ways in which race matters. Finally, I draw some conclusions regarding the state of the family literature with attention to how scholars can improve family research through a nuanced treatment of race.

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Methods: Review of Family Research Scope I determined how frequently race is mentioned and in what capacity using a systematic review of recent research published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. I focused on the Journal of Marriage and Family because it is a top-tier journal within the field of family research. As a result, articles published in this journal are expected to represent the leading scholarship on family dynamics. The population of my review is somewhat selective in that the articles are from a single journal, but homogeneity is an advantage here because it provides more direct insight into what family scholars deem worthy of publication in a top journal. I also restricted my analysis to articles published in 2022, which includes issues 1 through 3 given the timing of when I wrote this chapter. Some scholars have examined changes in the treatment of race over time (see e.g., Martin & Yeung, 2003). However, my focus on the most recent articles in the Journal of Marriage and Family gets me as close to current practices as possible, without using conference papers that are not peer-reviewed and thus are less than ideal for the purpose of my study. The total number of articles is 42 plus three shorter-length reports (N = 45). I elected to include the brief reports because space constraints should not make a difference to the extent to which a discipline deems something to be important for publication. I confirmed in separate analyses that the results are consistent when excluding the three reports, and I indicated those comparisons when discussing the full set of results.

Coding Publications for Use of Race I searched each article for mentions of race using a set of key terms: “race,” “ethnicity,” “racial,” “ethnic,” and “racism.” I also used specific race category names, including “Black,” and “White,” when probing to determine how race was treated in an article. The broader terms (i.e., “race”) were counted at each mention whereas the specific category names only contributed to the total frequency of race mentions as a block group. That is, a list of racial/ethnic categories (e.g., non-Hispanic White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic) counted only as one mention if a broader race term was not already counted within the same paragraph. My aim when creating this coding scheme was to be inclusive of all styles without artificially inflating the counts. Related, I emphasize that while race scholars make a clear conceptual distinction between race and ethnicity (see e.g., Omi & Winant, 1994), I am including the two ideas within the same count of race mentions because I want to reflect the range of existing practices even if there is some muddying of conceptual boundaries.

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I created a set of three categories based on these counts. The first reflects articles that include no detectable mention of race (i.e., there are mentions of race). The second covers articles with one to five mentions of race. The third category is for articles with six or more mentions of race. The thresholds selected for these categories reflect an omission of race, a minimal treatment, and an in-depth treatment. Similar to Martin and Yeung (2003), I used a second layer of coding to assess how race was incorporated into analysis, if at all, which involved reading all parts of the articles that included one of the search terms. Specifically, I identified whether race dynamics were omitted entirely; mentioned in the literature review but nowhere else; mentioned only in the context of limitations/future research; included in the analysis (and potentially mentioned elsewhere) but only as a control variable; or thoughtfully incorporated into the analysis, which typically meant race was mentioned throughout the article. I conceptualize these mutually exclusive categories as being “race-blind,” “neglectful,” “procrastinators,” “basic,” and “race focused,” respectively. I provide specific examples of these manifestations of how race is treated in recent Journal of Marriage and Family publications in my discussion of the results. A second reader provided her assessment of the articles, and we achieved 71% reliability. The large discrepancy is due to a misunderstanding regarding what it means when race is mentioned in the data section. I coded it as “basic” but she considered that to be part of the literature review since race was not discussed in the actual analysis of the data (even when it was included in the model). We came to a consensus on how to classify all articles when there was a mismatch.

Analysis My presentation of the results proceeds as follows. First, I provide the counts for how frequently race is included in the first three 2022 issues of the Journal of Marriage and Family. Second, I examine the substantive categories that represent how race is treated and provide examples of the kind of discussion authors used in each of the five substantive types. Finally, I include a supplemental analysis to assess the extent to which the broader trends are consistent across different disciplines. Family scholars come from a range of disciplinary homes, some of which may emphasize training in understanding racialized dynamics more than others. For simplicity, this supplemental analysis focuses on the dominant disciplines that appear in the issues examined (i.e., sociology and psychology) plus an “other” singular discipline and “interdisciplinary” category.

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Results Frequency of Race Mentions As exemplified in recent publications in the Journal of Marriage and Family, family research offers little engagement with race and racism. Results indicate that of the 45 publications included in my analysis 14 (33%) made no mention of the race terms for which I searched, and 56% mentioned race only one to five times (see Fig. 3.1). The third category for six or more mentions is the smallest. Just five articles (11%) mentioned race six or more times. As mentioned earlier, I confirmed that the results were unaffected by the inclusion of the shorter-length brief reports along with the full-length articles (not shown). Despite having different page allocations, the percentages for having zero mentions (33 for both reports and articles) and between one and five mentions of race (67 and 55, respectively) were remarkably consistent across the two types of publications. The primary difference between the two types of publications is that the brief reports had zero with 6 or more mentions of race. Still, the overall pattern is the same. Race and racism have not received much attention in family research, even in the most recent year of publications in a top family journal, the Journal of Marriage and Family. Another consideration is the country from which the data were collected. I assert that racialized dynamics are still highly relevant in countries other than the United States, but I acknowledge that it is more common to discuss race within the U.S. context than in European countries, for example. When I examined the frequency of race mentions for publications based on a population living outside the United States (e.g., Australia, Canada, China, England, Germany, and Sweden) I found that international family research accounts for all of the publications that do not mention race. A total of 21 publications focus on populations outside of the United States. Fourteen publications have zero race mentions. The rest of the international publications fall into the middle category with none mentioning a race term six or more times (see Fig. 3.2). On the flip side, the 24 publications focusing on the United Fig. 3.1  Race in recent family publications, 2022

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Fig. 3.2  Race in recent family publications by location of analytical sample, 2022

States are still heavily limited in their attention to race with 19 having one to five mentions and five with six or more. This is a breakdown of 79 and 21%, respectively. I incorporate this important nuance regarding the international context in my discussion of the next steps in the field. However, I maintain the full sample regardless of the focal country in the remainder of the analysis because all of the publications are reflective of the field of family research.

How Race Was Mentioned Mention of race in a Journal of Marriage and Family publication was no guarantee that race was included in the analysis let alone elevated above the status of an undiscussed control variable. The “race blind” category representing the omission of race from all sections of a publication overlaps entirely with the “no mentions” category from the frequency analysis, and the count of publications is, therefore, the same (see Fig. 3.3). However, the middle category covering 1–5 race mentions in a publication includes “neglectful” publications that mention race in the literature review but nowhere else, “procrastinators” that mention race only when acknowledging limitations of the analysis and/or suggesting future research, and “basic” analyses that include race only as a control variable that receives little to no attention. Three “neglectful” publications could have done more with race in their analysis based on what was covered in the literature review but did not. There are five

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Fig. 3.3  Categories representing how race is mentioned in recent family publications, 2022

“procrastinators” who recognized the limitations of their work but put off a more complete analysis for future research. The combined percentage of publications in these two categories is small – only 18% of the total sample – but I find it meaningful that these types of publications are present in any quantity. More frequently, a publication would offer a “basic” analysis with race serving exclusively as a control. There are 17 publications in this category, representing 38% of the sample. The last category overlaps entirely with the corresponding frequency category. This was not a given, but it seems plausible that at least 6 race mentions are required to support a thoughtful analysis of race (i.e., “race-focused”). Unfortunately, this means that only 5 (11%) of the publications included a thoughtful discussion of how race and/ or racism are/is connected to the aspect of family in their study. A representative example of the studies that I categorize as “race-blind” examines economic hardship and conflict within families with children, and the data represent families in England (Chzhen et al., 2022). The authors spend several paragraphs describing the economic hardship measures. However, information on the control variables in the model is difficult to find, and there is no mention of race or ethnicity in the main text. The clearest information I could find is in the first sentence of the results section, which states, “[t]he model posited in Figure  1, with demographic controls…” (p. 131). Control variables are included, and race/ethnicity may be among them, but it is not explicitly stated. More importantly, it seems likely that the topics of economic hardship, family stress, and conflict are strongly related to race and racism. I do not want to point fingers at individual authors by using this or other examples. However, I think it is instructive to see how easily a thoughtful discussion or even any mention of race can slip through the cracks. I saw this kind of missed opportunity repeatedly in my review of the articles.

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The “neglectful” category is nearly identical to the publications categorized as “race-blind”. The only difference is that race and/or racism are/is mentioned only in the literature review, which would seem to suggest that they are relevant to the study but are ultimately left out of the remainder of the article. I use Kapelle (2022) as an example here, because I think there is a missed opportunity when it comes to considering racialized dynamics. The study is of how divorce impacts wealth trajectories and the analysis is based on data from Germany. The type of model employed already essentially controls for stable factors, which may explain why race is not mentioned as a control (however, for research on instability in how someone identifies racially, see e.g., Liebler & Hou, 2020; Saperstein & Penner, 2012). Yet there is still a missed opportunity to at least suggest greater attention to race in future research. For instance, the author assesses whether the level and trajectory of changes in wealth after divorce differ for women and men. The same could be done by race and/or immigrant status, and racialized differences in the protectiveness of policy related to marriage and divorce could be used to motivate such an analysis. Perhaps more importantly, it is possible that the gender differences in wealth changes also differ by race/ethnicity. Assessing this possibility could be critical to evaluating the initial hypothesis regarding gender even though race was not intended to be a focal point. The publications in the “procrastinator” category are characterized by analyses that could not incorporate race directly into their models, often because the sample was limited. This happened even in studies focused on populations in the United States. The recognition of this limitation was sometimes brief but other times thoughtful. Van Dijk et al. (2022) went so far as to offer an assessment of the field by stating, “[m]any family studies suffer from this limitation…including most of the studies cited in this article, warranting the need to conduct similar research with a more diverse sample with regard to SES and racial and ethnic background” (p. 409). As I elaborate in the coming sections, there are ways to allow understandings of race and racism to inform scholarship without a “race variable” per se, but remembering the often distinct position of Whites is a good place to start. When samples permitted, the most frequent way race and racism appeared in the publications reviewed is through the inclusion of a binary or categorical variable in a quantitative model or as an identifying characteristic in qualitative research. Unfortunately, the inclusion of a “race variable” does not necessarily mean there will be a discussion of how race is involved (or not) in the process examined. A typical case is Cha and Crosnoe (2022). The authors examine the relationship between a mother’s midlife health and having an adult child with a serious health condition. Race is mentioned in the text when describing the variables and is included in the descriptive table, but there is no other discussion of race. In some ways, it is as if race is forgotten when it is included as a standard demographic control. As described by Martin and Yeung (2003), “Race is just one of many ‘variables’ that affects whatever is of interest, and data can be ‘deracialized’ without substantially changing the character of whatever is of interest” (p. 538). That is certainly one way to approach family research, but I think it would be more productive if there were a wider variety of approaches to thinking about race. In particular, I would like to see more

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conceptual attention to racism. None of the publications reviewed to this point mentioned the word “racism”. Three notable publications did include a discussion of racism, all of which were part of the “race-focused” category. One of the studies explicitly focused on race (Rendall et al., 2022). Rendall et al. (2022) examined racialized inequality in poverty rates for U.S. households with a newborn with emphasis on the explanatory role of family and household structure (e.g., the presence of nonkin adults). In the discussion, the authors state, “The strongly disadvantaged life chances of Black newborns relative to White newborns therefore need to be understood from the structural racism effects not only on Black mothers, but also on the lives of Black fathers and grandparents and other relatives or nonrelatives who would otherwise be more able to provide material support to the mother and her newborn” (p. 344). Not only do the authors name racism, they conceptualize it as a multifaceted system that is directly and indirectly connected to the available resources in a household. The other two articles do not ask questions with a specific race focus, yet they still thoughtfully engage with how race and racism are involved. In their study of sibling relationships among adults who identify as LGBTQ, Reczek et al. (2022) note, Siblings of color are likely to have unique sibling dynamics in ways our current sample does not reveal. For instance, siblings may offer vital support and advocacy to LGBTQ individuals of color who fear a lack of parental or community support; alternatively, experiences of anti-Black racism at the institutional and interpersonal levels, may increase cultural expectations to maintain sibling ties regardless of how tangential or harmful they are. (p. 433)

Finally, and perhaps most inspiring to scholars wondering what they could do in their own work, Bridgewater and Yates (2022) provide a two-paragraph section entitled “The Sociocultural Context of PI [Parental Incarceration]” to describe how incarceration – their focal independent variable – relates to race and racism. This approach provides important interpretive context to the reader at little cost to the author(s). Family research has its bright spots, but the overwhelming majority of publications are surprisingly limited in their engagement with race and racism.

How Do These Results Compare? To put these results into context, I make a brief comparison to Martin and Yeung’s (2003) research on changes in the analysis of race within a top Sociology journal, American Sociological Review. Martin and Yeung cover research published from 1933 to 1999 and find an increase in the inclusion of race, but the analytical attention is shallow and generally limited to including race as a control variable. They find the same pattern in a supplemental analysis of family research published in the American Sociological Review. To make this more concrete, consider the subfield of the family. While only 0–33% of papers in this field analyzed race in the first three periods, 80% did so in the last two periods. This increase has to do largely with the integration of data sets—as more data sets

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If you combine the second and third categories in my frequency analysis, then the total is just 66% of the publications mentioning race. However, as indicated by the second layer of my analysis, the mention of a race term does not mean some aspect of race was considered in the analysis. Focusing on the percentage from my analysis of how race is treated that is comparable to what Martin and Yeung (2003) reported, the percentage is even lower (51%). This comparison (i.e., the 80% figure found by Martin & Yeung (2003) in the most recent period vs. the 51% figure from my analysis) suggests a 29 percentage-­ point decline in the inclusion of race in family analyses in 2022 relative to 1999. One explanation is that datasets have become more racially homogenous again. I read some versions of “sample limitations preclude an analysis of race” more than I expected when reviewing these articles. Related, there could be an increased number of publications examining populations outside of the United States. As previously noted, I counted 21 publications based on countries other than the United States. However, I do not have a comparable figure from Martin and Yeung (2003) on publications using international data within the family subfield to assess whether that is part of the remarkable difference in whether race is included in the analysis. Finally, there may be differences due to the focal journal in each of the analyses – the American Sociological Review is a top sociology journal and the Journal of Marriage and Family is a top family journal. Family research in the American Sociological Review is more frequently published by sociologists than the mix of scholars in a demography-oriented journal like the Journal of Marriage and Family. I provide a sensitivity analysis focusing on the use of race in the Journal of Marriage and Family publications by discipline to provide some evidence on whether the disciplinary mix is a possible explanation for the substantial decline in attention to race in family analyses.

Disciplinary Differences The dominant pattern displayed in Fig. 3.1 for all publications is reflected across the articles associated with Sociology, Psychology, and other single-discipline authorship configurations (see Fig. 3.4). The set of articles associated with an interdisciplinary group of authors is the only one that stands out as having a distinct pattern. This is due to the equal number of publications with “no mention” and “one to five mentions.” There are six of each out of 13 interdisciplinary authorship publications. The breakdown for interdisciplinary publications is roughly a 50–50 split as compared to the 25–63 split for publications authored exclusively by people in sociology departments. Moreover, if the interdisciplinary publications are excluded from

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Fig. 3.4  Race in recent family publications by author discipline, 2022

the sample, then the percentage of publications that included race analytically increases from 51 to 69%. The mix of authorship disciplines – particularly the presence of interdisciplinary publications –could explain some of the decline in the analytic inclusion of race in family research. Yet 69% is still short of the percentage found for the period ending in 1999 in Martin and Yeung’s (2003) analysis of publications in the American Sociological Review. I hope to motivate future research – from all disciplines – to consider race more frequently and in more nuanced ways through a foundational discussion of why race matters and examples of different ways of thinking about race in family research.

Perspectives on Race Race is more than simply a demographic control. It is a socially constructed category that gains meaning through the processes to which it is related. Acknowledging the socially constructed nature of race has been common practice, but social scientists infrequently make adjustments in their research questions and methodologies to reflect this theoretical complexity (also see Martin & Yeung, 2003). A special issue of American Behavioral Scientist was dedicated to this very topic – how can we empirically incorporate what race scholars have demonstrated theoretically? The guest editors offer an excellent review of the research as well as some valuable resources to facilitate future research (Campbell et al., 2016). Here I offer an introductory discussion of what race scholars have shown about the meaning(s) of race and the implications for family scholars.

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I start by clarifying what we understand race to be. To do so, I draw on Bashi’s (1998) work on racial categories and the common comparison between race and ethnicity. First, to understand race one must consider the hierarchical, stratified system in which processes related to that racial category are unfolding. There is no inherent meaning attached to different racial categories. The categories of race will differ depending on the time and place in which they are being examined. Second, and equally important, ethnicity is distinct from race in that ethnicity is not tied to a power hierarchy. “[R]ace in the United States – as distinct from ethnicity – is not simply a matter of what one calls oneself” (Bashi, 1998, p. 964). Race is both “social structure and cultural representation” (p.  964), whereas ethnicity is presumably exclusively cultural representation. The “social structure” element of race refers to the fact that – despite not being a biological reality – race has become a social fact (Bonilla-Silva, 1999) that is taken for granted because it is so deeply embedded in our social structures. A clearer understanding of what race is (i.e., a socially constructed category grounded in hierarchical power structures; see especially Omi & Winant, 1994) provides stronger footing for explaining persistent differences along racialized lines. We all know biology is not a valid explanation for racial inequality. But there is also no one explanation for why race remains important (to a greater and lesser extent depending on the geographic and temporal context). There are different ways to think about race. At a fundamental level, we need to consider the distinction between identity and identification. Identity refers to how people see themselves; the racialized group to which someone feels most connected. Identification is the way that other people see a person’s race, particularly people who do not know that person well. Identification may also be referred to as classification. A person’s racial classification is indicative of how (most) people see them, whereas identity is how that person views their race. Sometimes a person’s identity is affected by how others identify them (for recent research focusing on how discrimination specifically relates to racial/ethnic identity see Wang & Yip, 2020). Identity and identification also correspond for most people, with a low of 75% of Native Americans expressing the same identity that others impose on them and a high of 98% for Black Americans (see Saperstein et al., 2016). Yet the concepts of how we self-identify and how others identify us represent separate pathways through which differences along racialized lines can emerge (also see Roth, 2018). Saperstein et al. (2016) demonstrate this point in a unique study that describes a person’s race using a combination of identity and identification, which allows examination of which dimension matters more when the two diverge. A more refined understanding of why race is important can lead to research that is theoretically richer and more specific when identifying the mechanisms involved. I describe some examples of when you might use one perspective on race versus the other. Identity would seem to be more relevant than identification when considering parenting styles, socialization, partnering patterns, and other micro-level processes. The consideration of racial/ethnic identity is well represented in family research, particularly in research employing an intersectionality perspective that recognizes the distinct positions of people based on how their multiple identities/

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identifications – spanning race/ethnicity, gender, class, etc. – overlap (see especially Crenshaw, 1989; hooks, 2000). Yet neither the specific understanding of the internal identity dimension of race nor the intersectionality framework that was developed by critical Black feminists are routinely mentioned in family research that takes this approach. Adding this nuance will enhance family research by clarifying the possible mechanisms involved (i.e., internal identity processes). As noted previously, there is an interplay between identity and identification which may make some aspects of how others perceive a person – particularly experiences of racism – relevant for micro-level processes (e.g., racial/ethnic socialization of children). The two dimensions of race are not independent. Careful attention to their differing and sometimes simultaneous roles is needed. For example, research in which race is measured using the intersection of identity and identification within the family context could empirically assess the extent to which each of these dimensions of race matter for different aspects of socialization within the family (see Saperstein et al., 2016). Other differences among families – particularly those tied to inequality – should be considered within the realm of identification. If you think about why race matters in everyday interactions that determine who gets what, then you will realize that it is the reactions of people to their perceptions of someone’s race (see especially Saperstein et  al., 2016). It is not race itself (i.e., biology) or even how someone identifies themself. Ideally, this would be captured by a variable reflecting that understanding (e.g., a measure of how someone else classifies a person’s race), but it is most common to use self-reported race, even when this is the stated theoretical perspective. While this critique is not exclusive to family studies (for reviews see Sen & Wasow, 2016; Roth 2016), I argue that family scholars are in a uniquely strong position to address this limitation given the number of studies that are based on original surveys. Racism is indirectly involved when considering the identification dimension of race, but we need to make an effort to name it specifically (for a related yet broader critique regarding approaches to studying racialized differences see Williams, 2019). Aside from the individual experiences of racism mentioned earlier in connection to socialization, race scholars emphasize the importance of structural racism in shaping differences that manifest along racialized lines. There are several ways of conceptualizing structural racism (e.g., Bonilla-Silva, 1996; Mueller, 2020), but the core tenets remain the same. Racism is built into how societies are set up making it relevant to nearly every topic you could study even when it is not immediately obvious. For example, scholars need to consider the extent to which policies  – such as family tax credits  – differentially benefit Whites as compared to populations of color (see especially Gundersen & Ziliak, 2004). Critically, I note that this recognition of the impact of structural racism is needed even when the sample in the study is mostly or all White. I elaborate on this point in the following section when discussing critical whiteness studies (see e.g., Frankenburg, 1993; Hughey, 2020; McIntosh, 1989). However, the broader point to emphasize here is that research on structural racism suggests the need for more attention to meso- and

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macro-levels of how race and racism intersect with family dynamics. Race is not just about individuals. With this set of core themes in mind – i.e., the distinction between identity and identification to better clarify why race is important; intersectionality; the presence of race and racism even in an all-White sample; and structural racism – I now turn to a discussion of positive examples within the family literature. The examples show how these and related aspects of race and racism can advance research on family processes and provide a guide for those who are unsure of where to start. I center the discussion on one main article in each subsection but I refer to related research where relevant.

Guiding Examples of Race and Racism in Family Research Incorporating Nuances of Race Scholars publishing in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2022 routinely called for – but did not execute – research employing “more diverse samples”. This would provide insight into the generalizability of the findings from their own studies based on largely White samples, they argued. This kind of approach  – where scholars examine how relationships play out differently for different racialized groups – is a helpful one, and one that has yielded more nuanced understandings of family dynamics and why race differences exist in the first place. Cross (2020) exemplifies this approach in her research on racialized differences in the relationship between family structure and educational outcomes among children. Specifically, the research assesses why residing in a single-parent household is significantly more damaging to White children’s educational achievement than it is for Black children. As emphasized in the discussion: Overall, the findings on racial differences suggest that the examination of the impact of family structure on children’s education, and well-being broadly speaking, is best approached from a pluralistic perspective, one that does not privilege one family type over another, because family structure does not always have the same social consequences for all groups. (p. 708)

The same can be said of other family dynamics (see especially Reczek et al., 2022; however, for a caution regarding the potential to reinforce the notion that racialized groups are inherently different from one another, see Martin & Yeung, 2003). Attention to the mechanisms that explain why the relationship differs for Blacks compared to Whites is additionally valuable because this approach offers insight into what explains Black-White inequality more broadly and why family structure, specifically, relates to differential outcomes (Cross, 2020). If racial/ethnic differences in socioeconomic resources mediate the relationship between family structure and education, then what deserves policy attention is not minority families’ deviation from the two-biological-parent family model but, rather, the social structures that produce and maintain racialized socioeconomic inequities. (p. 692)

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Williams and Baker (2021) draw similar conclusions when examining racialized differences in poverty penalties and find that the increased risk of poverty for Black families as compared to White families persists even within households of the same family type. “We conclude that family structure is not only an oversimplified explanation but also contributes to obscuring structural and systemic sources of racial inequality in poverty associated with single-mother households” (p.  966). Their argument emphasizes the need to consider the context of racialized systems of domination and oppression when developing an understanding of the meaning of family structure and why it matters for the question at hand (also see Baker & O’Connell, 2022; Vasquez-Tokos & Yamin, 2021). Family structure does not act on its own.

White Is a Race, Too Recognizing that the White experience will not necessarily be shared by different groups of color is a good start. However, the other piece to make more explicit when wondering what to do with your all or mostly White sample is that race and racism could still matter. Critical Whiteness studies have drawn our attention to the invisibility or taken-for-granted nature of Whiteness (see especially McIntosh, 1989). The tendency to view Whites as normal  – particularly, but not exclusively, by Whites  – happens under a range of circumstances, including when conducting research. I read several publications in my review that contained phrases similar to the following, “I/we could not account for race because the sample was racially homogenous.” However, the question of how race matters is inclusive of Whites (i.e., “race” does not equate to “racial minority”). Race could still be relevant to the discussion when the sample is White, but it requires a different way of thinking about race, including more of an emphasis on who benefits from racism rather than who is disadvantaged (also see Howell, 2019). The value of flipping the question of race on its head is exemplified by research on ethnic/racial socialization within families. This literature has traditionally focused on families of color to examine how it is that parents teach their children about what it means to be (seen as) Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American (see e.g., Hughes & Watford, 2022; Xie et al., 2021). However, the recent inclusion of monoracial White families in research on ethnic/racial socialization recognizes that White is part of the racial hierarchy. Moreover, understanding these dynamics is one way of developing interventions to reduce individual racism (Simon, 2021). Focusing specifically on the development of anti-racist attitudes, Smalls Glover et al. (2022) offer a thoughtful analysis of the relationship between White parents’ racial attitudes and their children’s attitudes as young adults. The study includes an examination of the interaction between authoritative parenting style and parents’ racial attitudes. Racial attitudes were similarly moderate for emerging adults who were raised in authoritative households, meaning that authoritative parenting “protected” children even when parents held racist beliefs about racialized minorities. It is only in the absence of authoritative parenting that a parent’s attitudes relate to the

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child’s attitudes. This result reflects a “protective-stabilizing” pattern and contributes to the broader literature focusing on authoritative parenting in addition to advancing understanding of dynamics related to race and racism (Smalls Glover et al., 2022). Studies focusing on mono-racial White families will be a critical component of future research on how race and family intersect. However, scholars will need to be thoughtful in how they think about Whiteness. I encourage family scholars to question more deeply what it means to be White and how the position of Whites within the racial hierarchy relates to the topic at hand. Race is involved even when the sample is not diverse.

Discussing (Structural) Racism I challenge family scholars to think about racism and family as fundamentally linked. Family is often viewed as private or as a personal affair. Yet family formation, particularly when it involves procreation, is essential to the maintenance of a nation, making family a central stage on which state-sanctioned projects (e.g., immigration laws, legal reform) play out. The family is anything but private for people who are racialized as non-White (Vasquez-Tokos & Yamin, 2021). The U.S. nation-state has continuously privileged White families and circumscribed the actions of families of color as a means to upholding White dominance. Three cases support the argument that the state has engaged in racial projects that institutionalize racism and support a particular racialized image of the United States: forced boarding school attendance for Native American children, the eugenics movement, and deportation of largely Latinx immigrants. The connection between these projects and family suggests that the study of family and its transformation over time cannot be divorced from racism. We see this connection between racism and family again when considering the concentrations of different family structures across racialized groups. One of the most commonly referenced trends is that single-mother families are more highly concentrated among Black families than among White families (e.g., Dollar, 2017). It is tempting to see this as resulting from individual-level or cultural factors. However, research suggests the mosaic of family structures and childbearing outcomes that we observe can be understood only after acknowledging the impact racism has on people and communities of color. For example, Deadric Williams and his colleagues have contributed to our understanding of the factors that contribute to romantic relationships and family formation through their research on stress (Williams, 2018; Williams & Parra, 2019; Williams et al., 2015). Racism – at the individual and institutional levels – is a unique form of stress that affects only people of color. The result is a disproportionate strain on families of color that can result in fewer marriages and more divorces. Racism is at the root of the different family formation patterns observed by demographers and helps explain the concentration of different family structures across racialized groups. When we take family

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structure for granted as something that exists on its own without recognizing the role of racism, we run the risk of oversimplifying explanations for its relationship with other outcomes (e.g., poverty; see especially Williams & Baker, 2021). Research suggests that families of the same structure, but different racial composition, have different experiences. This is evidenced by different levels of poverty and child education outcomes (Baker & O’Connell, 2022; Cross, 2020; Williams & Baker, 2021). A nuanced understanding of family structure informed by the connection between family and racism can elucidate why outcomes differ, but we still know very little about what those different experiences look like. Scholars tend to give disproportionate attention to single-mother families – which provides valuable insight into how Black and White families differentially experience welfare programs, for example (Johnson, 2010). However, differences among married-couple families may be more salient than differences among single-mother households, at least when considering the structural racism associated with the legacy of slavery (Baker & O’Connell, 2022). This suggests broadening the scope of research on family structure and racism to include more attention to the experiences of intact married couple households and the advantages that disproportionately benefit White families. Expanding attention to race and racism in family research has the potential to enrich existing lines of research while simultaneously opening up new avenues of inquiry.

 aking Race and Racism Central in Family Research: A Call M to Action Race is a key dimension of society yet is frequently omitted from family research. Its inclusion is critical to understanding family dynamics because one cannot disentangle race and the creation/experience of family. There are different ways in which race and racism relate to family dynamics, so I offer a range of approaches to advance family research. First, careful consideration of what aspect of race matters, its subsequent measurement, and intersectional approaches may be most relevant to micro-processes occurring within the family. Second, a nuanced perspective on race can also include insight from Critical Whiteness studies, which remind us that White is a race, too. A homogeneous sample means you need to think about race differently; not that race does not matter. Finally, family is integrally related to structural racism. Attention to how structural racism is involved  – even if indirectly – will advance family research focused on policy, inequalities, and the development of families. Of course, not every future family study will include race and racism. However, the results of my review of recent publications in the Journal of Marriage and Family suggest that we need a better mix. Family scholars cannot keep putting the “race discussion” off on future research; nor can they blame homogeneous White samples. Family scholars need to actively engage with different questions and methods to produce higher quality research on family that is informed by what we know

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about how race and family intersect. I also argue that family scholars can play an important role in race scholarship. Families are a central institution of socialization and as such are a critical component when studying understandings of race and identity (see e.g., Bratter & Heard, 2009; Brown et al., 2007; Smalls Glover et al., 2022; Young et  al., 2021; for reviews see Simon, 2021; Woods & Kurtz-Costes, 2007). Rather than seeing race as a tangential element of society that family scholars need to consider in their work, I see family scholars as pivotal to understanding race and racism (also see Vasquez-Toko & Yamin, 2021). I close with three broad suggestions to address structural shortcomings within academia that will facilitate enhanced engagement with race and racism in future family research. First, at the most fundamental level, I suggest reorganizing the training we provide in our population centers and in the home departments that feed into those centers (e.g., Sociology, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, Public Health). There is a tendency to see race as a specialty area when it should be central to our training. This kind of shift requires focused hiring efforts and incorporating required courses on race and racism in addition to other curriculum changes (see especially Fillingim & Rucks-Ahidiana, 2021; Gregory, 2021). Second, we can encourage more family scholars to pursue research on race and racism if we create more family sessions at conferences focusing on race. The call for papers often serves as inspiration for people looking to participate, so more sessions combining the topics of family and race/racism could lead to more thoughtful research on this critical intersection. Moreover, family scholars who attend the sessions could be motivated to conduct their own thoughtful research after hearing the presentations. Conferences provide their own form of training, but the call for papers also reflects what is valued by the members of the organization. I see this step as beneficial for inspiring both new and seasoned family scholars. Finally, if we want publications to reflect stronger analyses with regard to aspects of race and racism, we need formalized guidelines for reviewers and editors that emphasize meaningful attention to race. Formal guidelines will differ across journals and may change with the editorship. Yet we can circulate informal guidelines to students and faculty in our departments and population centers. And we can support editors who are attuned to the benefits of incorporating race and racism in social science research. Others have called for an overhaul of the peer review system as well as other fundamental changes to publishing practices in pursuit of better science (Buggs et al., 2020). “White logics” largely go unquestioned even in rigorous peer review processes because the process was developed within the institutional racism of academia. “Standard processes are often the way for structurally empowered individuals and groups to justify the exclusion and/or mistreatment of those at the racial periphery” (Buggs et al., p. 1390). If the standard processes are failing us in the pursuit of a better understanding of social outcomes  – as some would argue is true – then we have to start doing things differently. Reviewer guidelines are just one place to start. Conversations about race and racism and calls for big changes are draining and can be easily dismissed by those who have done well in an existing system. Resist the temptation to say, “It is too much.” Start small before working up to the “big

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ticket” changes. And remember that you are not being singled out. I have focused on family scholars in this discussion, but I could have written a very similar set of critiques and suggestions for most other subareas and disciplines in the social sciences. Change has to start somewhere, and I think family scholars are in a strong position to lead the way to more consistently and deeply engage with the fundamental issues of race and racism.

