Racial Identity Development

Racial Identity Development Theories

Below is a brief overview of theories explaining racial identity development. Within this literature, two overarching theoretical approaches have been used to conceptualize racial identity development. The first approach applies developmental theories to account for maturational changes in racial identity from early childhood through adolescence and includes work by Frances Aboud, Jean Phinney, and Stephen Quintana. This approach applies developmental principles discovered in other domains of children's functioning to conceptualize children's understanding of race. For example, Aboud applied neo-Piagetian theories concerning children's understanding of their social world to explain the development of their understanding of their racial world.

The second approach, framing racial identity from a social identity perspective using Henri Tajfel's theory, suggests that racial identity is affected by many factors associated with the dynamics of social identification with a group. Research for the second approach includes seminal work by Kenneth and Mamie Clark and, more recently, by Robert Sellers. Social identity theory suggests that specific social dynamics occur when someone identifies with a group. For example, identification with a group leads to bias toward the ingroup and against out-groups. Racial identity theorists have shown that the identification with a racial group, particularly when that racial group is stigmatized, is associated with the formation of particular attitudes toward the racial in-group and toward racial outgroups. Social identity theory describes the social and personal effects of belonging to a group, where identity is developed through membership in a group that is valuable to the individual. This theory also posits that identification with group membership can increase self-esteem and the sense of positive racial attitudes to an in-group. Social identity theory has been successfully applied to the study of racial identity and has been empirically supported for separate groups, including Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans.

Taken together, these two overarching theoretical approaches suggest that racial identity development is influenced by the maturation of cognitive and psychological processes internal to the child or adolescent and by the child or adolescent's context of complex sociocultural group dynamics. Most racial identity theories integrate both developmental and social identity perspectives but do so with different emphases. Quintana's model is used below to identify critical milestones in racial identity development.