Self-Striving and Black American Social Identity in the 21st Century

Abstract

Self-striving is a reflective attempt to develop and maintain a positive sense of the social self and the racial group in the presence of racial discrimination. A major theme in this paper is that self-striving is a continuous effort to construct a prototypical model of black identity that is empowering. To conduct our analysis we use the Black American subsample of the 2001-03 National Survey of American Life (NSAL) and the supplemental self-administered mail re-interview of the NSAL. We use structural equation techniques to generate estimates for a proposed structural model, which estimates the direct and indirect influence of personal discrimination, systematic racial discrimination, and black centrality on positive aspects of black social identity. A major conclusion that we draw from our findings is that the interaction of personal discrimination and black centrality minimizes the potential for self-alienation.