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Part II

Racial/Ethnic Socialization in Families of Color

Chapter 4

Research and Scholarship on Racial Socialization: Getting Here Diane L. Hughes

Over the past four decades, developmental and family scientists have built a rich and robust research literature on the subject of parents’ racial socialization. We have focused on how parents of color prepare youth to understand, cope with, and challenge the realities of race in America, including structural racism, white supremacy, discrimination, microaggressions, negative media images, and the like. Although children learn about race regardless of input from others (Bigler & Liben, 2006; Degner & Dalege, 2013; Hughes & Watford, 2022), parents can play a critical role in shaping how youth interpret, integrate, and act upon race: They can and often do serve as filters, as mediators, as protectors, and as lenses through which children experience and perceive all they are learning about race in all of the places they are learning it. Therein, parents position their children to navigate the racial terrain they will encounter in school, with peers, at work, in the community, and in the larger social structure. Given that race is an ever-present context in which parents are raising their children, researchers studying racial socialization have sought to understand the nature, antecedents, and consequences of different strategies parents use to navigate this context. Researchers’ study of racial socialization is largely rooted, of course, in the intractability of racism and oppression in American life. In the words of developmental psychologist Vonnie McLoyd 15 years ago: Ours is a nation that has been transfixed and transformed by race and racial oppression since its inception, where the visible marker of “race” is a major determinant of social location and economic opportunity and where racial segregation is evident in virtually all contexts. It is no exaggeration to say that race is the primary American dilemma. (McLoyd, 2006, p. 124)

D. L. Hughes (*) New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. P. Witherspoon et al. (eds.), Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States, National Symposium on Family Issues 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44115-8_4

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Events of 2020—including the murder of George Floyd, income and health disparities exacerbated by COVID-19, and more—remind us that this reality has changed little since 2006. Throughout their development, today’s youth are exposed to racial disparities in poverty, wealth, neighborhood quality, mortality and disease, grades, test scores, school suspensions, high school drop-out rates, incarceration rates, police violence, etc. (NCHS, 2020). They experience racial segregation in most of the spaces they enter–churches (Dougherty et  al., 2020), family social networks (DiPrete et  al., 2011; Cox et  al., 2016), neighborhoods (Massey, 2016), schools (Wang et  al., 2022), and classrooms and lunch tables (Tatum, 1987). Youth also experience and witness discrimination and violence against people of color in their families, in their neighborhoods, and in the media. These dynamics of American life are harmful to everyone but are especially harmful to youth of color. Continued research on racial socialization is critically important for providing parents with information on how to put in place protections to ensure their children’s safety, success, and thriving despite these dynamics. Research is also important for identifying strategies we can use to position youths’ pursuit of anti-racism and a socially just world. For this chapter, the editors asked me to reflect on the emergence of the research literature on racial socialization, including its early foundations and lessons learned, and then consider future directions. Because I have been working in the racial socialization literature for four decades, this would seem an easy charge. However, unearthing the most interesting and most telling aspects of the literature’s emergence proved to be quite challenging. Although those of us who have been writing about racial socialization from early on are well aware that the literature has grown exponentially, articulating its path is not straightforward. I found myself deep in the weeds trying to piece together the story of how and in which contexts the racial socialization literature emerged as it did—returning to the thick gray binders that held early papers I read, scanning library databases for current work, tracking how papers were framed, when and where they were published, who cited them, and so-on. This effort was not only revealing but it was unexpectedly emotional since the literature’s emergence and my journey as a scholar are so closely tied. Turns out, the story of the racial socialization literature—at least my version of it—is not a “feel-good” story. It is a story that embodies the dual processes of racism and resistance, of battle and triumph, of the individual and the structural, just like stories that have already been told about science in general (Graham, 1992; McLoyd, 2006; McLoyd & Randolph, 1984; Slaughter-Defoe et  al., 2006). As a seasoned senior scholar looking back, the larger forces that shape the contours of the literature’s emergence are readily apparent. As a junior scholar at the time, however, I did not have this lens for interpreting my day-to-day experiences. Thus, although many scholars have written about racism and white supremacy in the psychology literature, it felt important for me (personally) to sit with the extent to which this is true of the racial socialization literature as well. Now is an opportune time to tell this story. Journalists and others argue that America is undergoing a period of profound racial reckoning. Individuals, organizations, and institutions, including universities, are grappling with their and their

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founders’ role in America’s racial history—removing confederate symbols, names of slaveholders, and statues of white supremacists from buildings and endowed funds. Schools and universities are entertaining new criteria for diversity, equity, and inclusion in course curricula. As Americans seem ready for an honest look at where we have been, ready to engage in critical dialogue about the many ways that racism is manifest in America’s structures, systems, and everyday practices, so too must those of us interested in understanding racial socialization understand the origins of this work. Only then can we move forward towards a distinctly different, inclusive, and anti-racist agenda in society and our science. The chapter is organized as follows. After a brief delimitation of terminology, I review how scholars have defined racial socialization for readers who may be unfamiliar with the term. Then, I describe how the empirical research literature on racial socialization has developed from its inception in the early 1980s to now. In elucidating racism and resistance, battle and triumph, as foundational to the literature’s emergence, I interweave reflections on my personal story with reflections on the broader context of social science research on families of color and their children. Then, I consider the lessons we have learned from four decades of research on racial socialization. Specifically, I address three questions that I view as central to the literature’s usefulness: (1) What have we learned about how to promote positive ethnic identities among youth, (2) What have we learned about how to support youth in the face of racism at all levels (structural, institutional, interpersonal), and (3) What have we learned about how to position youth to towards agency and commitment in working towards more equal, just, and anti-racist settings. Finally, I highlight directions for future work.

 ace, Racial Socialization, and Structural Racism: A Note R on Terminology Before proceeding, it is useful to clarify “race,” “racial socialization,” and “structural racism” because I use these terms throughout. In using the term race, I recognize that it only minimally identifies biologically or genetically distinct groups. However, historical and contemporary economic, political, and legal forces uphold the idea of race and have reified it as a meaningful social construct (Bonilla-Silva, 2021). Second, I use the term racial socialization rather than the more contemporary term “ethnic-racial socialization” (see Hughes et al., 2006a, b for a discussion) to pay tribute both to the origins of the current literature on ethnic-racial socialization in the experiences of Black families rearing children in a racially oppressive context and to the early work of Black scholars. Third, in using the term structural racism, I rely on sociologist Tricia Rose’s definition of it as “the normalization and legitimization of an array of dynamics—historical, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal—that routinely advantage whites while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color” (CSREA, 2017). As the definition suggests,

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the dynamics of structural racism are not perpetrated by a “few bad apples”; they are built into everyday practice and the air we breathe in ways that often remain invisible to us. Finally, although the current American Psychological Association guidelines call for capitalization of all racial groups, in solidarity with antiracism scholarship and efforts to dismantle white supremacy, I do not capitalize “white” or its derivatives unless it appears as the first word of a sentence or citation (Rogers et al., 2021).

Defining the Concept: What Is Racial Socialization? Although there are endless potential agents of socialization that communicate ideas, information, and knowledge to children about race, the research literature on racial socialization has focused almost exclusively on parents (see Ruck et  al., 2021). Arguably, parents are children’s first, most proximal, and most important teachers. Thus, the definitions I discuss here are those that pertain to parents’ racial socialization. Racial socialization encompasses the entire complex of explicit, implicit, verbal, non-verbal, deliberate, unintended, conscious, and nonconscious behaviors, practices, and beliefs through which parents communicate messages about race to their children. Consequently, the formal definition I prefer is simple and broad: “Parental practices that communicate information and worldviews about race to children” (Hughes & Chen, 1999). This simple and broad definition encompasses messages that parents intentionally convey (e.g., everyone is equal; be proud of your race), messages that parents unintentionally transmit (under-the-breath comments, snide remarks), messages that are implicit in parents’ behaviors (e.g., purse-clutching, having same-race networks), messages that parents communicate as they manage who children are allowed to associate with or told to stay away from, and messages conveyed by the settings parents choose for their children (e.g., Chinese School, Black church). This broad and simple definition also elevates the idea that all parents communicate worldviews, information, values, and ideals regarding race to children, including parents who rarely name race or racial groups. Whereas my broad definition elucidates the big and small ways that parents socialize race, other definitions feature the intentional and protective practices that parents of color engage in to enable their children to navigate a racially oppressive macro system. For instance, Marie Peters defined racial socialization as “the responsibility of raising physically and emotionally healthy children who are Black in a society in which being Black has negative connotations’‘(Peters, 1985, p. 161). In Thornton and colleagues’ definition, racial socialization includes “specific messages and practices that are relevant to and provide information concerning the nature of race status as it relates to (1) personal and group identity, (2) intergroup and inter-individual relationships and (3) position in the social hierarchy (Thornton et al., 1990, p. 401). Fisher and Shaw defined racial socialization as “the process of communicating behaviors and messages to children to enhance their sense of ­racial/

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ethnic identity, partially in preparation for racially hostile encounters” (Fisher & Shaw, 1999, p. 396). Each of these definitions, the broad and the specific, underscores the complexity and nuances of racial socialization as a process that occurs in families. Unlike my own definition, earlier definitions highlight deliberate strategies Black parents use to help their children navigate racism and white supremacy in all forms. However, both types of definitions have yielded strikingly similar approaches to the study of racial socialization in terms of the concepts measured and how they are operationalized, a topic I return to later.

 he Emergence of Social Science Research T on Racial Socialization Currently, the research literature on racial socialization in the developmental and family sciences is rich and robust. In Deborah Johnson’s words, “The field of racial-­ ethnic socialization has now reached its adulthood” (Johnson, 2022, p. 6). In addition to scores of empirical studies, this literature includes multiple theoretical frameworks (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019; Boykin & Toms, 1985; Knight et al., 2017; Stevenson, 1994b), systematic literature reviews (Ayón et al., 2020; Hughes et al., 2006b; LeSane-Brown, 2006; McLoyd et al., 2000; Priest et al., 2014; Umaña-­ Taylor &. Hill, 2020), and meta-analyses (Huguley et al., 2019; Lee & Ahn, 2013; Wang et al., 2020a, b). This literature covers multiple ethnic, racial, immigrant status, and religious sub-groups across the full swath of development–from early childhood through emerging adulthood (Ruck et al., 2021). Although the literature consists primarily of scholarship focused on families of color, it more recently includes the study of white families, focusing on the reproduction of white privilege and supremacy as well as on how to facilitate anti-racism among white youth (Cox et  al., 2022; Gillen-O′ Neel et  al., 2022; Karras et  al., 2021; Perry et  al., 2019; Zucker & Patterson, 2018). In other words, the existing research literature on racial socialization is both broad and deep. Of course, the literature on racial socialization has not always been this way. However, it did not emerge linearly with new studies building on those prior. As I will show, it was slow to emerge and the lion’s share of studies that currently exist have been published within the past 7 years. Further, the recent surge in studies of racial socialization is not a chance happening that signals a sudden acceptance of racial socialization as a “legitimate” topic for study. It is the culmination of years of outspoken criticism, strategic pressure, and organizing by scholars of color and their allies to give voice and legitimacy to issues facing families of color and the researchers who work with them. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 show the number of empirical papers on racial socialization that I identified in PSYCHINFO as having been published in peer-reviewed journals between 1980 and 2022. (I am confident nothing had been published before 1980.)

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Fig. 4.1  Number of peer review empirical studies on racial socialization (n = 539)

800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

Fig. 4.2  Trajectory of publication of peer review empirical studies on racial socialization (n = 539)

Fig. 4.1 is intended to highlight patterns in the number of empirical papers contributed in each 5-year period. Figure 4.2 shows the same data in linear form. It highlights more clearly shifts in the trajectory of the racial socialization literature. Notably, for the final segment of Fig. 4.2, I extrapolated 3 of the 5 years starting in 2021 based on the number of studies published in the first 18 months of that period, assuming that the number of new empirical papers would remain roughly the same. In PSYCHINFO I searched the terms “racial socialization,” “ethnic socialization,” “ethnic-racial socialization,” and “racial-ethnic socialization” (in titles, abstracts, or keywords) in 5-year increments, with limits for empirical studies, humans, and peer review. Although I do not claim to have conducted a systematic search, the pattern of growth seems clear, even if I missed a few studies or included a few that did not fit the criteria.

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Now for a bit of my personal story. I came to the study of racial socialization in the early 1980s as a graduate student interested in work-family relations. Two of the most influential courses I took focused on maternal employment (Professor Lois Hoffman) and Black child development (Professor Vonnie McLoyd). With the super-critical eye that these professors had cultivated, I noted that the work-family literature centered on the experiences of white middle-class dual-career families. I questioned how models of work-family relations would differ for Black families, in which women’s employment had been the historical norm and in which workers’ experiences included workplace discrimination. I wondered whether race-related experiences at work informed what and how Black parents taught their children about race and race relations (see Hughes & Chen, 1997). I had grown up in a family in which my father’s dinner “lectures” frequently included lessons about “knowing my history”, about having to be “twice as good” and about how to get along in a world where “whites held most of the cards.” I was aware that other families in my parents’ social network–other Philadelphia professionals who had grown up in the Jim Crow South–held these same kinds of conversations about race with their children. However, the term racial socialization was not in my lexicon, or in my readings, or in my coursework. Turns out, there is a good reason. Although the seeds of these ideas were evident in an early essay on how nineteenth-century toys and marketers transmitted racist ideologies to children (Wilkinson, 1974), no empirical studies of the construct existed in the peer-review literature before 1980, as Fig. 4.1 shows. By the time I started as an Assistant Professor in the late 1980s, a small body of literature had emerged on parents’ racial socialization; all studies focused on Black families with few exceptions (Knight et al., 1993; Ou & McAdoo, 1993). The literature was richly descriptive, outlining Black parents’ ever-present awareness of racism, their drive to navigate it successfully in their parenting, and the strategies they used to do so. There was Barbara Richardson’s dissertation, in which almost all the 62 Black mothers that she interviewed worried about racism and racial oppression of their children (Richardson, 1981). There was the NICHD-funded Toddler Infant Experiences Study (TIES), in which co-PIs Marie Peters, Grace Massey, and Jean Carew described racial socialization as the “special things” Black parents do in raising children in the context of the “mundane extreme, environmental stress” of racism and oppression (Peters & Massey, 1983). Boykin and Toms (1985) provided a framework for articulating the challenges that Black parents encountered in simultaneously navigating their own culture, the dominant white culture, and the realities of subordination, discrimination, and oppression–termed “the triple quandary.” Margaret Spencer’s (1983) work on children’s racial preferences vis-a-vis parents’ racial attitudes and Beverly Tatum’s (1987) dissertation on Black families in white communities each provided the language and concepts to think about racial socialization processes, highlighting parents’ concerns about and commitment to protecting their youth from the harm that racism causes. Content aside, which aspects of these early writings led me to my storyline? First, most of the initial writings on racial socialization were adjacent to but outside of the mainstream literature in the developmental and family sciences. With few

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exceptions (e.g., Bowman & Howard, 1985; Peters & Massey, 1983; Spencer, 1983), the writings were published in specialty journals or as books and chapters about Black families and children (Spencer et al.,1985; McAdoo, 1988; McAdoo & McAdoo, 1985). It is easy to forget how unimportant and peripheral the study of racial socialization initially felt. As others have recalled, the experiences of Black families and children were of minimal concern to developmental or family science, and scholars of color were not represented among the gatekeepers to the publication and research process (i.e., journal editors, editorial boards, organizational leadership; McLoyd, 2006; Slaughter-Defoe et al., 2006). These early writings on racial socialization also routinely contested and provided counternarratives to the mainstream literature on Black families and children that surrounded it, a literature that was pathologizing, deficit-focused, and comparative. As an example, in “The Black community as a source of positive self-concept for Black children,” Barnes (1991) argued that parents’ and community members’ active efforts to protect children from toxic racial forces (i.e., racial socialization) were the primary family mechanism that enabled Black children to succeed and thrive despite discrimination and oppression. In this way, Black scholars’ quest to push back against pathologizing representations of Black families and children was the soil in which the concept of racial socialization germinated. The racial socialization literature itself, just like the construct, is born of racism and resistance. Over the next 15 years, there was a clear upward trajectory in the rate of publication of studies on racial socialization, as Fig. 4.2 shows. At the time, my colleagues and I experienced this increase as exciting and rapid. Ironically, now that we have witnessed how large a literature is possible, the number of studies published in that 15-year period seems small and incremental. Indeed, by 2005, only a small proportion (10%) of the currently existing empirical papers on racial socialization had been published, as Fig. 4.1 shows. Moreover, almost all these papers focused on Black families, especially those that emphasized the contexts of racism and oppression. In contrast, Black families were the focus of fewer than 1/3 of the papers discussed in Umaña-Taylor and Hill’s (2020) review of racial socialization papers published between 2010 and 2019, reflecting how the perceived relevance of the process had been expanded to include Latino/Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and white families. Given the context surrounding early work on racial socialization, I marvel at the ease with which my younger colleagues today can publicly name an identity as an ethnic-racial socialization scholar: As an early/mid-career academic in the 1990s and early 2000s, legitimizing that identity felt impossible. To be sure, I was grateful to be in a community with 12 other scholars who studied parenting in ethnic-racial minority families  – Drs. Nancy E.  Hill, Emilie P.  Smith, Velma McBride Murry, Deborah Johnson, Ellen Pinderhughes, Howard C. Stevenson, Paul Spicer, Nancy Whitesell, Ruth Chao, Rosario Ceballo, Mimi Le, and Adriana Umaña Taylor  – through a cross-university Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity (SGRCE) that Drs. Hill, Smith, and Murry founded in the late 1990s. However, in my home department and university, it was as if I was pursuing a hobby rather than a program of research. In a very personal way, I experienced the feelings of isolation and

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invisibility that have been documented among women faculty of color (Chancellor, 2019; Garrett et al., 2022). Outside my 4-person Community Psychology program, conversations about my work in professional spaces felt stilted and uncomfortable when they occurred at all. My first empirical paper on racial socialization, now cited almost 1000 times, was desk rejected from 3 journals before I eventually found a home for it in Applied Developmental Science (Hughes & Chen, 1997), which was a newly minted journal that centered development in context (Rich Lerner, Celia Fisher, and Rich Weinberg were founding editors). Importantly, though, this 15-year period in the racial socialization literature’s emergence held much of the juice that fed the literature’s later growth. Foundational empirical papers on racial socialization, including findings from the first-ever nationally representative survey of American Blacks (National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA); Demo & Hughes, 1990; Thornton et al., 1990), provided compelling evidence that socializing children about race was widespread across all sectors of the Black community and identified many of the strategies currently discussed in today’s racial socialization literature. Construct development and measurement papers (Hughes & Chen, 1999; Hughes & Dumont, 1993; Stevenson, 1994a; 1995) and papers quantitatively testing hypotheses (e.g., Brega & Coleman, 1999; Caughy et al., 2002; Phinney & Chavira, 1995; Thompson, 1994) brought some level of visibility to the literature. Most importantly though, the 1990 to 2005 period included shifts in the field at large that made way for the exponential growth in the literature that followed. The shifts in the field were varied and did not occur fortuitously. They occurred because a critical mass of highly vocal scholars of color and their allies were engaged in multiple streams of advocacy to advance representation and accuracy in research on children and families of color. Through professional caucuses and coalitions (e.g., SRCD’s Black Caucus and newly founded Asian and Latino Caucuses), scholars of color fought for representation in professional leadership positions, on editorial boards, and on grant review panels. As individuals and as groups, they negotiated the publication of key special issues on youth of color (Quintana et al., 2006; Spencer & McLoyd, 1990) and published transformative theoretical frameworks. Specifically, Coll et al.’s (1996) integrative model and Spencer et al.’s (1997) PVEST model brought the societal context (segregation, discrimination), social position variables, and meaning-making into the foreground, providing a clear framework for understanding how these were essential vis-à-vis children’s development. In addition, in the mid-1990s, the National Institutes of Health mandated that reviewers on study section panels pay attention to the inclusion of women and minorities in federal research to ensure their presence in studies of life processes. Thus, applicants needed to provide details about how these groups would be incorporated into the design and about analytic plans for testing the equivalence of processes across groups. These efforts pushed the field at large towards more culturally respectful, strengths-based, and inclusive research agendas. Battle and triumph! Returning to Fig. 4.1, there is a two-fold increase in the number of racial socialization studies published in the 5-year period beginning 2006 compared to the 15  years prior (1991–2005). The Study Group on Culture, Race, and Ethnicity’s

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(SGCRE) widely cited review of the racial socialization literature was one of them, published at the beginning of that 5-year period (Hughes et al., 2006b). When we conceived the idea of the review, there were roughly 50 published empirical studies of racial socialization, clearly insufficient for a meta-analysis but adequate for systematically organizing empirical findings in the literature and recommending a path forward. However, as a testament to the critical role scholars of color play when they are in key gatekeeping roles (see Roberts et al., 2020), I now question whether our manuscript would have seen the light of day in Developmental Psychology had Dr. Cynthia Garcia Coll not been its newly appointed editor. Although the review paper was strong, timely, and sorely needed, submitting it to a mainstream high-­ impact journal seemed a bold move. No paper on racial socialization had ever been published in Developmental Psychology (the journal of Division 7, Developmental Psychology, of the American Psychological Association) and only two racial socialization papers had ever been published in the Society for Research in Child Development’s journal, Child Development (DeBerry et al., 1996; Thornton et al., 1990). Dr. Coll was and still is a fierce advocate for adequate and appropriate representation of ethnic and racial minority youth, one who has held the academy’s feet to the fire on many issues. She was intimately familiar with the readership of Developmental Psychology and Child Development and was well-versed in how to write and frame issues in ways that a broad readership could hear. She showed an unending commitment to successfully shepherding our manuscript through the review process, providing infinite rounds of editorial feedback in addition to multiple rounds of reviews. Our synthesizing review reflected countless hours of discussion and debates about the definition, language, terminology, and processes that constituted racial socialization. The framework that organized our review suggested four content themes, many of which were nascent in existing writings. These were (a) messages that promote ethnic pride and transmit knowledge about cultural history and heritage (termed Cultural Socialization); (b) messages intended to prepare children to adapt to and operate within a racialized world, including exposure to prejudice and discrimination (termed Preparation for Bias); (c) messages emphasizing diversity and racial equality (termed Egalitarianism); and (d) cautions and warnings to children about other ethnic groups (termed Promotion of Mistrust). To the extent available, we included findings from studies of multiple ethnic-racial groups and developmental stages, highlighting that the content areas were equally applicable across them. The framework provided a vocabulary for researchers to talk about different types of racial socialization messages that have been widely applied in subsequent studies of Hispanic/Latino, Asian, Native American, immigrant, and religious minority youth (e.g., Benner & Kim, 2009; Cheah et al., 2021; Cross et al., 2021; Tuitt et al., 2022). The framework has facilitated scholars’ efforts to disentangle the associations between different types of racial socialization messages and youth adjustment outcomes. From 2011 on, scholarly interest in racial socialization, alongside broader public attention to effective ways of talking to children about race, moved to the main stage. For example, Fig. 4.1 shows that 193 of the 539 currently existing empirical

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papers on racial socialization (36%) were published in the 10-year period between 2011 and 2020. An additional 16% were published in the 18-month period from 2021 to mid-2022. Given a critical mass of studies upon which to build, the literature increased not only in size but also in rigor, methodological breadth, and conceptual depth. It now includes short-term longitudinal studies (e.g., Conway et al., 2021; Park et  al., 2021), daily diary studies (Cheeks et  al., 2020), observational studies (Dunbar et  al., 2022; Galan et  al., 2022) and intervention studies (Stein et al., 2021). The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 (following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in Trayvon Martin’s murder) brought the issue of structural racism to the foreground, escalated by George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the unignorable racial disparities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, racial socialization researchers focused more explicitly on how parents’ messages about race can empower youth toward critical consciousness, resistance, and anti-racism. The exploration of racial socialization in white families is an additional shift that has occurred within the past decade. Although critical whiteness has been recognized as a field of study for decades (Appelbaum, 2013), studies of how white families discussed race, racism, privilege, or oppression were absent from the racial socialization literature. That has changed. Alongside escalating national attention to structural racism, and to white people’s complicity in it, the number of studies that address questions about how white parents approach the topic of race with their children, about how white children learn about race, and about how effective conversations happen has increased exponentially (Abaied, & Perry, 2021; Bartoli et al., 2016; Gillen-O’Neel et al., 2022; Hagerman, 2014, 2018; Perry et al., 2020; Vittrup & Holden, 2011). These sorts of questions have taken center stage in the popular press, on websites, and in  local workshop offerings as well (see Bigler et al., 2022; Scott et al., 2020, for discussions). The recent special issue Journal of Research in Adolescence was dedicated to papers on white families’ racial socialization (Spanierman, 2022) and the panel on white families’ racial socialization at Penn State’s 2022 National Symposium on Family Issues, titled Racial/Ethnic Inequalities in the United States: Family Socialization around Race/Ethnicity and Racism, reflect this new emphasis as well. In documenting that many white parents avoid race or emphasize egalitarian messages and color-blindness in conversations about it with their children (Freeman et  al., 2022; Hagerman, 2014; Zucker & Patterson, 2018), this new literature has prompted dialogue about how privilege and systems of white supremacy are reproduced in families. And, because white parents often claim not to have directed conversations with their children about race, it has raised new opportunities to examine how children inherently learn race from patterns they observe in the larger social system and about how parents can disrupt the racial attitudes and beliefs they draw from them. To close this section, when the Penn State Family Symposium organizers asked me to provide a historical overview of the research literature on racial socialization, I expected it would be a straightforward and relatively simple task. It was not. My search for patterns in the way the literature emerged led me to see and feel things that I did not anticipate, some based on my personal experiences and others based on the field as a whole. The story that unfolded for me was one of racism and

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resistance and of battle and triumph. Piecing it together took more time than it should have. More importantly, my journey down the rabbit hole highlighted for me how intimately dependent my individual trajectory and success as a scholar has been on the work of brave scholars who preceded me: The dissemination of my own scholarship and thinking about racial socialization was only possible because of their tireless efforts to ensure that children of color and the people who love and care for them are accurately and appropriately represented in discussions of the developmental process. I turn now to a brief summary of empirical findings that the racial socialization literature has yielded.

What Have We Learned About Racial Socialization? My gauge of the usefulness of our efforts to build empirical knowledge based on the processes of racial socialization depends on the answers to three questions: (1) What have we learned about how to promote positive ethnic identities among youth of color? (2) What have we learned about how to support them in the face of racism at all levels (structural, institutional, interpersonal)? and (3) What have we learned about how to position all youth to have a sense of agency in and commitment to working towards a more equal, just, and anti-racist society? The answers to these questions are respectively, a lot, some, and a little.

Cultural Socialization: How Parents Support Positive Identities Racial socialization researchers have clearly documented that the large majority of parents of color, especially Black parents, can and do engage in deliberate and intentional efforts to ensure their children’s positive racial identities and to ground them deeply in knowledge about their group’s history and heritage (Hughes et al., 2006b; Umaña-Taylor and Hill, 2020) These cultural socialization practices are born both of resistance to systems of white supremacy and structural racism and of parents’ desire to pass on values, beliefs, and folkways that they themselves hold close (Hughes et al., 2008). In my own work, which has included samples of African American, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Dominican parents and youth, cultural socialization is the most frequent racial socialization strategy that parents (and their adolescent children) report, with 80–90% of them reporting it across multiple studies (Hughes & Chen, 1999; Hughes et al., 2009a). Importantly, the specific cultural socialization practices that parents use vary depending on parents’ racial or ethnic context, their own beliefs, and their children’s experiences (Hughes & Johnson, 2001; Hughes et al., 2008; Williams et al., 2020). Black parents report strategies such as exposing children to African-American books, magazines, dolls, documentaries, and trips to African-American museums

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and historical sites. They also report discussions with children about slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and about the beauty of Black phenotypic characteristics such as dark skin and natural hair (Hughes & Chen, 1999; Hughes et al., 2006b). Immigrant and U.S.-born Latinx parents’ cultural socialization includes traditional cooking, religious practices, celebrations, and community events, travel to the country of origin, Spanish language use, family photos, and web resources (Ayón et al., 2018; Umaña-Taylor & Fine, 2004). Cultural socialization can also include the transmission of specific core cultural values such as respect (respecto) and familism (familisimo) among Latinx families (Knight et al., 2011; Stein, Chap. 5) and a sense of family obligation among Latino and Asian families (Tsai et al., 2015; Stein, Chap. 5). These sorts of practices are well described in the research literature. It is not yet clear what effective cultural socialization looks like in white families or whether it is a relevant construct for them at all, because white youth learn and navigate race from a position of privilege and power. The benefit of cultural socialization for youth of color’s positive ethnic-racial identity development is the clearest and most robust finding in the racial socialization literature to date. It has been documented in studies of African American, Hispanic, and Asian families across multiple developmental stages from age five years through emerging adulthood and in cross-sectional as well as longitudinal studies (Derlan et al., 2017; Tran & Lee, 2010; Tuitt et al., 2022). Specifically, youth whose parents engage in more frequent cultural socialization report earlier and more frequent identity exploration, higher ethnic affirmation and private regard, greater identity centrality, and more identity commitment (Neblett et  al., 2009; Seaton et al., 2012; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2009). In a recent meta-analysis, the effect size for relationships between cultural socialization and ethnic identity (defined globally) was moderate to large according to commonly used metrics (Huguley et  al., 2019). Notably, parents’ more frequent cultural socialization is associated with other indicators of youths’ positive adaptation as well, including higher self-­ esteem (Gonzales-Backen et al., 2017; Hughes et al. 2009b), better academic outcomes (Banerjee et  al., 2011; Rivas-Drake & Marchand, 2016), psychological well-being (Nguyen et al., 2015; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014), and fewer behavior problems (Caughy & Owen, 2015; Hughes et al., 2009b; Johnston et al., 2007). The finding that cultural socialization is promotive for youth’s well-being does not surprise me for two reasons. As an identity-affirming practice, cultural socialization grounds youth in a solid and positive sense of themselves and promotes resilience and resistance in the face of race-related stressors (Jones & Neblett, 2017; Neblett et al., 2012). Second, I suspect that operationalization and measurement of cultural socialization are straightforward. Indicators are concrete (e.g., reading or having culturally relevant books, trips to museums and plays, teaching history, cooking foods) such that parents are willing and able to accurately report whether they engage in specific cultural socialization practices. In other words, the clarity of findings in this domain of racial socialization relative to others may be both a function of the force of intergenerational transmission of cultural roots and clear measurement.

