Topic Area Primers
This section features memos written by graduate students that explore and provide context for the major themes of the Black Youth Project survey.
Political Efficacy
African American youth, at first glance, seem to have a very strange profile in terms of the relationship between self-esteem and personal efficacy. However, advances in the social science literature have illuminated a coherent story about the way the self-concept of African Americans adolescents might develop politically. The problem is that the literature has failed to emphasized the big-picture narrative that it’s dispersed subfields make available. This essay excavates that narrative, shedding light on the seeming puzzle of the personal and political efficacy of African American youth.
Gender and Politics
What is gender and how do black youth perceive and experience it? This paper reviews recent empirical research on gender roles in black communities, paying special attention to young people. I begin this paper with a discussion of what the word “ gender” means. I then discuss existing measures of gender role attitudes and their applicability to black youth. From there, I review major empirical studies that help us to understand how gender plays out in everyday life for black youth, focusing on the following areas: gender roles, perceived gender discrimination and stratification, the influence of race and gender on political opinion and behavior, single parenting, and body image. This review of the literature concludes that there is little work focusing solely on black gender roles, and that which does usually confines its sample to the adult population. There is important work to be done on the gender role attitudes of black youth.
Black Youth, Health, and Society
This memo focuses primarily on previous research into the societal causes and impacts of racial disparities in health. We examine some of the structural and cultural causes of racial health disparities and their effects on African Americans, especially youth. The impact of economic inequality, discrimination, and unequal access to health care are among the topics explored. In addition, we take an in-depth look at four specific public health problems with special importance to black youth: HIV/AIDS, mental health, substance abuse, and violence. Each of these subtopics not only explores each public health problem but also provides some concrete examples of the mechanisms detailed in the explanations of racial health disparities. Finally, we examine existent research on race and public opinion on health issues.
Hip Hop and Politics
A review of the major theoretical arguments and important empirical findings relating to the influence of hip hop on the development of youth politics, particularly among U.S. African American communities. Of primary focus to this investigation are the intersections of hip hop and sex/sexuality, hip hop and racial attitudes and hip hop and substance abuse/violence.
African American Youth Political Participation
This essay briefly explores what existing research in political science has to say about the political participation of African American youth. The first section traces mainstream work in political science on participation. The early work on participation, based on the large-n survey tradition of the Columbia and Michigan election studies, focuses almost exclusively on voting, taking account race or age only as controls. The second section deals with the emergence of the currently dominant model of participation, the “resource” or “civic participation” model, which takes into account different forms of political activity besides voting and turns attention to factors unique to African Americans. Explaining race-based differences in levels and types of political participation turns out to be the driving focus on current research. Following this, I explore electoral and nonelectoral forms of participation in detail, paying special attention to youth of color, drawing from the most recent studies of their participation.
Social Psychology of Race Among African Americans
This is a review of empirical literature concerning the social psychology of race among black Americans. Central topics include: perceptions of racial discrimination, racial identity, and racial attitudes.
Youth and Civic Engagement
This memo is a review of the civic engagement literature particularly with respect to the place (or lack thereof) that African-American and other youth of color occupy in current research agendas. The memo elaborates and critiques several important aspects of the civic engagement literature including the difficulties of defining civic engagement, differences in research approaches, and methodological challenges in the field. Also discussed are key factors influencing youth civic engagement such as education, geographic context, race, political institutions/public policy, and family. Throughout the memo, there are critical assessments of some of the basic assumptions and oversights embedded in much of the civic engagement literature as well as suggestions for fruitful directions of future research.
Religion
There has been some disagreement among scholars as to whether the role religion has played in the development of African American consciousness, sexuality, and politics has been positive or negative. However, the importance of religion and its institutions in the perceptions of community members has been virtually unquestioned. Scholarship has shown that religion has a meaningful impact on the political and psychological consciousness of many African Americans, including young adults, with important consequences for their decision-making processes. This memo highlights some important periods in the development of Black religion, its effects on politics, and its impact on the decision-making of African American young adults with regard to sexuality and sexual practice.
Adolescent Sexuality
A great deal of the literature on black youth and sex fixates on sexual behavior and its accompanying risks. While this perspective permeates the literature on sex and young people in general, it is especially pronounced in research that focuses on black youth and youth of color living in urban areas. In this paper I argue that such work, while important to addressing real public health concerns, is profoundly limited. I first discuss the limitations of this work, and then review new approaches to studying and discussing black youth sexuality, highlighting research that takes seriously development, meaning, and context. Understanding how black youth themselves think about sex is central to understanding any aspect of their sexuality—whether contraceptive use, sexual initiation, pregnancy, or sexual orientation. It is also imperative to developing resources, policies, and discourses that encourage sexual health, responsibility, and pleasure.