Leoandra Onnie Rogers

The present study explored the ways in which adolescent Black girls responded to oppressive stereotypes and expectations based on their racial, gender, and intersectional (race-x-gender) identities. Participants included 60 girls who were students at a predominantly Black, all-girls high school ( M _age = 16.17 years) and completed a 1:1 semi-structured interview about their identity experiences. Expanding on existing research that offers modes of responding to oppression that are dichotomized and value-laden (i.e., resistance or accommodation), we find that adolescent Black girls engaged in a range of broad, nuanced, and overlapping strategies, within the larger categories of accommodation , survival , and liberation . We note that Black girls strategically negotiated the oppressive contexts in which they develop, and that their choice of response strategy connected to the type of oppression that they were navigating as well as their ability to maintain a coherent sense of self through their experiences with harmful structures and ideologies. Our findings highlight the need to learn from and support Black girls in developing a toolkit of strategies they can use to respond to the complexities of oppression, as well as a sense of agency in choosing which strategy to employ in which context.

The Listening Guide was my introduction to developmental science as a graduate student and the foundation for my training as a qualitative scholar in the United States. I learned how to do social science research through conducting in-depth, semi-structured interview analysis, which provided the foundation for how I think about the study of human development. As a developmental scientist, my research program is guided by one core question: How do young people understand the world and their place within it? I approach this question through the lens of identity development – asking how young people understand who they are and make sense of stereotypes and the social groups they belong to. In this qualitative work, I have adopted core aspects of Gilligan’s analytic approaches to analyze the identity stories of the young people carefully and systematically. The primary iterations include: The Listener’s Guide as a voice-centered, relational method and The Listening Guide as a psychological method attuned to contrapuntal voices. In this chapter I focus on three strategies from the listening methods that guide all my analyses: 1) Listening for context by situating the interview within the sociopolitical and relational context; 2) listening for multiple voices within an interview, continually asking: who is speaking to whom, in what body, in what societal structure, from what positionality? And 3) listening for resistance and strategies to negotiate oppression. I use two empirical examples to show how the Listening Guide has shaped how I listen to and learn from Black youth and how this approach has influenced developmental science.

Limited research has considered how school practices and narratives shape the construction of white identities. Using a critical qualitative approach, this article examines what white students (ages 12–14 years) learn about race and whiteness via the institutional narratives of a school with an anti-racist agenda. The analysis revealed that although the school's dominant racial narratives were race conscious in content (i.e., named racism and oppression), they largely did not work to disrupt the oppressive dynamics of white identity construction. In fact, we show how schools help produce particular kinds of white identities that serve the interests of white supremacy via the institutional narratives they endorse and socialize, even in educational settings committed to challenging racism. The article concludes by considering how efforts for racial justice in schooling are incomplete without deconstructing whiteness and white identity.

“My brother is more than just a video,” Philonise Floyd said to Joe Biden on a phone call before Biden was elected President of the United States (Samuels & Olorunnipa, 2022, p. 281). He was speaki...

As Black girls make sense of their identities in the context of racial, gender, and intersectional oppression, they also develop an awareness of the system of inequality and oppression in society. However, with in the growing body of research in developmental science focused on adolescents’ awareness of structural oppression in society, or “critical consciousness,” there remains a gap in listening to Black girls and their unique intersectional identity experiences to understand how adolescents are aware of oppression. The current qualitative analysis uses in depth interview data to examine whether and how adolescent Black girls discuss oppression in the context of their racial, gender, and intersectional identities. Analysis reveals that adolescent Black girls ( N = 60; M _age = 16.17; SD = 1.23) display an awareness of oppression through: (a) Stereotypes and (b) Hierarchies. Patterns of awareness were high and similar for race (“Black”) and intersectionality (“Black girl”) but lower for gender (“girl”). We discuss contributions for studying identity, critical consciousness, and intersectionality during adolescence, and prioritizing the knowledge of Black girls.