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Preparation for Racism, Bias, and Discrimination: How Parents Support Youth Parents of color are acutely aware of structural racism, cultural hegemony, the persistence of individual-level ethnic-racial discrimination, and the likelihood that their children may encounter these (Hannah-Jones, 2016). Some parents take this awareness as a cue to prepare their children to correctly interpret and handle experiences of discrimination, including various micro-aggressions. Other parents hold onto the prayer that their children will not encounter discrimination and only have conversations with them about it if and when they learn that such discrimination has occurred. In still other cases, teaching about discrimination does not occur at all. In contrast to studies of parents’ cultural socialization, the racial socialization literature does not provide clear answers regarding whether or how parents’ efforts to prepare youth for experiences with discrimination are beneficial for them. In empirical studies, preparation for bias has been associated with both more favorable adjustment (Burt et al., 2012; D’Hondt et al., 2016; Dotterer et al., 2009; Harris-­ Britt et al., 2007) and poorer adjustment (Banerjee et al. 2017; Daga & Raval, 2018; Davis et al., 2017; Dotterer & James, 2018; Nelson et al., 2018). Studies have also reported null relationships between preparation for bias and measures of youth adjustment (Elmore & Gaylor-Harden, 2013; Kyere & Huguley, 2020). Studies of the protective function of preparation for bias in the face of external stressors have been similarly inconsistent. This pattern of inconsistency has been noted in multiple systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses spanning several decades (Hughes et al., 2006b; Umaña-Taylor & Hill, 2020). Despite conflicting findings in the literature, many racial socialization scholars, including me, intuitively believe in the power of families and communities to protect children of color from the pernicious harm that racism causes or to at least fortify them in the face of it. That is, youth are likely to benefit when parents and other adults have honest and effective conversations with them about racism. Honest conversations are about how racism can show up in varied forms across varied spaces. Effective conversations are collaborative and reciprocal and provide explicit and concrete guidance to youth about how to constructively cope with and resist racism. On balance, although these sorts of conversations may heighten youth’s awareness that their group is stigmatized and oppressed within white-dominant sectors of society, the tools and fortitude that these conversations provide seem critical. Why, then, does the literature lack robust empirical support for the benefits of preparation for bias, given robust findings regarding the benefits of cultural socialization? A multitude of possible explanations come to mind. To me, the most apparent explanation is inadequate measurement: Preparation for bias is difficult to capture using survey-based items. Indeed, I often think that in trying to operationalize and assess it, we have lost much of its richness and beauty. Unlike cultural socialization, preparation for bias unfolds in the context of complex multilayered and often momentary dyadic interactions. These interactions can occur with humor, with love, with worry, with anguish, or with anger. The

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emotional tenor of messages is not distinguished in existing measures, including my own, although mothers’ emotions have been examined as a moderator of racial socialization (Dunbar et al., 2022; Smith-Bynum et al., 2016). In addition, survey measures cannot capture the clarity of preparation for bias messages. Youth can easily miss or misinterpret parents’ intended preparation for bias messages, and parents may be unable or unwilling to report them using survey assessment methods. In our work, the correspondence between messages about discrimination that parents believe they send and those that their children report receiving is quite low (Hughes et al. 2008; Hughes et al., 2009a; Hughes et al., 2006a). For example, in one of our studies of diverse adolescents, mothers’ reports of discussions about discrimination with adolescents were unrelated to adolescents’ own reports, especially for girls (Hughes et al., 2009a). Finally, existing survey measures lack sufficient nuance and specificity to capture important distinctions in the specific content of the preparation for biased messages that parents transmit. For instance, in our interviews with diverse adolescents and parents (Das et al., 2022), we have identified wide variation in the content of preparation for bias messages, ranging from distraction (e.g., “keep walking and ignore it”) to retaliation (e.g., slap them in the face and tell him that’s not how you talk to someone) to self-empowerment (e.g., always have your ID and always know your rights). Thus, with complex nuances and variations in parents’ efforts to prepare youth to recognize, process, and cope with discrimination and racism, it is not surprising that empirical findings thus far have been inconsistent. It is also the case that conversations that effectively prepare children for experiences with discrimination and racism are neither straightforward nor easy. In our studies, African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and white parents were much more likely to indicate that they believed it was important to teach children about the realities of discrimination than they were to do so in practice (Hughes et al., 2008). These conversations can feel emotional and challenging: Parents worry about promoting distress in their children and, at the same time, are re-living their own unpleasant experiences (Anderson et al., 2021). As I describe in the next section, recent efforts to assess and support parents’ competence, efficacy, and agency in having these sorts of conversations are quite promising.

 ow Parents Can Promote Resistance to White Supremacy H and Anti-Racism While supporting youth in the context of structural racism is critical right now, it is even more critical to identify racial socialization practices that prompt youth to resist and dismantle structural and interpersonal racism. Research on this topic is gaining visibility and traction but is in its early stages. For example, researchers have examined the intersections between racial socialization and sociopolitical socialization among Black and Latinx youth (Bañales et al., 2021b; Pinetta et al., 2020). In Banales et  al.’s (2021b) study of Black families, cultural socialization,

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preparation for bias, and sociopolitical socialization tended to co-occur and positively predicted aspects of youths’ critical consciousness. Other researchers have investigated the links between racial socialization and aspects of youths’ critical consciousness as well (Heberle et al., 2020). Studies of racial socialization in white families also seek to identify messages that recreate “white privilege” in white adolescents (Cox et  al., 2022) and messages that promote anti-racism among youth (Bañales et al., 2021a; Bañales & Rivas-Drake, 2022; Cooper et al., 2022; Hazelbaker et  al., 2022; Kornbluh et  al., 2021; Sánchez et  al., 2021; Woolverton & Marks, 2022). As scholars have shifted focus from individual to structural racism (Bonilla-­ Silva, 2021; Braveman et al., 2022), the study of how racial socialization intersects with youths’ awareness of and willingness to act against racism remains critical.

Summary The past four decades of research on racial socialization have yielded a large literature on the consequences for youth of different types of socialization messages from their parents. The three questions I posed about promoting positive ethnic identities, supporting youth of color in the face of racism, and positioning all youth to work towards a more equal, just, and anti-racist society have each been addressed in the literature to varying degrees and with different levels of confidence in the answers. The benefit of parents’ cultural socialization messages is the clearest and most robust finding, providing guidance for parents and others on strategies they can use to support youths’ positive development. Although the world also needs information on effective ways to talk to children about racism, the empirical literature to date has not yielded clear answers. However, the missed findings in the literature have prompted researchers to critically evaluate how to best conceptualize and measure it, as I discuss next, and thus have provided direction for promising paths forward. The research literature on racial socialization practices that promote youths’ resistance and anti-racism is in its early stages. Fortunately, research on how whiteness and privilege in white parents’ socialization contributes to the status quo, and on how to change this, is now part of the scholarly dialogue, as it should be.

Needed Directions for Racial Socialization Research In closing, I will share my perspective on a few of the most pressing needed directions for future work in the racial socialization literature. They fall into five broad categories. Although contemporary racial socialization scholars are already working on all of these issues and more, I share my thoughts about them.

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Expanded Conceptual and Methodological Approaches Although the racial socialization literature has expanded exponentially, it needs studies that are deeper in methodological and conceptual rigor. Much of our empirical knowledge is still based on studies using local and relatively small samples of parents or children, using cross-sectional designs and survey-based approaches. Thus, not only can critics dismiss findings, citing alternative explanations, but studies that permit stronger inferences are sorely needed for us to truly understand the process of socialization. For example, using the sorts of advocacy efforts that preceded the literature’s growth, scholars need to advocate for the inclusion of measures of parents’ racial socialization (or of youths’ received racial socialization) in federally funded studies that employ large random probability samples. There is also a need for studies that can disentangle temporal precedence and that can provide information on the conditions and mechanisms through which the benefits of varied aspects of racial socialization operate. To do this work, the field may need to recalibrate. In particular, we need to enrich and expand current conceptual frameworks regarding how racial socialization messages function and we need to systematically and rigorously test them. We also need to think deeply about measurement and, in particular, how we can effectively capture the dynamic processes that occur in situ. Much of this work is already underway. For example, the depth and breadth of the current literature on preparation for bias has provided researchers with ample material with which to reconceptualize and develop new measures of it. Anderson and colleagues’ measure of racial socialization competency shifts our focus from the frequency of discussions about race to the effectiveness and comfort parents experience in having them, especially when the conversations are about racism (Anderson et  al., 2020). Suyemoto and colleagues have developed a measure of resistance and empowerment in the face of racism (Suyemoto et al., 2022) which hones in on particular outcomes we would ideally like to see. Others have used observational methods, rather than survey-based self-report methods, to capture what parents actually do or say to their children regarding racism (Anderson et al., 2022; Dunbar et al., 2022; Smith-Bynum et al., 2016). All of these are promising steps forward that we need to build upon.

Experiments and Interventions for Causal Inference Kurt Lewin infamously said, “If you want to truly understand something, try to change it” (Gold, 1999). We need studies of racial socialization and children’s racial knowledge that attempt such change. What if we trained parents to have effective conversations about racism and oppression with their children? What if we taught parents more about the developmental process of racial learning and how early it starts? What if we were to experimentally manipulate parents’ expectations for the

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type of racial regularities students might be exposed to in a classroom? We have learned enough about how racial socialization operates to be in a good position to test causal hypotheses through experimental studies and interventions. In this regard, I am optimistic about what we will learn from several ongoing interventions that will evaluate the effects of programs aimed at increasing parents’ skills for, and effectiveness in, discussing racial intolerance and injustice with their children. For example, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania developed the Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race (EMBRace) intervention, a culturally based therapeutic intervention for Black youth ages 10–14 years and their caregivers. The intervention focuses on enhancing African American youth’s and families’ capacity to confront racial stress and trauma together (Anderson et al., 2018). The New York City-based Center for Racial Justice in Education (CRJE) developed a training program entitled “Talking about race: Raising children for racial justice”. The program is customized for parents, guardians, and caregivers to explore strategies for addressing race and racism with their children. Participants learn how children see race, gain skills for approaching age-appropriate conversations with a racial equity lens, and practice strategies to promote positive racial identity development in children. One Talk at a Time, a collaborative intervention program targeted towards ethnically diverse families, provides support for Latinx, Asian, and Black youth and their families to have conversations about race and ethnicity through videos and prompts (Stein et al., 2021). The results of these intervention trials will provide necessary information about whether scaffolding parents with skills to engage in conversations with their children about race relations and racial realities has consequences for youths’ positive development. Additional interventions such as these are needed.

Expanding our Gaze to Other Socializing Agents Although the focus of this chapter is on parents (undoubtedly children’s first and most important teachers), other socializing agents play key roles in supporting youths’ ability to process, cope with, and speak out against racism at all levels. The list of potential socializing agents who matter is infinite–extended family, peers, teachers, pediatricians, clinicians, employers, larger social networks, and other entities. This shift towards examining a wide range of socializing agents is taking place to some extent. Studies have examined racial socialization in the context of peers (Mims & Williams, 2020; Nelson et al., 2018; Su et al., 2020), schools (Byrd, 2015; Byrd & Legette, 2022; Del Toro & Wang, 2021), teachers (Hazelbaker & Mistry, 2021; Howard, 2018), neighborhoods (Winkler, 2012; Witherspoon et al., 2023), the media (Adams-Bass et al., 2014; Frey et al., 2022), and the larger macrostructure (Kuchirko & Nayfeld, 2021; Rogers et  al., 2021). Elaborating how these non-­ parental socializing agents communicate information and knowledge about race to children, how they can best support them given the current racial landscape in the United States, and how they can help them build a better one, are each important avenues for future work.

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 hat Children Learn from Racialized Patterns across Settings: W Racial Regularities Racial dynamics are operative in every setting children enter (Lewis, 2003) and children learn about race from these dynamics (Watford et al., 2021). School hallways, cafeteria lunch tables, neighborhood playgrounds, basketball courts, friend groups, churches, parks, and subway trains are all racialized spaces in which specific norms, regularities, rules, behavior patterns, and associated meaning structures reside. Children notice, attend to, and try to interpret the racial patterns they see in and across these spaces (Winkler, 2012). In a recent paper, I and my co-author formally introduced the notion of racial regularities to describe the racialized patterns that children observe in social settings (Hughes & Watford, 2022). Drawing on the concept of a “social regularity” that Ed Seidman (1988) outlined in the late 1980s, the concept of a racial regularity draws attention to setting-level patterns that inform children’s attitudes and beliefs about race. For example, children notice when the teaching staff at their school is predominantly white whereas the custodial staff is comprised of people of color. They notice when white neighborhoods are filled with gated homes and manicured lawns whereas the homes in adjacent Black neighborhoods are abandoned or run down, which is the case in Essex County, NJ where I live. They notice that most of the students who are sent to the punishing room at school are Black whereas most of the students in the schools’ honors courses are white. Racial regularities serve as implicit environmental cues that race carries social meaning or functional significance, suggesting linkages between racial group membership and specific experiences and roles. Indeed, children’s observations of these racial regularities, when repeated across time and place, provide much of the material children use in forming their attitudes and beliefs about race. Racial regularities have a specific structure embedded in their repeated nature that corresponds to concepts in developmental intergroup theory (DIT; Bigler & Liben, 2006). The nature of such regularities prompts children to develop attitudes and beliefs about race that can either reinforce or challenge beliefs youth already hold. In our paper, we provide far more detail about the components of racial regularities, how to identify them, and how they inform youths’ understanding of race (Hughes & Watford, 2022). What is most important to note here, though, is that researchers need tools to help us systematically identify racial regularities that are harmful for youth in order to change them. We already know about many of them in schools, for example–academic tracking, disproportionate discipline, differential teacher expectations, racialized school resource allocation, and more. Racial regularities do not exist by chance: They are created and maintained by choice because they benefit those who have the power to change them. In the future work that I would like to see, scholars would conceive, implement, and evaluate intervention studies aimed at altering harmful racial regularities in the social settings that youth frequent.

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Anti-Racism, Critical Race Consciousness, and Resistance I have already discussed the fact that research on how parents and others can foster stances towards anti-racism, critical race consciousness, and resistance is well underway. It must continue. One goal of the various anti-racism task forces of professional organizations, including the Society for Research in Child Development and the Society for Research on Adolescence, must be to strategize and advocate for the manpower (e.g., targeted postdocs and fellowships), resources (e.g., funding mechanisms), and recognition for outstanding work (e.g., awards) on these topics. We have seen activity around racial justice issues wane over time, as research on children’s cross-race friendships did in the 1980s and as support for the Black Lives Matter movement did within 3  months of George Floyd’s murder. As researchers, racial socialization scholars need to be intentional and deliberate in their efforts to advocate for funding and disseminate work in this area in effective ways.

Conclusion In this chapter, from my position as a racial socialization scholar for many decades, I shared my reflections on the emergence of the racial socialization literature, what we have learned from it, and where we need to go. Researchers studying racial socialization have produced a tremendous amount of empirically based knowledge on how parents and others can support youth as they navigate the racial landscape in the United States— knowledge that parents, practitioners, and policymakers need. Although the racial socialization literature emerged in a way that was slow and difficult— reflecting racism, resistance, battle, and triumph— it is now rich and robust. As a young 20-something scholar, I could not have imagined that the study of racial socialization would take hold the way it has. As I have said many times, my work on racial socialization is ultimately a quest for answers to large and hard questions about how to best ensure that all children—not just white children—have an equal opportunity to feel treasured, beautiful, loved, worthy, and capable; to feel they have purpose and can contribute; to feel hope and optimism about their futures; and to feel seen and heard. My work is also in search of answers to seemingly intractable questions about how to close the racial divide that remains in this country and about how to heal from our brutal racial past, especially now. I do not expect that I will be around to see the magnitude of change that is needed, but the work that racial socialization scholars have undertaken can take us further down the path.

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Umaña-Taylor, A. J., Alfaro, E. C., Bamaca, M. Y., & Guimond, A. B. (2009). The central role of familial ethnic socialization in Latino adolescents’ cultural orientation. Journal of Marriage and Family, 71, 46–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-­3737.2008.00579.x Vittrup, B., & Holden, G. W. (2011). Exploring the impact of educational television and parent– child discussions on children’s racial attitudes. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 11(1), 82–104. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1111/j.1530-­2415.2010.01223.x Wang, M.-T., Henry, D. A., Smith, L. V., Huguley, J. P., & Guo, J. (2020a). Parental ethnic-racial socialization practices and children of color’s psychosocial and behavioral adjustment: A systematic review and meta-analysis. American Psychologist, 75(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1037/ amp0000464 Wang, M.-T., Smith, L. V., Miller-Cotto, D., & Huguley, J. P. (2020b). Parental ethnic-racial socialization and children of color’s academic success: A meta-analytic review. Child Development, 91(3), e528–e544. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13254 Wang, G., Schwartz, G. L., Kim, M. H., White, J. S., Glymour, M. M., Reardon, S., Kersaw, K. N., Gomez, S. L., Inamdar, P. P., & Hamad, R. (2022). School racial segregation and the health of Black children. Pediatrics, 149(5). https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2021-­055952 Watford, J. A., Hughes, D., Das, S., Francis, T., Pagan, O., Keryc, C., Cox, B., & Way, N. (2021). Racial stories as learning moments: An ecological exploration of Black adolescents’ racial learning experiences. Journal of Social Issues, 77(4), 1149–1173. https://doi.org/10.1111/ josi.12497 Wilkinson, D.  Y. (1974). Racial socialization through children’s toys: A sociohistorical examination. Journal of Black Studies, 5(1), 96–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/002193477400500107 Williams, C. D., Bravo, D. Y., Umaña-Taylor, A. J., Updegraff, K. A., Jahromi, L. B., Martinez-­ Fuentes, S., & de Jesus Elias, M. (2020). Intergenerational transmission of cultural socialization and effects on young children’s developmental competencies among Mexican-origin families. Developmental Psychology, 56(2), 199–207. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000859 Winkler, E.  N. (2012). Learning race, learning place: Shaping racial identities and ideas in African American childhoods. Rutgers University Press. Witherspoon, D. P., White, R. M. B., Nair, R., Maereg, T. M., & Wei, W. (2023). Fertile ground for sociocultural responsivity: Schools and neighborhoods as promotive and inhibiting environments. In D. P. Witherspoon & G. L. Stein (Eds.), Diversity and developmental science: Bridging the gaps between research, practice, and policy (pp. 167–195). Springer. Woolverton, G.  A., & Marks, A.  K. (2022). An integrative model for the development of anti-racist behavior in White adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Research. https://doi. org/10.1177/07435584221091492 Zucker, J. K., & Patterson, M. M. (2018). Racial socialization practices among White American parents: Relations to racial attitudes, racial identity, and school diversity. Journal of Family Issues, 39(16), 3903–3930. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X18800766

Chapter 5

Racial-Ethnic Socialization in Latinx Families: Cultural Resilience and Coping Gabriela Livas Stein, N. Keita Christophe, Valerie Salcido, and Michelle Y. Martin Romero

Racial-ethnic socialization (RES) messages serve to lay the cultural foundation of familial protection for Latinx families who face structural, cultural, and interpersonal racism and xenophobia in the United States. Parental RES is conceptualized as the intentional and unintentional messages that parents provide youth about race and culture. Research on RES messages has focused on cultural socialization and preparation for bias messages (see Umaña‐Taylor & Hill, 2020 for a recent review). Through cultural socialization, families instill cultural pride, knowledge, values, and practices in their youth fostering the development of ethnic-racial identity, self-­ esteem, coping, academic resilience, and well-being (Umaña‐Taylor & Hill, 2020). Families also attempt to stave off the negative impact of discrimination by providing youth with racial socialization messages termed preparation for bias messages that prepare them to navigate racialized stressors. However, the effectiveness of preparation for bias socialization messages is less well established, particularly with Latinx families for whom there is little research (see Ayón et al., 2020 for a recent review of RES in Latinx families). This chapter opens by considering factors such as acculturation, immigration status, Latin American racial hierarchies, and colorism that make cultural socialization and preparation for bias messages unique for Latinx families. We then present a theoretical model of RES and cultural resilience in Latinx families which posits that RES foments cultural protection through beliefs and values, resulting in behaviors that support coping and well-being. We discuss G. L. Stein (*) University of Texas Austin, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] N. K. Christophe McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada V. Salcido · M. Y. Martin Romero University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. P. Witherspoon et al. (eds.), Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States, National Symposium on Family Issues 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44115-8_5

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how RES fosters culturally resilient values and beliefs, including familism, ethnic-­ racial identity, critical civic reflection, and familial resilience, that have broad support in the literature on Latinx families (e.g., Christophe et al., 2019; Ramos et al., 2022; Stein et  al., 2015). We then focus on how these values and beliefs lead to culturally consonant coping processes that may support youth in the face of discrimination (i.e., familial support, shift-&-persist coping). Finally, we conclude by considering how this model can inform prevention and intervention.

Racial Ethnic Socialization in Latinx Families Only a small portion of the RES literature has considered RES processes specifically in Latinx communities, but this research has been growing. In 2014, a review of RES studies found that only 10% focused on Latinx families (Priest et al., 2014), but in a more recent review covering RES research from 2010–2020, 30% of studies included a Latinx sample (Umaña‐Taylor & Hill, 2020). Nonetheless, this is a small body of work, as a recent review located only 43 studies conducted on RES exclusively with Latinx samples (Ayón et al., 2020). This emerging literature on RES in Latinx families has focused on cultural socialization processes. Studies have examined how Latinx families pass down the cultural values, beliefs, and practices of Latinx culture (e.g., speaking Spanish, eating ethnic foods, and celebrating cultural holidays and traditions) as well as the youth outcomes associated with these socialization messages (Ayón et al., 2020). Fewer studies examine other RES processes such as preparation for the experience of bias whereby parents warn their children about potential discrimination in interpersonal interactions and offer advice on how to cope. Indeed, in the review by Ayón and colleagues, almost every study (99%) examined cultural socialization, but only a third (32%) considered preparation for bias. Finally, most of the RES literature on Latinx families emanates from the use of RES models developed in Black families and then applied to other racial-ethnic groups in the United States (Hughes et al., 2006). While this was an important step in the right direction, models based on the experiences of Latinx families will better guide the work on how they prepare their youth to thrive in a society replete with racism and discrimination. The literature on RES among Latinx populations needs to be considered in concert with the acculturation literature examining the processes through which Latinx families psychologically and behaviorally adapt to life in the United States. As the literature documenting acculturation blossomed, this work explicitly examined enculturation, defined as learning and retaining the cultural values, traditions, and beliefs associated with their native Latin American countries (Gonzales et al., 2009). Thus, it is not surprising that the lion’s share of the RES literature with Latinx populations explicitly focuses on cultural socialization as this had been the focus of research on cultural protection since the early 1980s. However, RES literature has not considered how immigrant Latinx parents explicitly provide socialization messages of assimilation and adaptation to U.S. culture that communicate about race

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and ethnicity to youth. These messages may either overtly or covertly teach youth about interactions with not only White Americans but with other racial-ethnic groups as well. For example, in attempts to teach youth to acculturate, parents may provide messages about avoiding acting like certain racial-ethnic groups or messages about the importance of speaking English instead of Spanish. This approach has been considered for Asian American populations with a RES measure looking at acculturative messages such as “becoming American” (Juang et  al., 2016). Acculturative messages from immigrant parents may reinforce American exceptionalism and the minimization of race as parents tell their youth to achieve the “American dream,” inadvertently reifying the racial hierarchy (Liu et al., 2019). Qualitative interviews with Latinx immigrant parents revealed that RES messages are a response to xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States as well as to the immigration status of the family (e.g., undocumented family members). In addition to traditional RES messages focused on cultural pride, egalitarianism (i.e., emphasizing the shared humanity across groups), and preparation for bias, parents described a set of messages intended to teach their children about nativity and residence status, comfort them and secure their safety, and instill empathy and critical consciousness. Parents did this by helping children understand their plight relative to other groups that have been discriminated against in the United States (Ayón, 2016). Latinx parents also talked about the importance of providing cultural socialization messages centered on storytelling about their country of origin and set in the context of family (Ayón et al., 2018). These qualitative interviews laid the groundwork for a measure of RES in Latinx immigrant families including a cultural socialization subscale, a promotion of mistrust subscale, a valuing diversity subscale akin to egalitarianism, and two preparation for bias subscales (advocate for self in the face of discrimination and adapt to discrimination), thus largely following the RES literature. Unique to this RES measure was a subscale assessing messages that educate children about nativity and documentation (Ayón, 2018). Indeed, these messages were endorsed more frequently than messages about adapting and those promoting mistrust, underscoring their importance in research on RES with Latinx families. These findings were extended in another qualitative study of how documentation status influenced RES messages in Latinx immigrant families (Cross et al., 2021). Across both documented and undocumented families, and like Ayón (2016), families socialized youth around the limitations and restrictions of undocumented status as well as the privilege of being documented. Additionally, undocumented families provided messages preparing youth for potential parental deportation and family separation accompanied by messages of faith and belief in God as a source of familial strength and resilience. Families also countered the xenophobic rhetoric criminalizing Latinx immigrants by helping their children understand the nuance in law-breaking behavior that is responsive to hardship and context. In an earlier analysis of this same study, undocumented parents provided greater promotion of mistrust and more cultural socialization messages than documented parents, likely aiming to secure the safety of their family and support the youth’s mental health (Cross et al., 2020).

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Due to immigration, RES messages in Latinx populations are set simultaneously in the racial dynamics of both the United States and Latin America. These national dynamics are founded on both White supremacy and the racist ideologies of anti-­ Blackness and anti-indigeneity (Adames et al., 2021; Bañales & Rivas‐Drake, 2022; Chavez-Dueñas et al., 2014). Unique to Latin America though, is the myth of the mestizaje whereby all Latin Americans are racially mixed with European White, Indigenous, and African ancestry resulting in the creation of a new race (Adames et al., 2021). This narrative serves to maintain the racial status quo of White supremacy and social stratification by denying that there are inequalities due to phenotype or skin color since Latin Americans all “share” a racial group membership (i.e., mestizo identity; see Chavez-Dueñas et al., 2014 for a depiction of Latin American racial hierarchy and further discussion). More germane to RES is the fact that this ideology serves as the backbone of racial socialization of Latinx populations throughout Latin America, and by extension in the United States (Adames et al., 2021), erasing the racialized experiences of Black and indigenous communities. However, no studies of RES in Latinx populations in the United States, to our knowledge, have explicitly explored mestizaje-related RES messages, how they intersect with other RES messages, how they may vary across different racial and ethnic Latinx groups, and how they may relate to familial resilience and youth outcomes. The legacy of mestizaje includes the continued White privilege in Latin America and rampant colorism whereby Whiteness is still valued in political, social, governmental, and entertainment spheres (Chavez-Dueñas et  al., 2014). Colorist RES messages are also evident in Latin America and Latinx U.S. communities but again are not studied extensively. These messages are akin to color-blind messages in the United States and need to be incorporated into our understanding of Latinx RES more explicitly (Adames et al., 2021). Finally, Latin American countries vary in their histories, racial make-up, racial dialogues, and narratives about race and country that will contour RES conversations. Thus, the field needs to also consider potential differences by nationality/ country of origin. In practice, much of the RES literature does not account for differences by nationality/country of origin among Latinx families. This is likely due to sampling and recruitment limitations. As a result, much of what we know about RES among Latinx families is conscribed to either Mexican American experiences or the pan-ethnic Latinx label (e.g., combining the experiences of diverse subethnic groups). However, nationality/country of origin shape a family’s values, beliefs, and practices about race and ethnicity (Umaña-Taylor & Fine, 2001), and, in turn, RES. This may become more complex for families of diverse origins (i.e., if a family is made up of multiple nationalities/countries of origin). There may be variability across nationality/country of origin that could also inform RES. For example, previous U.S.  Census records demonstrate household composition differences by nationality/country of origin among Latinx families. In 2000, 36% of Mexican households were composed of five or more people compared to only 14% of Cuban households (Thierren & Ramirez, 2000). Household composition may directly inform who is involved in RES conversations and, in turn, may shape RES content and frequency. Differences in economic conditions (e.g., SES)

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and education attainment levels by nationality/country of origin are also likely to impact RES. Economic conditions and education attainment are both important ecological factors that more broadly shape the family environment, its networks, and potential exposure to racialized stressors (Garcia Coll et  al., 1996). Further, historical and sociopolitical contexts tied to nationality/country of origin in relation to the United States likely influence RES among families. For example, the content of RES messages might look different for Latinx families of Mexican-American descent with long ties and exposure to the United States compared to Latinx families of Venezuelan descent with relatively recent exposure to the United States Similarly, differences in migratory experiences to the United States by nationality/ country of origin are likely to impact RES. Future research that explores RES and potential differences by nationality/country of origin among Latinx families is warranted to move this discussion beyond conjecture. Overall, the acculturative and immigrant context needs to be more fully explored as it shapes the types of RES messages that Latinx parents provide. First, newer studies suggest unique RES messages that need more exploration: socialization around nativity status (Ayón, 2016; Cross et al., 2020), critical consciousness (i.e., linking one’s fate to that of other groups; Ayón, 2016), faith and resilience (Cross et al., 2020), and immigrant storytelling and narratives of seeking a better life (Ayón et al., 2018; Cross et al., 2020). We highlight this need in our model under RES messages. Second, Latinx RES messages exist in the sociopolitical contexts of the United States and Latin America that simultaneously influence the understanding of race and ethnicity uniquely leading to messages of mestizaje and colorism that are sorely understudied. Third, little is known about how RES messages may differ across nationalities or countries of origin. As described by immigrant Latinx parents, RES messages are inherently familial messages and the extended family serves as a context that supports RES and cultural resilience (Ayón et al., 2018). We now turn to these cultural resilience processes that we argue serve to support beneficial youth outcomes.

A Model of Cultural Resilience We propose a model of cultural resilience to explain how RES messages in Latinx families ultimately result in the positive youth outcomes found in the RES literature (i.e., self-esteem, academic engagement, prosocial behaviors, and well-being; see Fig. 5.1). We position this model in the context of Latinx families and identify RES messages that support cultural resilience based on more recent literature (left part of the model). We acknowledge that some RES messages can have damaging impacts (e.g., promotion of mistrust messages leads to greater youth depressive symptoms; Cross et al., 2020), but our chapter focuses on the protective processes that RES messages promote, and as such that is the focus of the model. We propose that RES messages support the development of culturally resilient values and beliefs that benefit youth. First, RES fosters racial-ethnic identity resulting in greater

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Fig. 5.1  RES and cultural resilience model for Latinx families

racial-ethnic pride, which contributes to positive feelings about being a member of that group (i.e., private regard) and teaches youth ways that others may view their group (i.e., public regard; Ayón et al., 2020; Umaña‐Taylor & Hill, 2020). In the same vein, RES supports youth’s internalization of familism values that center beliefs about family support, mutual obligations, and loyalty (i.e., Kulish et  al., 2019). These familism values serve as a cornerstone of familial resilience. Beliefs are passed down through parental storytelling and narratives whereby families highlight the optimism of seeking a better life, the ability of Latinx families to overcome, and their faith in a higher power as a firm foundation of their resilience (Ayón, 2018; Moreno et al., 2020). Latinx families also help youth develop sociopolitical beliefs, including critical reflection and motivation, linking oppressive forces across the United States and Latin America, and fostering resilience through critical consciousness (Maker Castro et al., 2022). These values and beliefs serve to undergird the enactment of culturally resilient behaviors and coping that help youth thrive in oppressive systems. Youth enact their racial-ethnic identity by participating in cultural traditions, preparing foods, listening to music, participating in affinity groups, speaking Spanish, etc. (i.e., Williams et al., 2020). These racial-ethnic behaviors support joy, meaning, and connection. Similarly, youth enact familism values by engaging in familism behaviors, especially spending time with family, whether in celebration, in building community, or in providing instrumental and emotional support; all of which drive purpose, meaning, and connection (i.e., Stein et al., 2020). Familial enactment of familism values promotes a warm, caring, and supportive family environment where monitoring and cohesion lead to positive adaptation (i.e., Cahill et al., 2021; Hernández & Bámaca‐ Colbert, 2016). Familial resilience also fosters familial support and coping that help families face cultural stressors (i.e., Martin Romero et  al., 2022). Finally, these beliefs and practices together enable shift-&-persist coping whereby youth can

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cognitively disengage from uncontrollable stressors (e.g., discrimination, economic stress) and engage in behaviors that provide them with optimism, meaning, and purpose (Christophe et  al., 2019; Stein et  al., 2022). Together, these behavioral enactments of cultural resilience and engagement in coping lead to adaptive Latinx youth outcomes, including a strong sense of self and self-esteem built on the foundation of familial support, academic engagement as youth seek to fulfill the promise of their family’s dreams, prosocial behaviors whereby youth enact behaviors embedded in familism and bring honor to the family, and well-being driven by a sense of purpose, feeling connected to the community, and enacting joy.

