Mental Well-Being of the Black Middle Class Adolescent: An Identity Crisis?

Few scholars examine health outcomes and socioeconomic status among adults, but this same intersection is understudied for adolescents. Even fewer scholars examine the relationship between race, class, and well-being of adolescents from a geographical or an educational achievement perspective. One team of researchers complain that studies rarely use “conceptually coherent and consistent measures of socioeconomic position” when studying health. This research project uses a Black Middle Class Index (BMCi) to determine whether middle-class status provides social advantages and health disadvantages for black and white adolescents. This study addresses the observation that blacks who come from middle-class backgrounds have a sense of identity crisis, similar to the identity crisis associated with being bi-racial. These black adolescents may not fit in with other black lower-class children because they have different lived experiences, but neither do they fit with their white middle-class counterparts because of racial differences. This inability to identify with a peer group may have a direct adverse effect on the mental (and physical) health of adolescents. Additionally, inability to identify with a peer group may affect academic achievement, which in turn can have an indirect adverse effect on adolescents' well-being. Concern for the implications of this kind of identity crisis leads to two areas of inquiry: (1) the relationship between socioeconomic status and health for black and white adolescents, emphasizing middle-class experience and incorporating a geographical perspective; and (2) the correlation between well-being, perceptions, and behaviors associated with adolescents, considered from an educational achievement approach.