“I’m just a girl; not a white girl”: Early Adolescents Making Sense of Race and Gender Intersectionality and Identity

Social identity is defined, in part, as the sense of “we-ness” an individual forms with a social group, such as race or gender. The social identity literature, however, is largely divided by identities—with racial identity conceptualized, measured, and interpreted separately from gender identity—rather than examining how youth understand these group memberships at their intersections (i.e., “we” Black girls or “we” white boys). In the current qualitative analysis we examine how Black and white early adolescents ( M age = 12.51; N = 63) interpret the subjective importance and meaning of their racial and gender identities and their intersections. Results reveal that adolescents reason about the (in)significance of intersectionality on different levels: personal (the self), relational (others, peers), and structural (stereotypes, discrimination) and adolescents’ race and gender positionalities shape their meaning-making. We discuss contributions for research on identity development and intersectionality during adolescence.