Cultural Resilience: Values and Beliefs Racial-Ethnic Identity  Undoubtedly, the most robust finding in the RES literature is the fact that RES results in a stronger racial-ethnic identity for Latinx youth (Ayón et al., 2020). Learning about their cultural values, beliefs, and practices supports youth’s understanding of themselves in terms of group membership and fosters feelings of connection, belonging, and pride in their Latinx identity (Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014). Recent theorizing highlights that racial-ethnic affiliation (i.e., sense of belonging) and racial-ethnic attitudes (i.e., evaluations of group membership) serve as distinct dimensions of racial-ethnic identity that foster positive adaption (Williams et al., 2020). Cultural socialization messages support Latinx youth’s positive private regard (i.e., feelings toward group members) and racial-ethnic pride (e.g., Kulish et al., 2019; Stein et al., 2023a). These cultural foundations of racial-ethnic identity are evident across adolescence. A recent analysis by our team found that parental reports of cultural socialization practices led to similar increases in youth-­ reported racial-ethnic pride across grades 5 to 11 when controlling for racial-ethnic discrimination (Stein et al., 2023a). That means these messages are continuously supportive and necessary to counter the eroding impacts of discrimination on racial-­ ethnic identity. Similarly, RES can support a sense of racial-ethnic belonging in Latinx youth (Ayón et  al., 2020), although this aspect of racial-ethnic identity is more understudied (Williams et  al., 2020). Feeling good and connected to one’s group is associated with a host of positive outcomes for Latinx youth such as stronger self-esteem (e.g., Umaña‐Taylor et al., 2009), academic motivation and engagement (e.g., Rivas‐Drake et al., 2014), prosocial behavior (e.g., Streit et al., 2021), and well-being (e.g., Rivas‐Drake et al., 2014). RES messages also help youth understand how others may view their groups (i.e., public regard), especially in preparation for bias messages (e.g., Rivas‐Drake et al., 2009). Although there is less work on the effects of public regard on youth outcomes, greater public regard in Latinx youth (i.e., believing that other groups value your own group) has been associated with greater levels of educational values and academic self-efficacy (e.g., Thomas et al., 2022) and fewer depressive symptoms (e.g., Stein et  al., 2017). However, lower public regard (i.e., awareness of

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discriminatory beliefs or racial stereotypes) may also serve a protective function. Low public regard can shape how youth interpret and understand discriminatory experiences, facilitating external attributions and supporting coping and promotive outcomes, if youth understand that others may view their group negatively (Neblett Jr. et al., 2012). How public regard shapes the ability of youth to cognitively reappraise and disengage from discrimination stressors has not been explicitly tested with Latinx youth. However, evidence from Black youth has shown that the relation between discrimination and depressive symptoms was nonsignificant when youth had lower public regard (Sellers et al., 2006). RES supports racial ethnic identity, and protective effects are evident for racial ethnic identity leading to adaptive outcomes. The role of public regard is less clear and warrants further examination. Familism Values  Familial cultural socialization messages in Latinx families center on teaching youth familism values that serve as the cultural bedrock for Latinx family life (Stein et al., 2014). These values establish the primacy of the family relative to the self and encompass expectations of familial obligation, emotional and instrumental support, closeness, and loyalty. These values dictate a hierarchical family structure whereby younger generations show deference and respect for elder family members (also termed respeto). Additionally, familism values support adaptive family functioning such that both parental- and youth-reports of familism values are associated with more family cohesion, greater familial warmth and support, and reduced family conflict and negativity (see Cahill et al., 2021 for meta-­analysis). Parental socialization of familism values has also been associated with greater levels of biculturalism among Latinx youth (Christophe et  al., 2020). Furthermore, parental familism values prompt greater cultural socialization messages to youth (e.g., Knight et  al., 2016), and not surprisingly, these messages result in youth reporting higher levels of familism values (e.g., Kulish et al., 2019; Streit et al., 2020). The internalization of familism values results in adaptive psychosocial adjustment in Latinx youth leading to better educational outcomes, less internalizing and externalizing symptoms, greater self-esteem, and more prosocial behavior (Cahill et  al., 2021; Stein et  al., 2015; Streit et  al., 2021). These promotive effects of familism exist, in part, because these values prompt youth to bring pride to their family through their academic and personal accomplishments (Stein et al., 2021) and provide youth a sense that they contribute meaningfully to their family’s well-­ being (Stein et al., 2020). The instilling of familism values ultimately serves as the scaffolding for adaptive prosocial behaviors (e.g., Streit et al., 2020, 2021). Familism values teach youth to be cognizant of others’ needs and emotions and to adjust and adapt to these in the family context. Similarly, youth are taught to do things for the well-being of the family (e.g., chores and caretaking). These developmental skills then translate to compliant and emotional prosocial tendencies, and these processes are supported by parental cultural socialization (e.g., Knight et al., 2016). In fact, in Mexican-origin youth, maternal ethnic socialization in 5th grade predicts stronger ethnic identity in 7th grade that then supports the internalization of familism values in 10th grade; greater prosocial behaviors ultimately result (Streit et al., 2021). RES messages support both racial-ethnic identity and familism values leading to

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adaptive developmental outcomes in Latinx youth. We contend that the cultural socialization of familism values also serves to prepare Latinx youth for bias as parents provide an avenue for meaning, purpose, and optimism in the face of oppression and discrimination through the enactment of familism behaviors. Familial Resilience  Given the primacy of family in Latinx culture, resilience extends beyond familism values that dictate cohesion, loyalty, and support. We argue that RES fosters additional aspects of familial resilience. We define familial resilience as a belief that one’s family can withstand external cultural stressors such as discrimination and immigration stress. We build on the model of familial resilience proposed by Walsh (2003) that argues that this family belief system of familial resilience is comprised of three facets: (1) making meaning of adversity, (2) positive outlook, and (3) transcendence and spirituality. For making meaning, Walsh proposes that familial resilience is built on the idea that the family is the foundation of coping and support (as opposed to being individually based). Families who view adversity both as part of our shared human experience and as a surmountable challenge can more effectively deal with external stressors. Maintaining a familial positive outlook fueled by optimism and confidence in the ability of one’s family to successfully navigate stress is also central to familial resilience. This positive outlook supports perseverance but is also countered by accepting things that are beyond a family’s control and investing familial resources in more controllable stressors. Finally, both familial meaning-making and positive outlook are built on the spiritual and religious traditions that support social action, provide a supportive community, and help engender purpose and meaning beyond the stressor. There is not a lot of work testing this model in relation to either RES or youth outcomes, but some newer work shows familial resilience is a key factor for Latinx youth. Cultural socialization and greater familial support were both associated with greater familial resilience six months later in Latinx youth (Garcia et al., 2023). In qualitative work with Latinx families and youth, RES storytelling/narratives and faith-based messages reveal this deep interconnection of perseverance, optimism, cultural pride, and faith as how Latinx communities believe they survive and thrive in racist and oppressive systems (e.g., Ayón, 2016; Moreno et al., 2021). Consistent with this line of theory, familial resilience indeed buffered the relation between racial-ethnic discrimination and depressive symptoms for Latinx youth (Ramos et al., 2022). Our research team has also found that familial resilience predicted less depressive and anxious symptoms for Latinx youth during the COVID-19 pandemic (Stein et al., 2023b). We argue that additional work should explicitly test how familial resilience provides a cultural backbone of resilience as promoted by parental RES messages and internalized across family members. Critical Reflection and Motivation  The qualitative work with Latinx immigrant families further revealed that Latinx families are actively providing messages that connect their immigrant experiences to the oppression faced by other groups as well as within the larger historical context of anti-immigrant policies and xenophobia (Ayón, 2016, 2018; Cross et al., 2020). These messages align with raising youth’s

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critical consciousness or their awareness and understanding of oppressive systemic forces that maintain the marginalization of racially-ethnically minoritized youth and families (Heberle et al., 2020). Recent theory has proposed that critical consciousness consists of three components: critical reflection (i.e., analysis of structural inequality), critical motivation (i.e., the ability to effect change), and critical action (i.e., individual, or collective action toward social and political change; Watts et al., 2011). Like low public regard, critical reflection supports youth’s understanding of social inequalities by unveiling multiple sources of systemic oppression: race, ethnicity, immigration status, socioeconomic status, gender, and sexual orientation. Critical reflection also entails holding egalitarian beliefs for a society where all groups are equal. Critical motivation is centered on a sense of agency and can serve to protect self-esteem by empowering youth to engage in political action. Together, critical reflection and motivation are culturally resilient beliefs and values that have been conceptualized as developmental assets that support marginalized (including Latinx) youth’s academic functioning and well-being (Diemer et al., 2016). There is emerging evidence that RES supports critical reflection and motivation. In a study of Black youth, RES in 10th grade predicted greater critical reflection in 12th grade such that youth endorsed greater structural attributions for the Black-­ White achievement gap (Bañales et al., 2020). Relatedly, cultural pride messages in Black youth were associated with greater critical agency, but these messages did not predict critical reflection (Bañales et al., 2021). We have extended this work to a diverse sample including Latinx youth where we found that cultural socialization and preparation for bias were both associated with greater critical reflection and action (Gomez Alvarado et  al., 2023). Racial-ethnic discrimination also predicts critical reflection and motivation (Heberle et al., 2020). So, it may be that once discrimination is included in the model it will have the most direct link to these processes. Consistent with this notion, when discrimination was included in the model, cultural pride messages no longer predicted critical reflection in Black youth (Bañales et al., 2021). Thus, more work is needed to test the interplay of RES messages, discrimination, and critical motivation and reflection in Latinx youth. Further work has extended RES in consideration with other parental socialization messages. For example, parental cultural socialization messages delivered in concert with sociopolitical discussions supported critical motivation in Latinx youth by engendering a greater sense of collective responsibility (Pinetta et al., 2020). Much more work is needed to delineate how RES supports these two dimensions of critical consciousness along with awareness of discrimination. Yet more important to resilience processes is how critical motivation and reflection then relate to coping and a greater sense of agency in Latinx youth. Again, there are hints in the literature that critical reflection and motivation can help support coping. In the face of discrimination, Black youth with higher oppressed minority ideology (i.e., connecting experiences of Black oppression to those of other groups) enacted avoidant coping diminishing the impact of discrimination on depressive symptoms (Seaton et al., 2014). Turning to Latinx youth, two qualitative studies of resilience highlight the role of social resilience as intertwined with racial-ethnic identity, cultural pride,

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and familism cultural values motivating critical action and supporting a sense of agency and coping (McWhirter et al., 2019; Moreno et al., 2021). This emerging work supports RES as an essential avenue supporting the sociopolitical development of youth. As evident in our model, all these cultural beliefs and values are interconnected and support one another. For example, familism values and racial-ethnic identity beliefs are correlated in Latinx youth, fostering growth in one another (Stein et al., 2017). Similarly, racial-ethnic identity supports critical motivation and reflection and vice-versa (Heberle et al., 2020; Mathews et al., 2019). Familial resilience can fuel critical consciousness and social advocacy (Walsh, 2003). RES collectively fosters these beliefs and values in Latinx youth that ultimately result in behavioral enactment and coping that we turn to now.

Cultural Resilience: Behaviors and Coping Racial-Ethnic Behaviors  Racial-ethnic behaviors include the language use and engagement in cultural traditions and customs, as well as the processes whereby youth gain clarity about one’s racial-ethnic identity (Williams et  al., 2020). Engagement in these culturally consonant behaviors starts early in development and helps youth build identity and a sense of community with similar others (Williams et al., 2020). For example, speaking Spanish serves as an important source of connection for Latinx youth. Shared traditions and customs such as Quiceañeras or posadas at holiday times foster cultural belonging and pride. Whether done in isolation, with peers, or with family, we posit that this behavioral engagement serves as a foundation of resilience as these experiences foster meaning, purpose, belonging, and joy (Sumner et al., 2018). These meaningful, joyful expressions of culture and identity serve to promote radical hope and healing in communities that are burdened with the heavy weight of oppressive policies, policing, and racism (Mosley et al., 2020). Unfortunately, to our knowledge, no studies have disentangled the benefits of behavioral enactment of racial-ethnic identity from other aspects of identity (Williams et al., 2020), but some support for the promotive effects of engagement in cultural practices comes from the acculturation literature in Latinx youth. For example, engagement in one’s culture of origin (e.g., language use, consumption of media, food) predicted better family functioning from both the perspective of Latinx adolescents and parents (Smokowski et  al., 2008). Thus, family resilience is strengthened by enacting culturally congruent behaviors. Engagement in cultural practices has also been associated with less drug use in Latinx samples (Martinez Jr. et al., 2009). Interestingly, this protective effect was true for cultural practices but not for a measure that included identity aspects of acculturation suggesting a unique promotive effect of behavioral engagement. Although other work does point to some protective effects of Latinx cultural engagement in terms of sexual behavior (Becker et  al., 2014; Schwartz et  al., 2014), it also points to a potential risk for

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Latinx boys in terms of alcohol use (Schwartz et al., 2014). Yet these studies have not fully explicated how engagement in cultural practices is purposeful to cope and connect with others, enacted with family members or others, and done as an explicit expression of racial-ethnic pride. These collective aspects of cultural engagement may be protective from a radical hope paradigm, whereby collectivist communities can effect change (Mosley et al., 2020). Familism Enactment  A specific type of racial-ethnic behavior that may be particularly protective is the enactment of familism values whereby youth fulfill family obligations, provide caretaking support, interpret for family, help siblings and cousins, and pursue higher education to bring pride to their families (Stein et al., 2014). We propose that purposeful cultural behaviors, family behaviors, and turning towards how family can help youth cope with the oppressive systems that surround them. Parental RES messages support not only familism values but also familism behaviors (Tsai et al., 2015). Furthermore, Latinx youth who engage in more daily family assistance behaviors exhibit lower internalizing symptoms (Telzer et  al., 2015), although this was not true for youth who did so in response to parental distress. Interpreting for parents also has protective effects but also some risk depending on the language brokering context (Martinez Jr. et al., 2009). Familism assistance behaviors can also bring risk when examining cortisol patterns (Doane et al., 2018). The protective effects of familism behaviors may emanate from the meaning and purpose youth derive from these behaviors (Sumner et al., 2018). In fact, feeling needed and useful to one’s family supports well-being in the transition to adulthood (Fuligni et  al., 2021). The context of engagement in family assistance may be important to consider in addition to the perceived fairness of these obligations (Toro et al., 2019). It is important to note that many of the familism behavior studies have solely focused on assistance behaviors, but other familism enactment may be more protective by supporting coping and resilience – such as spending more time with family, living close to family, attending familial celebrations, going to church as a family. Aligning with the focus on assistance behaviors, familism is associated with more social support which predicts well-being in Latinx college students (Campos et  al., 2014). Explicating the promotive coping processes associated with both familism values and behaviors will further our understanding of cultural resilience in Latinx populations. Familial Support and Coping  We further contend that the values RES messages instill lead to coping behaviors that rely on family support. Indeed, qualitative studies have begun to illuminate that how Latinx adolescents cope align with their cultural values (i.e., familism, family resilience) but are not currently captured in the individualistic coping measures that pervade the field (Gonzalez et al., 2022; Kuo, 2013). In a mixed-methods study that included qualitative interviews with 14 Latinx adolescents, relational coping emerged as an essential coping strategy reported by adolescents, especially support from family members (Gonzalez et  al., 2022). A longitudinal qualitative design of two in-depth interviews four years apart with 12 parent-adolescent dyads (Brietzke & Perreira, 2017), similarly found that Latinx adolescents reported family support and encouragement as well as a strong sense of

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ethnic identity as essential in helping them cope with stress. Furthermore, in focus group data from Mexican-origin adolescents, coping with racialized stressors was viewed as a shared threat among family members that necessitated coping interdependently through behaviors such as problem-solving together, talking to each other, and reframing the incident with pride. In these ways, cultural strengths such as racial-ethnic pride and familism undergird the coping responses families enact in the face of discrimination (Martin Romero et al., 2022). Aligned with the view that coping must be reframed as an interdependent process rather than as an individualistic process for collectivist cultures (Gonzalez et al., 2022; Kuo, 2013), a few studies have examined the use of family coping in Latinx samples. Family coping consists of strategies that families use together to manage stressors, which separates it from individual coping strategies, and is conceptualized as behaviors used to strengthen the family, maintain the well-being of family members, mobilize family and community resources, and problem-solve together (McCubbin et  al., 1998). More specifically, family coping consists of reframing (e.g., maintaining hope that things will improve, reframing the issue in a positive light), family problem solving (e.g., directly addressing the problem), family social support (e.g., relying on support of extended family), family spiritual support (e.g., praying together), mobilizing support from the community (e.g., seeking support from community resources), and family passive appraisal (e.g., belief that the family has little control in solving the problem; McCubbin et al., 1996). Cross-­ sectionally and longitudinally, prior research among Latinx families has found that family reframing and family problem-solving are related to fewer child mental health symptoms while family passive appraisal was associated with more symptoms (Santiago & Wadsworth, 2011; Santiago et  al., 2020). Additionally, family coping has been found to predict individual-level coping strategies in Mexican-­ origin children over time, specifically more secondary control coping and less disengagement coping (Santiago et al., 2021). Family resilience and familism values likely contribute to higher levels of family coping behaviors due to the high alignment between these family-based values and practices. Although to our knowledge it has not been directly tested, the belief that one’s family can overcome struggles likely leads to increased use of family reframing and family problem-solving, both of which have been linked to improved mental health. Similarly, family coping behaviors may be most effective for families who are high in familism. Indeed, the relation between family reframing and fewer internalizing and externalizing symptoms was strongest for families high in familism, showing that familism coupled with the coping strategy of family reframing was most effective in predicting better mental health (Santiago & Wadsworth, 2011). However, this finding was not replicated in a subsequent study (Santiago et al., 2020). In another study, familism was found to promote more engagement coping strategies on days in which Latinx youth experienced high levels of stress (Santiago et al., 2016). Although more research is needed, emerging studies suggest that Latinx youth have a repertoire of coping behaviors that integrate cultural and family strengths, likely fostered and maintained by the values that RES messages promote.

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Shift-&-Persist Coping  Shift-&-persist coping (S&P) is another way of coping that Latinx youth may use to effectively mitigate the negative effects of racial-ethnic discrimination. Studied primarily in the context of coping with poverty, the S&P model of coping (see Chen, 2012 for a more detailed description) proposes that individuals may exhibit more optimal physiological responses to uncontrollable stressors by shifting, or engaging in acceptance and positive/neutral cognitive reappraisal, and persisting, or holding onto optimism, a positive outlook on the future, and a subjective sense of purpose in life (Chen & Miller, 2012). Relative to other coping strategies that attempt to actively change the stressor (e.g., primary control coping; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), S&P is theorized to be especially effective in the face of uncontrollable stressors that are not directly or immediately amenable to change, such as conditions of poverty (Chen, 2012). Research has supported this claim, as S&P has commonly been found to protect against the negative impacts of poverty on health outcomes such as inflammation (Chen et al., 2015), allostatic load (Chen et al., 2012), and asthma-related impairment (Chen et al., 2011); across all studies, these benefits were not apparent for higher-SES youth and families who did not face this uncontrollable stressor. Building upon the S&P model of coping, our research team has tested whether S&P operated as a protective factor against the impacts of family economic stress and discrimination on depressive symptoms among Latinx adolescents. Like what had been found in the context of physiological outcomes (e.g., Chen et al., 2015), S&P protected against the impact of family economic stress on youth depressive symptoms (Christophe et al., 2019). However, in the context of peer discrimination, S&P was protective against the harmful impacts of discrimination only for youth low in racial-ethnic identity, or youth for whom their race-ethnicity was a less central and positive component of their identity relative to their peers (Christophe et al., 2019). We replicated these results in a longitudinal study of depressive symptom trajectories (Stein et al., 2022). Specifically, we found that in 9th grade, only youth low in ethnic pride who frequently engaged in S&P coping were protected from the harmful effects of peer discrimination. Similarly, these Mexican-origin youth had more steeply declining trajectories of depressive symptoms across high school than did youth with similar exposure to discrimination who were higher in ethnic pride. These two studies provide a basis for understanding how S&P seems to be operating among Latinx youth; because discrimination relative to economic stress directly targets one’s racial-ethnic group membership, racial-ethnic identity beliefs are relevant, and the effectiveness of S&P coping is indeed dependent on these beliefs. To better understand ways Latinx and other racially-ethnically minoritized youth may effectively cope with discrimination – regardless of their level of racial-ethnic identity – we attempted to further extend the S&P model to incorporate culturally-­ based coping strategies that align with the ethos of S&P coping: positive reappraisals and acceptance combined with optimism and meaning in life (Chen & Miller, 2012). To this end, we identified two such factors, that align with Latinx RES discussed earlier: religious coping and critical civic action. Both religious/spiritual coping and critical action are common practices in Latinx communities, and both

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tap into histories of resistance against and resilience in the face of systemic oppression. We argue here that these coping strategies also align with the premise of S&P. Religious/spiritual coping, for instance, often involves a reframing of stressors in the context of one’s religious/spiritual belief system and an acceptance of that stressor combined with a strong sense of purpose (Sumner et al., 2018) along with beliefs of a more positive future. Behaviorally, engagement in religious coping includes practices such as going to church and praying that support well-being. Similarly, critical civic motivation and engagement involve the belief in one’s efficacy to enact change and individually or collectively advocate for systemic change; this orientation towards a more positive and equitable future can equip youth with a strong sense of purpose (Sumner et al., 2018). The behavioral components of critical action (e.g., voting, boycotting, protesting) can serve to promote radical hope, thereby supporting well-being (Mosley et al., 2020). In a study of racially ethnically minoritized emerging adults (55% Black, 22% Latinx), we tested whether religious/spiritual coping and critical civic engagement, in combination with more general shifting and persisting, held together as a single higher-order coping construct that captured their conceptual similarities and worked to protect against the negative impacts of discrimination across all levels of racial-­ ethnic identity (Christophe et al., 2021). We did find evidence that shift/persist/spiritual coping and critical civic engagement were well captured by a single coping construct, which we termed culturally-informed S&P, that embodied the generally and culturally-based ways in which racially-ethnically minoritized emerging adults employed S&P principles to cope with stress. Further, we found that youth who were at mean and high levels of culturally informed S&P coping were fully protected against the negative impacts of discrimination, and this protective effect did not differ based on an individual’s racial-ethnic identity (Christophe et al., 2021). Further, although racial-ethnic identity was negatively correlated with depressive symptoms and predicted fewer depressive symptoms on its own, the promotive effect of racial-ethnic identity became nonsignificant when culturally informed S&P was entered into the model. Although future longitudinal research is needed to test this, we tentatively speculate that this occurred because the adaptive aspects of one’s racial-ethnic identity are being behaviorally expressed through racially ethnically minoritized individuals’ engagement in these culturally informed ways of shifting and persisting in the face of discrimination. Beyond S&P, it is crucial to better understand how critical civic engagement supports resilience and coping strategies in Latinx youth (Bañales & Rivas‐Drake, 2022). As we discussed, RES supports critical reflection, motivation, and critical action in Latinx youth, and critical reflection and motivation predict critical action (e.g., Diemer & Rapa, 2016). Civic engagement is argued to be an important coping strategy employed by racially ethnically minoritized youth in response to systemic and interpersonal inequality (Hope & Spencer, 2017). Indeed, civic engagement can be a direct response to racial-ethnic discrimination. Among Latinx college students, microaggressions predicted greater involvement in both Black Lives Matter and DACA advocacy (Hope et al., 2016). Furthermore, this participation attenuated the effects of discrimination on stress and depressive symptoms for Latinx youth (Hope

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et al., 2018). Critical civic engagement also results from a stronger connected racial-­ ethnic identity that supports a linked fate with other Latinx populations (Bañales & Rivas‐Drake, 2022). Families can engage in critical action together, and community resilience and radical hope thrive as Latinx families continue luchando adelante (i.e., striving forward; Moreno et al., 2021; Mosley et al., 2020). While research, to the best of our knowledge, has not directly examined links between RES and religious coping in Latinx youth specifically, cultural socialization and preparation for bias are positively associated with spiritually based coping among Black youth providing evidence for effects that may also extend to Latinx youth (Blackmon et al., 2016). Relatedly, the protective effects of religious engagement are evident in Latinx immigrant families in terms of mental health and in coping with racialized immigration stressors (e.g., Moreno & Cardemil, 2018; Moreno et al., 2020, 2021). As we have discussed, the foundations of religious coping likely intersect with RES messages in the narratives of resistance and resilience that families share with youth, and much more work is needed to continue to explore this critical resilience process. Finally, familial resilience beliefs align precisely with the S&P model with a shared focus on meaning making, purpose, and optimism that support well-being in the face of stressors. As our work has integrated faith and religious-based coping with S&P, this further aligns with the third facet of familial resilience. We need to further understand how this familial resilience translates both to family-based coping and S&P in Latinx youth. S&P is modeled by parents and taught in familial contexts, but unfortunately, little work has examined familial predictors of S&P (Chen, 2012). Our own work has found that cultural socialization and preparation for bias were associated with greater use of S&P coping in a sample of racially-­ ethnically minoritized emerging adults (47% Black; 22% Latinx; Christophe et al., under review). Links between parental RES and coping have frequently been outlined in conceptual work (e.g., Anderson & Stevenson, 2019), but have been less frequently examined in empirical work, especially outside of work on Black populations. We propose that familial resilience is enacted in familial and individual S&P coping. More explicit attention to these cultural behavioral processes in conjunction with beliefs and values will be essential in delineating how RES results in promotive outcomes. More research on linkages between parental RES and coping strategies such as S&P, religious/spiritual coping, and civic engagement in Latinx youth is thus necessary to better understand how parents engender adaptive coping with discrimination among Latinx youth.

Intervention Applications Our research team has extended this work on Latinx RES to building a prevention program for racially-ethnically minoritized families (Asian American, Black, and Latinx families; Stein et al., 2021). Our program titled One Talk at a Time equips parents with the confidence and skills to provide RES messages that promote coping

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and cultural resilience. The 2-hour online program presents parents with short videos and exercises that provide psychoeducation, RES skills, and social modeling to support effective RES conversations between parents and middle school youth. We have some initial evidence of the program’s effectiveness in leading to increased parental efficacy in delivering both cultural socialization and preparation for bias messages in 15 Black and immigrant Latinx and Asian American families (Stein et al., 2021). Parents noted improvements in their ability to have conversations centered on their child and supportive of coping. We are currently testing this program in a randomized controlled trial with 312 families and aim to test aspects of the model we present in this chapter. Namely, we will examine how RES might support youth’s racial-ethnic identity, familism values, familial resilience, and critical reflection in addition to supporting coping efficacy and, ultimately, youth outcomes 12 months later.

Conclusions There is much yet to be learned about RES processes in Latinx families and how these engender resilience in Latinx youth. We have attempted to delineate culturally resilient values, beliefs, and behaviors that are a direct result of RES messages that serve to promote development in Latinx youth. There are many processes already strongly supported by the literature (i.e., RES → racial-ethnic identity; RES → familism values), but others have only started to be tested (RES → critical consciousness) or conceptualized more fully (RES → familial resilience). How these values, attitudes, and beliefs support behaviors that promote coping also has some initial support in the literature. Further work should explicitly link RES to coping processes and consider how the behavioral enactment of the values promotes radical hope and fosters S&P coping processes that instill meaning, purpose, and optimism. More work needs to explicitly test coping as a family and specifically S&P coping at the family level to understand the intersection of RES and resilience more fully in Latinx populations. Finally, the enactment of culturally resilient behaviors strengthens culturally resilient values, beliefs, and attitudes, especially when enacted within a family and a community. RES facilitates radical hope in Latinx youth and this hope inspires all of the community.

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Chapter 6

Therapeutic Use of Racial Socialization for Families of Color and Clinicians Tanisha R. Clark, Ashanti Brown, Elayne Zhou, Monique McKenny, Akilah Patterson, Emily Ha, Isha W. Metzger, Chardée A. Galán, and Riana Elyse Anderson

Youth of color must achieve normative and universal developmental milestones while simultaneously grappling with race-based traumatic stress (Anderson et al., 2018a, b, c; DeGruy, 2017; Saleem et  al., 2020). Race-based traumatic stress is defined as “race-related transactions between individuals or groups and their environment that emerge from the dynamics of racism and that are perceived to tax or exceed existing individual and collective resources or threaten well-being” (Harrell, 2000, p. 44). The interpersonal representation of racism is racial discrimination or unfair treatment based on race. For example, youth of color in the United States T. R. Clark (*) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Brown · I. W. Metzger Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA E. Zhou Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA M. McKenny Wellstar Health System, Marietta, GA, USA A. Patterson Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA E. Ha Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA C. A. Galán Department of Psychology, Penn State, University Park, PA, USA R. E. Anderson Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. P. Witherspoon et al. (eds.), Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States, National Symposium on Family Issues 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44115-8_6

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regularly face displays of White nationalism (Mulupi et al., 2021; Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016), instances of racial violence in the media (Finkelhor et al., 2013), and encounters with racial discrimination in their own lives (English et al., 2020; Pachter et al., 2010). Youth of color are inundated with direct and indirect exposure to racial discrimination. These deleterious experiences place an insurmountable toll on their psyches and disrupt their daily sense of safety. As a by-product of systemic oppression, youth of color have less access to essential resources that facilitate optimal development. According to recent data from The Annie E. Casey Foundation (2020), Black children are the most at-risk of every ethnic and racial group across several indicators of health and well-being. For instance, the Black community has the highest rates of infant mortality, children living in poverty, underfunded education systems, and the lowest rates of economic ownership of their communities. In terms of disproportionality, Black children are overrepresented in the foster care system, juvenile justice system, school discipline infractions, and special education (U.S. Department of Education, 2020; Dettlaff & Boyd, 2020; Evans-Chase, 2014; The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2020). Before direct experience of racism, youth are often vicariously exposed through caregiver experiences with racism (Cave et  al., 2020). Maternal health statistics indicate higher rates of infant mortality and preterm births in the Black community when compared with all other ethnic groups (Dominguez et  al., 2008). Maternal exposure to racial discrimination is also associated with low birth weight and pre-­ term birth in Black children (Cave et al., 2020). Youth of color are then subject to personal experiences of racism as early as preschool (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001). This chronic exposure to deprivation of resources coupled with racial stress and traumatic experience has been demonstrated to elicit detrimental mental health outcomes including increased fear, anxiety, helplessness, re-experiencing symptoms, and avoidance (Bryant-Davis & Ocampo, 2005; Carter, 2007). The totality of structural, vicarious, and interpersonal racial experiences poses a serious risk to the psychosocial health and well-being of children and adolescents of color (A. T. Anderson et al., 2020a, b; Blume et al., 2019) and likely contributes to the increasing severity of mental health concerns among this population (e.g., suicidality; Lindsey et al., 2019). Additionally, these racialized systems further burden families of color by shaping the quality of mental health care they receive when seeking psychological services for their children. This paradox—characterized by the need for unique care due to racial inequity yet lack of access to suitable care because of racial inequity—poses a peculiar threat to the mental health and well-­ being of youth of color. Cultural humility is an interpersonal stance oriented toward understanding those with different identities. Research suggests that a lack of cultural humility from professional bodies, training programs, and individuals among mental health professionals contributes to and exacerbates the disparities (or stark differences in outcomes when compared to counterparts over time) in treatment quality (Holden & Xanthos, 2009; Shim & Rust, 2013). Despite efforts to promote cultural humility, disparities in care persist, deeply impacting youth and their families (Hagiwara et al., 2019; Williams & Wyatt, 2015). These disparities lend credence to the need for sustained, family-oriented approaches

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to training clinicians who serve youth of color. By utilizing a family systems lens, the value of historical cultural assets of families of color can come into focus, illuminating protective factors American families of color have used across generations of racial oppression (Jones & Neblett, 2016). Among these protective factors is racial socialization, or the verbal and nonverbal messaging about race and racial experiences within the family system (Hughes et al., 2006). Given that racial socialization is theorized to reduce racial stress for youth by increasing their self-efficacy and coping skills through dyadic conversations (R.  E. Anderson & Stevenson, 2019), it is posited as a useful tool to train and position clinicians as another socializing agent for youth of color (Anderson et  al., 2018a, b, c). Seeing psychology training through a lens of racial socialization can empower youth of color and their families in the face of an increasingly divisive racial climate. In adopting this lens, trained clinicians may yield more positive treatment outcomes for youth of color, bolster families’ comfort with participation in therapeutic services, and be better equipped to serve youth of color and their families in psychotherapy treatment (Harlow et al., 2019; Metzger et al., 2021). As such, this chapter discusses the importance of addressing both the concept and effects of racism within therapy. We assert that to improve familial competence with racial socialization, clinicians must strive for training and sustained effort in the theoretically driven approach of cultural humility to effectively work with clients of color. First, we describe the rationale for training clinicians working with youth of color experiencing racism. Next, we explore foundational training tenets drawing on community-based therapeutic interventions for clinicians. This training approach is further explored within various groups who interact with children and families, including trainees, established practitioners, and leaders of youth-facing therapeutic organizations. Finally, we conclude with limitations that challenge the actualization of these efforts as well as future directions for implementing social justice in clinical training to positively impact families and youth of color.

