Although adolescent alcohol use is less common in Black than White girls - despite the higher prevalence of childhood trauma in Black girls - we need to be careful not to underestimate risk for alcohol use initiation in Black youth who have experienced traumatic events. Our findings indicate that childhood trauma is an equally potent risk factor for adolescent drinking onset for Black girls as for White girls. We further found that associations of both Black race and childhood trauma with alcohol use initiation can be explained in part by SES and neighborhood factors and that the relevance of certain SES indicators (i.e., primary caregiver education level and residing in a single-parent household) to liability to alcohol use initiation differ by race and history of childhood trauma. In addition to exploring the generalizability of our findings to other substances as well as males and members of other racial groups, it is critical that efforts aimed at identifying distinctions between Black and White youth in other pathways to early alcohol use continue, toward the end of refining etiological models of alcohol use in Black youth.
