The Relationship Between Racial Identity and PsychoSocial Outcomes Essay

The Relationship Between Racial Identity and PsychoSocial Outcomes Among African American Males - Essay Example This is when the youth experiment with all their hearts and show these outcomes to the world, of course with the world either accepting them or rejecting them in the process (Oyserman and Gant, 1996). The youth embarking on establishing who they are synthesize what they already know from their childhood, with their accumulated skills and abilities, and use these to construct their adult selves that do seems to justify who they really are. This adult self provides meaning and order to its thoughts, experiences, feelings and actions. Aside from these interior functions, it sought to motivate actions to the ones around it through providing incentives, standards, plans, strategies and rules of conduct. Thus, the adult self is a social construct, relying heavily on the support of the society, as it could be the one dictated by the inherent norms or it could be the one setting the norms. The social environment is also the background for which the youth can source the resources it needs i.e. education, economic resources to enable them to obtain the skills and characteristics to be the adult deemed worthy of their sociocultural position. This paper would posit racial identity as the dependent variable and the independent variables are the future achievements of the black male, in or outside of school, the black youth's self-esteem and image and the level of psychological distress he suffers. Adole Adolescents deciding on their future adult selves are open to seems-like limitless alternatives for them to choose from, varying only on their personal attainments and available resources. Nevertheless, adolescence has a funny way of imposing a limit on these alternatives. This limit is the belief that they cannot or do not have the capabalities to succeed in school, leading to a general decline in the interest as well as involvement in learning, in school or otherwise, increase in risky deliquent behaviors and suscpetibility to depression (Osyerman and Gant, 1996). This simply describes the plight of many youth black males. Though it is the same that they are open to experiment in their adolescence in order to determine who they are, society seems to be harder on them that the restriction adolescence impose on their supposed-to-be limitless pallet of identities to choose from is much more existent than their white peers. Therefore, there are evident claims of youth black males in more increased risk for school failure and dropout, arrest and incarceration, as one can see in various studies. It is important to note that this manifests more in blacks residing in America, or African-Americans adolescents. Whatever a white youth has to face as a challenge to prove itself to the world, the African-American has to take on double (Osyerman and Gant, 1996). For example, it is natural for youth in the cities to seek out for itself employment opportunities that would sustain them and lead them to satisfying career paths amidst the tapering of these labor possibilities. However, there had already been imposed a job ceiling on African-Americans that often times, advancing from entry-level positions became quite impossible. Moreover, the blacks living in poverty is actually dismaying as it increases rapidly, and jails swamped with these youth rather than the schools. The African-American are mostly in unstable, low-paying jobs or unemployed that most of them gave up on even seeking one. Thus, the