Black Youth: Self-making, Creativity and the Assertion of Hybrid Black Identities

ABSTRACT

Development during adolescence and early adulthood is profoundly exhilarating and transformative, especially given emerging physical, emotional and intellectually capabilities. Psychoanalytic theories of development assume culture as benign and as not being an impediment to good-enough development. This is not the case for Black youth development, especially for those of low income. Their age-appropriate joy of life and insouciance must be tempered by caution and vigilance given the racist and impoverished communities in which they live. Some are able, with adequate protection and nurturance from family and community, to sculpt a hybrid self that is savvy, resilient and creative around self-making. Such a supported and protected self is also impactful on the larger world. These states exist in tension with a self-regulatory capacity to avoid dangerous regressions in expressing the rage at their cultural oppressions or the temptations of mindless consumption in pursuit of pleasure. They draw on inter and intra-generational legacies that speak to managing and sometimes re-signifying trauma narratives as protective and inspirational. Such Black self-worth by youth fashions hybrid, caring and innovative selves.

KEYWORDS:

• Black youth
• adolescence
• identity
• self-making
• hybrid

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

C. Jama Adams

Jama Adams, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His writings are from an interdisciplinary perspective cantered on the subjectivities of Africana perspectives. Psychoanalytic, socio-economic, historical and anthropological perspectives are brought to bear on the pursuit of subjective well-being.