racial identity

n. Racial identity is a sense of collective identity based on an individual's perception of shared racial heritage with a particular racial group. Conceptions of race, as well as the specific racial groupings, vary across cultures and time. Most social scientists now contend that racial groupings are arbitrary and are derived from social conventions and customs embedded within specific historical contexts. As such, they maintain that race is best understood as a socially constructed variable rather than as taxonomy that is biologically meaningful. Although recent genetic studies have renewed the debate about the potential utility of racial groupings in biomedical research, psychology remains ambivalent regarding how, if at all, best to understand racial groupings as a psychological construct.

Less controversial is the notion that racial identity is a psychologically useful construct, although there remain disagreements over terminology and conceptualization. The concept of racial identity overlaps with ethnic identity. Although some scholars use the two terms interchangeably, there are some conceptual distinctions between racial identity and ethnic identity that have been noted. For example, Janet Helms has suggested that race has a clear meaning in the context of contemporary American society, whereas ethnicity is less clearly defined and is often used as a proxy for racial classifications. Helms has also argued that racial identity centers around one's reaction to societal oppression based on race, whereas ethnic identity is based on a sense of a collective with others who share cultural characteristics such as religion and language.

Racial identity research has been most actively pursued within counseling psychology in the United States. It is generally concerned with the psychological implications of racial group membership, with the basic premise that in a society where racial categorization has social and political meanings, the development of a racial identity will occur in some form for everyone. The dominant theory of racial identity development was proposed in the early 1970s by William Cross, who argued that racial identity among African Americans can be understood as a developmental transformational process. According to Cross, the first stage is the pre-encounter stage, in which an African American individual has absorbed the racist beliefs, images, and values of the dominant culture without questioning. The second, the encounter stage, is precipitated by an event or a series of events that results in the individual's acknowledging that racism impacts his or her life. In the third, immersion/emersion stage, the individual desires to surround himself/herself with symbols of his or her racial identity and to learn about his/her history and share this experience with same-race peers while avoiding actively symbols of the White dominant culture. In the next, internalization stage, the individual has unlearned the internalized stereotypes about Blacks and holds a more secure racial identity such that he or she can begin to re-establish meaningful relationships with the members of the dominant society. In the final, internalization/commitment stage, the individual's positive racial identity translates into action for social change and a sense of commitment to the collective action on behalf of the racial group in selective alliances with members of the dominant society. Cross has termed this process of becoming Black psychologically nigrescence. Similar models of racial identity development have been proposed for other racial minority groups (including biracial individuals) in the United States.

Helms has argued that White Americans may also undergo development of positive White racial identity but that this entails coming to terms with their privileged status within society. According to Helms, white racial identity develops in six stages, starting with the contact stage, in which the individual has little or no awareness of the pervasiveness of racism. In the disintegration stage, the individual gains a growing awareness of, and discomfort with, racism and White privilege. In the third, reintegration, the individual may channel the guilt and anxiety felt during the previous stage to anger toward racial minority groups and blame them for the discomfort. The pseudoindependent stage is thought to follow, in which the individual no longer blames African Americans for racism and begins to disavow his or her own Whiteness in efforts to align with African Americans. Immersion/emersion is thought to involve the individual's search for positive White role models of antiracist behavior in an effort to redefine his/her racial identity. And in the final stage of autonomy, Helms describes the achievement of positive White identity that entails commitment to social change and a new sense of personal efficacy in multiracial settings.

Although these racial identity development models are presented as progressive stage models, theorists caution that the actual developmental processes are not always necessarily linear. Notably, Cross's (and other similar) racial identity development models have also been criticized for privileging a multicultural agenda as the desirable end stage of racial identity development and for lacking systematic empirical validation. Notwithstanding such challenges, racial identity theories have been applied to research, primarily in counseling and education. For example, scholars have examined the association between self-reported racial identity attitudes and multicultural competencies among mental health practitioners, especially among White counselors and trainees. Other research with racial minority individuals has examined the relationship between attitudes associated with specific racial identity stages and their experiences with racism and discrimination, self-esteem, friendship patterns, and so on. Finally in a different line of scholarship that has not been linked specifically to racial identity development models, a series of social psychological studies have shown that making individuals' racial identity salient (through explicit or implicit priming) can affect their performance on a wide range of tasks from cognitive performance to visual search performance for Black or White faces. – SOk