Race Talk During the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election: Emerging Adults’ Critical Consciousness and Racial Identity in Context

• In Event: Leveraging Developmental Science to Advance Social Justice

Abstract

Young people in the United States (U.S.) are growing up in a tumultuous sociocultural context marked by racial violence, inequity, and political polarization. In this study, we examined college-going emerging adults’ micro-level engagement with this macro-level context. To do so, we used qualitative experiential sampling at two time points surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election and 2021 inauguration, asking participants to report and reflect on recent race related conversations. Our sample included 47 students (Mage= 19.71, SD = 1.72; 81% female, 17% male, 2% other; 45% Asian/Asian American, 30% white, 13% Latinx/Hispanic, 4% Black/African American, 4% Multiracial, 2% Middle Eastern/Arab) at a private, predominantly white university in the U.S. Midwest. We analyzed our participants’ accounts through the dual lenses of critical consciousness, which includes awareness of societal inequity (critical reflection), belief in the possibility of effecting sociopolitical change (political efficacy), and sociopolitical engagement aimed at dismantling inequity (critical action), as well as racial identity meaning making, which includes how individuals make sense of their experiences of racialization and racial group membership. Based on hybrid inductive-deductive coding, we examined if and how these racially diverse young people engaged critically with societal events and structures and their own racial identities.
We found that a majority reported conversations with peers, focused primarily on racial inequity and justice. Among participants of color, links were drawn between events and issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-Asian violence, or the presidential election, and their own daily lives. Thus, for many young People of Color, conversations with peers offered spaces for critical reflection on macro-level issues, which led to micro-level racial identity meaning making. However, our participants narratives evidenced that these processes are interwoven, with reflections on individual experiences often embedded in reflection on socio-political and historical issues. In contrast, we found no evidence of racial identity meaning making among white participants, although many of their responses were coded for aspects of critical consciousness. Instead, most white participants situated race as outside of and disconnected from their lives—either not relevant or only relevant to “other” people. While many white participants wrote about their hopes, fears, or frustrations, especially related to the political sphere, whiteness generally remained unnamed and unexamined. Our findings show that more work is needed to better understand the ways in which positionality, including systematic racial privilege or oppression, shapes youth development. Without taking the socio-political context into account, group-based differences can seem static and neutral—occurring because of one’s racial group membership—rather than in relation to the racialized systems of power and oppression shaping our society. To advance a social justice-oriented developmental science, participant positionality and racialized experiences in the context of white supremacy and racial inequity should be named and incorporated into the theory, analysis, and interpretation of research.

Authors

• Ursula Moffitt, Wheaton College Massachusetts
  Presenting Author

• Leoandra Onnie Rogers, Northwestern University

• Yola Mzizi, Northwestern University

• Elana Charlson, Northwestern University