Society & Culture - Posted by Wendy Leopold-Northwestern on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 18:38 - 2 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Proud black teens less depressed
“A rising sense of ethnic pride appears to be particularly helpful to boys in buffering against symptoms of depression,” says psychologist Jelani Mandara. “It may be that race is a more salient issue for boys in this age group than it is for girls.”
NORTHWESTERN (US)—Ethnic pride may be as important as self-esteem to the mental health of young African-American adolescents.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
The empirical study is one of the first to look at the effects of self-esteem and of racial identity and to separately explore their effects by gender. The study specifically measures racial identity in terms of ethnic pride. Details were published in the Nov./Dec. issue of the journal Child Development.
“Our findings indicate that—regardless of self-esteem—as feelings of ethnic pride go up, mental health tends to increase as well,” says psychologist Jelani Mandara, associate professor at Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy. “That suggests that efforts to enhance youngsters’ sense of ethnic pride at home, in the classroom, and in mental health settings are not just appropriate but important to their mental health.”
In the study, researchers viewed self-esteem as the way adolescents feel about themselves as individuals, and ethnic pride as the way they feel about their ethnic group. Previous research generally has considered racial identity a proxy or sub-set of self-esteem.
The new study speaks to the importance of ethnic pride separate and apart from self-esteem. “Psychologists have been theorizing about this for years,” Mandara says. “Our empirical evidence indicates that we’ll see African-American teens with fewer depressive symptoms if we pay more attention to building ethnic pride.”
It’s easier to build ethnic pride than it is to influence self-esteem, he adds.
Using standard self-report measures, the authors assessed 259 African-American youths from six Chicago public schools when they were in the seventh grade and again a year later in the eighth grade.
In measuring racial identity, they focused on issues of ethnic pride and replaced phrases such as “I have a lot of pride in my ethnic group” with “I have a lot of pride in black people.” They did not address issues of culture or of “public regard”—how others look at race—in assessing ethnic identity.
The researchers found that both male and female students showed fewer depressive symptoms if their feelings of ethnic pride rose between seventh and eighth grade whether or not their self-esteem increased.
“The importance of self-esteem to adolescent mental health is well known and accepted,” Mandara says. “But it is not uncommon for individuals to have high self-esteem and at the same time exhibit depressive symptoms. Research has long shown that African-American girls have higher self-esteem compared to other girls but also have more depressive symptoms.”
The study found that the higher girls’ self-esteem was, the more likely they were to report depressive symptoms. Mandara suggests that could be because African American girls often are charged with adult family responsibilities that make them feel competent but also cause them stress.
To the researchers’ surprise, self-esteem did not correlate with mental health for males after controlling for ethnic pride.
“A rising sense of ethnic pride appears to be particularly helpful to boys in buffering against symptoms of depression,” adds Mandara. “It may be that race is a more salient issue for boys in this age group than it is for girls.”
The study suggests that strategies at home, in the classroom and in mental health settings can boost both ethnic identity and assist adolescents in reconciling their group- and self-identities.
“These children are bombarded with negative images of African Americans in the media,” Mandara says. “They need exposure to African Americans who are doing well to minimize the derogatory images they see.”
Researchers from Loyola University Chicago and Walden University contributed to the study.
Northwestern University news: www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/
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2 Comments
EelLove
Good article. Very true and from working with adolescents in the past (plus fancy learnin’) I realized that the students who did not have pride in their culture, an understanding of their history and were attacked based on ethnicity (regardless of ethnicity of the attacker was, verbal/physical etc.) were also the ones who got in the most trouble and had the earliest criminal records (an important correlation, not causation). Some people in past classes with me and where I worked with AA at-risk teens thought that it would be the other way around…more cultural pride, cause more trouble. That was not really the case there.
It’s also important to make sure that it is understood that ethnic pride is not hatred of any other group, but love and understanding of one’s own. That pride cannot be based on destroying another group or superiority to another group.
Though black youth are inundated with negative images of blacks (yes, they abound), is racial pride really the route to take? (Historically, it has had negative consequences in the American south, Germany, and Japan).
Though it is necessary to their healthy psychological development that black youth feel confident and secure about their ethnicity, It seems to me questionable that ethnicity be made the foundation upon which their self esteem is to be built. Though important (despite its being a fictional social construction) race is only one aspect amongst many (gender, nationality, age, intelligence) upon which self-esteem could be built.
So it is important, but it seems to me this article is ultimately doing the community a disservice by exaggerating one piece of a far greater puzzle. Is that what we want?