The shooting death of Michael Brown in August was the latest in what’s become an all-too-common story. Brown, 18, an unarmed black teenager, was stopped by white police and shot to death in his hometown of Ferguson, Missouri. The tragedy echoes similar confrontations in which the response appeared to far outweigh the initial incident, including the shooting deaths of black teens Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis in 2012, and in a particularly bleak historical example, the gruesome 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, whose alleged crime was flirting with a white woman.
Brown’s death stirred up intense public reaction, including demonstrations, looting and a full-scale national response from African-American leaders and the press.
In particular, the event underscored the uphill battle that black boys in this country face from negative stereotyping, racial profiling and discrimination — a battle that too often results in violence and even death.
“African-American boys have a lot of potential stressors, even relative to African-American girls,” says Virginia Commonwealth University psychology professor Faye Z. Belgrave, PhD, co-author with Josh Brevard of the forthcoming book, “African-American Boys,” a summary of research on this population. “Especially as they get older and move into adolescence, they face racism and discrimination that other racial and ethnic groups simply don’t face to the same extent.”
Now, efforts are under way to turn this negative situation around and to give black boys better chances of success. On the national level, President Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, launched in February, is directly tackling both the bad publicity these boys can receive and the structural, societal and economic realities they face in this country. The program, initially funded by foundations and philanthropists at approximately $200 million, was expanded in July with an additional $104 million in commitments from school districts, foundations, agencies and corporations.
Psychologists are undertaking their own positive efforts, examining ways that parents, schools, community institutions and society can more fully recognize and foster the natural strengths of these young people. In particular they’re looking at how factors like teaching styles, classroom interventions and parental monitoring can be used to steer these boys onto healthy, successful paths.
In addition, psychologists are working with the boys themselves to help them recognize racism and to develop their positive cultural and racial identity to combat it, a strategy known as “racial socialization”
“Our work is based on an African proverb that the lion’s story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it,” says Howard Stevenson, PhD, a University of Pennsylvania social psychologist who trains educators to help black boys respond to heated situations using creativity and humor. “Part of our job is to help the boys tell their story and not follow someone else’s script about them.”
A complex challenge
Research suggests that people often see black boys through negative lenses — and that boys can suffer the consequences.
In a study in the February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles social psychologists Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, and Matthew Jackson, PhD, found that white female undergraduates judged all children as equally innocent up to age 9 but saw black children as significantly less so starting at age 10.
In a second study reported in the same article, police officers who viewed black boys in more dehumanized ways than they did white boys were more likely than other officers to use force against them in custody.
A confounding issue is that a subset of African-American boys — 20 percent to 30 percent — do start to act out behaviorally and to perform worse academically than other children in school. That downward trajectory continues into adulthood, research finds.
“Part of the puzzle is trying to figure out what happens along the way that creates such disparate outcomes for them,” says Oscar Barbarin III, PhD, a Tulane University professor of psychology who organized and co-leads a multi-university initiative, the Boys of Color Collaborative, which is gathering and analyzing data on these boys’ development.
One factor is that these boys may come from homes that don’t provide them the same school-preparation perks that their peers may get. So by the time they start school, they are already behind other children in language skills, says Barbarin, who edited and wrote several articles in a special 2013 issue of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry on boys of color.
What’s more, if teachers and other students expect these boys to do poorly in school, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, adds Barbarin, who also provides training, consulting and research for Head Start, the federal program that promotes school readiness in low-income children.
Other data show that black youth, and black boys in particular, are far more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their white peers. In surveying 72,000 schools in 7,000 school districts in 2012, the U.S. Department of Education found that black students were three-and-a-half times more likely to be expelled or suspended than white kids, with black boys twice as likely to be suspended as black girls. While it’s not completely clear why such large disparities exist, researchers cite unintended bias, unequal access to highly effective teachers and differences in school leadership styles as possible reasons.
“That’s not to say in some cases boys aren’t doing things that require some correction and redirection,” says Barbarin, “but often, the punishment is more severe than it needs to be.”
Schools as solutions
Psychologists’ research points to specific factors that can help change black boys’ trajectories for the better.
Some are related to the school environment. In particular, a teaching style that Barbarin calls “warm demanding” — being emotionally responsive while maintaining high expectations — is a promising way to counter the tendency of some teachers to emotionally distance themselves from youngsters they fear will act out behaviorally. A more interactive style “really has to do with affirming that there’s something [good] about the child,” he says.