Rationale for Clinician Training in Racial Socialization Youth Experiences of Racism Health inequities or systemic differences in health outcomes based on population-­ level characteristics, plague families of color within the United States across mental and physical health outcomes (WHO, 2018). A main driver of health inequities within this society is racism, or actions or policies directed towards groups based on their race, which erects a system of barriers for those of color navigating daily lived experiences (e.g., seeking health care, applying for jobs) and the quality of those systems (e.g., education, green spaces). Black people in particular—throughout their development—are exposed to the highest rates of daily discrimination, which is consistently predictive of poor mental health outcomes throughout the lifespan

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(English et al., 2020). Other youth of color are also negatively impacted by these daily occurrences. A systematic review determined that the impact of discrimination on longitudinal health outcomes of youth of color across racial and ethnic groups includes behavioral problems, delinquent behavior, mental health issues (e.g., depression and low self-esteem), health problems, and health-harming behaviors (e.g., substance use, sleep difficulties; Cave et al., 2020). A recent study found that male youth of color are more likely to be perceived as threats and treated as adults by citizens and law enforcement personnel (Goff et al., 2014). According to researchers, this begins as early as age 10  years. Stripping youth of color of their childhood and innocence creates conditions that normalize inflicting inhumane treatment upon them (e.g., police brutality, use of excessive force). This phenomenon has led to the murder of many Black youth through violent methods without any proper recourse or justice for their families. For example, in 1944, George Stinney, Jr., a Black teenager, was the youngest person on record to be “legally” executed in the United States. Ten years later, Emmitt Till, a 14-year-old Black child, was brutally disfigured and lynched by vigilantes for allegedly whistling at a White woman. Unfortunately, state and vigilante killings of youth of color continue today (e.g., Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Jordan Davis, Jordan Edwards, Laquan McDonald, Michael Brown). Black children are also 18 times more likely to be charged as adults in the criminal justice system than their White counterparts (Goff et al., 2014). Children and adolescents being charged as adults are exponentially more likely to experience physical assault, sexual assault, or commit suicide (e.g., Story of Kalief Browder via Washington et al., 2021; Goff et al., 2014). Experiences of systemic oppression occur in interlocking settings (e.g., the education system and public recreational settings; Bernard et  al., 2021). In the academic setting, youth of color often report frequently having their competence and intelligence questioned by peers and adults (Jernigan & Daniel, 2011). Countless studies have revealed that youth of color are disproportionately subject to a higher frequency and severity of disciplinary actions than their counterparts (The Annie E.  Casey Foundation, 2020). As a result, youth of color are likely to develop an elevated sensitivity to peer and teacher perceptions throughout their academic careers (Jernigan & Daniel, 2011). Caregivers of color are grappling with a parallel experience when encountering public-serving organizations and personnel, such as the police (Hughes et  al., 2006; Roberts & Rizzo, 2021; Stevenson, 1994). This leaves some Black children as victims of direct and indirect racial trauma (Saleem et al., 2020). Unfortunately, in communities of color, children are the most vulnerable to the impacts of racism. As a result of racism, youth of color are often forced into tasks that require interrogation of their identity and role in society long before their white counterparts (Hughes et al., 2006; Kendi, 2016). Racism causes impressionable youth of color to respond to imposed a priori biases and affronts to their humanity and relative worth at critical stages of development (Saleem et al., 2020). Before the 1990s, the vast majority of child development literature failed to adequately conceptualize youth of color grappling with these unique stressors. Often, the burden of shielding and

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preparing marginalized children for this increasingly complex process falls on their caregivers (R.  E. Anderson & Stevenson, 2019; Stevenson, 1994). Caregivers of youth of color are not afforded the privilege of avoiding developmentally complex discussions about race and racism due to the high probability of youth of color experiencing both overt and systemic oppression (Hughes et al., 2006).

Racial Socialization A common protective mechanism employed by caregivers of youth of color to combat the reality of racism is racial socialization. Racial socialization is the process through which individuals learn values, norms, and customs regarding their racial or ethnic group (Lesane-Brown, 2006). Racial socialization serves as a protective factor in Black communities, as it allows caregivers to prepare children for racial discrimination. Since young people of color face more risk under race, they also need the protection of race-based practices. As a result of the communication, emotional support, and behavioral practice afforded by racial socialization, youth develop adaptive racial coping, yielding more optimal psychosocial outcomes (e.g., Anderson & Stevenson, 2019). Their improved outcomes contribute to a reduction of their psychological disparities (Stokes et  al., 2020; Wang & Benner, 2016). However, youth are not the only beneficiaries of these dyadic processes. Caregivers, inclusive of parents, extended family members, and health providers, have also noted the psychological benefit of participating in racial socialization practices (Anderson et al., 2018a, b. c). Caregivers who learn more competent racial socialization strategies have improved mental health outcomes and behavioral practices, benefitting individual, familial, and structural phenomena while contributing to the reduction of health inequities based on race. Racial socialization primarily consists of four methods that caregivers employ individually or in tandem: egalitarianism, preparation for bias, promotion of mistrust, and cultural socialization (see Hughes et al., 2006 for an exhaustive review). Egalitarianism consists of teaching children to treat others with equality and respect their individuality, often without explicitly teaching about race. Preparation for bias occurs when caregivers teach children about the high likelihood of discriminatory racial encounters and potential methods of surviving these encounters. This is rarely proactive, rather, it occurs after the child has observed or been a victim of discrimination (Constantine & Blackmon, 2002). Promotion of mistrust involves teaching youth of color to increase their vigilance during situations where discriminatory racial encounters are likely to occur (i.e., police encounters, retail shopping, education systems, and the workplace). This may entail potential education on cues for discrimination as well as the best way youth can protect themselves (R. E. Anderson & Stevenson, 2019). Finally, cultural socialization includes instilling cultural pride and teaching Black history (Hughes et al., 2006). Emphasis is often placed on contributions people of color have made to modern society and on cultural achievements by people of color globally. Cultural socialization is often used to counteract

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the “Whitewashing” and anti-Black undertones that are prevalent in the Western educational system, political system, media, and economic systems (Hannah-Jones et al., 2021; Kendi, 2016). Although racial socialization has many benefits, to be sure, limitations certainly abound. Of primary concern, there is great division in contemporary society about where and whether race should be discussed (e.g., anti-CRT policies; Ray, 2022). Moreover, the prevalence of communication—often between parent and child— varies widely by study (R. E. Anderson et al., 2023) and racial group (Simon, 2021). When asked, families note that fear and stress are barriers to their racial socialization communication (R. E. Anderson et al., 2021), particularly at times of heightened racial animus (see Blackmon & Thomas, 2015; Sullivan et  al., 2021). Additionally, while parents and other family members are often the most reliable providers of socialization (R. E. Anderson et al., 2022), others who may serve as important socializing agents (e.g., mental health care providers) often are not asked about their provision or competence of care focused on race. We must delve into the importance of integrating clinical providers of care into the familial practice of racial socialization. This familial tool has been demonstrated to improve with training and practice (Anderson et al., 2018a, b, c; Livas Stein, 2021).

Clinicians as Agents of Racial Socialization Despite established outcomes in the literature, few evidence-based clinical training opportunities have been developed to include racial socialization. As such, clinicians often are not equipped with the skills to address the lived experiences of youth of color (Galán et al., 2021a, b). Preliminary findings show that in a sample of over 400 graduate students currently enrolled in Clinical Psychology (PhD and PsyD) and Counseling Programs (PhD), approximately 87% indicated that they have received little to no training on how to broach topics of racism-related stress within the clinical context. Thus, cultural humility is often low amongst clinicians due to a lack of self-exploration and training on how their identities can influence their work (Brottman et al., 2020). The fear and lack of skill underscored by parents in conjunction with the lack of opportunity to engage in cultural exploration noted by clinicians shows a critical intersection of challenges related to working with youth of color under racism. Clinicians’ failure to identify and address client racism-related stress and trauma has been linked to client dissatisfaction with therapy, suppression of personal disclosures, premature departure from treatment, and decreased willingness to pursue mental health services in the future (Chang & Berk, 2009; Constantine, 2007). Though there are significant advances in our understanding of youth mental health, youth of color continue to experience inequitable access to and utilization of mental health services (Cook et al., 2017; Rodgers et al., 2022). Health inequities, including rates and quality of treatment, result in disproportionate mental and physical health outcomes for youth and their families. Even when youth of color can access

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mental health care, the quality of services they receive is often lower than those received by White youth (Kodjo & Auinger, 2004). This is particularly true for linguistic minority youth and families where language is an additional barrier to services (Flores, 2009; Pumariega et al., 2009). Discrimination within healthcare and in youth’s daily lives negatively and disproportionately compromises psychosocial functioning (English et al., 2014; Tobler et al., 2013). In contrast, a growing body of research suggests that clinicians’ explicit discussions of racial, ethnic, and cultural concerns in the lives and experiences of clients of color enhance therapist credibility, the depth of client disclosure, client willingness to return for follow-up sessions, and favorable client outcomes (Zhang & Burkard, 2008; Zhang & McCoy, 2009). It is therefore paramount to pave routes for clinicians to become better equipped with the awareness, knowledge, and skills needed to understand and treat racial discrimination using relevant approaches like racial socialization and to incorporate such practices into clinical care when working with youth and families of color.

Incorporating Racial Socialization into Clinical Practice For many families, racial socialization represents the generational transmission of community knowledge informed by both individual and collective experiences. Transferring this knowledge from the community to the therapeutic setting is often counterintuitive in American psychology pedagogy and training, which is entrenched in Western values and the medical model, as well as in problem-identifying orientations (American Psychological Association [APA], 2017, 2021). We posit that knowledge must flow between the community and the clinician. Racial socialization provides the opportunity for clinicians to become a part of the larger family unit. Researchers have emphasized the benefits of racial socialization as part of the clinical treatment of racial trauma for youth of color (R.  E. Anderson & Stevenson, 2019; Metzger et al., 2021), often citing its impact on youth academic performance and on behavioral health outcomes (Wang et al., 2020).

 Framework Towards Racial Socialization A Integration: RECAST The racial encounter coping appraisal and socialization theory (RECAST; R. E. Anderson & Stevenson, 2019; Stevenson, 2014) integrates and improves upon prior models of behavioral change and stress and coping by focusing on discriminatory contexts and racially specific coping strategies for youth and their caregivers. RECAST postulates that providers’ explicit and consistent delivery of competent racial socialization practices promotes improved racial coping behaviors and beliefs in youth, altering the subsequent trajectory of psychosocial problems, associated

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disparities, and related long-term inequities. Because historical and systemic problems are slow to change, individuals’ belief that they can effectively resolve racial stressors is often limited, thus reducing their coping behaviors, and subsequently resulting in greater problems (e.g., depression, aggression). Racial socialization, however, serves as a protective and promotive process for youth and clinicians. Clinical healthcare providers can practice coping behaviors, talk through questions, and develop plans of action with youth but can also consider ways to improve upon their cultural humility through psychoeducation and training. Racial socialization helps empower those who use it to choose their coping strategy rather than relying on avoidant strategies or depleting, which can challenge the key assumption that a racially stressful experience is insurmountable (Smith & Carlson, 1997). Additionally, provider competence regarding racial stressors demonstrates to the child that the fight against racial discrimination does not rest solely with them. Racial socialization has been shown to buffer health- and mental health-related behaviors and outcomes with respect to discrimination. RECAST posits that this relation exists by virtue of enhanced efficacy and coping processes afforded by provider racial socialization competency (e.g., skills, confidence, lower stress) that provides the cognitive and behavioral elements critical for youth comprehension and behavioral activation. Clinically, then, racial socialization competency—or how confident and skilled providers are to engage in racial socialization transmission (Anderson et al., 2018a, b, c)—is a function not only of a provider’s ability to utilize the technique but also concerns the process by and the extent to which providers can be trained in its use. Instead of exploring the frequency of racial socialization messages that predominate the current literature, the clinical focus of racial socialization competency is on how well providers understand, transmit, receive, and implement culturally specific coping skills for racial encounters. Although the themes of racial socialization (e.g., cultural pride) are still emphasized in the competency framing (see other chapters in this volume), RECAST argues that providers transmitting racial socialization messages can develop an increased sense of competence with training and practice. In this way, the improvement of racial socialization competence in providers is posited not only to directly improve the racial coping self-efficacy of youth but also to reduce their fear and stress around racial communication. Although other elements are certain to impact the racial socialization of a provider (e.g., event-related and environmental conditions), the dimensions targeted for change via RECAST are hypothesized to be mechanisms for sustained change with continued clinical practice (Stevenson, 2014).

Improving Clinician Training with Racial Socialization Providers of clinical care (henceforth, clinicians) are asked to engage in multiple trainings deemed important for clinical care, and it is critical to become more competent in their own racial socialization practice before utilizing it with families of color. Namely, we posit here that clinician cultural humility is positively correlated

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with the quality of behavioral health care for children of color, family engagement in treatment, and treatment outcomes. However, given the potential barriers present for clinicians, it is necessary to provide initial guidance for the delivery of racial socialization interventions in behavioral health settings. For instance, with regard to tailoring interventions for specific populations, clinical staff in community-based settings often cite large caseloads, time constraints, and variability in training backgrounds as barriers (Clark, 2022). Therefore, outlining an explicit pathway for clinicians to join the family unit in the delivery of racial socialization is essential. Effective clinician training should aim to establish or enhance one’s knowledge of racism, encourage clinician exploration of their individual identity and biases, and allow clinicians the opportunity to develop a plan to address race through the lens of cultural humility (see Galán et al., 2022 which provides clinicians with concrete recommendations for supporting youth and families of color following highly publicized acts of racism-based violence and related events).

Knowledge of Racism: Self-Education To partner with families, clinician training must promote self-education regarding the impact of racism and White supremacy in our socio-political systems as well as present-day fears associated with behavioral health services. Throughout history, racism has been upheld by biased research conducted by behavioral health professionals (APA, 2021). This immutable fact has left many communities of color skeptical of behavioral health services. Training should equip clinicians to discuss the role that the field of behavioral health has served in the oppression of people of color and understand client reluctance to immediately disclose information. Clinicians must understand the paradoxical experience of seeking help from systems that use science to justify their inhumane treatment. With comprehensive training, clinicians will be equipped to ground discussions of racial discrimination in their own education about this country’s history, which has resulted in racial trauma for several marginalized groups (Adames et al., 2022). Racial trauma is outlined as a cumulative process that involves racism at several levels (Williams, 2018). Larger experiences of racial trauma are often compounded by daily microaggressions (verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, or insults that communicate hostility, inferiority, or derogatory stereotypical messages based on an individual’s membership in a marginalized group; Sue et  al., 2007). Understanding this complex history will decrease the chances of clinicians engaging in cultural impasses, which may include minimization of client experiences of racial discrimination, premature attempts to reframe client experiences with racial discrimination, and asking clients to serve as “corrective experiences” for individuals who have harmed them. Each example can result in the invalidation of client experiences and damage the establishment of safety and rapport in the therapeutic space. Racial socialization training will afford clinicians an opportunity to self-­ educate to avoid preventable ruptures in the client-therapist relationship.

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Broaching Race and Racism through Evidence-Based Practice Once clinicians are educated on race and racism, it is important to increase their self-efficacy in having related discussions throughout the course of treatment. Training should emphasize the practice and use of vocabulary that is both inclusive and transparent, describing actions as byproducts of cultural humility rather than isolated techniques. However, training may also capitalize on the clinician’s baseline knowledge of evidence-based techniques as well as the common factors of psychotherapy inherent in all modalities (e.g., therapeutic alliance, therapist empathy and related constructs, and client expectations, etc.). Regarding the therapeutic alliance, clinicians must build rapport early in the therapeutic relationship through transparency about their own identity, potential biases, and privilege. For instance, clinicians should be comfortable discussing aspects of their identity that impact the lens that they bring to therapeutic settings (e.g., a White clinician discussing their position of power or privilege). Training should also be designed to foster clinicians’ comfort in discussing issues that impact marginalized clients including stigma and system mistrust. The outcome of this facet of training is to build clinicians’ identities as allies or advocates. Furthermore, training must assist clinicians in designing treatment plans that help clients better understand, navigate, and thrive despite individual, organizational, systemic, and structural experiences with racism. In addition, training should emphasize the need for clinicians to discuss their role as a service provider and related issues including mandated reporting and limits of confidentiality, within the context of discussing relationships with other parts of the system (e.g., law enforcement, social services). This is standard practice; however, adding the caveat that these systems disproportionately punish and criminalize families of color validates the reality faced by marginalized groups (Dettlaff & Boyd, 2020). Training should also equip clinicians to emphasize the integration of race and racism throughout treatment and emphasize the salience of both to the familial system. Additionally, training should occur within the framework of evidence-based practice. Clinicians should be provided with examples of ways to use skills within their current repertoire to transmit knowledge about race. Examples include the use of psychoeducation (e.g., validating, normalizing, and providing information on the impact of racism) and parenting skills training (e.g., discussing how racism impacts parenting and providing education on disparities in social service involvement in families of color). When processing race and racism, clinicians may find it beneficial to do so via the lens of the cognitive behavioral triangle. This may be accomplished by emphasizing how racism leads to inaccurate and negative thoughts, harmful emotions, and problematic behaviors. Also, clinicians may work in tandem with clients to restructure their responses to racial stressors rather than their perception of racist encounters. Finally, training should assist clinicians in identifying and working with clients to process common forms of potentially unhealthy compensatory behaviors used to counteract racism and systemic oppression. For example, two common constructs

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discussed within current research literature include the Strong Black Womanhood Schema & John Henryism. The Strong Black Womanhood Schema is defined as the cultural and societal expectation that Black women engage in the process of “continuously conjuring resilience as a response to physical and psychological hardships” though it is physiologically taxing and may even conceal trauma (Abrams et al., 2019, p. 2). Similarly, John Henryism is defined as “a strong behavioral predisposition to cope actively with psychosocial and environmental stressors” (Hudson et al., 2016, p. 5). The name, John Henry, draws upon a Black male character from popular folklore. John Henry worked excruciatingly hard to prove his abilities to be equal, if not superior, to a machine, and though he succeeded, it led to his untimely death (Hudson et al., 2016). These constructs, derived from the Black community, are often cultural messages transmitted to a vast majority of youth of color in various ways (e.g., “You must work twice as hard, to get half as much” or “We [cultural group] do not have time to be sad”). While processing maladaptive coping strategies, clinicians should remain cognizant of balancing time spent processing potentially traumatic content with the teaching of healthy replacement coping strategies along with helping clients access positive emotions and cultural messages. This balance can be achieved through a consistent emphasis on teaching and practicing healthy coping in the therapeutic setting (e.g., mindfulness & progressive muscle relaxation). Finally, clinicians should be aware that broaching race and racism requires taking risks and adopting a stance of curiosity rather than assuming the position of the expert. For instance, a culturally humble approach includes inquiry about how the client’s race and individual identity (e.g., interests, hobbies, spirituality or religion, and community messaging about race, etc.) inform their coping behaviors. Teaching clinicians to integrate racial socialization through the lens of evidence-based practice and cultural humility may increase their efficacy and comfort in integrating new practices. Clinician’s Self-Awareness of Racial Identity and Bias  To improve practitioners’ self-awareness and social awareness, training should include self-reflection on their identity and previous experiences that contribute to their worldview. Research indicates that therapists’ approaches to broaching race in therapy can depend upon their racial identity (Day-Vines et  al., 2007). Therefore, several experts in the field of cultural research have cited the need to help clinicians develop awareness of their own identities and biases (Hook et  al., 2016). Practitioners should participate in training activities that allow them to examine their own privilege and to understand how they can leverage their social location to serve as an ally and advocate for clients. Failure to do so may result in the clinician unintentionally playing out biases in the therapeutic space. One way this happens is when clinicians interpret the ­client’s experiences through their own worldview or experiences and struggle to make connections or develop empathy for the client’s experiences due to their own assumptions. Examining one’s own identity and biases can be accomplished through the frameworks of cultural humility as well as anti-oppression, both of which concern the exploration of racism at societal and individual levels (Brown, 2019;

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Gottlieb, 2021). Training that encourages exploration of the clinician’s identity may reduce the potential for re-traumatization and microaggressions that can occur in the therapeutic space when treating clients who have experienced racial discrimination (e.g., questioning a client’s interpretation of an experience of racial discrimination and asking clients to discuss how their actions contributed to racial discrimination; Spann, 2022). Understanding the facets of one’s own identity creates the framework for clinicians to understand the complexity of each client’s unique identity. Efforts to improve clinician training in racial socialization approaches must adopt intersectional approaches that consider overlapping aspects of diversity that impact youth’s identity and experiences both in clinical treatment and in the community. As noted by Galán and colleagues: Although clinicians have an ethical responsibility to consider how race-related factors such as racism are related to the client’s presenting concerns, it is important to do so through an intersectionality framework, recognizing that all children have multiple intersecting social identities that can influence their unique experiences of discrimination and privilege. People of color are not a monolith, and reducing clients to their race or making assumptions based on a stereotypical understanding of their race can be incredibly harmful. (2022, p. 588)

As such, in addition to race and ethnicity, effective training should provide opportunities for practitioners to explore gender, social location, ability, and other intersections of their own identities that are marginalized. Galán et al. (2022) advance an intersectional-contextual approach to understanding how racism interacts with other types of oppression like sexism, giving rise to unique manifestations of racism and racial coping along gendered lines. Training to improve clinician’s ability to engage ethnically marginalized youth should emphasize racial socialization competency and prepare clinicians to attend to these intersecting identities as they impact the protective practices and coping strategies utilized by youth and caregivers seeking mental health treatment.

Address and Redress Racism with Clients: Future Orientation Finally, training should emphasize that the clinician’s approach to the delivery of racial socialization must be strengths-based. Extended family members are emphasized in racial socialization as integral to the healthy development of Black youth (White-Johnson et al., 2010). Thus, clinicians must see the value in drawing upon the wisdom of past and present members of clients’ collective family units. The radical healing framework explores the need to develop culturally responsive pathways to healing and processing the detrimental impact of systemic oppression and entails the concept of radical hope (French et al., 2020). Radical hope draws on the legacy of faith, resilience, and perseverance of enslaved peoples and those oppressed by violence rooted in imperialistic values (Mosley et al., 2020). An example of radical hope includes the use of collective ancestral memories to give credibility to

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hopes of seemingly idealistic and unattainable societal reform (Chavez-Dueñas et al., 2019; French et al., 2020). Each framework effectively creates a pathway for resilience and the development of an optimistic future orientation in the face of delineating experiences such as racial discrimination. Effective clinician training should emphasize that treatment conceptualizations for youth of color should be framed in resilience as opposed to despair to highlight overcoming in the face of adversity imposed by external systems.

Meeting the Training Needs of Different Providers There are various opportunities throughout a clinician’s training that can increase their efficacy and effectiveness in engaging and treating families of color and in utilizing racial socialization therapeutically. While the most obvious time might be when clinicians begin their training as graduate students, intervening at any stage and throughout one’s career will be beneficial. As such, it is important to highlight unique elements across training modalities that yield improved therapeutic alliance, rapport, and client outcomes.

Graduate Program Recommendations Integrating racial socialization training into health service psychology graduate programs (e.g., clinical and counseling) is key to improving the provision of mental health services for youth of color and their families. To do so, actions need to be taken not just at an individual supervisory level but also at a program and structural level. Define Goals and Identify Gaps  A pre-training, program-wide assessment is an integral first step to define broad training goals. Programs should identify gaps in training for both supervisors and trainees as it pertains to clinicians’ competency in working with families of color, broaching race-related topics, and identifying and addressing racism-related stress and trauma. A program-wide effort centers on the idea that improving the provision of care for families of color must be a shared responsibility rather than a responsibility to be shouldered by students and faculty of color. Important areas to assess include supervisors’ and students’ skills, confidence, and stress regarding racial socialization transmission, racial identity development and exploration, and awareness of social inequalities in the United States. Additionally, it may be helpful to include intermediate instructors in racial socialization training efforts, such as advanced clinical students, to address gaps in students’ needs. Methodically assessing potential supervisors in terms of knowledge and self-awareness is of the utmost importance at this stage. Clinical supervisors expected to promote racial socialization competency in trainees must be competent

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themselves. To ensure this, they should complete planned training exercises and seek additional learning opportunities before supervising. Additional steps can be requesting feedback from students on courses across the department and piloting ungraded courses. Competency should be regularly evaluated with a continual assessment process in place rather than a single stamp of approval with no expiration date. Formalize Training  Training can be formalized in a manner that incentivizes continued education in the subject matter for graduate students. Many programs already offer specializations or training tracks based on coursework and practicum with specific populations. As such, programs might consider offering a formal training track or certification for students working with communities of color, using strengths-based practices to promote resilience against race-related stressors. That said, students will likely work with clients of color at some point during their training and beyond. Offering a specialization does not mean that those who choose not to specialize should not receive essential racial socialization training. Broadly, we recommend that programs integrate racial socialization skills throughout graduate training rather than in an isolated workshop or single course. Building racial socialization into the curriculum and practica demonstrates a longer-term commitment and avoids sending the “one and done” message more commonly associated with cultural competence models. To do so comprehensively, programs should consider offering racial socialization-­ specific practica focused on working with communities of color; clinical opportunities with families of color in training clinics; group and one-to-one supervision on racial socialization; and coursework based on racial socialization, racial coping strategies, racial trauma, and discrimination. Programs should additionally ensure that research advisors are trained in racial socialization, as research advisors and clinical supervisors are often different faculty members. Multicultural issues, racial trauma, racial socialization, and discrimination are highly relevant supervision topics not only in clinical settings with communities of color but also within research studies. Taking these steps creates space for meaningful dialogue in multicultural advising or supervisory issues. More broadly, these additions to psychology programs have implications for students’ perceptions of program diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and their relationship with supervisors. It is not enough to simply train graduate students in racial socialization approaches. We must also develop standardized systems of assessing the effectiveness of these trainings. Trainees, like supervisors, should be regularly assessed for racial socialization competency. This may take the form of surveys completed by trainees and their supervisors on their racial socialization competency at the beginning and end of clinical experiences. Throughout clinical supervision, trainees typically meet with supervisors either in group or one-to-one settings. These are excellent opportunities to review videos of instances in which trainees broach race-­ related topics with clients and then provide feedback.

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Content Recommendations  A recent field-level audit survey of graduate-level training in cultural humility practices revealed a general focus on cultural knowledge over exploration of identity—an over-emphasis on client identities and an under-emphasis on trainee identities (Galán et al., 2022). This is an important gap to consider particularly when health service psychology is still composed of predominantly White trainees, instructors, and institutional spaces. As such, it is essential to explicitly address how Whiteness and proximity to Whiteness play a role in the quality of care provided to families of color. A lack of intentional reflection on one’s own identity, particularly within the power imbalance of a White clinician working with clients of color, has the potential to perpetuate harm experienced by marginalized groups within the healthcare system. Taking care to thoughtfully reflect on one’s own social position and identity as well as their influence on clinical interactions is key to competently addressing and treating racial stress using relevant approaches like racial socialization (Anderson et al., 2019). Students should be familiar with common racial socialization strategies, differences in racial socialization practices based on sociodemographic variables (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, age), and outcomes related to discrimination and racial socialization intervention work. In addition to identifying racial socialization strategies and behaviors, students should be encouraged to consider how broader environments may shape racial socialization behaviors and motivations (e.g., proactive and reactive racial socialization behaviors). Supervisors may consider identifying how racial socialization strategies can be understood in the context of racial coping strategies more broadly as well as how racial socialization strategies map onto or correspond with existing treatment modalities taught in clinical settings. Restructure the Incentive System  An additional consideration is graduate programs’ capacity and individual faculty’s motivation to provide these training. In recent years, scholars have criticized the institutional “minority tax”, which refers to faculty of color being disproportionately tasked with additional duties such as diversity efforts, mentorship, and clinical responsibilities (Rodríguez et al., 2015). Yet there is evidence that this time-consuming and emotionally laborious diversity work is still not being rewarded in promotion decisions as much as activities regarded as traditional scholarship (Mallery et al., 2019). This disparity not only greatly hinders the career advancement of faculty of color and the diversification of the field but it also impacts the sustainability of any attempted diversity-related program implementation. Consider the following: What studies are funded? What work is paid or unpaid? Who typically takes on unpaid or volunteer work? Whose expertise is valued? How does this translate into promotions, hiring decisions, job stability, and other important goals? Without clear incentives for faculty, expecting the immediate uptake of racial socialization training by individual clinical ­supervisors is at best unrealistic and at worst further encouraging an inequitable system that overwhelmingly burdens people of color. Thus, it is important and necessary for the implementation of racial socialization training to have long-term motivators across the field of psychology and career trajectories.

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Practitioners and Supervisors Clinicians and Trainees  According to Clark (2022), 75 clinicians and trainees working in community-based settings (e.g., juvenile justice systems and large urban school districts) completed a racial socialization training emphasizing race-based stress and discrimination, racial socialization competency, racial trauma, and cultural humility. The activity’s primary aim was to determine the level of clinician-­ perceived feasibility, acceptability, and appropriateness related to racial socialization training in general. Outcomes were measured using questionnaires and surveys administered before and after the training along with the collection of open-ended responses from participants. The post-training survey was completed by 59 clinicians. While unpublished, the following are insights gleaned from the training of practitioners and supervisors. Preliminary data analysis revealed high levels of training satisfaction, themes of clinician safety, and the need for organization-wide training in racial socialization (Clark, 2022). For example, 96% of clinicians stated that they would recommend the training to colleagues; 95% indicated the training increased their knowledge of racial socialization; and 95% indicated the training increased their comfort working with African American clients with experience of racial trauma. Additionally, on average, clinicians perceived the training to be moderately to extremely feasible, acceptable, and appropriate for their work setting and current workflow. These initial data are promising as they indicate that the current training would be useful in filling the gap in clinician training. The current data also indicates that clinicians view racial socialization training as critical to serving their current population of clients. Themes of clinician safety emerged in open-ended feedback (Clark, 2022). For example, one clinician reported processing several of her personal experiences after the training. Therefore, consideration for clinician training may include providing optional safe spaces following training, to facilitate clinician reflection on ways in which training content may trigger personal recollection of potentially traumatic experiences based on their own identities (e.g., race, gender, ability, sexual orientation). It is imperative that both the training and safe spaces entail discussion of multiple avenues for clinicians to resolve personal experiences that arise during and after training. Furthermore, assisting clients in developing racial socialization skills may inevitably entail clinician exposure to client and family experiences of potentially traumatic events. Therefore, it is imperative that training equips clinicians to identify and respond to symptoms of vicarious traumatization that can potentially occur as a result of exposure to secondary trauma. It may also be helpful to normalize experiences of countertransference that could occur in therapeutic space when discussing race and racism. Clinicians should be encouraged to seek appropriate consultation and supervision when addressing countertransference as it arises. Validating clinicians personal experiences and providing them with education and tools to support their psychological well-being models the therapeutic environment they will create for families.

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Finally, clinicians expressed a desire for organization-wide racial socialization training to aid in the creation of safe workspaces (Clark, 2022). One clinician reported, “Our department would really benefit from you all presenting to the entire department on racial socialization. I noticed that there were a number of department members that were not present…I would go as far as to label them as agents of systemic racism.” Clinicians expressed that training behavioral health providers, without training others within their organization, may result in individual changes that are not supported by the culture in their workplace. In the case of clinicians in schools and juvenile justice settings, this could also lead to clients having their experiences with race and racism understood by a small percentage of personnel they interact with daily. Formal organization-wide training was seen as a step toward ensuring the proper culture is in place to address issues and support providers and the families they serve. Opting to deliver training on race and racism to service providers within an organization without training the entire organization often occurs when there is no buy-in for expanding cultural humility across the organization (Schmader et al., 2022). In these cases, the burden of change often lies with marginalized individuals, wielding little to no organizational power, who are most impacted by experiences of racial discrimination in the workplace. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that clinicians trained in racial socialization are not subsequently expected to carry the burden of changing the culture of their organization at the risk of their own well-being and safety. Supervisors  Before conducting racial socialization training, it is essential to understand the organization’s capacity and willingness to provide supervision reflective of cultural humility to clinicians being trained. That is, supervisors must be willing and able to model an interpersonal stance that is oriented toward understanding those with different identities from themselves (Hook et al., 2016). Supervisors with limited knowledge of racial socialization and multicultural psychotherapy must also be willing to take on the role of a learner when trainees have more extensive multicultural knowledge and experience than they do. Given the recent shift in the field of behavioral health that mandates diversity in behavioral health training, it is likely that several supervisors trained in prior years may have received antiquated education in multiculturalism likened to previous assertions that America is a “melting pot” built on meritocracy. Additionally, formal education in supervision is a relatively new requirement in the field of psychology. Therefore, several senior clinicians may not have obtained extensive formal training in supervision or diversity-related topics. Clark (2022), a clinician with over 20 years of experience, expressed the qualitative difference between racial socialization training and ­multicultural education offered in graduate schools in past decades. She stated, “I was worried I wouldn’t get much out of this training because I have so much experience, but the information you are presenting is so different from the education I received on diversity in my graduate training.” As a result, it may be necessary to provide safe spaces for supervisors to discuss their own fears, biases, knowledge gaps, and barriers prior to engaging in the supervision of clinicians with previous racial socialization training. Prior to training clinicians, it may be beneficial for

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organizations to informally assess the knowledge and readiness of current supervisory staff to provide appropriate supervision to clinicians trained in racial socialization and other multicultural therapeutic interventions.

