From Group Membership to Group Identification
From Group Membership to Group Identification
This chapter discusses the group boundaries of Black identity. These boundaries have traditionally been shaped by historical and ongoing processes of racialization—the macro and micro processes that ascribe Blacks as stigmatized, lower status in the ethnoracial hierarchy of the United States. African descents have been subsumed through these boundaries into an all-encompassing and homogenized Black identity in a society where internal intraracial (or ethnic) differences are less important than interracial differences. The chapter also examines the transition from embracing an ascribed racial or ethnic group label to feeling a sense of attachment with other individuals who have also been placed in that category. It identifies five stages that a Black person experiences as his or her racial identity evolves: pre-encounter, encounter, immersion-emersion, internalization, and internationalization-commitment.
Keywords: Black identity, group boundaries, racialization, ethnoracial hierarchy, intraracial differences, William Cross
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