Classroom structure may also be a factor. In a study reported in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry special issue, Barbarin found a significant drop in teacher ratings of black boys’ social competence between pre-K and kindergarten. A possible reason, he and others surmise, may be schools’ abrupt shift from a developmental, early childhood model that allows for activity and play, to a more rigid academic one.
Meanwhile, some schools are adopting innovative interventions to foster prosocial outcomes for kids who act out. One called restorative justice is a growing movement in educational, criminal justice and other settings. It reframes discipline in terms of helping the perpetrator make amends and reconcile with the community, rather than punishing him or her. The framework includes following a set of specific practices, such as having the victim and perpetrator talk directly about how the perpetrator’s actions may have caused harm and giving the perpetrator a task to repair the damage. Once the young person has finished the assignment, the group welcomes him or her back.
Research suggests the approach works. After a year of a restorative-justice intervention at Cole Middle School in Oakland, California, suspension rates fell by 89 percent, while a restorative school discipline program launched in 2011 at Richmond High School in Richmond, California, cut suspension rates in half a year later, according to FixSchoolDiscipline.org, an online resource that’s a project of Public Counsel, a pro-bono law firm dedicated to education rights in California.
Moms and dads as solutions
Parents can also play a powerful role in their kids’ academic and behavioral development. One way for them to intervene, research shows, is to monitor their children’s activities with peers and after school, says Belgrave.
“If you know where your boys are, who they’re with, what they’re doing, you’ll be ahead of the game,” she says.
In one study, researchers found that black teens who refused drugs or didn’t use drugs at all were more likely than those who used drugs to have parents who expressed negative attitudes toward drug use and to monitor their behaviors (Journal of Black Psychology, 2012).
Another study underscores the importance of parent-child communication in black youngsters’ emotional well-being. In a 2012 study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, researchers found that African-American teens were more likely to be depressed when their parents didn’t grasp the extent of their emotional and behavioral problems. That included teens who reported having many problems, whose parents perceived they had only a few, and the reverse — teens who reported having few problems when their parents thought they had a lot.
“If something is going on with the kid, [these kinds of parents] don’t know how to intervene because they don’t know that anything’s wrong,” says study author Alfiee M. Breland-Noble, PhD, who directs The African-American Knowledge Optimized for Mindfully-Healthy Adolescents Project at Georgetown University.
Parents may be absent for many reasons, she adds, including being too consumed with their own problems, not recognizing mental health problems in themselves, being preoccupied with work, and being worn out from dealing with racism and discrimination.
Communities as solutions
When Breland-Noble first began studying mental health awareness in black churches, she observed many ways that black boys were absorbing good influences. Many had good role models, were respected and valued by their communities, and assumed leadership roles, such as performing solos in a choir concert or helping to run church services.
“It helps children of color to see people they look up to, who also look like them,” she says.
In an April article in Applied Developmental Science, a team led by Joanna L. Williams, PhD, of the University of Virginia, examined how measures of positive ethnic identity and positive youth development could be used to inform community or other programs. In a sample of 254 low-income black and Latino urban male teens, the team found that the teens who scored higher in positive youth development were more likely than peers with lower scores to be engaged in prosocial activities, such as clubs or school government, and less likely to be involved in criminal activities. Those with a positive sense of ethnic identity also had lower levels of depression, the team found.
These findings suggest that adding culturally relevant factors into community programs can make these programs, and the kids who engage in them, stronger, the authors say.
Researchers also are exploring how religious leaders, coaches and even barbers can influence young black men’s lives for the better. One such study is called SHAPE-UP: Barbers Building Better Brothers, a project funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development that Stevenson is co-leading with University of Pennsylvania colleagues Loretta Jemmott, PhD, John Jemmott, PhD, and Christopher Coleman, PhD. Through the intervention, Stevenson will examine whether the free-wheeling, debate-style discussions that take place in black barber shops could be used as springboards to educate young black men about a range of hot-button topics such as sexually transmitted diseases, the risks of retaliating violently, and the benefits of learning effective negotiation skills instead.
“Barbers see themselves as invisible heroes,” says Stevenson. “They do an amazing job of keeping young men and boys out of trouble.”
By Tori DeAngelis
October 2014, Vol 45, No. 9
Print version: page 50
Tori DeAngelis is a journalist in Syracuse, N.Y.