The Psychology in African American

Over the last 500 years, our country has established and battled one of the largest socio-tragedies known to man: racism. While this pestilent issue has affected many ethnic groups, the most publicly known is the racial discrimination concerning African Americans. By my reasoning, along with many sociologists and psychologists, racism is the root cause of African American race socialization. Race socialization is the theory of verbal and non-verbal messages being transmitted to specific ethnic groups for the positive or negative development of behaviors, philosophies, morals, and attitudes concerning the significance and importance of racial stratification, intergroup interactions, and personal and group identity. The timespan in which I will be surveying connects milestones of race socialization with many of the most significant moments in United States history. The primary sources I will be using as support for this paper will be several works by W.E.B. Du Bois1 and a book by Dr. Faye Belgrave entitled African American Psychology: From Africa to America2. The psychological effect that racism and race socialization has had on African Americans is more than apparent not only through texts written by various sociologists and psychologists, but also throughout history. I will focus on a specific fifty-year span when race socialization took effect, racism was socially acceptable and ultimately racism was combatted. It is my purpose in this paper to discuss, examine and determine the psychological effect that racism and race socialization has had on American citizens of African descent between the timespan of 1870 to 1970.
To better recognize the psychology behind African American race socialization, the idea of racism has to be understood. Racism is the belief that all members of each race possess the same characteristics and abilities. Racism came about when the Caucasian race felt superior to other ethnic groups and began categorizing them by their combined racial