Why do we need another book on ethnic and racial discrimination? Why should scholars, parents, educators and policymakers care about the impact of discrimination on our young people? The answer is both simple and complicated. The simple answer is that discrimination matters for how young people grow up – how they see themselves when they look in the mirror, how they see themselves as members of society, and how they see the prospect of their futures. But it is not just how they see themselves. Discrimination also matters for how they engage with their peers, how they develop a sense of self, how their bodies grow, and how they experience age and time. The more complicated answer is that who perpetrates the discrimination (e.g., peers, adults, teachers, strangers), when in the life course young people experience discrimination, what sources of support are available, how many forms of discrimination young people are exposed to (e.g., racial, ethnic, weight, language, gender, sex, sexual identity, adoption), and how young people respond physiologically and emotionally also matter for the ultimate impact that discrimination has on how they grow.

The driving impetus for this collection was to bring together contemporary scholarship on ethnic and racial discrimination and youth development – drawing an arc from foundational theories from thought leaders to present-day interventions. Research and theory on ethnic and racial discrimination (ERD) have increased multifold over the past few decades. Across the disciplines of developmental science, psychology, social epidemiology, education, human development, and public health, scholars have documented robust detrimental effects of discrimination stress on young people. This book integrates the state of the science across foundational theories, empirical conclusions, and multilevel methods with interventions among children, adolescents, and young adult populations. In this volume, analytic reviews are balanced against suggestions for forward-facing advances and future scholarship, policy, and practice. The ultimate goal is an edited volume that offers an integrated, comprehensive reader on the state of developmental science on ERD among young people. To synthesize theoretical and empirical perspectives into a comprehensive and integrated collection, the cross-cutting foci of the book include: (1) intersectionality (or the ways in which young people’s racism experiences intersect with other societal divisions such as sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, classism, and ableism), (2) implications for policy, practice, and youth-serving programs, (3) unique and universal experiences across ethnic, racial, and age groups, and (4) multiple levels of context and analyses (e.g., physiological, families, schools, neighborhoods, communities) over various timescales (e.g., daily, annually).

This collection will serve as an introduction for some and advanced study for others. For those who are new to thinking about the stressors related to ethnicity, race, and racism, the book will provide an overview to the theoretical and empirical approaches to studying how these stressors shape youth outcomes. For those who are already well versed in topics related to racism and stress, the book will offer in-depth conceptual and methodological analyses. Either way, the book is made more accessible through its organization into four cross-cutting categories.

The first section of the book focuses on foundational theories from established and up-and-coming thought leaders in this area. In this section, the chapters present and analyze the theories and guiding frameworks that have shaped past and present scholarship on discrimination and its consequences for young people. This section begins with two paradigm-defining theories, without which it is unclear whether the scholarship that fills this volume would exist. Starting with Chapter 1, Spencer and colleagues revisit the phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST; Spencer et al., Reference Spencer, Dupree and Hartmann1997), a foundational framework that has advanced nearly all of the work presented in this book. Chapter 2 by Marks and colleagues revisits yet another paradigm-shifting model, the integrative model for the study of developmental competencies in minority children (García Coll et al., Reference García Coll, Lamberty, Jenkins, McAdoo, Crnic, Wasik and Vázquez1996), which has been equally impactful on today’s scholarship of minoritized youth development. The next four chapters advance newer formulations. In Chapter 3, Gee and colleagues describe how even the fundamental experience of time is stratified by race, suggesting that the experience of time is a form of structural racism. Chapter 4 by Spears Brown uses the developmental intergroup theory (Bigler & Liben, Reference Bigler, Liben and Kail2006) to provide a theoretical underpinning for how and when children develop awareness of discrimination, with the ultimate goal of interrupting these processes. Chapter 5 by Auguste and colleagues proposes a new model describing mutually informing links between ethnic and racial identity development and discrimination with a focus on racializing processes. The section ends with a new theoretical model proposed by Cox and colleagues, the integrated model of anti-racist socialization for White parents, which lays the groundwork for how daily routines and activity settings enacted by White parents can serve as intentional spaces for raising White youth who are committed to anti-racism.

