Importance Of Gendered Racial Identity

“Gendered Racial Identity of Black Young Women”

With the expressed concentration in building of identity in children, this article defined identity as “a phenomenological experience of coming to understand oneself; identity is lived discourse” (Thomas, Hacker, and Hoxka 530). The importance of developing social identity is stressed as the membership to certain groups’ potential for positive association to identity is crucial for children’s identity as a whole to their concept of self. Race is primarily targeted in the early stages of research when studying the “role of race and ethnicity” to the concepts of self-identity in both the general and social settings (Thomas, Hacker, and Hoxka 530). The article refers to the Clark doll studies, which was a study of children that showed that African American children typically chose more positive associations to white dolls as a sign of “internalizing negative stereotypes” than to African American dolls (Thomas, Hacker, and Hoxka 530). The positive attributes to racial identity were suggested to be caused by encouraging situations from African Americans’ childhood.

As the article noted, “young women reported that they felt negative expectations were placed n them from a variety of sources including the media, teachers, and sometimes even family members” (Thomas, Hacker, and Hoxka 534). These negative expectations impacted the self-identity and self-value of these women. African American women are face the stereotypes of “Mammy (self-sacrificing nurturer), Jezebel (highly sexualized), and Sapphire (angry, hostile, and emasculating),” which caused these images to influence young African American women’s images of themselves (Thomas, Hacker, and Hoxka 535). The women from this study also noted that they felt that they needed to overcome the stereotypes and break the barriers surrounding them by being more empowered and having