Racial identity development is a rich psychological process in which I can totally nerd out on and completely get lost in the weeds. Or, at least I can lose my audience.
I am grateful for the feedback I received once, “You say racial identity development a lot. Those words together don’t mean anything to me and I feel bored when you say them.”
In research it is incredibly useful to define concepts, especially in the social sciences where so much information is socially and culturally constructed. In life it’s also really helpful to define concepts in order for people to be on the same page, to capture a moment or a phenomena or bring to the surface a social script that feels invisible (i.e., White fragility, weaponized incompetence, invisible labor, etc). Then in academia, we get lost in all kinds of fun arguments about what words mean and how they philosophically differ from each other, and which theorist got it right and which researcher has the most expertise and the best methods, and even sometimes, what or who is the most socially just. Oh, how we find competition everywhere.
But, I especially care about defining racial identity and specifically racial identity development (RID) theory in a way that is accessible to professionals who care about building strong relationships with the people they serve.
So then, what is racial identity?
Racial identity development theories (especially ones created by Dr. Janet Helms) focus on the psychological experience of race and racial identity.
Our psychology on race includes our thoughts, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors about:
- our worldview on race in general
- our own race
- the dynamics interplay between #1 and #2.
The development of racial identity refers to a nonlinear emotional and knowledge-gaining process of understanding ourselves. A part of gaining an understanding of ourselves is learning how our society has used race to effectively maintain power to a certain group of people based on a set of physical characteristics (i.e., phenotype). Of note, there is no biological basis for how we define race. Race is a social construct defined by those in power, which evolves and shifts over history to keep up with values, technology, and patterns of human life.
Now, how can professionals benefit from knowing about racial identity?
Oh, let me count the ways. (See, I can go nerdy quite fast).
First, many White people struggle to understand they even have a psychology on their own race. We are currently socialized to reduce a rich psychological experience into two categories (i.e., racist or not racist) and even those two concepts are flat. When we start to understand the dimensions and developmental process of understanding our racial identity, we will likely also start to see race differently within our society. In other words, our worldview on race in general will change. The dynamic interplay between our worldview and our identity is a little chicken-egg, thus there is no “perfect” or right order between advancing learning of self vs how race is used in our world.
Second, we are conditioned to avoid our psychological experience of race which interferes with our ability to 1) take perspective of and 2) empathize with people of Color. Our relationships with people of Color in work (and our whole lives) suffer when it is clear we struggle to do both. In addition, learning about racial identity tends to shift our understanding or rather helps us tolerate the intense negative feelings of cracking our delusion about the existence of racial privilege.
When we avoid thinking about our racial identity and the global historical use of race, can’t take perspective of or empathize with people of Color and also ask them to teach us about our privilege, oh no we are in trouble.
Professionals need to understand they have a racial identity and that psychology on race comes to play at work, even in a mostly White or even all White context. Learning about (and growing) racial identity is not just about a few moments of standing up when something goes wrong (but please do that). It is about how our psychological experience of race is walking around with us all the time and how helpful it is to build a practice of noticing, engaging, reflecting, and establishing new behaviors on race in order to be more racially responsive.