The second section of the book transitions from theoretical approaches to a focus on analytical methods for investigating the impact of discrimination on youth development across various levels of analyses. In this section, authors write about the measures that have been used to assess the prevalence and impact of discrimination on the youth and families, what these measures tell us, and what is still missing. This same section also focuses on the levels at which developmental science has investigated discrimination (e.g., structural, organizational, institutional, group, interpersonal), how these levels of influence intersect with each other. and how measurement corresponds to these levels. At the same time, this section also includes multiple levels of analysis related to the impact of discrimination on youth development (e.g., physiological, biological, intergenerational). The section starts with Chapter 7 by Seaton and colleagues and provides an overview of methodological tools that have been employed to assess youth experiences of interpersonal racism, charting future directions for the development of structural measures. In Chapter 8, Fisher and colleagues review the history, development, and current use of the Adolescent Discrimination Distress Index (ADDI, Fisher et al., Reference Fisher, Wallace and Fenton2000), one of the most widely adopted instruments for capturing ERD among young people. Chapter 9 by Lee and colleagues describes the unique experiences of discrimination among transracial and transnational adoptees including ethnic and racial discrimination, coethnic discrimination, and adoption discrimination, while also outlining the development of the Transracial, Transnational Adoption Discrimination Scale. In Chapter 10, English and colleagues take a micro-longitudinal approach to the measurement of daily experiences of ERD, illuminating the value of measuring discrimination as a daily, acute event. In Chapter 11, Wang and colleagues balance the risk and protective roles of peers in exposure to and coping with discrimination. In the following chapter, Chapter 12, Xie and colleagues review the science on the biological embedding of discrimination for hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis functioning, inflammation, and allostatic load. The next three chapters take an intergenerational, family-systems approach. Starting with Chapter 13, Del Toro and colleagues examine adolescent premature aging in response to police intrusion and how father ethnic–racial identity (ERI) provides protection against accelerated biological aging in a national sample. In Chapter 14, Kim and colleagues review 271 research articles from the past two decades to characterize the dynamic associations between parent and child discrimination experiences with child outcomes considering moderated and mediated pathways. Finally, Chapter 15 rounds out this section with an indigenous strengths-based approach, the seventh generation philosophy, an intergenerational worldview that shapes how present day experiences are seen in light of future generations. In this chapter, Fish and colleagues balance the seventh generation approach against the backdrop of past and present group-level trauma, showing the protective effects of a multigeneration perspective.

The third section of the book is organized by periods of youth development: middle childhood (ages 6–12), adolescence (ages 13–17), and young adulthood (ages 18–30), all while highlighting the unique and common drivers and consequences of discrimination during these formative developmental periods. The authors in this section review the state of the science within and across these developmental periods. Starting in middle childhood through adolescence, in Chapter 16, Rogers and colleagues confront the issue of the “inevitable existence of racial discrimination in our current world” with a response focused on how Black families can create spaces of resistance, healing, and excellence. Since adolescence is a key developmental period for exposures to discrimination and for significant biological and socioemotional changes, Chapter 17 by Benner and colleagues takes a deep dive into how discrimination during adolescence is linked to host of key developmental outcomes such as mental health, substance use, risky sexual behaviors, sleep, physical health, and academic indicators. At the same time, the chapter also considers protective factors such as social support, parental socialization, and social identities. The final chapter in this section covers the period of young adulthood. In Chapter 18, Jugert and colleagues focus on discrimination in higher education domains and how college-based experiences differ for students of different ethnic and racial backgrounds. Not only do the discrimination experiences themselves differ, but the histories of different groups in the larger cultural and institutional context play a role in how that discrimination ultimately impacts young adults. Finally, Cheah and colleagues round out this section with a thorough analysis of how the COVID-19 pandemic served as a global “flashpoint” for unpacking anti-Asian racism. They focus specifically on Asian American families and the impact of the pandemic on the identity, mental health, family dynamics, and academic outcomes of Asian American youth.

