When is Civic Action Critical? Exploring White Young Adults’ Actions Against Racism

• In Event: The Development of “Allyship” and Critical Action among White People over the Lifecourse

Abstract

Recent public attention in the United States has focused on the institutionalized racism and violence experienced by Black people (Putnam, Chenoweth, & Pressman, 2020), partially emphasizing the role that White people play in either perpetuating or actively working to dismantle race-based systems of oppression (DiAngelo, 2018). Accordingly, public discourse has focused on motivating White people to challenge oppressive racially-based forces – in other words, to engage in critical actions (Freire, 1993). Developmental science has an important role to play in investigating the trajectories that White people take to initiating and sustaining engagement in these actions. Towards these efforts, it is important to consider how we measure critical action: how can researchers know whether the actions that people report are intentionally aimed at dismantling oppressive systemic forces? In this presentation, we report on our exploration of measuring critical action related to racism among White young adults.
We collected data online in spring 2019 from 600 White heterosexual young adults in the U.S. (300 women, 300 men; Mage = 22.01, range = 18 – 25). They named and described 10 social issues that were important to them and answered questions about actions they took to address those issues. The questions were phrased about social issues in general way to minimize the potential for social desirability and because some participants may understand the systemic roots of societal inequalities but not the term “systemic inequality.” The questions focused on systemic inequalities broadly speaking; here we report analyses specifically about race. We have completed analyses for the 300 women; analyses of data from the men will be completed by the end of 2020.
First, we coded information about the social issues that participants listed as important to them. Of the 300 women, 137 (45%) listed at least one social issue that involved race (124 mentioned one, 12 mentioned two, and one mentioned three). For these 137 women, race-related responses were coded as involving inequality only (53), systems only (0), both systems and inequality (53), or neither (54). Examples of responses and codes are in Table 1. We then linked these social issues to 16 civic actions (Table 2). Participants reported engaging in an average of nine actions (range 1 – 16). For 125 women (42%), at least one of their actions was targeted at a social issue involving race. The number of race-related actions ranged from 0 to 13, M = 2.5. All 35 women whose responses were coded as reflecting a systemic inequality perspective indicated that they had engaged in at least one action to address a race-related social issue. The most common actions reported as being targeted at racism from a systemic inequality perspective were related to talking about social issues, responding to others’ social media posts, speaking up against jokes or negative stereotypes, and supporting candidates for election based on their stance on social issues. These results suggest that very few of the actions engaged in by White young adults can be considered critical action in the sense of intentionally targeting oppressive structures.

Authors

• Sara Kassie Johnson, Tufts University
  Presenting Author

• Yerin Park, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Naaila Hudani, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Matthew N Gee, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Linnea Otto, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author