As a young woman of twenty-three, I married a Nigerian, a Yoruba man I met while we were students at NYU. When my older son was about a year and a half old, we moved to Nigeria and, three years later, my second son was born there, a real “omo Ìbàdàn,” or “son of the soil,” as the midwife who attended his birth pronounced him. Coupled with yearly or...

Those who, from the earliest stages, would not let the book go unwritten: James “Bumpa” Godsil, Joni Jackson, David Lloyd, Gayle Tate, and Joseph Trimble;

In a conversation with her mentor, Whitney, one of the girls in our study, had this to say about being black:

Marx (2005) contended that “[Individuals] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” This idea, that history and ideology are inevitably reflected in our identities, provided one of the theoretical underpinnings of...

As has been emphasized repeatedly, identity cannot fruitfully be studied in a way that ignores the contexts that give rise to it, as identity is constituted by, hence is inextricable from, aspects of the historical moment, the sociocultural milieu, and the contexts of family and community. In short, identity

Courtney’s journal entry describing her attendance at the debutante ball of her mentee, Nicole, provides a glimpse into the lifestyles of many affluent African American families, including those of the upper middle-class girls in our project. Their class position afforded them many privileges and comforts: a college preparatory education in two of the best private schools in the state of...

Megan’s unabashedly bold statement of her career goals epitomizes the middle-class girls’ “supreme” confidence in their abilities and futures, and brings to mind the lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V, that “self love be ne’er so vile as self neglect.” All the middle-class girls attended the Blue Ribbon Magnet School and were well-rounded, good...

Charnita’s resolve not to become a gangbanger, despite the ongoing gang activity in her community and her sister’s involvement with a gang, reflects the courage and clear-headedness of most of the low-income girls. Hence, the subtitle for this chapter, “Resilience, Resistance, Responsibility,” is an apt one, for it represents the responses of the Underwood High School girls...

The project reported on in this book examined identity formation in black adolescent females through the lens of class, an approach rarely adopted in mainstream psychological research. We explored how class positioning, and the kinds of developmental contexts and experiences that that positioning provides, impacts the intersectional nature of identity construction. Just as class location is...

Akan proverb,D01.17 ,

Sheila Walker is professor of psychology at Scripps College and chair of the Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies at The Claremont Colleges. She earned her PhD at Cornell University, in developmental psychology. Prior to her academic career, she was a counseling professional, and worked as a counselor in the Manhattan Criminal Courts, at Baruch College of CUNY, and at the...