The fourth and final section of the book concludes the collection with a forward-facing focus on interventions, programs that have been implemented in families and schools to empower young people to counteract the challenges of discrimination and racism. This section includes interventions that have been designed, implemented, and evaluated by developmental scientists to reduce discrimination and its impacts. The section begins with Chapter 20 by Stein and colleagues and focuses on a parent-level intervention geared toward helping families discuss the realities of race and racism. After reviewing the literature on parental ethnic and racial socialization across Black and Latiné families, the chapter describes the One Talk at a Time intervention (OTAAT; Stein et al., Reference Stein, Coard, Gonzalez, Kiang and Sircar2021), which targets multiple ethnic and racial groups including Asian American families. Chapter 21 by Gönül and colleagues reviews the sociocognitive underpinnings of exclusion and discrimination among youth, noting the unique role of power and who has control over relevant resources as drivers of social inequalities. The chapter ends by reviewing a novel program, Developing Inclusive Youth (DIY; Killen et al., Reference Killen, Burkholder, D’Esterre, Sims, Glidden, Yee, Luken Raz, Elenbaas, Rizzo, Woodward, Samuelson, Sweet and Stapleton2022) a randomized control classroom-based program targeting children ages 8–11 focusing on prejudice as a foundation for peer inclusion and exclusion. In Chapter 22, Chae and colleagues advance ColorBRAVE, an empirically informed framework for family-centered conversations focused on anti-racism. In Chapter 23, Priest and colleagues share their experiences developing and codesigning with policy partners the Speak Out Against Racism (SOAR; Priest et al., Reference Priest, Alam, Truong, Sharples, Nelson, Dunn, Francis, Paradies and Kavanagh2021) program, a six-pronged, school-based intervention implemented in Australia. To conclude this section, in Chapter 24, Umaña-Taylor shares her reflections on developing and implementing The Identity Project (Umaña-Taylor et al., Reference Umaña-Taylor, Douglass, Updegraff and Marsiglia2018), a program designed to foster ERI development among the youth in the United States. Since its development, the program has now been implemented outside of the United States. The chapter discusses the benefits of the program for youth outcomes, while at the same time acknowledging the challenges of integrating programming in existing educational contexts, particularly in light of increasingly polarized sociopolitical landscapes.

The book concludes with two expert perspectives. The first is an integrative synthesis by Diane Hughes (Commentary). The second is a visionary map by Richard Lee (Future Directions) making a connection between the research on ERD in its infancy and his hopes for the future of this area. Like the thought leaders whose chapters begin this collection, Hughes’ synthesis provides a beautiful bookend to the collection. Her careful and pathway-paving scholarship on how racially minoritized parents prepare their kids to face the realities of racism and discrimination runs adjacent to the research presented in this volume on the pernicious effects of discrimination (Hughes, Reference Hughes2003; Hughes & Chen, Reference Hughes and Chen1997; Hughes et al., Reference Hughes, Rodriguez, Smith, Johnson, Stevenson and Spicer2006). Hughes’ work on ethnic-racial socialization contributes knowledge to the focal topic by being part of the solution – teaching us how parents’ conversations about racism, warnings about how society will view children as racialized beings, messages of cultural pride and resilience, and sharing of tools to combat discrimination – offering a framework for arming our youth to confront the realities of racism. In this collection, Hughes outlines the arc that connects theoretical approaches to present-day interventions, while at the same time highlighting threads that bind the collection: (1) structural and historical oppression, (2) issues of power, (3) intersectionality, (4) White youth’s racial learning, and (5) strengths and rights-based perspectives.

In his vision for future directions, Richard Lee asks that future generations intentionally consider and interrogate the distinction between ethnic and racial discrimination, noting that while they are related constructs, they are also distinct. He also notes the importance of contextualizing discrimination experiences as a way to facilitate this distinction – what are the relevant features of communities (e.g., neighborhood conditions) and families (e.g., immigration status) that should be considered when understanding the impact of discrimination? Lee also encourages those who choose to embark on the scholarship of discrimination to consider their own positionality and relationship to the communities and populations that they investigate – how do our own lived experiences shape the types of research questions we construct and how we approach our science? Another area of growth relates to expanding the scope of developmental outcomes that are related to discrimination, including topics such as pubertal development and identity formation. Lee also challenges us to refine our measurement of discrimination; to move beyond self-reported measures of discrimination, which occupies a large majority of our scholarship. He concludes by noting that cocreating inter- and multidisciplinary teams is imperative for understanding how social media and artificial intelligence may be agents or venues of discriminatory exposures. Lee’s remarks provide a segue from this correct collection to the next generation of scholars who will embark on this scientific journey.

In closing, to the authors who have contributed to this volume, I thank you. As I was preparing the proposal for this book, I thought deeply about including a range of authors, disciplines, levels of analyses, and developmental stages, aiming to include the most eminent scholars to contribute to this book. I am honored to showcase your scholarship and voices here. Each of you share a deep commitment to unpacking the intersecting experiences and influences that contribute to the detrimental impact of racism and discrimination on young people and their families. You also share my excitement about the possibilities of this volume for contemporary and future theory, scholarship, policies, and programs focused on eradicating this societal harm. It is my hope that, through this collection, the importance of your work can be shared broadly and with the young people whose lived experiences drive our passion and motivate this work.