Youth homelessness and the racial knowledge gap

ABSTRACT We know relatively little about homeless youth of color. Despite comprising almost three-quarters of the homeless youth population in the United States, youth of color, along with their unique needs, experiences, and wellbeing, have seldom been the subject of sustained and critical empirical inquiry. For example, in the context of education, the ways in which grade point averages, frequency of school change, and graduation rates may differ between homeless youth in general and homeless youth of color remain unknown. Even if we were to take the liberty of extending the existing comparative research regarding general student performance, the best we can surmise is that homeless youth of color fare worse according to all of these traditional success standards, but we haven’t the faintest idea how much worse or why. When it comes to vital questions about the wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable children in America, we are, at worst, asleep at the wheel and, at best, stumbling in the dark. On its surface, the “racial knowledge gap” appears to be a yawning expanse of missing information enveloped by a hazy mist of imprecise data interpretation, the meaning and significance of which I expound upon in this brief.