Social identity is defined, in part, as the sense of “we-ness” an individual forms with a social group, such as race or gender. The social identity literature, however, is largely divided by identities—with racial identity conceptualized, measured, and interpreted separately from gender identity—rather than examining how youth understand these group memberships at their intersections (i.e., “we” Black girls or “we” white boys). In the current qualitative analysis we examine how Black and white early adolescents ( M _age = 12.51; N = 63) interpret the subjective importance and meaning of their racial and gender identities and their intersections. Results reveal that adolescents reason about the (in)significance of intersectionality on different levels: personal (the self), relational (others, peers), and structural (stereotypes, discrimination) and adolescents’ race and gender positionalities shape their meaning-making. We discuss contributions for research on identity development and intersectionality during adolescence.

In critical approaches to the study of whiteness, white ignorance refers to systematic and intentional ways of (not) knowing that function to perpetuate racism. The current critical qualitative analysis examines how white ignorance surfaces in the racial identity narratives of white adolescents (N = 69, M age = 15.91, SD = 0.49, data collected 2017–2019). Using semi-structured interview data, we identified three manifestations of accommodation to white ignorance: constructing white as disadvantaged, framing race(ism) as unimportant and elsewhere, and the active refusal to know or imagine racial oppression. Alongside this accommodation we also observed a less common but important thread of resistance to white ignorance: seeing (and naming) systemic racism. The findings reveal how white ignorance as a macrosystemic cultural practice becomes embedded in, and strengthened through, the micro-level racial identities of white adolescents. Implications for conceptualizing and contextualizing white racial identity in developmental science are discussed.

Although current approaches to the study of resilience acknowledge the role of context, rarely do those conceptualizations attend to societal systems and structures that include hierarchies of power and privilege-namely systems of racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism-nor do they articulate how these structural realities are embedded within individual experiences. We offer critiques of the current literature from this structural lens, using the concept of master narratives to articulate the incomplete and, at times, damaging story that the discipline of psychology has told about resilience. We then provide three models that center history, systems, and structures of society that can be employed in the study of resilience. We close with lessons learned from listening to those voices who have been marginalized by mainstream society, lessons that require us to redefine, broaden, and deepen our conceptualization of resilience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Genderqueer and non-binary (GQNB) people are increasingly recognized within the gender-diverse community, yet how they navigate the sociocultural constructions of GQNB identity remains underexamined. This article examines the constructions of GQNB identity at the intersection of racial-ethnic identity among 19 racially diverse GQNB college students at an elite, predominantly white, Midwestern university. Participants completed a one-on-one semi-structured interview regarding their experiences with the expectations others hold about their identities. Using thematic analysis, we identified five related themes that characterize participants’ identity-relevant expectations: (a) Racial/Ethnic Stereotypes, (b) Queer Normativity, (c) Privilege & Power, (d) Binary Rigidity, (e) Educating Others. We then analyzed how participants negotiate these expectations using the master narrative framework to interlace personal and societal identity narratives. Rigidity regarding how to be GQNB demonstrates the transactional nature of identity as individuals internalize and resist sociocultural norms. Implications for the broader literature on gender identity and its development are discussed.

The call for psychological science to make amends for "causing harm to communities of color and contributing to systemic inequities" (American Psychological Association, 2022a) requires a critical acknowledgment that science itself is not neutral but a sociopolitical and ideological endeavor. From its inception, psychology used science to produce what was framed as incontrovertible "hard" evidence of racial hierarchy, infallible "proof" that white people (i.e., cismale, heteronormative, and economically resourced white people) were superior to Indigenous and Black people. We first trace the historical links between postpositivist epistemology and the ideology of white supremacy in psychological science, showing that although explicitly racist science (e.g., eugenics) has faded, the widely shared and strictly enforced epistemological norms about what is (and is not) "good" science remain entrenched. We then outline three epistemic imperatives to resist this harmful master narrative: (a) embrace humanizing epistemologies, (b) listen and learn from those who have been systematically left out of science, and (c) recognize resistance as normative and necessary. We discuss how these imperatives, rooted in critical, feminist, and antiracist scholarship, disrupt oppression and guide us toward doing science that does good. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).