Youth of Color in Care: Intersecting Identities and Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Youth of Color are disproportionately placed in foster care, often with families who don’t share their cultural background. Youth of Color in foster care also must navigate experiences linked to the child welfare system, including reason for foster placement, multiple placements, maltreatment, and high turnover of child welfare professionals. These foster care-related experiences, typically reflecting systemic inequities, can interact with and compound those experiences Youth of Color have regarding varied social identities, including race, ethnicity, birth family history and current issues (e.g., incarceration of one or both parents), immigrant status, sexual identity and gender identity, maltreatment experience, and disability. Ethnic-racial socialization and other important socialization processes can support the healthy identity development of these youth. Foster parents, tasked with the responsibility of supporting the development of Youth of Color, and often in transracial/transethnic placements, may face challenges in providing these needed socialization processes. Drawing on the extant literature, this chapter will present a multileveled discussion of the experiences of prejudice and bias foster youth face, with a focus on the systemic inequities among diverse youth in foster care, the individual challenges youth with different social identities face, socialization processes that can support these youth, and challenges foster parents face in supporting foster youths’ healthy identity development.