Organizational Leadership Although training students and working professionals in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts are in vogue, less is known about initiatives targeting the leadership of organizations and institutions. Within governing bodies of mental health practice (e.g., APA, American Counseling Association, & National Association of Social Workers), requirements related to multicultural practice may have been enacted after those in leadership joined the organization. There are three practical ways this can be accomplished. First, forums must be provided for leaders of mental health providers to demonstrate their awareness of social problems and effective means of solving them. There is an urgency to address better facilitation of treatment for clients of color dealing with discrimination. Organizational leadership lies at the heart of discussion as it plays an integral role in recognizing and holding mental health professionals accountable. Future consideration of opportunities include but are not limited to training programs or consultations for the continuation of DEI and education workshops, promotion of humility and discomfort when discussing racism, and fostering environments that are supportive to engage in racial self-reflection (Sue et al., 2007). Regarding racism, Sue (2004) notes the greatest challenge in mental health settings is “making the ‘invisible’ visible” (p. 762). Relative discussions surrounding racism in mental health professions are meaningful in the context of effective training opportunities for organizations. Second, organizations must offer opportunities for leaders in organizations to openly discuss and critically acknowledge racial stressors and their substantial impact. Efforts should emphasize fostering supportive environments that will allow for discomfort and vulnerability. Training should also be designed to influence how we think about multicultural competencies. It is important to first understand the dynamics of racism, even if classified as “subtle” (i.e., microaggressions) when interacting with clients of color. The invisibility of microaggressions in practice manifests into harm and can be further perpetuated when misunderstood, invalidated, or negated by professionals. Organizations should actively seek consultation from groups committed to addressing issues of diversity and inclusion. Training programs will allow leaders of organizations to note the disparities amongst different cultures and to learn how their biases inform judgment (Schmader et al., 2022). Throughout this initiative, educational structures will provide an opportunity for sustained inquiry, not assumption, into how organizations can support youth and families of color.

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Third, organizations and institutions can incorporate anti-bias training to challenge and change how individuals interact with one another (Schmader et al., 2022). A good deal of positional power lies with mental health professionals, which consequently makes them less likely to adequately assess their role in committing racist acts against clients of color (Sue et al., 2007). Harm is often unrecognized or biased, leaving the damage minimized. Anti-bias training would prove substantially effective for training organizations on how to reduce biased-based behaviors. Workshops would allow organizations the time to learn about other racial groups and cultural norms, while also effectively focusing on the ways to confront stereotyping and prejudice (Ashburn-Nardo et al., 2008) and should be paired with proactive policy changes within the institution. For example, with the knowledge from training, organizations should implement policies that hold leaders accountable for biased actions. Such accountability supports the notion of a cultural shift within the organization over time. Organizations must also acknowledge that racial socialization training requires difficult and uncomfortable truth-telling within organizations. Implementing training on a larger scale will require governing bodies within the mental health profession to acknowledge the gaps in training and the ways in which the field of behavioral health has historically perpetuated racism. Given the painful legacy of race and racism in this country, some organizations may be tempted to avoid the issues and engage in one or more common organizational pitfalls (do nothing; avoidance; invalidate historical facts, data, and marginalized individuals; etc.). One such approach is deciding to “do nothing” and operate as usual. This approach exacerbates existing issues and continues to relegate these conversations to small pockets within the organization, silently eroding the culture and decreasing morale. The do-nothing approach also continues to silence the experiences of those impacted and creates a culture that thrives on performative diversity rather than a true culture of safety for the entire workforce. Additionally, as individuals within organizations share their experiences, initial responses may include a stance of defensiveness or varied levels of avoidance. Preemptive methods to circumvent the aforementioned responses include enforcing procedures and norms around discussions of race and racism within the organization. Organizations should also create and enforce policies and procedures that validate and protect impacted individuals. Following, organizational training, data collected may be used to integrate anti-racism and discrimination practices in hiring, onboarding, and new-hire training protocols to establish a commitment to diversity for new personnel. The strategies listed are not exhaustive but rather a springboard to facilitate additional discussion around the complexities and pitfalls of creating a culture among leaders or institutions. The potential of an organization perpetuating harm should be considered when weighing the risks and benefits of implementing training. Organizational training involves a substantial degree of risk-taking on behalf of leadership but can yield an environment of safety and productivity for the entire workforce and youth and families of color served.

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Limitations in Implementation of Training Programs Though graduate programs are uniquely positioned to embed racial socialization training into practicums and curricula, we must anticipate several limitations. In theory, a strong and consistent understanding of diversity and cultural humility would pave the way for racial socialization to be seamlessly integrated throughout graduate training. However, in a recent survey of nearly 300 graduate students and faculty in clinical psychology graduate programs, researchers found that 24% of respondents reported a lack of racial and social justice issue-based courses in their programs, 48% reported a lack of formalized training on cultural aspects of the clinical encounter, and 88% of the students who did receive training in cultural humility were largely dissatisfied with their experience (Galán et al., 2022). To make matters more difficult, there is vagueness around who is the responsible entity for addressing these issues in implementation within and between programs. Galán and colleagues further discovered that 100% of programs represented by those surveyed lacked any kind of oversight or continuous assessment of clinical supervisors’ own training and progress in cultural humility. The two primary program accreditation bodies, APA and the Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System (PCSAS) provide general DEI guidelines, but there are no such guidelines on overseeing these training processes, assessing the quality and rigor of the training, reviewing instructors’ ability to provide such training, and other such evaluative criteria. Programs and individual faculty leading racial socialization training may thus have little formal support or guidance in carrying out these important efforts, furthering the variability of training experiences students may have across programs. Expected limitations are gleaned from challenges faced in implementing DEI-­ related training into graduate programs but, to our knowledge, no empirical evidence exists on best practices for training graduate students in racial socialization practices. More broadly, few studies to date have examined the effects of cultural humility training on client or service outcomes in mental health settings, and there are notable gaps in this body of work, including the use of pre-post designs rather than randomized controlled trials (Benuto et al., 2018; Chu et al., 2022). Additional research is sorely needed to identify and implement effective approaches to improve clinicians’ racial socialization competency and standards of care for youth and families of color using strengths-based, context-informed approaches.

Future Directions Taken together, racial health disparities illustrate the precarious position of youth of color and their families who face racial inequality and need culturally humble therapeutic services, yet rarely receive them because of the same systems of racial

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inequality. This reality highlights how vital cultural humility is for mental health clinicians across career stages from graduate students to faculty supervisors. We argue that just as racial socialization is the lens through which young people learn to see, understand, and respond to race in the world around them with their families, clinicians can benefit from a similar lens of racial socialization to inform their clinical practice and thus yield more positive treatment outcomes. As a guiding theory, RECAST illustrates how bolstering youth’s racial literacy through racial socialization can support increased racial coping self-efficacy. Similarly, clinician’s racial response self-efficacy can be bolstered through a ­parallel process of racial socialization. RECAST emphasizes processes of confidence or self-efficacy, skills, and stress management among youth and families and thus provides a basis for all providers of the process. We now summarize recommendations from the chapter and discuss those as pathways to increased racial socialization competency, through tenets of confidence, skills, and stress management.

Confidence or Self-Efficacy Clinician confidence and self-efficacy in their ability to deliver culturally humble care can be bolstered through various training agents. Systemically, at the very top are the professional bodies that provide accreditation to training programs. Professional bodies like the APA include principles emphasizing the “value of cultural diversity and differences” in their evaluation for accreditation (APA, 2015, p. 31). Professional bodies play a vital role in ensuring that the cultural humility commonly discussed in the field is prioritized by training teams. Yet there remains a need for clear guidelines on overseeing this aspect of training processes, assessing the quality and rigor of cultural diversity training, understanding instructors’ ability to provide such training, and other such evaluative criteria. At the subsequent level, university departments and training programs play an instrumental role in the racial socialization process of trainees. Among recommendations discussed in this chapter, it is encouraged that programs begin with a pre-­ training, program-wide assessment that identifies opportunities for growth in training for faculty, clinical supervisors, and trainees. Programs should consider formalized training specific to the needs of marginalized communities. Formalizing this training and establishing clinical tracks for this work center youth and families of color instead of placing them at the margins of clinicians’ training. Simultaneously, formalizing these training tracks challenges notions suggesting that scholarship that centers on marginalized communities is a less rigorous psychological science. With confidence in their professional bodies and training programs, clinicians are more likely to have increased self-efficacy in their ability to respond to and navigate racial encounters in the clinical space.

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Skills Development and Practice With bolstered self-efficacy, clinicians can confidently move into skills development and practice. Skills developed from a lens of racial socialization can equip clinicians with the tools necessary to provide culturally responsive care. As discussed in this chapter, the development of these skills begins with assessing one’s own social positionality and taking an inventory of existing skills around communication on race. In addition to this reflection, it was recommended that trainees be educated on common racial socialization strategies, predictors of racial socialization practices, and outcomes related to the construct. With this reflection and evidence-­based education, as prerequisites, clinicians will be better prepared to begin developing higher-level skills of cultural humility and enact racial coping tools with patients. One pathway to developing these skills may be through participation in community-­based, culturally relevant interventions. This experience should only be undertaken following critical reflection and with ongoing culturally responsive supervision. A significant body of research suggests that culturally responsive interventions based in communities of color yield positive psychosocial outcomes including reduction of risky behaviors (Belgrave et al., 2004; Murry et al., 2007), reduced anger and aggression (Stevenson, 2003), and parenting skills development (Coard et al., 2013). Funding and institutional support of these programs can create a ripple effect, resulting in the development of culturally responsive skills for many participating clinicians. In fact, these applied research interventions can “bridge the gap” between research and clinical practice with youth (Jones et al., 2020a, b). This is further demonstrated with feasibility data from programs like the EMBRace intervention (Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race; see R. E. Anderson & Stevenson, 2019 for full review). Given the sensitive nature of community-based research (Christopher et al., 2008), researchers and clinical supervisors with longstanding relationships with communities of color should be identified. By promoting and supporting community-based research, especially those from a community-based participatory research approach, training programs, and clinicians can maintain relationships with the communities with whom they work, support the communities’ autonomy, and develop therapeutic skills relevant to often underserved communities. Interdisciplinary Collaboration  Though they are impactful contexts for training, clinician skills in racial socialization, and ultimately cultural humility, must extend beyond training universities, community-based interventions, and traditional psychotherapy spaces. Youth experience race-related stressors across various systems (i.e., healthcare, education, social media), and concurrently, mental health professionals are increasingly being integrated into various contexts (i.e., schools, hospitals, primary care clinics). These intersecting systems are also contexts for racial socialization–whether explicit or implicit. Continuity can be created by incorporating racial socialization across these youth-serving systems in thoughtful, integrated ways as delivered by clinicians trained from a racial socialization lens. Psychologists,

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and mental health professionals broadly, are well positioned to be leaders in this space, advocating for the integration of cultural assets of families of color in these varied contexts. For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) presented a call to action, acknowledging the racial health disparities facing American children and challenging practitioners to act in novel, strengths-based approaches (Flores & Committee on Pediatric Research, 2010). Among these recommendations was the mention of the integration of cultural strengths like racial socialization practices into clinical care. As psychologists are increasingly engaged in integrated care teams and work alongside other providers, clinicians can contribute to important racial socialization processes for youth and caregivers as well as other medical providers on care teams.

Stress Management Lastly, clinicians trained with a lens of racial socialization and steeped in cultural humility may also be better equipped to support stress management among youth and caregivers as well as manage their own stress amid racial encounters. As research suggests that some clinicians face discomfort when talking about issues of race or other identity-related stressors, those who are trained from a lens of racial socialization may be better equipped to manage their own stress during cross-racial conversations in therapy, therefore, freeing them up to adequately attend to families coping with racial stress (Knox et al., 2003). When clinicians effectively manage their own stress and are freed to adequately process race-related stressors with clients, they may even see improvements in coping across other domains. Parallel processes have been observed in youth’s racial socialization processes. Among eighth graders, racial socialization messaging contributed not only to their race-­ related coping but to the youth’s general coping as well (Anderson et al., 2018a, b, c). Finally, clinicians can grow in cultural humility when they are trained from an approach that adopts a racial socialization lens. Just as clinicians and researchers tout the value of racial socialization messaging, efficacy, skills, and stress management for youth’s thriving, clinicians’ skills can be bolstered through this parallel process. Adopting this novel approach to training can support youth’s mental health and challenge long-standing disparities in care.

Conclusion How America addresses and redresses racism is a major point of contention as of the writing of this chapter. States, school districts, and individual households grapple with ways to effectively combat and communicate about racism—or not. More germane to this work, organizations intimately tied to psychology are in the throes of a mass exodus of leadership and members as well as invited resignations over

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diversity-related requirements, infrastructure, and unequal treatment. As luminary scholars in the field are resigning from their positions and posts, it is imperative for scholars focused on anti-racism initiatives broadly, and racial communication strategies specifically, to provide a steady course of recommendations for how we can continue improving the psychological outcomes for all Americans, specifically those understudied and often demoralized in our literature. Racial socialization is not just the observation of strategies between families of color. It is also a clear path by which trainees in the fields of behavioral health services can grow more competent in understanding how their knowledge, awareness, and skills as clinicians are shaped by race and racism. Furthermore, if we deny clinicians’ abilities to improve in their racialized strategies, we are furthering the disparities and dismal outcomes seen in therapy because of structural and interpersonal racism. As described in this chapter, it is essential to provide opportunities throughout the maturation of a trainee and professional to frequently take stock of one’s racial identity about our client’s presenting problems. It is therefore critical to enhance mental health services through the inclusion of effective racially specific practices for clinicians to decrease psychosocial problems in families of color.

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Part III

Antiracist Socialization in White Families

Chapter 7

Upending White Normativity in Parenting Research Jamie L. Abaied

When asked how their parents talked about race or racism when they were children, most White adults remember nothing but silence (Tatum, 2017). Despite this silence, whiteness is very much a part of parenting in America. Racial identity shapes how White parents discuss race with their children (Ferguson et al., 2022) as well as the choices parents make about how, where, and with whom they raise their children (Hagerman, 2018). Yet White parents typically avoid discussing race with their White children (for a review, see Perry et al., 2022), even when high-profile current events involving racism happen in their communities (Ferguson et  al., 2022; Underhill, 2018). When asked why, White parents reveal that they view race as an irrelevant, unnecessary, or even inappropriate topic for their children (Abaied & Perry, 2021) and adolescents (Abaied et al., 2022). If family racial discussions do occur, White parents tend to emphasize a color-blind rather than anti-racist approach (for a review, see Spanierman, 2022). During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, for a brief moment, it seemed that the tides might be changing. White people showed up to march alongside their neighbors of color in larger numbers than ever before (Harmon & Tavornese, 2020). Among those who marched were children and adolescents, many of whom continued to engage in racial justice activism, both independently and alongside their parents, in the months that followed (Baskin-Sommers et  al., 2021). The words “Black Lives Matter” appeared in places where they had never appeared before – on lawn signs in front of White families’ homes, painted on the pavement in majority-­ White cities, and erected on flags in front of town halls and public schools; popular press articles urging White parents to discuss race with their children proliferated in American news media (Bigler et al., 2020). J. L. Abaied (*) University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. P. Witherspoon et al. (eds.), Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States, National Symposium on Family Issues 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44115-8_7

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A year and a half later, it became clear that this brief moment in time, when the White parents who claimed to support racial justice seemed to outnumber those who opposed it, was over. Egged on by political operatives claiming to oppose the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in schools (despite the fact that CRT is not taught in schools), White parents began finding their voice about whiteness, in ways both public and harmful. White politically conservative parents began showing up at school board meetings, demanding that books that discuss race be removed from libraries, questioning the validity of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and accusing schools of making their kids “feel bad” because they are White (Ray & Gibbons, 2021). Some of these incidents escalated to threats, harassment, and even forced termination of school staff (Stringer, 2022). This movement, which I will refer to as the anti-CRT movement, echoes similar movements in which White parents’ ignorance, fear, and racism were harnessed by political operatives to oppose civil rights progress such as desegregation of public schools (Devlin, 2018) and efforts to increase linguistic sensitivity for Black children (Baugh, 2000). Anti-CRT protestors invoke both their children’s whiteness and their roles as parents to justify their actions. Thus, it is appropriate to conceptualize their actions as parenting behaviors, and parenting scholars should contribute their expertise to interdisciplinary efforts to understand the causes and consequences of the anti-CRT movement. To do so, we must also explore the role of whiteness, not simply because the majority of parents involved in the anti-CRT movement are White and have White children, but because all of these parents are engaged in activism that reinforces White supremacy. Yet the field of parenting research in its current state is not well positioned to understand the role of whiteness in parenting. Ironically, the field of parenting itself is inherently defined by whiteness – whether parenting scholars intended it or not. This chapter elucidates how the field of parenting research implicitly centers whiteness. Specifically, I explore ways that parenting research ignores White supremacy as an overarching context of family functioning and engages in White normativity, implicitly positioning White parents’ perspectives, practices, and experiences as a normative standard from which parents of color diverge (Frankenberg, 1993; García Coll et al., 1996; Roberts & Mortenson, 2022). I will discuss the growing body of research that is moving the field forward by examining the centering of whiteness in parenting. I argue that failing to explicitly address whiteness in parenting is not only failing to challenge White supremacy, but is also bad science. I end with concrete suggestions for changing our existing research practices to understand the urgent and overdue question of how whiteness and parenting intersect. While race is a social construct that varies between sociopolitical contexts, I focus on whiteness in the context of research conducted with families in the United States.

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Approaches to Parenting Research I will explore the implicit centering of whiteness within two types of approaches to parenting research. Domain-specific parenting research asks focused questions regarding how specific parenting behaviors contribute to specific aspects of development within a context of interest. Much of this research is designed to assess ways that parents “target” specific developmental processes in their children. Parent responses to children’s emotions and parent social gatekeeping are two examples in which researchers focus on a parenting behavior in a specific domain in attempts to understand how parents contribute to their children’s developing adjustment within this domain (i.e., emotion regulation and social competence, respectively). Broadband parenting research adopts a more generalized lens by exploring parenting constructs (such as warmth, hostility, autonomy support, and psychological control) that manifest in a variety of contexts and do not typically target a particular child outcome. Although overlap between the two approaches occurs, a domain-­ specific approach tends to focus on a subset of specific parenting behaviors, whereas broadband parenting research focuses on general parenting styles. Parenting research within both domain-specific and broadband approaches implicitly centers whiteness, but also explicitly ignores whiteness. I will begin by contextualizing the notable lacunae of domain-specific research on White parent racial socialization. Then I will “zoom out” to the broadband parenting literature and discuss ways that researchers continue to implicitly center and explicitly ignore whiteness in this work.

Whiteness in Domain-Specific Parenting Research Absence of Racial Socialization Studies of White Families Parents are not the sole source of socialization in a child’s life, but due to time, proximity, and attachment, they are a highly important and impactful one (Bornstein, 2015). Much of the domain-specific parenting literature seeks to understand how parents contribute to basic developmental competencies in their children (such as self-­ regulation, cognitive functioning, and social skills) as well as children’s growing understanding of themselves and the world around them. Parenting researchers routinely study ways that White parents contribute to developmental competencies in just about any domain other than race. We ask questions about how parents teach their children to get along with peers (Werner et al., 2014), manage their schoolwork (Wu et  al., 2022), understand and regulate their emotions (Zimmer-Gembeck et  al., 2022), understand politics and civic engagement (Patterson et al., 2019), manage and monitor children’s media use (Corcoran et al., 2022), conform to versus challenge gender stereotypes (Leaper & Friedman,

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2007), and cope with stress (Abaied & Stanger, 2017), to name a few. We have developed interventions designed to help parents teach their children language skills (Roberts et  al., 2019), discuss sex and puberty (Coakley et  al., 2017), engage in elaborative reminiscing with children (van Bergen et al., 2018), prevent children’s disruptive behavior (Helander et al., 2022), and more. Like the vast majority of the psychological literature (Buchanan et al., 2021) and developmental science in particular (Nielsen et al., 2017), White parents are systematically overrepresented in these areas of research. Perhaps the only area of parenting research in which White parents are systemically underrepresented is studies of racial socialization. A vast and nuanced literature exists that explores the ways that parents of color contribute to their children’s developing racial identity and understanding of racism (i.e., ethnic-racial socialization, or ERS; Hughes, Chap. 4, this volume). Enough research has been published on ERS in families of color for two meta-analyses to date (Huguley et al., 2019, 68 studies; Wang et al., 2020, 102 studies). One review found that 259 articles on ERS were published from 2010 to 2018, but only 10 included disaggregated data on White ERS (Umaña-Taylor & Hill, 2020). Much of the research on ERS in families of color involves high-quality methods, including detailed in-depth qualitative analysis; well-validated and reliable quantitative measures that were developed based on qualitative data; multiple informants; and longitudinal designs (Umaña-Taylor & Hill, 2020; Wang et al., 2020). In comparison, the literature on racial socialization in White families is decades behind (Loyd & Gaither, 2018; Umaña-Taylor & Hill, 2020). At the time of writing, 25 peer-reviewed published empirical studies directly measure White parent racial socialization; over half of these studies were published in the last two years, demonstrating a dramatic shift in the field. Most of these studies include qualitative analysis of interview data (Cox et al., 2022; Freeman et al., 2022; Gillen-O’Neel et al., 2022; Hagerman, 2014, 2017; Hamm, 2001; Underhill, 2018, 2021; Underhill & Simms, 2022; Vittrup, 2018; Vittrup & Holden, 2011) or of brief responses to open-ended prompts or survey questions (Abaied et  al., 2022; Abaied & Perry, 2021; Ferguson et al., 2022; Leneman et al., 2022; Perry et al., 2019; Rogers et al., 2021; Scott et al., 2022; Smalls Glover et al., 2022; Sullivan et al., 2022; Zucker & Patterson, 2018). Three studies have assessed White racial socialization via observations (Galán et al., 2022; Katz, 2003; Pahlke et al., 2012) and three have incorporated survey measures based on the broader ERS literature in families of color (Cox et al., 2022; Zucker & Patterson, 2018; Williams & Banjaree, 2021). Although these studies provide a solid foundation for domain-specific parenting research focused on White racial socialization, the literature in its current state (including my own contributions) suffers from some unfortunate limitations. First, most of these studies have small sample sizes. Second, several of these studies use survey measures that do not allow researchers to ask follow-up questions or explore racial socialization in depth. Additionally, survey measures of ERS were developed for families of color, who are marginalized due to White supremacy; these surveys are not valid measurement tools for racial socialization in White families, who are instead the beneficiaries of White supremacy (Moffitt & Rogers, 2022). Third, most of the extant research on White parent racial socialization is descriptive, providing

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insight into how and why White parents discuss, or fail to discuss, race with their children, but without directly testing associations between parenting and children’s racial beliefs, attitudes, knowledge, or identity. These studies tell us what White parents do or say they do regarding race, but most do not provide empirical evidence of the impact of parents’ words or actions. Furthermore, most of these studies overly rely on parent reports without including White youths’ perspectives of the parenting they are receiving or the ways they react to parenting (Hagerman, 2022). This is a problem not only because incorporating child perspectives is a foundational component of parenting research, but also because parents communicate messages about race that are not captured in their responses to interviews or surveys (Cox et al., 2022; Hagerman, 2018) or communicate contradictory messages about race even within the same assessment (Abaied & Perry, 2021; Cox et al., 2022). However, we should acknowledge that the methodological limitations of extant empirical studies of White racial socialization are not necessarily due to researcher oversights but to limited resources. Recruiting large samples, collecting data from multiple informants and minors, and using rich methodologies such as interviews or observations are mostly out of reach for researchers who cannot obtain external funding. Funding agencies that support parenting research have little to no interest in research on whiteness. Parallel to the lack of research on racial socialization in White families is the lack of attention to racial constructs as developmental outcomes in studies of parenting. Although we have some basic research on the ages at which children understand concepts such as racial categories and prejudice, “[w]e know very little about the processes by which White children and children of color internalize racial privilege and assume their status in the racial hierarchy” (Waxman, 2021, p. 897). Waxman (2021) also makes the critical observation that although we have large, nationally representative, multidisciplinary datasets that assess ways that social contexts contribute to child development, racial outcomes – such as how children acquire racial labels and categories, come to understand racial prejudice and privilege, or develop their racial identity – were simply not incorporated into these studies as child outcomes, nor was parent racial socialization included in measures of family functioning. This lack of attention to race is particularly striking given that studies such as the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), and The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (ADD Health) attempted to be comprehensive in their assessment of developmental antecedents and outcomes, including a wide variety of measures of many aspects of youths’ environments and their cognitive, emotional, and social development. When reading over the research protocols for these studies, it seems as though they measured nearly everything except processes of racial development. One can only conclude that racial socialization and children’s racial development were simply not a priority for the principal investigators and funding agencies behind these studies. Instead, these landmark longitudinal studies, which have made substantial contributions to the field of developmental science, implicitly center and explicitly ignore whiteness.

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 resence of White Supremacy in Domain-Specific P Parenting Research When choosing which domain-specific aspects of parenting to study, researchers are asserting what domains of human development they view as worthy of inquiry. The lopsided nature of the racial socialization literature strongly suggests that researchers in our field – and the institutions that financially support their work – view racial socialization as relevant only to people who experience racism, but not (White) people who perpetrate, are complicit in, and benefit from racism. As a result, we have failed to prioritize the study of parenting processes underlying the development of racism in White youth. It is worth taking a moment to consider how remarkable it is that studies of White parent racial socialization are so rare. Due to racism and White supremacy, race is a robust predictor of the paths we take through life, and White persons experience systemic advantage in essentially every context of human development (for reviews, see Pieterse & Powell, 2016; Priest et al., 2021). A wealth of social science research demonstrates that the social construct of race – including Whiteness – affects every facet of our lives and is an indelible part of ourselves and the world around us. Much of this research is in disciplines that closely align or overlap with developmental and family science, such as counseling psychology (e.g., Helms, 2020; Neville et al., 2000, 2013), social psychology (e.g., Apfelbaum et al., 2012; Richeson & Shelton, 2007), and sociology (e.g., Baker & O’Connell, 2022; Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Gallagher, 2019; O’Connell, 2019). Extant research provides ample evidence that White people espouse beliefs, support policies, and take actions that reinforce White supremacy and cause systemic marginalization and considerable harm to people of color, and interdisciplinary theories have been developed to understand the antecedents of White racism (e.g., Lewis Jr., 2021; Roberts & Rizzo, 2021). Within parenting research itself, decades of research show us that White supremacy forces parents of color to expend considerable time, resources, and emotional labor to prepare their children to weather the racism they will inevitably face, support their self-esteem in a society that views them as inferior to Whites, and help them find joy in their culture in a society that continually silences and sanctions their voices (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019; Umaña-Taylor & Hill, 2020). All of these indicators point to whiteness as a key piece of the puzzle of human development. Yet somehow, parenting researchers have rarely turned their focus to whiteness as a topic worthy of study. The failure to explore the racial development of White youth (and how parenting contributes and reacts to such development) becomes even more surprising considering how much our field has focused on preventing other negative behaviors in youth. Consider youth aggression and antisocial behavior, for example. A PsycINFO search for peer-reviewed articles with some variant of the word “parenting” or “aggression” in the title (search terms “parent*” and “aggress*”) yields 1456 results. A similar search for studies of parenting and antisocial behavior yields 550 results. In addition, several published meta-analyses have assessed the efficacy of parent training interventions at reducing or preventing antisocial behavior in youth (e.g.,

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McCart et  al., 2006; Piquero et  al., 2016). Clearly, parenting researchers have devoted considerable time and resources to understanding the role of parents in promoting or reducing aggression and antisocial behavior in their children, and this knowledge base has been leveraged in parent-based intervention protocols. Presumably, parenting scholars (and the agencies who fund them) have prioritized studying youth aggression and antisocial behavior due to the need to prevent harm to other persons. Since we know that White racism causes substantial harm, even to very young children of color (Benner et al., 2022; Berry et al., 2021; Trent et al., 2019; Yip et al., 2019), why have we not prioritized the study of parental contributions to racism in White youth in order to prevent such harm? The lack of explicit attention to whiteness in domain-specific parenting research stems from White normativity. As stated by Seaton (2022), “Racism positions Whiteness, White culture, and White people as ‘standard’ and the ‘norm’ to which all other individuals are compared implicitly and/or explicitly” (p. 938). White normativity implicitly centers White people’s experience and is fueled by White supremacy, which positions White people as inherently superior and deserving of their dominant societal position (e.g., Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Feagin & Ducey, 2018). As a result of White normativity, researchers rarely focus on White youths’ racial development or how White parents contribute to White youths’ racial development, instead viewing race as a topic only relevant to samples of color (Moffitt & Rogers, 2022). White normativity is not unique to parenting research but rather is a broad problem that is endemic to social science including the field of psychology, which has routinely positioned White people as the assumed norm (Roberts & Mortenson, 2022). Parenting researchers must face the reality that White normativity has contributed to the lack of empirical investigations of whiteness in our field. As argued by Karras et al. (2021): “the dearth of white ERS [ethnic-racial socialization] and ERI [ethnic-racial identity] research is not neutral; rather it is an artifact of racial inequity wherein concepts of normative development are centered around the experiences of being white and middle-class” (p. 1307). Most parenting researchers – myself included – were trained in intellectual environments that implicitly centered White families as raceless defaults and viewed race as only relevant to families of color. Indeed, authors are much less likely to mention the race of participants as the proportion of the sample that is White increases, even when the study is focused on race (Roberts & Mortenson, 2022). This illustrates a clear pattern in which scholars tend to only call attention to race as it applies to samples of color, implying that they view White samples as raceless. When viewed from the framework of White normativity, it is easy to see how the literature on racial socialization and children’s racial development is now so imbalanced in favor of samples of color. Why would we study racial socialization in White families if we do not think of White as a race? Why would we include measures of racial development in nationally representative studies of child development if we believe that the concept of race applies only to a subset of the population? In this way, the implicit presence of whiteness has prevented research that explicitly focuses on whiteness as a domain of human development.

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White normativity has created structural barriers in our field that have stymied work on White racial socialization. Indeed, the inadequate knowledge base on racial socialization in White families is consistent with a larger pattern of relegating racial issues to the sidelines of social science research. This pattern manifests in a few different ways. First, scholars who study racial issues have historically seen their work funneled away from mainstream, high impact-factor publication outlets to “specialty” journals, which have historically been under-valued in the field (Buchanan et al., 2021; Roberts & Mortenson, 2022). Consistent with this trend, the majority of ERS research on families of color is published in specialty journals focused on marginalized populations (Umaña-Taylor & Hill, 2020). Second, scholars who study racial issues must weather racial bias in the peer review process and submit their work to a publishing industry that is dominated by White gatekeepers (Buchanan et al., 2021; Roberts & Mortenson, 2022) as well as navigate exclusionary social systems that prevent scholars of color from developing a sense of belonging in their fields (Dupree & Kraus, 2022). Third, these same scholars have struggled to secure external funding to support work on racial issues, which until very recently were not a priority at most funding agencies. Since most of the scholars focusing on race in developmental and family science are people of color, these scholars are also held back by the underfunding of principal investigators of color at agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF; Chen et al., 2022) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH; Taffe & Gilpin, 2021). As a result of underfunding and racism in publishing, family scientists seeking to study race have been systematically under-­ resourced and under-cited, which de-incentivizes junior scholars from focusing on racial issues in their work. Fourth, a lack of resources also leads to work with more limited methods and smaller samples, which both limits our knowledge base and makes it harder to publish studies that focus on race in high-impact journals. Due to these barriers, all of which are symptoms of structural racism in developmental and family science, the study of racial socialization is estimated to have been delayed by approximately thirty years (Hughes, Chap. 4, this volume). Since George Floyd’s murder and the resulting worldwide protests in the spring of 2020, many journals that publish parenting research have initiated special issues or solicited commentaries focused on racism, adaptive functioning in communities of color, and/or whiteness. This is a welcome change but clearly a reactive one, and it is long overdue. How can we capture White parents’ contributions to their children’s understanding of the world around them without asking how they help their children understand race, including their own whiteness? How can we understand parenting itself without taking into account the societal structure of White supremacy in which all parenting and youth development take place (Rogers et al., 2021)? The truth is, we cannot. As stated by Seaton et al. (2018), “White youth do not develop in a vacuum outside the system of racial oppression” (p. 774). Failing to consider White supremacy as a context of development, as well as failing to consider parenting and youth racial development as specific targets of study, provides a distorted incomplete picture of parenting processes. Simply put, ignoring whiteness is bad science. Omitting the study of whiteness from parenting research is also hindering efforts to eradicate racism. We know that youth of color experience racial discrimination,

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which is perpetrated by a variety of people in their lives (e.g., teachers, school staff, peers, law enforcement officers) and which substantially compromises their psychosocial adjustment (Benner et al., 2018, 2022; Yip et al., 2019). More broadly, large portions of the White population of the United States vote for political candidates who support overtly racist policies and practices, and White male adolescents are disproportionately likely to commit acts of domestic terrorism targeting communities of color (Seaton, 2022). Yet developmental science has little to tell us about the developmental pathways that precede White racism. Seaton (2022) elaborates: There is no greater indictment of developmental science than the fact that it has failed to produce empirical research that explains: (1) how White youth learn to be racist, (2) when White youth learn to be racist, (3) the specific individuals who teach White youth to be racist, (4) the specific institutions that reinforce racist beliefs among White youth, and (5) the consequences of White youth’s racist behaviors in childhood, adolescence and adulthood including domestic terrorism (p. 940).

