AFRICANGLOBE – African American teenagers perform better academically when their parents instill in them a sense of racial pride.
New research shows that when parents use racial socialization—talking to their children or engaging in activities that promote feelings of racial knowledge, pride, and connection—it offsets racial discrimination’s potentially negative impact on students’ academic development.
Preparing adolescents for possible bias is also a protective factor, though a combination of this preparation and racial socialization is ideal in moderating the possible damaging effects of racial discrimination by teachers or fellow students, according to a study published in the journal Child Development.
“Our findings challenge the notion that ‘race blindness’ is a universally ideal parenting approach, especially since previous research has shown that racially conscious parenting strategies at either extreme—either ‘race blindness’ or promoting mistrust of other races—are associated with negative outcomes for African American youth,” says lead author Ming-Te Wang, assistant professor of psychology in education at the University of Pittsburgh, who coauthored the study with Harvard University’s James P. Huguley.
“When African American parents instill a proud, informed, and sober perspective of race in their sons and daughters, these children are more likely to experience increased academic success,” says Wang.
Racial Pride Beneficial
Although previous studies have shown that parental racial socialization is beneficial to the mental health of African American youth, few researchers have looked at how daily experiences with racial discrimination in a school context are related to the child’s educational prospects.
Scholarly research has shown that African American students, males in particular, are at risk for being unfairly disciplined, being discouraged from taking advanced classes, or receiving lower grades than they deserved, all because of their race. Other studies point to negative peer treatment because of race—getting into fights, being bullied, or not being selected for teams or activities.
Wang and Huguley explored how racial discrimination relates to the students’ educational outcomes, specifically grade-point averages, educational aspirations, the sense of belonging to a school, and cognitive engagement, which is the initiative a student takes in his or her own learning. And they set out to determine how the outcomes are affected by parental racial socialization.
Using a combination of questionnaires and face-to-face interviews of both students and parents, the study examines the home and school racial experiences of 630 African American high school students in a diverse but mostly Black urban area on the East Coast of the United States.
Unlike other studies that focus on low-income families, this project involved participants who came from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. The median household income range was $46,000-$50,000, and 40 percent of the parents or guardians had a college degree.
Overall, the study found racial pride to be the most powerful factor in protecting children from the sting of discriminatory behavior. It directly and positively related to three out of four academic outcomes—grade-point averages, educational aspirations, and cognitive engagement—and was directly related to resilience in the face of discrimination. Preparation for bias was directly related to only one outcome—the sense of belonging to a school.
“Our study provides empirical evidence that the longstanding practice in the African American community of cultivating racial pride and preparing children to face racial bias in society should be considered among appropriate and beneficial practices in parenting Black children,” says Wang, who plans to conduct the same kind of research with Latino and Asian American teenagers.
The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
It’s my opinion that like if a white supremacist/Nazi is going to be reformed. They need to do so willingly. The only times I’ve heard of successful rehabilitation of fascists is when they made the conscious decision to no longer be one anymore and seek atonement. People who try to like hug and change fascists that don’t want to change are fucking morons
Correct. I was crypto-facist for a few years, and the people trying to hug me didnt change me because at that point I wouldnt have listened. It was only when I started to see the movement for what it was that I was finally able to listen.
I’m not derailing your addition but I’m horrified you’re only 18. When did you become a fasc?
Yeah trust me it *is* horrifying. I’m ashamed of who I was and I think my only atonement is to talk about how damn easy it is to become one when you’re young.
This is gonna be a long post.
For a little bit of background, I am a mixed race person, half brown and half white. I was raised in a Muslim family and am still closeted around them.
I started to have issues with Islam at around 12 or so, when I first started to get the idea that I might be gay. Now I never would have admitted that was my reason. If you had asked me I probably would have said “logic” or something. Because of that I went hard into atheism and atheist circles.
Now people hate to admit this but ex-Muslim spaces are predominantly right wing. Ex-Muslims often see the left as “too tolerant” towards a religion that hurt them. This was the only community I had though, and I read through everything. I was 13.
The other thing that people hate to admit is that, especially when you’re young, being mixed race is so damn hard. If I acted “too white”, following my mother’s German/Austrian traditions, I was accused of hiding my true nature. But if I acted “too brown” I was just another camel jockey. So I hid my “Indian” customs from others and tried passing as white. Especially online.
So I’m not saying this is all youtube’s fault or anything. I was raised to believe that the brown half of my family was lesser and stupid. And with my hatred of Islam, I believed it doubly.
Then came Anita Sarkeesian. I was watching pewdiepie and from there my recommendations were all set. If I’m remembering the pipeline it was pewdiepie - Philip Defranco - Chris Ray Gun (sp?) - Thunderfoot - Sargon - etc. But I was pretty much acquainted with all of the right wing youtube of the day.
Funnily enough, I found her through Thunderfoot. That got me into antifeminism, and more specifically, GamerGate.
I was primarily on the subreddits KIA (Kotaku In Action) and TIA (Tumblr In Action). Both made fun of the SJWs. I kid you not, I would gleefully wait for “Sanity Sunday”, where the people would talk about how feminism is disgusting, cultural appropriation is fake, the wage gap isnt real, etc. I would scroll through this tag for hours.
I got most of my youtube recommendations from those subreddits. This led me from GamerGate to more fascist lines of thinking, such as watching videos about why BLM is a terrorist organization, why all muslims were evil rapists, and why I was fundamentally right to reject my Indian heritage and follow my “correct” heritage.
From here I delved into “race realism”, and I believed it all. I had to. This was the only community I had felt safe in. One of the fash guys even offered to shack me up at his house if my parents kicked me out for being atheist. I was 15.
To say that again, I was 15 and believed that white was right, blue lives matter, “we wuz kangs”, etc. I never would have called myself a fascist or a Nazi. How could I? I used my brown skin as a token, so that people could point to me and say: “See, we aren’t misogynistic and racist! We have this brown girl right here.” But I believed in all the things the Nazis did. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I will never pretend I didn’t.
But then something happened. I admitted to myself, and to a few others, that I was gay. And suddenly, the homophobia that I had molded myself in, it didn’t fit right. I happened to, by accident, click on the reddit thread of GamerGhazi, the opposition to GamerGate. And after a long bout of introspection I found out that they were accepting of gay people, that the things I had been experiencing were common, that maybe, just maybe, we didn’t need a white ethnostate.
I don’t want to be dramatic but that accidental click saved my life.
From there it was a road of recovery. I deleted all my old accounts, made new ones, and started to read leftist theory. I found better friends, cut out old people. So now, just about two years later, I’m healing.
I think that’s everything. I probably got some times and dates wrong because I’ve been trying to move on from it. But if you need more info or anything like that, please let me know.
