That Sounds About White: Parental Racial Socialization and White Youth Identity Development

Abstract

Though parental racial socialization in the United States has been investigated since the 1970s, the literature almost exclusively focuses on its execution within minority families. The study at hand addresses this gap and ascertains how parental racial socialization works in White families. It unravels this question qualitatively, via semi-structured interviews with twenty students at a private university in the Southeast. The intention behind approaching college students was to gain a better sense of the kinds of racial behaviors and attitudes that White children internalize. In addition, it was hoped that interviewing college students about their parental racial socialization would provide insight into the impact that their parents have on their offsprings’ racial identities into adulthood. The findings of this paper were noteworthy, as they shed light onto how members of the dominant racial group in the twenty-first century learn to conceive of themselves and, by extension, racial others. Consistent with prior work on this topic, the main finding was that the parents of those surveyed neglected to converse with their kids about race and, for the most part, attempted to raise them “color-blind.” However, as I show, parents still passed on ideas about race, but through implicit means. A novel insight that this study provides is that White children in the twenty-first century may socialize their own parents about race once they mature and develop their own political opinions.