Black mothers' racial socialization practices in response to racial unrests in 2020.

Abstract

Objectives: The 2020 racial uprisings surrounding the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor impacted Black families in distinct yet diverse ways. Several factors conceivably shaped individual responses to this critical period, including one's age, gender, and familial roles. Guided by the phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory, this study specifically examined how a sample of Black mothers from a large urban Midwestern city constructed meaning of the racial unrest of 2020 in relation to their intersectional identities as women who are Black and who are also mothers of adult children.

Method: This qualitative study utilized a phenomenological approach to examine how a sample of 24 Black mothers aged 46-71 experienced the 2020 racial unrest. Descriptive and thematic analysis of in-depth semistructured interviews suggests the 2020 racial uprisings were a precursor for a resurgence of "The Talk" in Black families.

Results: Findings from this study provide first-hand evidence of older age Black mothers providing racial socialization to their adult children, further explained by three distinct subthemes including: (a) remembrance of the first "talk," (b) gendered socialization, and (c) insistence of faith.

Conclusions: Study findings fill an important gap in the extant literature on racial socialization that assumes these specific parental practices stop once children enter adolescence or young adulthood, when in fact these data suggest parental racial socialization occurs across the life course, with adult children, and may be shaped by interactions between multiple ecological systems. These findings have important implications for the psychological well-being of older Black mothers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).