Racial Discrimination, Racial Socialization, and Crime: Understanding Mechanisms of Resilience

Taking a "strength approach" to African American families and cultures, recent research demonstrates that familial racial socialization provides resilience to the criminogenic effects of interpersonal racial discrimination among Black youth. Building on these nascent findings, the present study takes a process-oriented approach to understand how racial socialization reduces and counteracts the effects of discrimination on offending. Building on a social schematic theory of offending (Burt & Simons 2011), this study explores whether two social psychological factors, positive racial identities and spirituality, serve as mechanisms through which racial socialization provides resilience. We test our hypotheses with structural equation models using data from the Family and Community Health Study (FACHS), a longitudinal, multisite study of roughly 700 African American youth and their primary caregivers followed from late childhood to early adulthood. Consistent with our theoretical model, findings suggest that familial racial socialization practices provide resilience to the criminogenic effects of racial discrimination in large part by increasing positive racial identities and spirituality. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.