Kenneth Clark, PhD
I don’t know how many of you reading this know about Dr. Kenneth Clark. Growing up he was the most famous psychologist I ever knew heard about. In the 1950’s his work got brought before the United States Supreme Court in a very famous case about segregation. He had designed a study using dolls with children. It was a simple study using four dolls. Two of the dolls were boy dolls and two of the dolls were girl dolls. One boy doll and one girl doll had brown skin tone and one boy doll and one girl doll had white skin tone. Most of the children in the study, done on children in segregated schools in the South, said that they could tell which dolls looked like them accurately. But when asked to point to dolls that were pretty, smart, or had other likeable features the children chose the white dolls. When asked to point to dolls that were stupid, ugly or had unlikeable characteristics the children chose the brown skin toned dolls. The study was accepted by the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 as part of psychological practice and it was part of what made me decide to become a psychologist. Dr. Clark died in May 2005.
Unlike Dr. Clark, I’m a Caucasian psychologist who has published on racism. I’ve replicated the doll study enough to know that even today it can be replicated with ease. Young children will still tell you that the brown dolls look like them and that the pretty, smart dolls are the white dolls. Lots of psychological and sociological effort has gone into trying to change that. There’s been an entire Afrocentric movement in the hopes that will change that, but we know segregation for positive or negative purposes really doesn’t work well.
As a journal author my picture doesn’t accompany my articles on racism. Young psychology students write me on occasion at the email address or at the mailing address at the end of the article. It’s clear there is a presumption that I’m African American when they write for advice on school selection regarding dealing with issues of racism and racial identity in the application process. When I got the first of these letters I asked a colleague about this. I said I wanted to make sure the school I was going to wasn’t racist, had a good mix of faculty with a focus on cultural and ethnic diversity, and that I could work with a broad based population of people from all walks of life. I didn’t worry about being discriminated against because I was white. I worried because I was young, I had money, I wanted to work with poverty level people and mainly minorities and I wasn’t sure I had enough of a research background, people going to schools like UCLA were already trying to get something published. I was providing tutoring services for poverty elementary school students on-campus at Washington Street Elementary School in Los Angeles to help students who were having difficulties in the class. It was an early intervention program. Being African-American would have raised different issues. My friend and colleague said for me to stick just with the issues and to leave my race out of it. He said the question was about school selection and the criteria used. So I wrote back a detailed letter about how I look for objective and subjective signs of institutional sensitivity to race. I look at the published documents the organization sends out and see if they have diverse pictures of people representative of all types of people. I look at how they go about selection decisions–are they just looking at test scores or are they looking at other means of making selections. I look at how many people in the organization are from various groups–how diverse is the organization and at what levels. Is senior management diverse or only the contracted staff? Finally I want to see how they support the research I want to produce–who do they have on their faculty doing the type of research I want to do? I ended up attending California School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles. At the time I enrolled there they were one of the only schools that had a non-discimination policy in writing that included sexual orientation and was activly recruiting for African-American students. It was a school that was attempting to establish itself as much more than tolerant, but as welcoming.
Coming from that environment, it’s interesting listening to people who don’t know anything more about me than the fact that my skin tone is white. These are the same 2/3 of people who said the white dolls were prettier.
I have two quote on the back of a miniature quilt. The first is from Michelle Wallace in 1975 “We exist…working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle–because being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world.” The second is seventy years earlier from W.E.B. Dubois in 1903 “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” The other problem is that it’s 2005 and both quotes hold up now.
Dr. Clark will be missed.
