Framing Racial Equity in Adolescence: Messaging Strategies for Social Change

This framing playbook helps practitioners, advocates, policymakers, and journalists communicate more accurately and effectively about racism and equity and their impact on adolescent development. In addition, FrameWorks is publishing a messaging supplement that distills these recommendations into a strategy checklist.

These messaging resources come at a critical inflection point in the nation’s public discourse about race, racism, and equity – particularly with regard to young people. The recommendations – which also include examples of what to say and how to say it – serve as a practical guide for difficult conversations about topics that are deeply impacting American adolescents.

Recommendations include:

• Define and explain equity, inequity, and equitable solutions early and often.
• Don’t talk about disparities without naming their causes.
• Explain racism as embedded in institutions young people interact with every day, not only as interpersonal experiences.
• Opportunity for all is a powerful value for talking about equity in adolescence.
• Use the Community Connections value.
• Connect anti-racist advocacy and civic engagement among youth with healthy development of identity and agency.
• Talk about supporting parents, not just telling parents what they have to do to support their adolescents.
• Amplify the voices of those who are most directly affected – youth of color.

The Framing Racial Equity in Adolescence playbook and supplement are part of a broader effort to change how people think and talk about adolescence and adolescent development in America.