Highlighting Parental Support for Black Adolescent Organizers

Background: We live in a grotesquely anti-Black world where Black parenting is riddled with numerous dialectical tensions to hold and metanarratives to combat. Still, Black parents rear their children to make valuable contributions to society. Teaching youth to make transformative contributions comes with risks, particularly when offered in the modes of political resistance and activism. From Trayvon Martin to Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Black families have been confronted with numerous acts of state-sanctioned violence in recent history. As Black children grow increasingly aware of this genre of violence and their vulnerability to such, many desire to organize and resist. This begs the question: How do Black parents support Black children who commit to combating racial injustice?

This paper draws on data from the Making Justice Project to examine how Black parents prepare and promote the well-being of Black children who mobilize for racial justice in the United States. This work provides insights for social work researchers and practitioners about the unique situatedness of Black children in the wake of pervasive anti-Blackness and political violence. Its findings can inform how social workers support Black children, community organizers and move in solidarity both with their causes and our ethical mandate to end racial oppression.

Methods: The Making Justice Project (MJP) is a multimethod qualitative study that examines the activist identity formation, political perspectives, and sociopolitical outlooks of Black adolescent (ages 12-18) activists throughout the United States. I used network sampling to recruit 10 self-identifying Black adolescents with personal histories of activism in the United States. Then, the youth and I individually met for a three-phase narrative interview where I employed lifestory interviewing, artifact elicitation, and imagework methods, consistent with the organizing framework past-present-possible. The interview length and richness enabled both individual and cross-cutting analyses using a holistic-content analysis approach. Techniques, such as member checking and reflective journaling, were used to enhance rigor, ensure trustworthiness, and assess within-group transferability.

Findings: The subset of findings focused on parental support are being presented for this symposium, highlighting the role of parental support both in sustaining Black adolescent activists’ involvement and promoting their psychological wellbeing. Themes identified in the youths’ individual and communal narratives highlight influential role of parental support to expanding political knowledge, forming activist identity, learning familial civic engagement histories, adopting community values, and being encouraged during the direct-action periods of mobilization. These findings must inform how social workers support Black children and parents of children who are community organizers in the wake of pervasive racial injustice, moving in solidarity both with their causes and our ethical mandate to end racial oppression.

Conclusion: Black parents provide their children with support, knowledge, and skills needed to sustain social justice movements, which is essential to social advancement and societal development. This occurs despite the persistence anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violences against Black people, including Black children. Using narrative interview data from Black adolescents provides keen insights from their unique social locations about their role on social transformation and their parent’s contributions to those efforts.