Study shows BLM movement helped shape childrens’ thoughts on racial identity

A recent study found that middle school students had greater awareness of their racial identities from 2014 to 2016, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. The study, published by Onnie Rogers, assistant professor of psychology and Institute for Policy Research (IPR) fellow, surveyed students between second and eighth grade.

“We were surprised to see the clear and systematic changes in the content of children’s racial identities in relation to Black Lives Matter-related themes. It just became so clear that children were paying attention to how the broader conversation about race and racism had changed, and they were drawing on these social narratives to makes sense of their own racial identities,” explained Rogers.

Researchers asked questions to children regarding racial identity narratives and how important of a role race played in their lives. In addition, children from all racial groups in the survey were more likely to mention race as part of a system of injustice, along with other core BLM ideas.

“Too often we underestimate children’s awareness of race, but these data not only suggest that children are aware of racial injustice, but they are paying attention and trying to make sense of it,” Rogers said.

Read more in the Institute for Policy Research’s article, “How Black Lives Matter Shaped Children’s Racial Identity.”

Onnie Rogers discusses the study in the presentation, “M(ai)cro: Centering the Macrosystem in Racial Identity Development” below:

Video Description: Both society and psychological science are deeply grounded in (and often perpetuate) racism. While human development is inextricable from macro-level structural racism and hierarchies of oppression, developmental research often locates processes in the micro-level of individuals and relationships, ultimately obscuring how intimately macro-level forces shape developmental processes. To shift this perspective, Northwestern psychologist Onnie Rogers draws on the concept of “m(ai)cro” to explicitly intersect the individual and society in our discussion of human development. In this talk, she will discuss how this approach shapes her research program and then present an empirical study of children’s racial identity development as a m(ai)cro process, situated in the sociopolitical context of Black Lives Matter.