Black racial identity and engagement during Black Lives Matter 2020: The role of age and multiracial status.

OBJECTIVE: The social category of race plays an important role in how people navigate their identities and social worlds, especially in societies where racial injustice is salient. The present study considers the racial identity experiences of Multiracial and monoracial Black adults in the United States during a race-salient moment: the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Using survey data collected in the fall of 2020, our study seeks to understand racial identity and activism experiences among age-diverse monoracial and Multiracial Black people during BLM 2020. METHOD: Participants were 183 Black adults in the United States (73 Multiracial, 110 monoracial). Regressions were conducted to examine (a) how identity exploration and commitment differed by age and by Multiracial status during a time of heightened racial salience, and (b) how identity exploration and commitment was associated with BLM engagement. RESULTS: We found that Multiracial and monoracial individuals engage with racial identity differently across age groups, reflecting their different relationships with dominant societal narratives of race. We also found positive associations between racial identity and BLM engagement regardless of participants' Multiracial status or age. CONCLUSIONS: While our findings did underscore several commonalities across Multiracial and monoracial Black people, they also indicated a need to revisit the relevance of established (mono)racial identity development models for Multiracial individuals, especially outside of adolescence and young adulthood. Revisiting previous models is critical to engage with the m(ai)cro process of racial identity and how the cultural context of anti-Blackness and monoracism shapes individual development across the life course. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Family Racial/Ethnic Socialization Through the Lens of Multiracial Black Identity: A M(ai)cro Analysis of Meaning-Making.

The role of family members in racial identity development is often constrained to conceptualizations of parental socialization, with a focus on socialization during childhood and adolescence. However, parents may continue to play a role in racial identity development as youth enter young adulthood and continue to explore who they are. Our study investigates how parents feature in the racial identity meaning-making of multiracial Black college students to understand the role that parents may continue to play for youth's identities as they age. We invoke a critical m(ai)cro perspective to fully consider how parent influence necessarily intertwines with macrosystem dynamics of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and monoracism for multiracial Black youth's identity meaning-making in the context of Black Lives Matter. Through inductive analysis of semi-structured interviews with 11 multiracial Black ("Black + ") college students, we found that young adults mention parents or familial adults when discussing their racial identity to (1) recount parental guidance on racial identity, (2) illustrate the racial politics of multiracial identification, and (3) expose the nuances of navigating (un)shared identity spaces within the family. Our findings highlight the relevance of parental socialization in the adulthood years, and that parents are inextricably implicated in how youth are making sense of macrosystem dynamics of anti-Blackness and monoracism. We end with a discussion of takeaways for parents of multiracial youth.