Margaret Beale Spencer

• Senior Advisor on the American Psychological Association's "Task Force Report on Resilience and Strength in African American Children and Adolescents."[5]
• Board Member and Trustee of the Foundation for Child Development.[2]
• Member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Black Psychology.[6]

Spencer master's thesis, titled "Effects of Systematic Social and Token Reinforcement on the Modification of Racial and Color Concept Attitudes in Black and in White Preschool Children," was inspired by the doll studies of Kenneth and Mamie Clark and investigated whether children's racial beliefs and preferences could be modified by incentives.[3]

The study included 24 Black and 24 White children between the ages of 3–5, who all attended a Head Start program serving lower-class families. In the control condition, children were asked to choose between drawings of Black or White animals and children; this baseline found that the children in the study showed a 70% - 80% bias towards the White stimuli. In the experimental condition, a Black or White mechanized puppet taught the children to choose the Black stimuli by rewarding them with marbles; this intervention reduced bias towards the White stimulus to only 40%.[7]

Spencer concluded that the children had learned implicit biases during their childhood, but that the initial preference towards White stimulus could be reversed with incentives, suggesting that initial bias was more related to learned attitudes than an internalized self-hatred as suggested by the Clarks.[3]

Spencer's PhD dissertation was a continuation of her master's degree work looking at racial preferences among children, but with a focus on the confidence and self-esteem of Black children that exhibited biases towards White stimuli.[3]

Her dissertation studied 130 Black children from six preschools in the South Side of Chicago. This work determined that while the children showed significant bias against the color black and Black people, and favored the color white and White people, these attitudes were not internalized by the children, allowing them to maintain healthy self-esteem despite implicit anti-Black attitudes.[3]

Built off of Urie Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory, Spencer developed the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems (PVEST) Theory as a framework to examine strength and resiliency, especially during the process of identity formation in adolescents.[8][9] PVEST addresses the social, historical, and cultural context in which youths develop, and as well as the perceptions and self-appraisals that individuals use to form their identity.[8]

The PVEST Theory breaks identity formation into the following five components:[10]

1. Net Vulnerability level: history of prior experiences and coping outcomes.
2. Net stress engagement: actual experience that challenges individual's well-being.
3. Reactive coping methods: employed to resolve dissonance-producing situations.
4. Emergent identities: coping strategies are repeated, become stable, and combine with self-appraisal to form identity.
5. Life-stage, specific coping outcomes: identity affects future behavior and outcomes (self-esteem, achievement, health, etc.).

The APA Task Force on Resilience and Strength in Black Children and Adolescents describes Spencer's PVEST theory as "a seminal and important contribution to the study of resilience among African American children and youth" (p. 34) for being one of the only theories taking into account the "ecological contextual circumstances unique to youths of color in the United States" (p. 23)[8]

In a 2008 publication titled "What does ‘acting White’ actually mean?," Margaret Beale Spencer and Vinay Harpalani addressed John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham's widely cited "Black students' school success: Coping with the burden of 'acting White,'" which proposed the Acting White hypothesis, the idea that African-American communities devalue academic achievement because success in school is seen as an attribute of White dominant culture.[10]

Spencer and Harpalani cite data that suggests that African-American families have just as much investment in their children's academic success, and that high-achieving African-American students have higher social status than their peers, opposite to what would be presumed under the Acting White Hypothesis.[10]

Spencer and Harpalani also found conceptual problems with Ogbu and Fordham's approach, saying:

"… the analysis presented by Fordham and Ogbu lacks a normative, developmental perspective; it fails to view African American youth as normal, developing beings who are maturing in a hostile context of racial inequity. " [p.10][10]

The article concludes that Acting White is simply one of many coping response that Black youths employ and is not responsible for academic underachievement.[10]