As parenting researchers, we have a critical role to play in righting this wrong. White children are highly likely to internalize racial stereotypes and color-blind racial ideology (Pauker et al., 2010, 2015, 2016) and develop implicit racial bias (Baron, 2015). At some point in their development, White youth will potentially perpetrate and most certainly witness racial bias and discrimination, and through social media, White youth will interact with content that normalizes racism and hegemonic whiteness (Frey et al., 2022). If intergenerational transmission of racism is occurring in White families – and what data we have suggests that it is – then we must find ways to disrupt it (Seaton, 2022; Spanierman, 2022). Thus, if we truly want our field to be anti-racist and in service of social justice, racial socialization in White families should be a top priority for domain-specific parenting research.

Implicit Centering of Whiteness in Parenting Research The same white normativity that has delayed domain-specific parenting research on whiteness has affected the parenting literature more broadly, but in somewhat different ways. This includes domain-specific research that focuses on areas of parenting other than racial socialization, as well as research on broadband parenting constructs. Although the field has made substantial progress in improving the inclusivity and cultural sensitivity of our theories and measures, some vestigial traces of White normativity remain.

Legacy of Deficit Models of Human Development Historically, social scientists studying children of color have applied deficit models to their research by focusing on adverse experiences and negative adjustment outcomes and ignoring positive experiences and protective factors in samples of color.

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White normativity underlies deficit models, as they position White families as the norm against which families of color are compared and found lacking (García Coll et al., 1996; McLoyd, 2006). Another key component of deficit models is a failure to explore unique strengths in communities of color that are not captured by research questions and methods designed from a White perspective (García Coll et al., 1996; Rogoff et al., 2017). As a result of deficit models, the knowledge base on the development of children and families of color is heavily skewed toward studies that assess the maladaptive developmental consequences of under-resourced, chronically stressful environments (Cabrera & the SRCD Ethnic and Racial Issues Committee, 2013). Although not solely focused on parenting, a common theme in deficit models is to blame chaotic home environments and parenting practices when youth of color lag behind their white peers on various indicators of child functioning (García Coll et  al., 1996; Miller-Cotto et  al., 2021). A 1990 special issue of Child Development focused on the development of children of color and García Coll et al.’s (1996) Integrative Model represented pivotal shifts toward approaches that instead center the experiences of youth of color, acknowledge the ways that families adapt to structural constraints (including systemic racism), and assess the role of unique strengths and assets in communities of color (McLoyd, 2006; Seaton et al., 2018). In recent years, we have continued to see a clear shift away from deficit models in favor of more inclusive, strengths-based approaches that focus on ways that communities of color develop resilience and adapt to marginalization to achieve developmental competencies (for reviews, see Perez-Brena et  al., 2018; Rogoff et  al., 2017). Yet we must remain vigilant for signs that the legacy of deficit model approaches in developmental and family science, and the White normativity that underlies them, are still influencing our research. A study may be perpetuating the deficit model if it focuses on adverse experiences and outcomes in families of color and does not include any of the following: (a) the joint consideration of strengths and protective factors in families of color, including cultural assets, adaptive processes, and/or active coping with marginalization (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019; García Coll et al., 1996; Miller-Cotto et al., 2021; Rogoff et al., 2017); (b) measures designed and validated for the study’s specific subpopulations (Buchanan et  al., 2021; Miller-Cotto et  al., 2021; Yoshikawa et  al., 2016); (c) multidisciplinary research teams that are diverse in terms of social positionality, include key personnel with shared identities with the study’s subpopulations, and are led by scholars of color (Miller et  al., 2019); and (d) integration of prior work on race and racism, particularly work by scholars of color who are systematically under-cited (Buchanan et al., 2021; Miller et al., 2019). Although the desire to study adversity in families of color likely comes from a well-intentioned place of wanting to call attention to the lived experiences of hardship that stem from systemic racial inequality, such research can easily slip into long-established patterns of deficit-based framing without these practices.

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Ignoring Culture and Privilege in White Families Another indicator that White normativity is still at play in parenting research is a lack of explicit discussion of White families as members of the dominant culture and beneficiaries of systemic racial privilege. In a commentary reflecting on the progress the field has made in shifting away from deficit models in developmental science, Spencer (2006) pointed out that “researchers for the most part have not investigated how cultural and racial privileges influence the development of nonminority children, or how this privilege influences the development of minority children of color” (p. 1150). Sixteen years later, the parenting literature continues to be largely silent about racial privilege in White families, not only in studies with majority-White samples but also in studies with racially diverse samples that specifically test racial differences in parenting. One manifestation of silence about racial privilege is cultural misattribution bias, defined as “the tendency to see minorities as members of a group whose development is shaped primarily by social-level cultural processes, and to perceive Whites as autonomous and independent actors whose development is instead largely influenced by individual-level psychological processes” (Causadias et al., 2018a, p. 65). Cultural misattribution bias is evidenced within the subfield of developmental psychology (Causadias et al., 2018a) as well as in psychology as a whole (Causadias et al., 2018b). At the level of study design, results revealed a tendency for empirical studies focused on race, ethnicity, or culture to have disproportionately more participants of color compared to studies not focused on these topics. At the level of the researcher, developmental psychologists – regardless of their own racial identity – tended to view samples of color as more appropriate than White samples for testing culture-related research questions and reported believing that culture and personality are most influential on development for people of color and White people, respectively (Causadias et al., 2018a). All of these indicators point to a pattern in which developmental researchers view White participants as cultureless defaults whose experience supposedly represents universal development, yet another indicator of White normativity. To upend White normativity in our field, we must explicitly name White supremacy as a developmental context in which all parenting takes place. Just as we acknowledge racial disadvantage and adaptive culture when studying families of color, we must also acknowledge ways that racial privilege and social dominant White culture are affecting the phenomena we are studying in White families. By failing to do so, we not only risk perpetuating harmful, false stereotypes about families of color, but we also compromise the scientific integrity of our scholarship by failing to take membership in dominant culture and racial privilege – factors that we know have profound effects on human development – into account. Building upon Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, Rogers et al. (2021) propose the term m(ai)cro to represent development as a series of transactions between micro- or individual-level processes (such as parenting behavior) and macro-level process (such as White supremacy and systemic racism), arguing that

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only by considering these processes together may we conduct research that is truly anti-racist. Moffit and Rogers (2022) provide a concise summary of this perspective: The systemic privileging of whiteness shapes individuals’ opportunities and experiences across the lifespan. Incorporating this reality into developmental theory requires an intentional engagement with white supremacy as a macro-level process that is reinforced and resisted at the micro-level of interactions and individual beliefs, behaviors, and identities (p. 816).

Scholars unfamiliar with this approach may be wondering: How can I accomplish this in my research? In fact, a detailed account of how jointly considering microand macro- (i.e., m[ai]cro) systems can be applied to the study of racial socialization, specifically, is available (Rogers et al., 2021). However, it is critical for our field to apply this approach to all aspects of parenting – not only parenting behaviors specifically focused on race.

 ritical Reflection of White Normativity in Parenting C Research: An Illustrative Example Recently, I have engaged in critical reflection of my own past work on socialization of coping, all of which I conducted with majority-White samples. I have considered ways that the overarching contexts of White normativity and White supremacy have influenced my work, as well as how these contexts can help me understand my findings. This reflection is ongoing, but I will provide some preliminary insights here. First, I considered my scholarly training. I began studying socialization of coping very early in graduate school in what is generally viewed as one of the best PhD programs in developmental psychology in the country. It was a vibrant, exciting, challenging, and intellectually stimulating scientific community. Within this intellectual environment, my instructors and mentors often discussed cultural factors and occasionally discussed race and racism, but I did not receive encouragement to apply these ideas in my own research. (Dr. Peggy Miller stands out as a mentor who centered culture in her teaching.) Instead, my exposure to issues of culture and race was largely walled off within discussions of other people’s research (i.e., that of other graduate students and colloquium speakers) that included international samples or samples of color within the United States. I and other graduate students whose research questions did not focus on culture or race were rarely, if ever, questioned for taking a race-silent approach. Discussions of systemic inequality were largely focused on income inequality rather than race. Thus, my graduate training environment was clearly shaped by cultural misattribution bias, just as Causadias et al. (2018a) identified in their work. Second, I considered the theoretical approaches that informed my work and the methodologies on which I relied. The dominant theories of coping in the field are race-silent, failing to take into account the idea that racial privilege and

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disadvantage may impact the availability and/or efficacy of certain types of coping strategies. When these theories incorporate potential moderators of the effects of coping, they typically focus on the degree to which stress is chronic versus episodic or controllable versus uncontrollable, occasionally tying this idea to income inequality or chronic stress exposure without naming racism as something that is underlying these factors for youth of color (e.g., Compas et  al., 2001; Skinner & Zimmer-­Gembeck, 2007). Informed by these theories, when I have explored moderators of socialization of coping, I have focused on type and amount of stress exposure (e.g., Abaied & Rudolph, 2010, 2011) and psychophysiological stress reactivity (e.g., Abaied et al., 2014) rather than on race. Furthermore, the measures derived from dominant coping theories, such as the How I Coped Under Pressure Scale (HICUPS), the Responses to Stress Questionnaire (RSQ; Connor-Smith et  al., 2000), and my own socialization of coping questionnaires based on the RSQ (Abaied & Rudolph, 2010; Monti et al., 2014), omit coping strategies that have been shown to be particularly impactful for samples of color, such as communalism and spirituality in Black youth (Gaylord-Harden et  al., 2009, 2012). These measures also demonstrate unique factor structures and unique associations with youth outcomes in Black samples that differ to some degree from patterns observed in majority-White samples (Gaylord-­Harden et  al., 2009; Phan et  al., 2022). In this way, there is clear evidence of White normativity within my past work on socialization of coping, shaped by the theories and measures I typically use. Third, I reflected on ways that White normativity and White supremacy may help to explain the findings I have observed in majority-White samples. For example, I have consistently found that parent encouragement to use engagement coping when dealing with social stress is associated with adaptive social and emotional functioning in majority-White samples of youth in middle childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood (Abaied et al., 2014; Abaied & Rudolph, 2010, 2011; Abaied & Stanger, 2017; Stanger et  al., 2016, 2018). Engagement coping involves actively directing attention and resources toward stress or the emotions that result from stress and trying to either change them (referred to as primary control engagement) or adapt to them (secondary control engagement; Compas et al., 2001). Engagement coping with social stress can be resource-intensive, as it requires one to actively regulate emotions when around others, plan and enact problem-solving strategies with interaction partners, and/or revise one’s existing appraisals of stressful social situations to be more positive. For White youth, especially those from middle- or high-income households, their positionality may afford them social power to enact these strategies successfully. Furthermore, primary control engagement coping is more likely to be effective when applied to controllable stressors (Compas et al., 2001), which White youth may be more likely to encounter compared to youth of color due to racial privilege. Directly facing stress may also be consistent with dominant cultural norms and broader societal narratives associated with White culture in the United States, which emphasizes individual hard work, determination, and grit in the face of obstacles. Thus, when White parents encourage their White children to use engagement coping, they are reinforcing White social norms, potentially with

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the implicit understanding that their child’s whiteness affords them enough resources and control over their social environments to successfully engage with social stress. This same exercise can and should be applied to any area of parenting research. The hidden Whiteness in parenting measures and constructs is rarely scrutinized within our field. In studies with majority-White samples, we must go beyond stating that findings may not generalize to other populations and discuss how White normativity and systemic racism help us understand the antecedents and consequences of White parenting. We must also critically reflect on ways that a White, middle-class-­ centric perspective may be built into our theoretical understanding and methodological assessment of parenting constructs such as (but not limited to) psychological control, autonomy support, parental monitoring, warmth, and hostility. If these constructs and measures indeed have White normativity at their core, it is essential that researchers (a) acknowledge the ways that White normativity has influenced extant theory and findings when reviewing the literature and (b) reframe their research questions, hypotheses, and interpretations of results in a way that acknowledges the social positionality of the racial identities represented in their samples – including that of White participants. Failing to do so will reinforce the status quo of White normativity, provide incomplete and inaccurate accounts of parenting processes, and substantially hinder anti-racist scholarship.

 ecommendations for Upending White Normativity R in Parenting Research  ecommendations for Research on White R Racialization Socialization Racial development must be prioritized as a domain of human development worthy of study across all racial identities. To this end, direct assessments of racial socialization and youth racial development processes should be incorporated into investigations of parenting, especially in samples that include White participants. Future investigations of racial socialization should take advantage of recent quantitative and qualitative studies (see, for example, 2022 special issues of Journal of Research on Adolescence and Child Development) and use them as a knowledge base to inform research questions moving forward. Unique measures must be developed to focus on White racial identity and socialization rather than relying on measures designed for samples of color. As has been pointed out, “ERI development cannot be measured as a universal process, as it is shaped by one’s positionality within a white supremacist system” (Moffitt & Rogers, 2022, p. 882). Thus, measures of racial socialization must take White families’ positionality of racial privilege into account. The development of standardized survey measures, interview protocols, and laboratory-based measures is needed to facilitate scientific

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investigations of the antecedents and consequences of White racial socialization. Such measures should include both child and parent reports, as there is a great need for work that incorporates ways that youth are active participants in their own socialization (Rogers et al., 2021). Research should seek to understand how White racial socialization processes unfold alongside other aspects of parenting behavior and parents’ own psychosocial development. Studies that address how White racial socialization relates to broadband dimensions of parenting (e.g., autonomy support, psychological control, warmth, hostility) and interrelated aspects of domain-specific parenting (such as political socialization, gender socialization, or social coaching) would serve to contextualize this new research within current models of parenting and inform efforts to update parenting models that were developed from a White normativity lens. Analysis of racial socialization among White parents in Minneapolis, MN, during the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder clearly demonstrates that White parents’ own racial identity development is a key predictor of the messages they communicate to their children about race and racism (Ferguson et al., 2022). Continuing to explore ways that White parents’ racial identity shapes their racial socialization messages, as well as capturing changes in White parents’ racial identity in response to their children’s racial development, should be high priorities for future research. Parents’ political alignment is another critical predictive factor to explore, as political ideology appears to explain variability in racial socialization (e.g., Abaied et al., 2022; Ferguson et  al., 2022; Rogers et  al., 2021) as well as racial attitudes and beliefs (Brown et al., 2022). When pursuing this work, it is essential that scholars look beyond studies from within developmental and family science and explore preexisting theory and research on racism and whiteness from other disciplines. Researchers should search far and wide, as the discipline-specific databases that we often use to find research are limited in scope. (Those who only know how to use PsycINFO should book an appointment with their reference librarian). Resources exist that will assist in broadening one’s search, such as a roadmap for the various scholarly literatures on White youth’s racial development (Hagerman, 2022), a detailed overview of the history of racial identity scholarship (Moffitt & Rogers, 2022), and various commentaries that provide review of relevant works (Perry et  al., 2021, 2022; Seaton et  al., 2018; Spanierman, 2022). Perhaps most importantly, researchers must take great care to not erase or co-opt work by scholars of color (such as Drs. Janet Helms, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Helen Neville, Diane Hughes, Vonnie McLoyd, Margaret Beale Spencer, Nancy Hill, Deborah Rivas-Drake, Cynthia García Coll, Noni Gaylord-­ Harden, Adriana Umaña-Taylor, Eleanor Seaton, Rashmita Mistry, and many others), who began conducting work that challenges White normativity long before the broader scholarly community in developmental science turned its attention to racial issues (Hagerman, 2022; Miller et al., 2019; Moffitt & Rogers, 2022).

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Broad Recommendations for Parenting Research Conceptualize White Supremacy as a Context of Development When conceptualizing parenting or its downstream impact on youth development, researchers must take White supremacy into account as an overarching context in which all parenting takes place. More specifically, we must investigate unique assets and structural constraints that might affect parenting for all racial groups represented, without implicitly centering White families as the default from which families of color diverge. This means examining ways that White cultural dominance and privilege affect parenting in White families, ways that adaptive culture and experiences with racism affect parenting in families of color, and ways that these processes intersect in multiracial families. Developmental theories such as the Integrative Model (Garcia Coll et  al., 1996) and M(ai)cro Model (Rogers et  al., 2021) may help scholars develop research questions and hypotheses that take White supremacy into account in meaningful ways. A guide to conducting diversity science research also provides a helpful framework for researchers seeking to reorient their work toward an anti-racist approach (Miller et al., 2019).

 crutinize Existing Methodologies for Implicit S White Normativity We must do a much better job of addressing ways that White normativity is “baked in” to the parenting constructs and measures on which our field relies. To this end, researchers assessing key dimensions of parenting (e.g., warmth, hostility, sensitivity, responsiveness, psychological control, behavioral control, autonomy support) via widely used questionnaires, laboratory tasks, and coding schemes must interrogate how White normativity shaped the development of these methods, as well as the theories that underlie them. Researchers must be diligent in determining the racial composition of prior samples on which measures were initially validated and later used in subsequent research. If measures were validated in primarily White samples and subsequently applied to samples of color in studies that were conducted from a deficit lens, researchers must not assume that validity extends to samples of color (Gaylord-Harden et al., 2009; Miller-Cotto et al., 2021). In multi-­ racial samples, researchers should routinely test for measurement invariance of parenting constructs and, if needed, revise or develop new measures that more accurately represent the lived experience of a study’s subpopulations (Buchanan et al., 2021; Rodriguez et al., 2021; Yoshikawa et al., 2016). Researchers who rely on coding of observational or interview data, even if coded data is exclusively used in quantitative analyses, must be particularly vigilant when observing racial differences in coded parenting behaviors, as coders’ own implicit or explicit racial biases may come into play when interpreting signals such as facial expressions or linguistic patterns (e.g., Hugenberg et al., 2003, Kurinec & Weaver III, 2019).

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Measure Racial Development In studies of broadband parenting constructs, researchers should prioritize including indicators of children’s racial development as outcome variables. Understanding the processes through which parenting styles and practices contribute to children’s racial development (including racial identity development, racial attitudes, and children’s emerging understanding of racial categories, stereotypes, hierarchies, and privilege) is just as critical for our field as are other commonly examined outcomes of parenting (e.g., academic, cognitive, social, and behavioral adjustment). Because developmental science is so far behind in our understanding of these processes (Moffitt & Rogers, 2022; Seaton, 2022), researchers should consider adding indicators of racial development to parenting studies, especially those that include White participants, even if race is not a central focus of the study. Indeed, studies that speak to how racial development unfolds alongside other developmental milestones would move the field forward in exciting ways. Perhaps most importantly, researchers must directly measure racism and resistance to racism in White youth and their parents. We cannot apply parenting research to interdisciplinary efforts to eradicate racism if we do not have basic information about the problem we are trying to solve. To inform effective family-level anti-racist interventions, studies that directly assess predictors and outcomes of concordance versus discordance in parent and child racial attitudes, beliefs, and bias across developmental periods are sorely needed. Prevalence rates of racism in White youth and their parents should be as readily available as they are for other common family intervention targets (such as aggression/antisocial behavior, alcohol and substance use, or mental disorders). Racism and resistance to racism should be measured at multiple levels, including implicit and explicit racial bias, endorsement of racial stereotypes (Pauker et al., 2016), color-blind racial ideology (Neville et al., 2000), motivations to respond without prejudice (Devine et  al., 2002), bias awareness (Perry et al., 2019), family choices regarding social networks, schools and neighborhoods (Hagerman, 2018; Underhill, 2021), and more. A developmental model of anti-racism in White youth outlines a framework through which the development of resistance to racism may be explored (Hazelbaker et al., 2022).

Addressing the Anti-CRT Movement in Parenting Research Interdisciplinary social science research should empirically examine involvement in and resistance to the Anti-CRT movement as parenting behaviors within the broader context of White supremacy in the United States. This work should seek to understand the underlying factors and ensuing developmental consequences of the antiCRT movement by exploring research questions such as: 1. To what degree are White parents in the Anti-CRT movement motivated by their political beliefs, racial attitudes, and racial identity development?

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2. What factors predict the likelihood of parent involvement in Anti-CRT protests versus counter-protests? What other parenting styles and practices do these parents adopt? 3. How do parents who engage with versus resist Anti-CRT protests communicate messages about race in the home, explicitly through race-talk or implicitly through other means (e.g., social gatekeeping, neighborhood/school choice)? How do youth respond to these messages? 4. How do youth react to their parents’ involvement in Anti-CRT protests, or engage in protests or counter-protests themselves? 5. How do parents and youth who disagree with the Anti-CRT movement respond to these efforts in their communities? What factors increase the likelihood of resistance to the Anti-CRT movement?

Conclusion Challenging White normativity in parenting research is not “timely,” as racism and White supremacy are not new. It is time for parenting researchers, regardless of their theoretical orientations or methodological approaches, to face the hard truth that we have been complicit in White normativity in our field. The current trend of increased explicit attention to whiteness in parenting is welcome, but also clearly reactive. We should not have required a worldwide racial justice movement to make this change. We must keep up the momentum we have built and shift to a proactive focus on whiteness in parenting. This will require dramatic changes in how we think about, write about, and conduct our work. Such changes are imperative, both to preserve the scientific integrity of our scholarship and to ensure that our efforts are in service of social justice and anti-racism.

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Chapter 8

White Families’ Communications About Racism and Politics: Expanding Theories of White Racial Socialization and Racial Learning Margaret A. Hagerman

Existing research on children’s racial learning processes, often referred to as racial socialization, focuses primarily on how and what kids learn about race and racism in the context of their families. Much of this research focuses on microlevel processes of how families communicate about race, and in particular, how parents report communicating about race with their children (Hughes, 2003; Hughes & Chen, 1999; Umaña-Taylor & Hill, 2020; Whitaker & Snell, 2016). Very few studies consider what kids report happening in their families with respect to race-based communications, and only a limited body of work explores how kids interpret these messages or examines how kids make sense of racial messages that are contradictory or inconsistent (Hagerman, 2016; Winkler, 2010). Within the limited research on how children produce ideas about race and racism, scholars have found that the social contexts in which families are situated matter for racial learning. For instance, in one study, Black children growing up in Detroit understood aspects of race and racism because of observations they made about racial patterns in the neighborhoods and broader racialized city in which they were growing up. As Winkler (2012) argues, “Children develop their ideas about race in the context of systems, structures, institutions, government, and culture, all of which are racialized within the U.S. context” (p. 1). School-based research has demonstrated extensively that where children attend school influences the ideas about race and racism that they produce (Lewis, 2003). And other research illustrates how the “adolescent geographies” of youth or “the paths that young people take and their social and physical destinations,” such as moving from home to school, shape their perceptions of injustice, including racial injustice (Shedd, 2015, p. 9). In my prior research with White affluent families, I explore how the choices M. A. Hagerman (*) Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. P. Witherspoon et al. (eds.), Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States, National Symposium on Family Issues 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44115-8_8

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parents make about neighborhoods, schools, media, travel, and youth activities shape their children’s racial learning (Hagerman, 2018). Research has examined racial learning that unfolds in additional children’s social environments, including summer camps (Moore, 2002), youth sports (Andrews et al., 1997), children’s television (Nilsen & Turner, 2014; Roberts, 2004; Vittrup & Holden, 2011), social media sites such as TikTok (Weimann & Masri, 2020), and more. Overall, this research illustrates that children grow up within a particular racial context of childhood, or a “social environment surrounding a child that shapes how that child makes sense of race” (Hagerman, 2018, p. 20). And as such, it is important to study micro, meso, and macro aspects of children’s racial contexts and how they interrelate as we expand the study of racial learning and racial socialization. While the racial context of a child’s life shapes their racial learning regardless of their own racial identity, studying the racial contexts of White children’s lives rather than exclusively what parents report saying to their kids about the topic is particularly necessary due to the dominance of colorblind thinking among White parents (Underhill, 2018; Vittrup, 2015). Specifically, given that White parents often report not talking openly with White children about race, claiming to be “colorblind” or saying things like “my kids don’t even know what race is,” it is difficult to study White racial learning processes, at least if we use existing models of asking parents to self-report when and how they communicated about race. Listening to White children talk about race demonstrates that they are absolutely learning these ideas somewhere, even if their parents claim that the kids have no thoughts on the matter. As such, examining White children’s racial contexts of childhood is key to understanding why White children develop the ideas that they do as well as what those ideas constitute. Though family conversations, neighborhood and school choices, and even geographic regions have been theorized as being linked to how White kids learn about race and racism, little attention has been paid to one particular aspect of the macrolevel of a child’s social environment: the political landscape. That is, how does the macrolevel political landscape of one’s childhood shape the messages kids interpret about racism at the microlevel? How do current political events involving race get discussed by White parents and children in private spaces, and how does this contribute to racial learning outcomes? Moving from the microlevel of family conversations out to the macrolevel of national political landscape, and considering the micro–macro link between these two, this chapter explores how the political climate of childhood shapes young people’s racial learning within the family. I argue that racial learning is connected to political learning and to understand the ways that White children produce racial ideas, such that we can engage in anti-racist practices with kids, we must spend more time examining how racial and political socialization work together. As such, the central research question examined in this chapter is: how does the political climate of one’s childhood shape race-based communications in White families and White kids’ ideas about race and racism, as reported by kids?

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Learning Politics, Learning Race How the newest members of society develop political attitudes, and particularly how young people develop a political party affiliation, has long been of interest to political scientists and political sociologists, especially with regard to predicting how people will vote in a participatory democracy (Alwin & Krosnick, 1991; Jennings et al., 2009). Studies of childhood political socialization processes have long existed, and much like early theories of socialization generally, many models centered the idea that parents pass political ideas on to children or that “parents drive the learning process” (Ojeda & Hatemi, 2015, p. 1150). Indeed, “the transmission of political party identification from parents to children remains one of the most studied concepts in political sociology” (p. 1150). In recent years, however, scholars have considered more carefully the role that kids themselves play in their own political learning. As explained, “Children play a critical role in their learning; they create their own realities, have their own cognitive and emotive biases, selectively attend to experiences, and differentially process information, including that from parents” (Ojeda & Hatemi, 2015, p. 1151). In line with developments within the new sociology of childhood, these latest theories have led to research that considers children’s own perceptions of political leaders and current political events. These theories also call for more scholarly work that examines how families communicate about politics and share ideas in bidirectional rather than unidirectional ways. Political scientists have also explored how growing up in a particular moment in time shapes the political attitudes of individuals. Mannheim’s concept of generational imprinting theorizes that “events and personalities that shape the political attitudes prevalent among younger cohorts when they enter political life will continue to register in future years” (Jacobson, 2016, p. 73). For example, young people coming of age during the 1960s, often referred to as the “protest cohort,” had a set of experiences in childhood and adolescence that profoundly shaped their political activities in the future (Jennings, 1987; Ojeda & Hatemi, 2015). Generational imprinting accounts for how political learning in childhood not only matters when individuals are young but can also have a substantial impact on individuals’ political perspectives for the rest of their lives. In short, generational imprinting accounts for the role that the political landscape in which a child comes of age shapes how they think about the social world (Jacobson, 2016). While theories of childhood racial learning and theories of childhood political learning have increasingly accounted for the role that young people play in their own socialization processes, empirical research has not explored the contours of how these two kinds of learning are interconnected and what the consequences are for the social (re)production of racial ideas and actions. How is learning about race in American society connected to learning about politics and vice versa? In a society fundamentally organized by the placement of actors into hierarchically organized racial categories and in a society in which the social, economic, and political realms are structured by race, these learning processes likely work together (Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Omi & Winant, 1994).

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Certainly, research on racial attitudes has taken seriously how racism and “racial prejudice is in and of politics” (Bobo, 2004, p. 27). Racial attitudes reflect the group position of racial actors and thus reflect the political interests of particular racial groups within the existing unequal racial order (Blumer, 1958). For instance, survey researchers have long asked White respondents questions about their racial attitudes toward political topics such as segregated schools in America as a way of accessing their racial beliefs that fuel political policy positions. “As a historic fact and experience, as well as a contemporary political condition, racial prejudice has profoundly affected American politics. A wide body of evidence is accumulating to show that racial prejudice still affects politics” (Bobo, 2004, pp. 22–23). Further, moving from the expression of specific attitudes to racial ideologies, or sets of beliefs that represent a “commonsense” way of understanding racial matters, or a roadmap racial actors use to inform their “worldview and everyday individual interactions,” we see that “what is most important about racial ideologies is that they are inherently political” (Doane, 2020, p. 28). Doane goes on to argue: Politically, groups ‘weaponize’ racial ideologies to attack or defend the existing racial order, for they provide the rationale for social policies and the organizing ideas for social movements. In this political struggle, racial ideologies are used strategically to attract and mobilize supporters and to neutralize and discredit opponents (Doane, 2020, p. 28).

Indeed, racial ideologies are political; ideas about race and ideas about politics cannot be separated (Metzl, 2019). A powerful illustration is offered in a study of White communities in Missouri, Kansas, and Tennessee where residents were more interested in maintaining the racial hierarchy and racial status quo than maintaining their own health, well-being, and even their lives. That is, these White Americans preferred to send their children to underfunded schools, allow the proliferation of guns despite high rates of gun-related death among their own communities, and succumb to subpar healthcare options due to the politics of racial resentment and their desire to maintain the existing racial order, even if it hurt them individually (Metzl, 2019). In a similar vein, far-right political ideas are finding their way to the mainstream, especially in youth culture of White adolescents. That is, the racial ideas and far-­ right political ideas of some White youth cannot be separated and are instead interwoven together in powerful and potentially destructive ways (Miller-Idriss, 2020). I am interested in how young people interpret, produce, reproduce, and sometimes rework dominant racial ideologies—ideologies that play a major role in political and social realms and that can be considered political ideologies altogether. In order to explore these learning processes, I argue that we ought to move beyond thinking about racial learning as happening only at the microlevel and instead take account of how the larger political landscape that surrounds a family informs the ideas and actions kids embrace in childhood. This is important because research shows that racial ideological positions crystalize and solidify as adolescents get older, even in the face of evidence that counters their positions (Byrd, 2017; Hagerman, 2020; Mueller, 2017; Warikoo & de Novais, 2015). To do this work, we must take account of how the political landscape is a central part of a child’s racial context of childhood.

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Methods The era of Trump’s US presidency (i.e., 2017–2021) offers one such context to begin this line of inquiry. Existing scholarship has considered how growing up in the Trump era specifically has shaped young people’s ideas about race and politics, though the vast majority of this work has explored the devastating effects of the Trump presidency on children and families of color, kids who identify as LGBTQ, and kids who are Muslim (Cheah et al., 2020; Rodriguez & Ybarra, 2022; Wells, 2017; Wray-Lake et al., 2018; Yoder, 2020). American society has seen tremendous political divides during this time which makes it an interesting case study. Children were presented with conflicting ideas about racism in American society during the Trump campaign and presidency: Is the country really “over” racism if the President says racist things? As such, this is a particularly useful moment to explore theoretically and empirically how the political realm shaped the ideas held by these children about racism. Data in this paper are part of a larger qualitative study on how kids made sense of racism in the era of the Trump presidency. The data were collected between 2017 and 2019. The larger project focused on regional differences in racial learning as the kids in this study live in either Massachusetts or Mississippi, two very different states in terms of state- and local-level politics. The larger project also explored the concept of racialized emotions, which is not included in this chapter. And the larger project explored the perspectives of children across racial groups. However, for the purposes of this chapter, I focus on how the political landscape of the Trump era shaped White children’s ideas about racism and anti-racism in the United States and specifically their reports of how their families talked about race and politics in the home. Theoretical snowball sampling was used to recruit child participants. The snowball sample began with multiple nodes in two distinct communities, one small town in Mississippi and one small town in Massachusetts. The author’s personal connections and recruitment efforts situated within after-school programs in each location were used to help start the sample. Interviews were conducted with children between 10 and 13 years old, a developmental period in which young people begin to think in new ways about the world around them and spend increasing amounts of time outside the family home (Meece & Daniels, 2007). Parents granted permission for their children to be interviewed and child assent forms were also completed. Interviews were conducted in my office at work, in the homes of children, at the after-school programs, or at a place of the parent and child’s choosing. In some of the interviews in Mississippi, graduate students assisted with interviewing children, and graduate student interviewers were matched with child participants along the lines of race as well as perceived “southern-ness.” I am not from the South, and this aspect of my positionality made it difficult to build trust and rapport with White families, particularly those with conservative political viewpoints.

