@glitter-stained I want to be cool like you so I'm going to flex some knowledge in my area of expertise, too: development theory. (This will involve developmental psychology, identity development frameworks, and a gentle understanding of canon.) I'll talk about Dick because I'm shamelessly playing favorites.
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Background
We're products of our environments.
You've probably heard the term "nature vs. nurture" regarding why someone becomes who they are. Is it genetic? Is it how they were raised? The answer is, it's both. Piaget describes how children develop a sense of self awareness and eventually (usually around 4 years old) an understanding of the fact that other people (a) exist (b) with different perspectives from your own (theory of mind). Vygotsky describes how children learn from their interactions with others, developing heuristics (memory models) that help them recognize, predict, and respond to patterns. Together, child development is both internal (driven by cognitive maturation) and external (interactions with the people around you).
Bronfenbrenner takes this external piece even further, creating his famous nested ecosystem model in which development is shaped by an ever growing ring of systems, starting with the individual, then the people and structures you interact with most (e.g. family, classmates), expanding to systems that indirectly impact you, and finally including the larger cultural, systemic, and sociopolitical networks you're enmeshed in. All of this shapes who you are and how you see yourself.
Adulthood
Gradations of life are a relatively new concept. Back in the day, you used to just go from being a child to being an adult. Then the concept of adolescence (teenagehood) emerged. Now, the concept of young adulthood is popular, describing the age from roughly 18 to 25. During this period, your identity is shifting from someone dependent on an adult for survival, to someone who is becoming independent. The reason we started defining this specific period as separate from plain old adulthood is because in society today, people in this age range typically still rely on another adult for some things but are generally tending towards autonomy. (This is why many of you don't feel like "real" adults.)
Chickering says that folks move from being dependent (relying on an adult), to independent (trying to do everything yourself), to interdependent (being self directed while understanding that you'll still need to rely on others), to developing mature relationships (appreciating the differences of the people around you). Young adults are often in the independent stage.
Racial and ethnic identity development
I'm far too lazy to go dig up my decade-old notes/textbooks for names of theorists, so you'll just have to trust me on this section.
Generally speaking, adolescents and young adults go through several fits and starts understanding their identities, particularly if they belong to a marginalized group. This applies to race/ethnicity as well. (Real quick: in America, race refers to the phenotypic expression of your ancestry, while ethnicity refers to your community's history, culture, and language. This is why "Hispanic" is listed as an ethnicity – a Hispanic person can be any race and still claim this identity, such as Afro Latino folks, or those with African ancestry, who are Black. You'll see why this distinction is important.)
Remember that your sense of self is both innate and dependent on your interactions with the world around you. As you encounter more people and more systems (and develop a deeper understanding of both) your sense of self will change. This is normal (and good). People usually enter young adulthood with at least a loose concept of their racial/ethnic identity, especially if that identity is (a) visible and (b) oppressed.
This is because they are more likely to encounter reactions and consequences to those identities different from their peers with a mainstream (privileged) identity. However, as they move through autonomy, they will naturally encounter many different types of people, which will challenge that concept of their racial/ethnic identity. If they encounter people of different identities from them, those differences will trigger a feeling of otherness. If they encounter people of the same identity, they will experience belonging and/or confusion (this can be simultaneous) as they recognize similarities and differences between their background and expression and their peers'. Eventually, they will settle on their own definition of what it means to be that identity (or they may reject it altogether). They go through this cyclically.
While the "coming out" phase is typically associated with LGBTQ identity development, I find it relevant in all development trajectories involving marginalized identities. Once a person defines their identity, they usually will go through a phase of claiming and expressing that identity, such as wearing certain clothes and hairstyles, buying particular brands or products, making body modifications, and joining groups of similar people. People can and will come out multiple times to different audiences throughout their lives.
