What is Racial x Academic Socialization?: Model of Racial-Academic Socialization and Links to Children’s Positive Academic Adjustment Among Black Families

• In Event: Racial Socialization and Positive Parenting Across Ages in African American Families

Abstract

Scholars have suggested the need to understand the processes that contribute to and promote Black children’s positive psychological well-being within the school setting. Previous literature has suggested that Black children experience various forms of racism, such as microaggression (Henfield, 2011) and discrimination (Aloud, & Alsulayyim, 2016) from school peers and teachers. Such experiences can potentially have a lasting negative impact on their psychological needs (Coard & Sellers, 2005) and academic performance (Johnson et al., 2014). A robust literature exists on the role of African American parents’ messaging about race (i.e., racial socialization) and its role in promoting African American youth’s positive development (Wang et al., 2020) and in buffering African American youth from the negative effects of discrimination (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019). Yet, racial socialization is often examined as if parents’ communication about race occurs in isolation without other types of socialization messaging. Such an approach limits the ecological validity of our understanding of racial socialization and may provide seemingly contradictory patterns of associations with youth outcomes. For instance, parents’ messages about discrimination or preparation for bias messages are sometimes found to be negatively associated with African American youth’s academic achievement (Wang, M., & Huguley, 2012). Yet, given the history of African Americans’ marginalization within schooling contexts and the use of education as the resistance among African American communities (Franklin, 2016), African American parents’ racial socialization messages are likely layered onto academic messages which convey academic values, beliefs, expectations, and assessment of their child’s academic performance (Trask-Tate, Cunningham, & Francois, 2014). In this presentation, we synthesize two separate and emerging works of literature—the racial socialization literature and the literature on academic socialization among Black families— we outline a conceptual model illustrating the overlap in the two constructs and their joint influence on Black children’s psychological well being. The Model of Racial-Academic Socialization is depicted below. Specifically, we describe how parent and child experiences of school-based discrimination shape parents’ integration of racial and academic socialization messaging. Subsequently, parental racial-academic socialization contributes to children’s racial identity development and academic cognition and affect and subsequent child academic achievement. Additionally, parental racial-academic socialization acts as a moderator to the association between racial discrimination and academic-related outcomes. Finally, consistent with previous research on the protective role of positive racial identity, child racial identity is also described as a moderator of the association between child experience of racial discrimination on academic-related outcomes. The model has implications for understanding the role of racial socialization in the broader process of how African American parents promote resilience in their children, particularly in the face of racism within various levels of the schooling experience.

Authors

• Stephen Micheal Gibson, Virginia Commonwealth University
  Presenting Author

• Fantasy T. Lozada, Virginia Commonwealth University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Latisha Ross, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Non-Presenting Author