Anti-Racism Action Development among Latinx Youth

The increased visibility of the Black Lives Matter Movement in response to countless murders of Black people, including but not limited to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, and Ahmaud Arbery, underscores that the United States (U.S.) is a country plagued with anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and other manifestations of racism. The term BIPOC—Black, indigenous, and People of Color—has gained traction during the Black Lives Matter Movement to underscore the unique racialized experiences Black people and indigenous people have in the U.S. as a result of slavery and colonization (Grady, 2020). Latinx youth may be represented in all aspects of the BIPOC term, as these youth may identify or are racialized as Brown, Black, indigenous, amongst other minoritized races. As a diverse racial-ethnic group, there is a need to investigate the ways in which Latinx youth develop as anti-racists that challenge integrated systems of oppression, such as anti-Black racism and xenophobia, that negatively affect the Latinx community and other communities of color. Theoretical work suggests that youths' involvement in social justice efforts is informed by the conversations they have about race and racism with their parents (i.e., parental ethnic-racial socialization), youths' personal ethnic-racial identity, and their structural analysis of racism (Anyiwo et al., 2018; Mathews et al., 2019), although this work rarely consider how these processes might promote anti-racism development among Latinx youth. The proposed pilot study will investigate how 13-14-year-old Latinx youth in Chicago, Illinois develop as anti-racists through three aims: 1) To investigate associations between parental ethnic-racial socialization and youths’ anti-racism action; 2) To explore the extent to which parental ethnic-racial socialization is associated with youths’ ethnic-racial identity structural analysis of racism; and 3) to investigate the extent to which youths’ ethnic-racial identity and structural analysis of racism mediate associations between parental ethnic-racial socialization and anti-racism action.