Finally, folks with multiple and/or vague racial/ethnic identities also deal with having to figure out which groups they (are permitted to) belong to and when. In America, skin color matters a lot, so folks who look closer to the race they claim are more likely to be considered that race (and therefore accepted by their peers in that group), while folks who don't look like an identity they claim are far more likely to face doubt, exclusion, and ridicule when claiming that identity. With white passing folks specifically, they can and often are considered white until/unless their other identity is disclosed. (This may be a holdover from antebellum America, in which the "one drop rule" maintained that no matter how white a person looked, if they had even "one drop" of Black in them, they were Black.) Naturally, multi racial/ethnic / ambiguous folks can feel even more isolated or excluded than monoracial/ethnic folks who are marginalized.
I want to be clear that I am speaking about claiming and rejecting identities from a values-neutral stance. Neither are inherently good or bad. Instead, they are both indicators of how a person sees themself, and that's it. They also may change over time.
Culturally responsive pedagogy
Hammond wrote a beautiful book on this concept, developed by Ladson-Billings (who also coined the term critical race theory). Essentially, the model states that students must be approached with their culturally-based ways of making meaning so they can effectively learn. Hammond explains that when we force children into systems that were not created for them, which includes punishing them for "failing" to learn, they go into survival mode: the amygdala "hijacks" your brain so that you can focus on responding to threats. When this happens, your brain is not focusing on complex learning or encoding memories. Getting around that involves building relationships with students to learn how they learn best, and then approaching new concepts based on their already developed heuristics.
Morality and perspective
And finally, the theories that made me want to write all of this in the first place.
Love him or hate him, Kohlberg's moral development theory is a helpful place to start. It says that a person's sense of right and wrong evolves over time, starting with being motivated by punishment and reward: do more of the behaviors that get you rewarded and avoid the behaviors that get you punished. Then you start doing the things that satisfy your needs and desires and avoid doing the things that don't. These two stages (the pre conventional stages) are typical of young children.
The conventional stages involve wanting to be seen as a good person/rule follower, and then believing in the absolute rightness of law or some authority figure. This is typical of older children and younger teens. (Recall that children develop theory of mind in between the pre conventional and conventional stages.)
Lastly, the post conventional stages consist of the social contract, or the belief that you should treat others fairly or not cause harm, and what I call the Jesus stage, or the commitment to doing the most right thing that benefits the most people regardless of personal cost.
Most adults hover between conventional and post conventional. This means that most people are concerned with obeying the law and not harming others.
Now we switch over to Perry, who says that children, teens, and young adults develop along a trajectory from dualism to commitment to relativism. At the dualism stage, the world is binary: right and wrong, good and bad. Authority figures (parents, teachers) are absolute. The second stage is multiplicity, which is the understanding that people have different opinions that must all be considered equally; authority figures are not always right and maybe aren't all that special. Relativism, the third stage, involves weighing those different opinions differently because of the understanding that not all of them are equal – some are more informed than others, for example. The final stage, commitment to relativism, involves a person realizing that multiple truths exist and they must make meaning of all of that for themselves.
What usually motivates someone to grow to the next stage is a crisis (here meaning "a disruption in the norm") in which they cannot use their current understanding of the world to make sense of new information.
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Salty section
I haven't done enough research to declare anything in this section definitively, so do your own and take what I say with a grain of salt. I think all of these points are worth discussing, so I still wanted to include them.
Displaced peoples
Based on what few things I know of the Hmong people and Indigenous Americans, I wanted to draw some potential parallels that have helped me conceptualize what the Romani people have experienced.
All identity groups mentioned have been violently forced to relocate. The Hmong have a diaspora spanning continents. I was lucky to learn more about them while living in Minnesota, where there is a strong Hmong community. The ways they have held onto their identity include staking a physical claim to where they live (e.g. Hmong Village, living in certain neighborhoods), reinventing cultural traditions like quilt making, and gathering family/clans regularly to perform rites of passage for their young people (like a way cooler family reunion).
From anecdotes, I know that Indigenous folks in the southwest US (like Arizona) also have something like clans, in which folks who live together on a reservation or in a certain neighborhood rely on and watch over each other whether or not they are related by blood. Also, though this may vary state to state, reservations usually have autonomous governance structures, meaning they run their own schools, create their own laws (that don't conflict with state or federal law), and have their own elected officials. From what I've heard, law enforcement will usually not interfere with whatever happens on a res (out of fear? respect? I'm not sure) unless absolutely necessary.
