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Abstract
This paper treats striving as an unobservable yet critical mental process in identity formation and social categorization among African Americans. Striving is a reflective, continuous attempt to develop and maintain a positive sense of the social self and the racial group in the presence of racial discrimination. We contend striving plays an important yet understudied function in the development of black social identity as this process interrupts the otherwise alienating and demobilizing effects of encounters with racial discrimination. Using the Black American subsample of the 2001-03 National Survey of American Life (NSAL-SAQ), we propose a structural model that estimates the direct and indirect influences of personal discrimination, systematic racial discrimination, and black-self-categorization on positive aspects of black social identity. We find some support for the model, suggesting that striving effectively affirms black individuals' positive social identification in light of their experiences with racial inequity, while surfacing potential cleavages within the black political coalition.
Keywords: Striving, social identity, black self-categorization, discrimination, linked fate Relevant fields: Race and ethnicity; African American politics
Ezekiel saw de Wheel
Way in the middle o' the air
The big wheel moved by faith
The little wheel moved by the grace o' God
A wheel in a wheel
Way in the middle o' the air
Striving toward the kingdom of God, or metaphorically "walking with members of a congregation in a holy way" so that one is not overtaken with "weariness," was a major theological tenant of the Puritan clergy who settled in New England. Jonathan Edwards' reading of Luke 13:24-strive to enter into the straight gait"-led him to posit that striving requires strong desire, endeavor, and "agony" (Shepard 1999). W.E.B. Du Bois attended Congregational Sunday School in Barrington, Massachusetts, a community stepped in Puritan tradition, and the idea of striving is embedded in his writings and activism.1 In an 1897 essay entitled The Conservation of Races, Du Bois contends that it is" our duty to conserve our physical powers, our intellectual endeavors, our spiritual ideas; as a race we must strive by race organizations, by racial solidarity by racial unity." And in The Souls of Black Folk, [1903], Du Bois articulates the ultimate aim of this effort: "the end of black striving is to be a co-worker in the...