About this session

Thursday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Measuring structural racism and its effects on child development

Structural racism – the totality of ways in which racially marginalized individuals are affected by discriminatory policies and practices which create systemic power and privilege imbalances – is an understudied construct in the field of developmental psychology (Bailey et al., 2017; Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Iruka et al., 2022). Although individual-level bias and prejudice have attracted developmental psychologists' attention for a while (Aboud et al., 2003; Rutland et al., 2010), the question of how structural racism impacts children’s reasoning about themselves, others, and the world around them has received much less attention. A key feature of structural racism is the mutually reinforcing effects across interconnected societal institutions (e.g., education, housing, labor), with racism within each institutional context exacerbating racism in other institutional contexts (Gil & Hicken, 2021; Needham et al., 2022). Such multiplicative, emergent effects characteristic of complex systems pose challenges for the conceptualization, measurement, and assessment of structural racism within the context of child development.

In this roundtable, moderated by Gorana González, panelists will take stock of the recent theoretical and methodological advances and identify areas that need work to advance our understanding of how children are affected by structural inequalities in virtue of (1) being the targets of structural oppression, and/or (2) developing awareness of how they and other members of society are oppressed. Panelists include developmental scholars with expertise in structural oppression and racism measurement. This discussion will foster a constructive dialogue among developmental scientists to catalyze innovative research on the effects of structural racism on social and cognitive development.

Panelists
Dr. Eleanor Seaton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
Dr. Natasha C. Johnson, Columbia University, United States
Dr. Ny Vasil, California State University East Bay, United States
Aaron Neal, University of Michigan, United States

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