Adoptees
I've had the pleasure of knowing many different types of families, including many adoptees, both monoracial (adopted parent and child are the same race) and trans racial (parent and child are different races). In both cases, there has been a point where the adopted child seems to reclaim their family. I can only comment on this from an outside perspective, but it appears to me like they are committing to a both/and framework: their adopted family both is and isn't their traditional family, and that's okay.
My transracial adoptee friends also underwent a race/ethnicity development trajectory that's driven by self discovery moreso than searching for a sense of belonging. This was regardless of their relationship with their adoptive parents, although my friends who have more secure relationships seemed less distressed about doing this kind of exploration.
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So let's start at the beginning.
Dick was born to a Romani couple in Europe who traveled frequently. They were circus performers, and Dick became one, too. This means that Dick's early childhood was spent with other nomadic folks living this non traditional lifestyle, probably including other Romani folks (we know Raptor was one of them). He likely learned English among many other languages, and certainly French, given his mother's background. He was most likely homeschooled.
His parents' deaths and his move into the Wayne manor happened when he was between 8 and 10 (you decide; nobody agrees on this), an age at which he was susceptible to believing in the inherent rightness of authority figures and that the world is divided into right and wrong; this aligns exactly with dualistic thinking.
He also was plucked out of one sociological ecosystem and plopped into another – homeschooled to traditional school; transient to rooted; ethnic minority (Romani) to mainstream identity (white/white passing); multilingual to monolingual environments. This alone is traumatic and likely to trigger survival mode. Dick's ability to socially integrate and even do well in school is a gigantic sign that the adults in his life at this age created psychological safety for him so that he could overcome that amygdala hijack and actually learn. Most likely, Bruce engaged Dick in the heuristics he had developed already (say, practical application of theoretical concepts; community-centered learning like storytelling) to help him transition to his new environment. So say it with me: Bruce Wayne is a good parent.
...sort of. Because later in his life, Dick exhibits rigid thinking that indicates he hasn't quite moved beyond dualistic thinking. As an adult, he often defines the world in binary ways: heroes and villains, criminals and victims, right and wrong. This is very likely the rigidity he learned from Bruce, the one for which he's been rewarded since he was 8 years old. Though he's lagging behind developmentally (most adults are in the multiplicity stage), there is little incentive for him to abandon that way of thinking.
In fairness, though, this may also be a product of his late-stage moral development. Dick is certainly approaching the Jesus stage (it's formally called "principles" but that's boring), if his self sacrificing nature is any indication. What keeps me from loudly declaring that he is, in fact, in that stage is that he doesn't always choose the "most right" thing – say, sacrificing someone else or killing a killer.
Then, as Seeley showed us, there is a real gap in Dick's concept of his ethnic identity. He goes through the whole reclaiming-his-adoptive-family thing right on time (around age 19, after moving out and once Jason joins the fam) as he reconciles with Bruce and learns why he never formally adopted Dick. But he rejects his ethnic identity¹ by rejecting Raptor, and in fact he doubles down on claiming Bruce as his father figure.
Of course, it's not that simple. He doesn't seem to explore or understand why, but Dick does try to hang onto remnants of his childhood² – buying the circus, reconnecting with old friends (both items in Nightwing (2011)), naming his dog Haley, to name a few. So he's going through his cycles of identity exploration and I'll eagerly await his coming out phase.
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Additional reading
¹ @romanyeva talks about how important the Raptor arc is and how much more we need stories that explore Dick's status as a Romani adoptee (link)
² I explained how Nightwing (1996) shows that Dick never learned how to grieve, which is another reason he holds onto things (link)
On a related note, I plan to read My Grandmother's Hands, a book about intergenerational and racial trauma. It's an American perspective but still relevant to this conversation (link)
Otherwise, I leave all talk of neuropathology, trauma, and cognitive psych to glitter (for example, this – trigger warning for child sexual assault)
And speaking of trauma, I have The Body Keeps the Score on my reading list. It's about the physical manifestation of trauma (link)
I just found a National Institute of Health research paper on Latino identity development in adolescents and young adults (link)
(link)
