Critical Consciousness and the Social Justice Engagement of White Young Adults

Abstract

This work investigates an important topic of how to bring privileged and White individuals into solidarity with those with more marginalized identities. Given the saliency of racism, heterosexism, and other systems of oppression in modern America, this research is timely and urgent. The first chapter of this dissertation introduces the work. It describes the research questions to be addressed, the hypotheses, and the organization of the dissertation. This chapter also includes a positionality statement to inform the remainder of the work. The second chapter in this dissertation is a literature review exploring multiple facets of antiracist allyship from White individuals, including its definition, antecedents, and barriers. In it, I highlight several decades worth of research describing how allyship can be fostered, and what it may look like in practice. This offers fundamental and important distinctions between what is and is not allyship, thereby facilitating authentic solidarity and ally development. It further offers a theoretical framework through which White individuals’ antiracist solidarity can be interpreted through the lens of critical consciousness theory. The third chapter of this dissertation provides an empirical evaluation of key antecedents of social justice commitments in privileged young White adults. It uses a person-centered approach to explore and classify patterns of social dominance orientation, critical consciousness, and White racial identity exploration in White young adults. Subsequently, it shows how groups exhibiting dissimilar patterns across these constructs differ in their endorsement of social justice commitments. In so doing, this study identifies “levers of change” for future interventions at home, school, or policy levels for equity-oriented social change. The fourth chapter of this dissertation operationalizes findings from the literature review and from the third chapter to develop a novel psychometric instrument designed to measure critical consciousness in privileged, White young adults. This instrument is the first with this expressed goal within the CC literature. Much like other measures of critical consciousness have been essential for evaluating CC among more marginalized communities (e.g., Diemer et al., 2016; McWhirter & McWhirter, 2016; Shin et al., 2019), this instrument is tailored to measure CC in more privileged individuals. Prior studies have linked CC development in more marginalized youth to positive academic outcomes (e.g., Sieder, Clark & Graves, 2019). This instrument enables similar studies, in addition to serving as a bellwether for future interventions intended to promote and assess critical consciousness development for White young adults. The final chapter of this dissertation briefly summarizes the findings throughout the dissertation. Collectively, these chapters lay groundwork for future research into the development of critical consciousness in White and other privileged populations.