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Jewish World Review May 11, 2005 / 2 Iyar, 5765 Shades of race identity boil down to a doll test By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
NEW YORK CITY — It was a simple test. You give a child two dolls, one white, one dark-colored, and ask the child which one he or she likes best. Which one do they want to play with? Which one is the "nice" doll? Which one looks "bad"? Which one do you like best?
When black psychologist and educator Kenneth Clark asked these questions while researching the impact of segregation in 1951 (with his wife, Mamie Clark) on 16 black children in South Carolina, most of the children preferred the white doll. Ten of the children considered the white doll to be the nice doll. Eleven thought the brown doll looked bad.
Clark's death Sunday in his New York state home at age 90 reminds us of how profoundly the story of his doll test has shaped modern notions of how racism can be internalized in self-destructive ways.
Yet, curiously, few of the obituaries and tributes to him bothered to mention how the doll test was more valuable as symbolism than as science. Its sample group was too small by modern standards. There was little pursuit of why the children preferred one color over another. Nor was there a control group of white children through which we could compare how often they might prefer a black doll.
Nevertheless, the results of the study were startling enough for the U.S. Supreme Court to cite them in its unanimous 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision that ruled racially segregated schools unconstitutional. A half-century later, we can see that the high court's view only scratched the surface of what social scientists already were learning in the early 1950s about the complexities of race in America.
In his 1991 book, "Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American Identity," psychologist William E. Cross Jr. of Cornell University examined "Negro identity" studies from 1936 to 1967 and debunked self-hatred as too simplistic a notion to describe black identity during Clark's era or now. Modern obsessions with proving black pathologies of various sorts have caused us to overlook important adaptive strengths in black culture and psychology, he said.
Indeed, some subsequent tests of white children have found them almost as likely to choose a black doll as black children are likely to choose a white one.
I, for one, discovered this lesson in 1993 when our son, then age 4, came home from pre-school and announced, "I want to be a white policeman when I grow up." I grabbed my handy copy of "Raising Black Children," by noted black psychiatrists James P. Comer of Yale Medical School and Alvin F. Poussaint of Harvard Medical School (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.). Their advice: Relax. It's quite normal, the esteemed doctors said, for children to take full notice of color differences at age 4, but they don't necessarily attach any value to the various colors. They eventually learn color values from us, their parents and other elders, the same as they learn other values.
It is also not unusual for white 4-year-olds to want to be black, Comer and Poussaint point out, if the child's personal heroes are black. I knew this was true, since my little man-child's best friend was a blond-haired 5-year-old Scandinavian-American neighbor whose bedroom was plastered with images of Michael Jordan.
Indeed, self-hatred does not explain why two-thirds of black Americans have escaped poverty while others have not. But it might offer some insight as to why some black teenagers, entranced by hip-hop rebellion, display a self-destructive hostility toward mainstream success as "acting white."
Rather than relax too comfortably with the notion that we Americans have put racism behind us in this era of Oprah, Colin and Condoleezza, we also need to look more deeply into the psychological impact that centuries of racism have had on today's young people.
When I watch rap videos with my son, now a teenager fully enthralled with hip-hop, I marvel at how much has changed since Clark's doll tests. Negative imagery about black folks used to come almost exclusively from white folks. Now black folks cash in on it too. What a country.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
