A Fraught Passage: The Identity Challenges of African American Emerging Adults

Emerging adulthood, first outlined as a theory less than a decade ago [Arnett, 2000], has grown rapidly to become a distinct field within psychology, focusing on development from the late teens through the twenties. Although emerging adulthood has been postulated as a normative life stage in industrialized societies, it has been emphasized from the beginning that the features of emerging adulthood are likely to vary substantially by country, culture, and social class [Arnett, 2000, 2006]. In this essay, our aim is to present some ideas about African American emerging adults, with a focus on identity issues. Our thesis is that identity issues are more complicated and difficult for African American emerging adults than for emerging adults in other American ethnic groups because they must overcome the negative assumptions that others have about them as young Black people. We sketch this idea briefly here, as a step toward a broader theory.