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In the 1940s psychologist Kenneth Clark, along with his wife psychologist Mamie Phipps Clark, performed experiments in which they offered black children the choice of two dolls identical in all but skin color. The Clarks' doll experiments grew out of Mamie Clark's master's degree thesis titled "Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Preschool Children" . The Clarks found that Black children often preferred to play with white dolls over black, thought the white dolls prettier than the black dolls, and characterized the white dolls as "nice" and the black dolls as "bad". Moreover, when black children were asked to fill in a human figure with the color of their own skin they frequently chose a lighter shade than was accurate. From this evidence the Clarks inferred that the children had internalized the racist views of the society around them.
The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in several school desegregation cases, the most noteworthy being Brown vs. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954). In Brown, the United States Supreme Court held that racial segregation in public education facilities violated the U.S. Constitution. The testimony of the Clarks in Brown is said to have been a significant factor in the Court’s decision. Indeed, some portions of the Court’s decision in Brown have been read as a reference to the harms of segregation demonstrated by the doll experiment: “to separate them [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Brown at 494.
The use of social science data in legal cases was relatively novel at the time of Brown and engendered some controversy, particularly since close examination of the data suggested that more black children in the less segregated Northern states favored the white doll than did black children in the highly segregated American South. Recently high school student Kiri Davis reprised parts of the Clarks’ doll experiments in a short documentary. In Davis’ documentary, an overwhelming majority of the black children presented with the two dolls, one black, the other white, preferred the black doll. A number of observers have suggested that the outcome of the reprised experiment indicates that black children continue to suffer from internalized racism, and that the law should go further in addressing race-based school inequalities. Other observers have remarked that black children’s preferences in dolls may not be a clear indicator of the children’s self-esteem and that such data should be excluded from legal assessments of educational policy.
I think that social science data in general has been and will continue to be a useful source of evidence in legal cases. However, the Clark doll tests, both then and now, may be a test not of self esteem but of what black children believe is the "right" answer to such questions. The proliferation of media images depicting the the dominant white culture is bound to affect what children understand about what society says is "nice" or "beautiful," but may not be a fully accurate indicator of what they themselves think. Of course, if black children think that society believes that white is "better" this may ultimately affect their own beliefs; the tyranny of majority opinion is hard to resist.
Nonetheless, one of the earliest lessons that young children learn in school is to dissemble, not to lie per se but rather to suppress their actual thoughts and beliefs in order to adopt the answer deemed correct by the teacher or other questioner. Heck, I'm still smarting from the time in Kindergarten when Mrs. Johnson told me that October started with an O and not an A as I insisted. She said that if I listened carefully I could hear the O sound and that it was nothing like an A sound. To me, October sounded more like amen (we pronounced it ah-men in my house) than over and open, words whose spelling I was pretty sure I knew (I prided myself on being the smartest kid in Kindergarten). But after that public correction, from there forward I dutifully recited that October started with O, that it sounded like it started with O, and that it didn't sound like it could start with anything else. I kept my actual opinion to myself.
What is your opinion?