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In total, 45 children were interviewed. This chapter focuses only on the 25 interviews with the White children, which included 15 children in Mississippi and 10 children in Massachusetts. These interviews do include a few children who identified as “White” and another racial category but did not identify as “biracial” or “mixed” and thought of themselves as White instead. Children’s racial identities were left up to them to report, and I recorded their racial grouping using their own language and self-descriptions of their racial group membership. Interview questions focused on topics related to current events, politics, kids’ schools, their families, and anything else they wanted to share. Controversial questions, particularly those related to electoral politics, immigration, and gun violence, were saved for the end of the interview with the hope that the children would feel more comfortable sharing their honest perspectives as the interview progressed. Interviews were conducted using child-centered practices such as using the same language as children do, encouraging kids to lead the interview in directions they desired, and skipping questions that the kids thought were uninteresting or uncomfortable. Interviews were transcribed and coded using initial coding followed by thematic coding. MAXQDA was used for all coding. I analyzed patterns in the data as will be presented next.

Data and Findings Multiple themes emerged with respect to how growing up in the era of the Trump presidency shaped White families’ conversations about race as reported by these children as well as the ideas these children had about racism in the United States.

 erceptions of Family Communications: Politics and Current P Events More Than Race Almost all the children told me that they talked to their parents about “politics” and “political stuff.” When I asked them what came to mind when they heard the word “politics,” almost all the children said that the word politics implied something to do with the President of the United States. Children in both Massachusetts and Mississippi responded, “Politics is like presidents and stuff”; “President, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.”; “The president. And the government”; “Basically, presidential types of things and like the electing of presidents, government”; “elections”; and “People who run for like government and presidents, and like they serve our country like not physically like the army does, but they try to do good for our country.” These kids did not seem to believe that these topics were in anyway linked to race.

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Almost all the children also reported communicating about “current events” with their parents. These children brought up several current events such as immigration enforcement, conflict between black communities and police, and racial justice protests like that of Colin Kaepernik. However, despite the undeniable racialized nature of these events, the events were not necessarily understood to be about race, or politics for that matter, by these children. As a result, about half of the children perceived that their families did not communicate about race or racism but instead communicated about politics and current events. The other half of the children, especially those in families with politically progressive parents, told me that they did talk to their parents about racism. For example, one boy in Mississippi told me he often talks to his parents about patterns he notices at his school. “My school is mainly, like the majority is Black. There is still discrimination though.” He went on to tell me how he perceived the White kids to be treated better than the Black kids at his school, particularly when it came to discipline. He also told me about the White segregationist academy across town from his school. “I like my school because it is more including,” he told me, after explaining the history of the private school—a history he learned from talking with his parents about racism, school choice, and the history of Mississippi. However, many examples of what I heard from the kids who said they did talk about race with parents (and even from the kids who said they did not talk about race) were not examples like this one. Instead, the examples related to politics and specifically the election of Trump, an individual that some White children in this study believed was a deeply racist individual. For example, as a child in Massachusetts told me: My mom watches a lot of news like the news every morning and I go in my mom’s room sometimes with my dad, and then my mom says, “Oh man.” My dad says, “Oh man this is crazy. Why are they doing this?” And I say, “What’s wrong?” and he says, “They’re making very bad decisions…very bad decisions.”

She told me that most of the time, the “bad decisions” were “racist” ones that Trump was making “like about the wall and keeping immigrants out and stuff.” Here, this child drew a clear link between racism and specifically, the election of Trump. Other children also told me that they watched the news with their parents, and often it was during conversations related to Trump when the family communicated openly about racism. While many of the children perceived that their families do not talk about race, almost all the children said they talk with their parents about “political stuff” or current events. Most specifically, they mentioned talking about the election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Even for the kids who said their families do talk openly about race, most of the examples they gave of these family discussions were actually directly related to politics and specifically about Donald Trump. Overall, these data show how family communications about politics (and current political events) and family communications about race are entwined—indeed, talking about Trump’s racism included talking about both race and politics.

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Commiserating, Celebrating, Arguing: Trump’s Racism As I have outlined, the children I interviewed frequently shared stories of talking with their parents about Donald Trump, race, and current political events, often linking these topics together. In these conversations, family members tended to commiserate about the harm Trump was inflicting, celebrate the political victories of Trump, or argue with family members holding different political views. Of course, these conversations were not the only vehicle of racial messages, but the family communications about Trump were one part of how these children learned about race and racism. In some instances, racism was explicitly named and discussed in connection with the Trump administration. For example, Paige in Mississippi shared with me the kinds of topics she discussed with her mom, specifically related to watching PBS Newshour together: Me and my mom will be watching the news and it’ll be something like, remember that instance where Trump was like, “Oh it was locker room talk.” You know, that’s all it was. Like I personally found that like, very like, very disrespectful to women…I just felt like we were making so much progress with Obama, like considering like everything like women’s rights, gay rights, racism, like things like global warming. Then like now that we have the new President it’s like a million steps backwards, you know. (sighs)

I asked her if she and her mom often watched the news together and if they talked about the news stories together. Paige replied: Sometimes I’ll be bored and like, “Hey Mom, whatcha doin?” [She will say] “Watching the news.” And so I’ll sit down and we’ll watch the news, and it’ll be like something like this just happened where a Muslim woman was attacked on the streets for wearing Hijab. And like it’ll just be kind of sad and then we talk about it… I mean, um we’re not like a talky, like “feelingsy” kind of family, but like we’re all like kind of on the same page like about what’s right and what’s wrong.

Paige’s mom walked into the room just then and after overhearing Paige, she added with a laugh, “We do some family bonding time watching Judy Woodruff.” Paige nodded her head and said enthusiastically, “Yeah, we do.” For Paige and her family, discussing the news of the day was one way they communicated about racism, as well as other forms of oppression and violence. The backdrop of the Trump administration seemed to encourage these conversations, particularly because from Paige’s vantage point, racism was not as big of a problem in American society until Trump was elected, a theme I explore at length elsewhere. In this sense, how Paige communicated with her mom about racism in contemporary American society was interwoven with how they communicated as family members about politics and current political events. And Paige produced ideas about racism in America through these discussions with her mom about the nightly news coverage of politics. In other families, however, the communications about politics were overt between kids and parents, but the race-based communications were more subtle. For example, 12-year-old Grace in Mississippi described her feelings after finding out that Trump won the election:

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Well, I didn’t really want Hillary to win because she was a Democrat. And um, we were excited about Trump winning! I didn’t feel good that night and I stayed up and watched it with my parents. And we um, and we wanted Trump to win and, and my mom voted for him and like I said, we didn’t really want Hillary to win. So [when Trump won] I felt really happy!…We talked a lot about how good it was… I was happy that Trump won because I think he knows how to handle like, people who threaten us and stuff.

Trump’s appeal to Grace was that he knew how to “handle” people who threatened people like Grace. Through talking with her more, it was clear that she was mainly concerned about undocumented immigrants who she viewed as threatening and even “dangerous.” In this family, race-based communications are clearly at play, but they are disguised as simply discussions about politics. The racialized aspect of these communications was ignored as families embraced colorblind approaches to “talk nasty about minorities” without sounding overtly racist and used racially coded language to do so (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 77). As my ethnographic evidence illustrates elsewhere, White families I have studied often communicate about race in daily life in subtle rather than overt ways (Hagerman, 2018). Though very few of the kids I interviewed said they had strikingly different perspectives than their parents on politics, current events, or racism, one theme that did emerge included family fights with extended relatives, specifically grandparents. Um, with my family…like my grandparents were like, for Trump, so when like we go over to their house, we would like, argue about it a lot. Like, they would eventually like, stop, especially like, when we were eating dinner and stuff and they would like, not continue that conversation afterwards. (Nora, 12 years old, Massachusetts)

When asked what the family would argue about, she explained that most of it had to do with immigration. “…not letting immigrants in. I feel like that is kind of racist…My family argues about that a lot.” Nora also mentioned debates about police violence against Black people. For Nora, like other kids in the study, family communications about race and family communications about politics were one and the same—her parents did not agree with her grandparents about politics because they believed Trump’s rhetoric and actions related to immigration policy were racist. Nora, thus, learned ideas about what constitutes racism through family tensions she observed about the political climate of her childhood. Nora told me that her family stopped seeing the grandparents for a while because of their political and racial beliefs. “My parents did not want me to hear that kind of stuff,” she told me. Family disagreements between parents and grandparents about race and politics happened particularly in families where parents hold progressive political views and grandparents hold more conservative political views. Another interesting theme was that of children’s friends having strong disagreements with their parents about Trump and racism. As Zena told me, I have a good friend whose parents are really big on Trump and everything he’s doing. And she’s like, “I just don’t see where they’re coming from!” …their parents are like, you know, “Oh we need to raise you like this and you need to be a big supporter of Jesus and Trump and racism.” And my friends are like, you know, “I’m going to need you to take steps back, Mom and Dad!”

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Interestingly, in this description of her friend’s relationship with her conservative parents, Zena connects “Trump” and “racism” (as well as religion) and Zena understands these two as linked. This example, much like the example from Nora, illustrates that from the perspectives of the children interviewed, learning about race coincides with learning about politics in this era, since so much of what is discussed by families is Trump’s racist words and actions.

Understanding Political Identity as Tied to Racial Attitudes In addition to sharing their assessments of how their families communicated about politics and race, the children in this study told me what they think it means to be a member of a particular political party. For many of these kids, one’s political party identification is directly tied to how one thinks about race. They were very explicit about this. Children like Paige and Zena spoke openly about how they believed Democrats were interested in “racial progress” and “progress on gender” and finding ways to include more people in American democracy, while they believed Republicans were trying to block anyone who was not White, heterosexual, and Christian from even accessing basic human rights. For kids like Paige and Zena, what it meant to be “liberal” was directly related to how one thought about who should be considered a full American and who should not—and how these designations, among other things, were racialized. Children who considered themselves to be politically conservative also perceived that one’s political identity is wrapped up in how one makes sense of race relations in the United States, both today and in the past. For example, Ned talked about a homework assignment he had to do involving coloring in a map with blue or red markers as the election results came in. He said his class made predictions before the election and then discussed their maps in school after the election. Although he fell asleep while coloring in the map on election night, Ned said he felt good when he woke up and found out the results: Interviewer: Why’d you feel good? Ned: Cause I’m a Republican. Interviewer: Okay, why are you a Republican? Ned: Cause I live in the South…and like, I felt good because I knew [Trump] would make good decisions.

Ned shared the reasons he thought Trump would make good decisions, many of which had to do with immigration reform. But when asked about what he viewed as the connection between being a Republican and living in the South he had additional thoughts: Interviewer: Why do you think that people in the South are Republican or have to be Republican? Ned: They don’t have to be Republican but most of them are. Interviewer: Do you think there’s a reason for that? Ned: It’s their choice. (Sighs)

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Interviewer: Like, do you think there’s a reason they choose that? Ned: Probably because they believe in the same stuff, like, that a bunch of other people believe in like, smaller government and stuff like that. Interviewer: Okay, why do you think that people in the South believe in that stuff and people in the North don’t believe in that stuff? Ned: Well, I think people in the South believe in it because like, they were um, on the Civil—like, they were um, like, (Laughs) like, people in the South, um, okay. I don’t know why they think different. They just—probably people in the South, like people that are Republican more because like, they like the way they make laws more than they like Democratic laws. Interviewer: Okay, what were you gonna say about the Civil War? Ned: Yeah, I was like, slavery, I don’t know what I was gonna say. I was just like…yeah.

Here, Ned articulated a general, vague understanding of how American politics work. He did not seem to have his explanation worked out entirely, but he sensed that people in the South are Republicans because they do not want the federal government telling them what to do—and that this is somehow connected to the Civil War and slavery. He also seemed to suggest that “Democratic laws” do not appeal to Republicans and that Democrats and Republics “think different.” His mention of slavery suggests that he is aware of a looming racial narrative but has not quite figured out how to express it exactly. Certainly, this is different from kids in Massachusetts who never mentioned the Civil War, a topic I explore elsewhere but that shows how geographic region is also an important piece of a child’s racial context of childhood. What this example from Ned richly illustrates is that young people see connections between political party affiliation and race in America, even if their ideas are not entirely worked out yet. And, much like the children who think of themselves as politically progressive, conservative children are learning about politics and race at the same time. One could argue that these two kinds of learning cannot be separated from one another—that growing up in a racialized democracy means learning about the inherent connections between race and politics. But this theme also suggests that there is something particularly important in this current moment—the moment in which these young people are coming of age—about expressions of racism and political party membership and how they are connected in key ways. Perhaps this has always been true, or perhaps this moment of racial and political divisiveness in America is leading children to develop the idea that one’s attitude about race in America is what singularly and uniformly defines one’s political party membership.

Discussion and Conclusion As the data presented here illustrate, I found three themes that offer insight into how racial learning is shaped by a child’s political context. Specifically, I show that these White children (1) perceived their families as talking about politics more than about race, but shared examples of political discussions as also being race-based communications even if they did not identify them as such; (2) learned about racism through

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watching their families commiserate, celebrate, or argue about Trump’s election and presidency; and (3) believed political party affiliation was determined in large part by how one thought about race. These themes show that overall the political landscape that shapes a child’s early years is certainly part of their racial context of childhood. Learning race is ultimately learning politics in a racialized social system, and this is an area of research in need of further development. To advance our knowledge of racial learning processes and outcomes, social scientists need to consider more thoroughly the aspects of the social environment that shape a child’s racial context of childhood. The social environment conveys messages about race to children in everyday ways. Further, in order to help promote anti-racism among White youth, we must recognize the power of the political landscape that surrounds a child and how political ideas, at least in this study, are interwoven with and reinforced by racial ideas. Certainly, family is a central place where children receive messages and work out their ideas about race, politics, and so much more, which is why it is important to study. But at the same time, we cannot lose sight of the powerful socialization messages that exist outside of the family. And, most importantly, we must find creative ways to attend to how macrolevel forces shape processes at the microlevel—that is, how a presidential election at the national level influences family communications about race at the individual level. One important lesson from this study is that for these kids, talking about what they defined as “politics” or “current events” was easier for them than talking about race, even if the content of the interview was inherently about race. Colorblind logic is pervasive, and these kids appear to have been taught to avoid discussing race, especially with people they have just met. However, they do not seem to have internalized the same lesson regarding politics. In this sense, I was able to access their ideas about race by asking them questions about politics or current events. This is interesting theoretically and further evidence of the power of colorblind thinking. Further, this is useful methodologically as we think about how to access the racial ideological positions of White children specifically, given what we know about the challenges of accessing what White people think about race (Alexander, 2017; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Forman & Lewis, 2006; Gallagher, 2008; Lewis, 2004). Overall, the political landscape not only shapes the political and racial perspectives of one’s parents and other family members, but it also potentially has the power to generationally imprint ideas, or shape in powerful ways how young people in a particular political moment come to produce political and racial ideological frameworks. These ideological frameworks shape their ideas in the present but are also likely to inform their attitudes and behaviors for years to come. Given the rise in far-right hateful rhetoric, as well as forms of racial violence that have long persisted in American society, understanding racial learning processes among White youth is urgently needed. As such, we must work together to construct better theories of White racial socialization/racial learning processes that account for the multiple and interrelated aspects of one’s racial context of childhood including micro-, meso-, and macro-level dynamics.

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Chapter 9

Expert-Guided Antiracism Among Progressive White Parents: The Promise and Limits of Antiracist White Parenting Megan R. Underhill and Makenna K. Clark

I think [antiracism is] an orientation. I think it’s a way of understanding at a deeper level what racism is, how it operates, and the nuance of what it would take to dismantle it. (Dana, mother of one child, age 9 years). I think being antiracist is a verb; it is an action, right? Like it’s not just voting, Facebook, or social media. It’s those very difficult, uncomfortable conversations with my parents, with old people, and people who are like “set in their ways.” (Addy, mother of two children, ages 6 and 8 years). I think a lot of the work is talking to White people about this and not trying to cause any more harm or stress or burdens on doing process work with people of color (Thea, mother of two children ages 5 and 9 years).

Not too long ago, the words “antiracism” and “antiracist” were concepts primarily associated with activist groups or ivory tower academics (Perry et al., 2021). That is no longer the case. In the wake of Black Lives Matter (BLM) activism and specifically the 2020 George Floyd protests, the word antiracism has crossed over into the mainstream. Today, self-help books on antiracism dominate bestseller lists, and news articles on antiracism are common (Harris, 2020; Scharfenberg, 2020). As this has occurred, a corporate antiracism industry has emerged (Jan, 2021) primarily targeting White social and political progressives whose attitudes on race and racism have liberalized over the past decade (Jardina & Ollerenshaw, 2022; McElwee, 2018). In fact, some survey research indicates that White Americans’ self-reported racial attitudes are now more liberal on race and racism than Black Americans M. R. Underhill (*) Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina Asheville, Asheville, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. K. Clark Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, VA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. P. Witherspoon et al. (eds.), Family Socialization, Race, and Inequality in the United States, National Symposium on Family Issues 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44115-8_9

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(Scharfenberg, 2020). Today, many White Americans, and specifically White parents, who identify as social and political progressives aspire to be antiracists (Gillen-­ O’Neel et al., 2021; Heberle et al., 2021; Perry et al., 2021). However, what that means to them or how they pursue antiracism is unknown. Many of these public discussions of antiracism—via books, articles, and social media posts—focus on a particular population of White progressives—White parents. The authors of these pieces see the focus on White parents as a necessary intervention. Not only are White parents responsible for raising the next generation of White Americans, but research has identified a glaring oversight in how White parents communicate ideas about race and racism to their White children; most say nothing at all (Abaied & Perry, 2021; Bartoli et al., 2016; Underhill, 2017; Vittrup, 2016; Zucker & Patterson, 2018). For example, data from a study of 6070 parents collected in 2019 found that only 27% of White parents “often” or “sometimes” spoke with their children about race compared to 61% of Black parents, 56% of Asian parents, and 46% of Latinx parents who did so (Kotler et al., 2019). It is not only that most White parents refrain from speaking with their children about race and racism, however. Research also reveals that White parents maintain their silence in the face of highly visible anti-Black violence perpetuated by the police, White supremacist groups, and White vigilantes (Abaied & Perry, 2021; Hagerman & Vivier, 2014; Underhill, 2017). White parents’ silence contrasts sharply with the talk Black parents have with their children about how to safely navigate police interactions to prevent police violence (Thomas & Blackmon, 2014; Threlfall, 2016). When White parents do speak with their children about these subjects, they provide colorblind, egalitarian messages that “everyone is the same,” despite mountains of evidence indicating gross racial disparities between White Americans and Americans of color (Abaied & Perry, 2021; Bartoli et  al., 2016; Vittrup, 2016; Zucker & Patterson, 2018). Consequently, in recent years, public discussions about the need for White parents to speak with their children about race, racism, and Whiteness have intensified. For example, books like Raising White Kids by Dr. Jennifer Harvey calls on White parents to communicate with their children that “race is visible and normal” and urges White parents to cultivate “an awareness of racial injustice, and a working presumption that people can and do take action against racism” (Harvey, 2018, p. 65). Harvey and others advocate for White parents to adopt a “color- or a race-conscious” approach when speaking with their White children about race for several reasons. First, evidence suggests that color-conscious dialogue has the potential to undermine colorblind beliefs that inform many White people’s understanding of race in the United States (Abaied & Perry, 2021; Vittrup, 2016; Zucker & Patterson, 2018), the dominant perspective being that “racism is over” (Bonilla-Silva, 2013). Others contend that color-conscious talk promotes social-justice-minded White youth who “possess the rhetorical tools and agency necessary to challenge and rework dominant ideology, demonstrating the participatory role that children play in social change” (Hagerman & Vivier, 2014, p. 76). Drawing on White racial socialization research published over the last decade and interview data collected in 2019 from 53 progressive White parents, this chapter analyzes what White progressives’ racial awakening means regarding antiracist

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White parenting. Like many middle-class parents, all the study participants pursue intensive parenting wherein they “acquire detailed knowledge of what experts consider proper child development and then spend a good deal of time and money attempting to foster it” (Hays, 1996, p. 8). They read books, listen to podcasts, and attend workshops about the right way to parent according to public-facing, racial experts—i.e., authors of popular books or newspaper columns, hosts of race-related podcasts, and activists and social media influencers. The knowledge parents derive from these experts prompted them to embark on a radical racial re-education that reshapes how they think about race in the United States—including their identity as White people—and how they communicate these ideas to their children (Underhill & Simms, 2022). In this chapter, we investigate two interrelated research questions. First, how do White parents understand antiracism, and how is that understanding shaped by messages they receive from racial experts? Second, what actions do White parents pursue in light of the race-related parenting advice they receive from public-facing experts on race and racism? Finally, we take stock of White parents’ efforts regarding racial change and issue recommendations for how progressive White parents can deepen their antiracist practices. Before sharing our findings, we provide a brief overview of the antiracist literature, interrogating how academics and public-facing writers discuss antiracism. After, we investigate how White racial socialization researchers measure antiracism and detail if and how White parents engage in antiracist action. We argue that antiracism is inconsistently measured and underdeveloped in both bodies of literature making it difficult to articulate precisely what it means to be an antiracist or to pursue antiracist White parenting.

What Is Antiracism? What is meant by antiracism? Further, how does a White person become antiracist? In many instances, public and academic discussions of antiracism are underdeveloped and lack conceptual specificity. For example, it is not uncommon for writers to discuss antiracism without providing the reader with a definition of what antiracism is or the criteria used to determine whether someone is antiracist. In other instances, writers provide overly broad definitions of antiracism encouraging people to “challenge racism” or “take a stand against racism” without offering clear, specific directives for what it means to pursue either action (Harvey, 2018; O’Brien, 2001). Many writers advance a binary definition of antiracism, associating it with personal and structural change (Hughey, 2012; Kendi, 2019; Bunyasi & Smith, 2019; Zamalin, 2019). For example, in his bestselling book How to be an Antiracist, historian Ibram X. Kendi writes that an antiracist is “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea” (2019, p.  15). Though scholars of antiracism argue that both individual and structural changes are necessary, they place greater weight on the need for structural change, a position best articulated by author Alex Zamalin:

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Focusing on structural changes is more important than individual or interpersonal transformations. Ending mass incarceration and police brutality is better than efforts at racial reconciliation. Addressing racial disparities in wealth through policies of socioeconomic redistribution is better than shopping in Black-owned businesses. Eliminating the education gap through more public funding of segregated schools is better than White people moving into all-Black neighborhoods. Never are these activities mutually exclusive, but those that address structures are better…because history shows that they have worked in the past and broadly affect more people (2019, p. 23).

Despite attributing greater importance to structural change, most academic and public-facing antiracist experts focus on individual-oriented antiracist actions. The unstated assumption is that individual actions will eventually promote structural change. Few authors question the veracity of this association or provide guidance about how to achieve structural change via the uncoordinated efforts of individuals. Within this body of scholarship, four models of individual-oriented antiracism predominate: antiracism as consciousness raising, antiracism as White accountability, antiracism as [White] privilege divestment, and antiracism as political participation.

Antiracism as Consciousness Raising: Unlearning Whiteness White consciousness raising is the most common individual-oriented antiracism strategy endorsed by experts (Ball, 2022; DiAngelo, 2018, 2022; Kendi, 2019; Saad, 2020; Singh, 2019). Antiracism in the form of consciousness raising encourages White people to embark on a process of racial re-education—or racial re-­ socialization—wherein they read books, listen to podcasts, or attend trainings to learn about the history of White supremacy in the United States and how they have been shaped by White supremacy culture (Ball, 2022; Saad, 2020; Singh, 2019). Consciousness raising is intended to help White people identify how past policies fuel contemporary racial disparities and then to temper or unlearn their implicit racial biases. Sociologists describe this perspective accordingly: “White antiracists believe that, since racism is embedded in the inner burrows of our minds and bodies, Whites must practice a kind of reflexive vigilance, examining how their everyday actions support and are supported by racial domination” (Desmond & Emirbayer, 2010, p. 145). Consciousness-raising activities among White people are deemed essential for several reasons. First, racial awareness among White Americans is much lower than among Americans of color; most White people associate race exclusively with people of color, overlooking how they are racialized (Lewis, 2004). Second, few White Americans possess a robust, historically grounded understanding of the country’s racial history, particularly regarding the racist laws and policies that White Americans pursued to secure their economic, political, and social dominance (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018). These factors contribute to White people downplaying the salience of race and racism in the United States, resulting in lower

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levels of White support for racial equity initiatives. Additionally, many writers and White antiracist organizations contend that consciousness-raising efforts among White people are important because they protect people of color from incidents of racial harm associated with White fragility (Ball, 2022; DiAngelo, 2018, 2022; O’Brien, 2001; Saad, 2020). Results are inconclusive regarding whether consciousness raising advances racial equity. Some claim that consciousness-raising activities “build a foundation for a well-informed person to move toward antiracist advocacy and action in one’s community” (Bunyasi & Smith, 2019, p. 169). However, other research indicates that while these activities may alter White people’s stated racial beliefs, they do not necessarily change racial practices, exemplifying the principle policy implementation gap (Smith & Mayorga-Gallo, 2017). Further, “when offered in lieu of actionable policies regarding equity, consciousness raising can actually undermine Black’s progress by presenting increased knowledge as the balm for centuries of abuse” (Grundy, 2020, para. 4).

Antiracism as White Accountability Antiracism as White accountability calls on White people to “work on racism in their own communities” (O’Brien, 2001, p. 15). It challenges White people to “call out” White family members, friends, or co-workers for racist behavior and then to “call them in”—to educate them on why their beliefs or actions are prejudiced. Antiracism as White accountability relieves people of color from the emotional, temporal, and energetic burden of having to constantly correct or educate White people on issues of race and racism (Ball, 2022; DiAngelo, 2018; Saad, 2020). White accountability is also about reframing how White people think about race and racism. It entails undercutting ideas that race relates only to people of color or that racism is a “Black problem” rather than a White one (Ball, 2022; O’Brien, 2001). Proponents of this model charge White antiracists with educating other White people about the realities of race in the United States so that they understand that racism is a systemic problem created and sustained by White Americans (Ball, 2022; DiAngelo, 2018; Feagin, 2013; Saad, 2020). The goal is for White people to abandon colorblindness in favor of color consciousness. A color-conscious perspective recognizes that race is a product of White supremacy that shapes every facet of people’s lives in ways that accumulate advantages and disadvantages.

Antiracism as White Divestment White divestment is another model of individual-oriented antiracism advanced by antiracist scholars and organizations (Ball, 2022; DiAngelo, 2018; Saad, 2020; Singh, 2019). It associates antiracism with material and social sacrifice,

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encouraging White people to abstain from actions that promote White opportunity hoarding—wherein privileged White people secure valuable resources for their families in a non-competitive manner—and instead pursue opportunities that benefit the collective (Reeves, 2017; Underhill et al., 2018). Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is one of the most well-known proponents of this individual-oriented antiracism strategy, which she elucidated in her 2016 New York Times Magazine article, “Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City.” In this article, Hannah-Jones (2016) discusses the difficult decision she and her Black husband faced regarding where to enroll their daughter in school. Should they choose a majority White school with high rankings or a lower-ranked, majority Black school where their daughter would be subject to less racial discrimination but perhaps also have fewer educational resources? Like other scholars, Hannah-Jones lays the problem of segregated and unequal schools squarely at the feet of White parents who avoid enrolling their children in majority Black and Brown schools, even if it is the most proximate school to their home (Billingham & Hunt, 2016; Roda & Wells, 2013). Instead, White parents maneuver to send their children to the “best schools,” a distinction that is deeply racialized (Johnson & Shapiro, 2003), without considering how their actions strip Black and Brown schools of badly needed resources, resulting in racialized and classed processes of opportunity hoarding. To make educational spaces more integrated and equitable, Hannah-Jones advocates for White parents to “surrender” some of their advantages by enrolling their White children in their local school (2016, final para.). Hannah-Jones acknowledges the limits of this individual-level strategy, noting that “few families can transform a segregated school,” but also argues that nothing will change if privileged White parents remain unwilling to divest their privilege (2016, para. 11). White divestment is also a perspective advanced by sociologist Margret Hagerman in her 2018 award-­ winning book White Kids. Hagerman contends that White parents’ decisions to privilege what is best for their children hurts children of color. This message of antiracism as White divestment received further support in a popular podcast produced and released by Serial Productions and the New York Times in 2020 entitled Nice White Parents, which had over 24,000 listener reviews as of 2022 (Joffe-­ Walt, 2020).

Antiracism as Political Participation Proponents of antiracism as political participation argue that participation in electoral politics—via voting, writing elected officials, or even running for office—is the most effective way for individuals to advance an antiracist agenda and create meaningful structural change (Bunyasi & Smith, 2019). Central to this position is the belief that citizens can compel their local, state, and federal governments to support equity-oriented laws and policies designed to eradicate racial disparities. Budding antiracists should be especially attendant to local and state politics because

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“most of the inequality we see on a day-to-day basis is not produced by Congress but instead is created, maintained, and exacerbated by in-state legislatures and city halls” (Bunyasi & Smith, 2019, p.  169). To create change locally, Bunyasi and Smith advise readers to support socially progressive candidates, attend school board or city council meetings, join or organize voter registration campaigns, or even run for local office if progressive political representation is absent. However, readers do not learn what successful participation looks like or how to promote social change while investing time, energy, and money in incremental, electoral timelines. While an important vehicle for change, individual participation in electoral politics does not always yield the results constituents desire and is not a panacea for racial inequality. Elected officials may not have the will or the means to enact an antiracist agenda while in office. Moreover, even if they successfully create and implement antiracist policy, aspiring antiracists should treat said changes with caution. As critical race scholars argue, racial progress is always subject to political and social contestation, rendering most political gains a provisional status (Ray et al., 2017). Further, anti-discrimination laws make racist practices costlier to pursue, but they do not eliminate them. For example, research indicates that Black Americans continue to experience employment and housing discrimination even though federal law prohibits both (Korver-Glenn, 2021; Pager & Shepherd, 2008). This indicates that multiple strategies, including, but not limited to, political participation are necessary to achieve transformative social change. In the next section, we provide a brief discussion of the research on antiracist White parenting. We examine how scholars of White racial socialization measure antiracism and describe what their findings reveal about the who and how of antiracist White socialization.

Antiracist White Parenting Though the number of White Americans identifying as antiracists has grown in recent years, this identity remains a minoritized one—including among White parents. As noted earlier, most White racial socialization research indicates that White parents conversationally downplay the salience of race in their family’s life (Abaied & Perry, 2021; Bartoli et al., 2016; Vittrup, 2016). Few White parents initiate discussions about race and racism with their children, and when these discussions do occur, it is at the prompting of their children. Further, parent–child discussions about Whiteness as a racial identity or as a system of power are even more anomalous (Underhill, 2017). However, as racial attitudes on the left have become more liberal, so too have some racial socialization practices of White parents who identify as social and political progressives. Several studies indicate that this small but growing population of parents aspire to be antiracist and to raise social justice-minded White youth (Gillen-­ O’Neel et  al., 2021; Heberle et  al., 2021; Underhill & Simms, 2022). That said, antiracist parenting is uncharted territory for these parents (Heberle et  al., 2021;

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Underhill & Simms, 2022). Few parents report growing up in antiracist homes or having antiracist White role models whom they can turn to for advice. Consequently, parents seek out racial experts to learn how to be antiracist (Anoll et  al., 2022; Heberle et al., 2021; Underhill & Simms, 2022). Though the samples in many of these studies are small (n