Cross's nigrescence model expanded upon the work of Black psychologists who came before him and created an important foundation for racial/ethnic identity psychology.
While at DU, Cross seriously questioned his religious beliefs and eventually denounced God because he couldn't explain slavery or the Holocaust.
[5] With the Black Power Movement in full swing, Cross was put in charge of creating proactive programs to engage the youth of Evanston.
[5] On recommendation from his college friend Badi Foster, Cross served as assistant to the Chair of Afro-American Studies at Princeton University starting in the summer of 1969.
[5] Their only daughter, Tuere Binta Cross, now holds a MSW degree from NYU and is currently employed as a social worker in Denver.
The items that they created for a Q-sort experiment would eventually influence the first version of the Racial Identity Attitude Scale (RIAS).
[1] After graduating from Princeton, Cross became an assistant professor at Cornell University in the summer of 1973, where he taught black studies and psychology.
[1] Cross relates, “As a cultural psychologist, my work examines the cultural, historical, and economic forces shaping human development and everyday psychological functioning in general, and black identity development and functioning in particular.” [5] Cross published Shades of Black in 1991, which was largely a tribute to his experiences at the Africana Center at Cornell.
[5] He published this text with the help of Henry Louis Gates Jr., who motivated him to write the book, and Robert L. Harris who introduced him to Janet M. Francendese, a senior editor at Temple University Press.
While at Penn State, Cross assembled a research group that experimentally tested and validated the Cross-Racial-Identity-Scale (CRIS), which has become one of the most widely used social identity measures employed by the Division 45 scholars.
Cross left Penn State in 2000 to become a part of the Social Personality Psychology Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
[1] In 2008, Cross was awarded emeritus status at CUNY, and he continues to serve on dissertation committees in social-personality and developmental psychology for doctoral students at the Graduate Center there.
[9] One of the major focuses of the Division 45 is highlighting the roles of women, gay and lesbians, and people with disabilities within the American Psychological Association.
In the encounter stage, individuals undergo an experience that suddenly and sharply calls race into perspective and is generally an awakening to racial consciousness.
Eventually, the individual's highly emotional response to the encounter begins to plateau and this “psychological defensiveness” is replaced by “affective and cognitive openness,” which allows for a more critical analysis and worldview formation.
The internalization stage is marked by an individual's comfort with rejoining society with a strong enough sense of his own racial/ethnic identity to be able to forge relationships with members from other racial/ethnic groups.
This racial/ethnic anxiety often leads to the rejection of other racial groups, accompanied by an over simplistic and stern code of Blackness, rather than a positive affirmation of pro-Black ideas and actions.
For a “successful” transition into this stage, the individual must become their new identity, while engaging in meaningful activities to promote social equality and political justice for their group members.
Repeating stages is not a regression but often a part of greater process of integrating new information and reevaluating ideas from a more mature standpoint.
In this review, Cross detailed two errors committed almost invariably by the authors during this time frame – they generalized conclusions about adult identity from the results of research conducted with preschool-aged children, and they employed measures that assessed social attitudes while interpreting their results as if they had assessed factors of personality like self-esteem or self-hatred.
Cross demonstrated how working and middle-class Black families had historically exhibited strong mental health and adaptive personal qualities that allowed them to prevail and maintain positive self-images even in the midst of their political and social struggles.
There was a high correlation between the IMCI and PA (subscale intercorrelations), which may indicate that it in such a racially charged environment like the United States, isolating a Black RGO from African Americans may be impractical.