Cultural Identity, Stages of

The stages of cultural identity is a conceptualization developed by James A. Banks to help teachers, practitioners, and scholars conceptualize and observe the diversity within ethnic and cultural groups. This typology was called the Stages of Ethnicity when Banks first conceptualized it in 1976. He later renamed it the Stages of Cultural Identity when he expanded the typology to be inclusive of groups other than ethnic groups, such as groups categorized by culture, class, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. Banks developed the typology because his teaching experiences, readings, and observations of ethnic behaviors caused him to seriously question theories, concepts, and paradigms that described ethnic groups such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans in the United States, and American Indians as monolithic, static, and essentialized.

Examples of the monolithic, static, and essentialized descriptions of ethnic groups that Banks encountered before conceptualizing the Stages of Cultural Identity typology are “The Negro Personality” (used by Bertram P. Karon in his 1958 book The Negro Personality); describing young African American children as having negative self-racial attitudes as was done by Kenneth B. and Mamie Clark in their pioneering research studies in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s; and the “culture of poverty” concept used by Oscar Lewis in his popular 1965 book, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty, to describe Puerto Rican families.

Banks observed that the students in his ethnic studies classes at the University of Washington within the same ethnic groups had widely varying levels of identifications, attachments, linguistic characteristics, and behaviors. Some of his African American students, for example, confined most of their interactions within Black communities both on and off campus, whereas others lived in predominantly White suburbs and had few African American friends. Some of Banks's Jewish students identified strongly with Israel and felt politically and culturally connected with it; others did not. Some of Banks's Latino students were fluent in both English and Spanish, whereas others spoke only English and were uncomfortable when people expected or implied that they should be Spanish speakers. Banks created the typology to describe the wide diversity within ethnic groups and to help his students and other educators comprehend how ethnic and cultural groups are complex, dynamic, and changing and that they are not static and therefore should not be essentialized.

Banks's typology anticipated much research and scholarship on ethnic groups done in the first decade of the 2000s, such as the typology constructed by Eugene Robinson published in 2010. Robinson maintains that the African American community is very economically and culturally diverse. He conceptualizes the African American community as consisting of four distinct subgroups: (1) the mainstream middle-class majority; (2) a large abandoned minority (a low-income population that is concentrated in urban poor communities); (3) a small transcendent elite (which consists of people such as Oprah Winfrey and Jay Z); and (4) two recently emergent groups—Blacks of mixed race heritage and recent Black immigrants from nations in the Caribbean and Africa.