Page 182 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Ethnically Correct Dolls . 167

designed to understand the development of racial self-concept of Negro 8
children, the child was presented a white doll and a black doll, identical
in every way except their color. Each child was asked a series of ques-
tions, including items such as "Which doll is the nicest?" The results
were startling then and remain so now. The majority of Negro children
preferred white dolls, thinking that they were "nicer" and "prettier,"
while they often pointed out the Negro doll as being "bad" or "ugly."
By implication, the Clarks argued, this is just what Negro children
thought of themselves: that they were bad and ugly. What the Clarks de-
scribed as a poor self-image could easily be magnified, in their view, to
self-hatred, underachievement, juvenile delinquency, and a host of other
social ills and pathologies. The Clarks' conclusion was that although
children's self-images needed adjustment and change, the key to effect-
ing such change lay in transforming the society in which these children
lived and grew, since that was the ultimate source of these attitudes.
Drafted into service in NAACP test cases against segregation in
American society, Kenneth Clark testified in the lower courts as to the
effects of segregation on school children. Clark argued that in a largely
segregated society, different groups responded not to each other, but to
inaccurate and lopsided stereotypes. Because whites lived primarily in
their own insular society, as did Negroes in theirs, these inaccurate
stereotypes remained largely unexamined. In such a situation, the Clarks
emphasized, rapprochement was impossible. Moreover, they insisted
black children were damaged by such a state of affairs, but white chil-
dren suffered as well, since their own sense of well-being was dependent
on being able to point to a whole race who were, by definition, more in-
adequate than they in any endeavor.
The event that really catapulted the Clarks' studies into the American
popular consciousness was a footnote in the Supreme Court's celebrated
case Brown v. Board of Education. The members of the Supreme Court
had used Kenneth Clark's comprehensive survey of social science litera-
ture on the effects of prejudice on children "as a factual basis on which
to rest its conclusion that segregation of white and Negro school chil-
dren was a deprivation of the equal protection of the laws commanded
by the Fourteenth Amendment" (Clark [1955] 1963,143). Although the
doll studies were never directly referenced in the Brown decision, and al-
though the Clarks themselves felt that other methods (such as the color-
ing test) provided more nuanced information about the complexities of
children's racial self-concept, it is the doll studies that continue to be re-
membered as the Clarks' connection to the watershed opinion.