LIBS 128: Exploring Race and Identity

Ever notice that when you walk into any racially mixed high school, the Black youth are always seated together in the cafeteria? In fact, the White, Latino, Asian Pacific, and in some regions, American Indian and Middle Eastern youth are also sitting together, clustered in their own groups. The same phenomenon happens in college dining halls, faculty lounges, and in corporate cafeterias. What is going on here? Some think this self-segregation is a coping strategy we should support, while others consider it a problem we should try to fix. Can we get past our reluctance to address racial issues to even discuss it? This semester, our class will undertake this exploratory journey together.

A significant driving force of this self-segregation is racial identity. Over the past 20 years, several preeminent, progressive psychologists of color have proposed theories of racial identity development that have revolutionized how we view the adaptive strengths of racial and ethnic minority group members, as well as influenced research with these target populations and informed our psychotherapeutic treatment of diverse clients. This class will expose you to these theories of racial identity and the impact they are having in the field of psychology, with an emphasis on African Americans. You will be challenged to think critically about these theories, and engage in informed discussions about the strengths and limitations of our current foundation of knowledge in this area. By the end of this class, you will be able to identify some of the reasons you sat and ate lunch with who you did in high school, and see how an examination of your racial identity might lead to different (or the same!) choices at lunch tomorrow.

Diane Graves Oliver is a new assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. Originally from southern California, Dr. Oliver earned her Ph.D. in child clinical psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle. She specializes in working with clients from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Dr. Oliver just completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Dr. Oliver is working on several projects involving Black youth from the National Survey of American Life (NSAL). She investigates the prevalence rates and psychosocial correlates of various psychological disorders found in these teens, and the effectiveness of screening tools for depression and other clinical disorders in this population. Dr. Oliver’s future research will continue to explore development of African American children, specifically in the areas of racial identity, religion and spirituality, and the impact of information technology on their lives.

This course may be used to satisfy the CASL distribution requirement in the Social and Behavioral Analysis Group A.