When Development Is Not Universal: Understanding the Unique Developmental Tasks that Race, Gender, and Social Class Impose

I read Reimagining social and emotional development: Accommodation and resistance to cultural ideologies in identities and friendships of boys of color by Leoandra Onnie Rogers and Niobe Way with great interest. I highly respect the work of both of these scholars, and I have written several papers about the salience of race in the identity development process [Cvencek, Nasir, O’Connor, & Meltzoff, 2014; Nasir, Snyder, Shah, & Ross, 2012]. However, where my own scholarship has focused on the challenges to young people’s identities when they are stereotyped by race, which limits the possibilities for who they can be and become, this important article focuses on how young people, boys of color specifically, resist the dominant gendered and raced ideologies that seek to constrict their expressions of friendship and emotion. The article emphasizes the bidirectionality of developmental processes, taking as a premise that individual development occurs in relation to the cultural context, and that development both responds to and shapes that context [Bronfenbrenner, 1983; Cole, 1996; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff, 2003]. But the article goes a step further than that. It argues that not only is development culturally situated, it is also socially and politically situated. In other words, development – emotional, social, cognitive – is always in interaction with the constraints and affordances of the society that surrounds it. That includes interactions shaped by societies’ key institutions, social categories, and ideologies. And given that we are in a society that is highly structured by race and social class [Carter, 2012], this observation is central for accurately accounting for the development of both students from nondominant groups and students from dominant groups (whose lives are equally and differentially shaped by race and social class). Published online: December 12, 2018