Spotlighting Black Adolescent Development in the Shadow of Racism: A Commentary

Abstract

The special issue brings together scholarship that expands our understanding of the adverse effects of interpersonal, online, and vicarious racial discrimination on Black adolescents’ psychosocial well-being and sociocultural factors (e.g., racial socialization and positive racial identity) that mitigate these effects. It also focuses attention on ways that adolescents’ behavior and characteristics shape racial socialization. Some of the critical tasks that lie ahead include elevating a developmental perspective, documenting developmental pathways, directly assessing proximal mediating processes, giving more attention to the robustness and replicability of findings, and expanding levels of analyses and outcomes to include both macro-structural indicators and indicators of physiological and neuropsychological functioning.