61.2.bergner

Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests,and the Politics of Self-Esteem

Gwen Bergner

American Quarterly, Volume 61, Number 2, June 2009, pp. 299-332 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/aq.0.0070

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| 299Black Children, White Preference

©2009 The American Studies Association

Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem

Gwen Bergner

The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education dealt a lethal blow to the “separate but equal” doctrine of segregation established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896; it did so largely

on the grounds that segregation damages African American children’s self-es-teem. In the Court’s words, “to separate [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.”1 Because of this psychological harm, the Court determined, African American children could never get an educa-tion equal to white children’s in a segregated school, no matter how good the physical facilities or curriculum. To support its finding of psychological damage, the Court cited in a footnote a number of social science works, most notably a report by psychologist Kenneth Clark that summarized the results of “racial preference” tests he and his wife, Mamie, had conducted to assess African American children’s racial identification.2 In the most famous of these tests, the Clarks asked children to choose between brown and white dolls in response to a series of questions, including which doll was the good one and which the bad, which doll they wanted to play with and which looked most like him or her.3 A majority of children identified a brown doll as looking like them, but chose a white doll to play with, as the nice one, and as the one with a nice color. The Clarks concluded that the children had internalized society’s racist messages and thus suffered from wounded self-esteem. Effec-tively legitimating the Clarks’ research, Brown established a discursive link between educational achievement and self-esteem for African Americans and spurred a veritable industry of racial preference testing that continues to this day. Social scientists have used racial preference tests to advocate policies on multiculturalism, self-segregation, affirmative action, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, resegregation, and the racial achievement gap.4

| 300 American Quarterly

After Brown, the Clarks’ studies set the parameters for virtually all subse-quent research on racial identity, self-esteem, and child development5—even though they were discredited on methodological and statistical grounds in the late ’60s and ’70s. Moreover, subsequent research using direct tests of self-esteem, as opposed to projective racial preference tests,6 showed that (1) racial preference, as measured by the doll and similar tests, bears no relationship to self-esteem; (2) African American children’s self-esteem is equal to or greater than that of white children; and (3) the persistent educational achievement gap between African American and white children cannot be attributed to disparities of self-esteem. Although these more recent findings would seem to invalidate the race and self-esteem link established by Brown; social science on racial identity and educational achievement remains invested in it.

Indeed, the Clarks’ doll test findings have attained a level of factual cur-rency through reiterative citation; researchers often simply cite them at the outset of papers to establish as fact that African American children have lower self-esteem than white children. Moreover, in affirming psychology as an institutional force for organizing public life, the American Psychological Association (APA) has been loath to reconfigure accepted notions of African American identity given the historical significance of the Clarks’ research. The professional organization draws a direct line from the Clarks’ studies to the Supreme Court’s ruling on segregation in order to authorize psychology as an institutional force for organizing public life. In the 1950s, because the issue of segregation was controversial for its membership, the APA was slow to praise, or even acknowledge, the impact of Kenneth and Mamie Clark on Brown. Now, however, it proudly—albeit inaccurately—touts the Clarks’ role on its Web site: “Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark demonstrated that segregation harmed black children’s self-images. Their testimony before the Supreme Court contributed to desegregation in the United States.”7 The Clarks did not, in fact, testify before the Court, nor did their studies actually isolate the effects of segregation on children’s self-esteem—a fact Kenneth Clark, himself, later acknowledged.8 Such distorting simplifications of the Clarks’ doll test recur regularly in social psychology textbooks.9 Yet, because it is invested both in the goal of racial equality and in its own authority in U.S. public policy, the discipline of social psychology continues to sanctify the Clarks’ research and the link between racism and low black self-esteem.10

Although the Clarks’ research holds a hallowed place in social psychology, racial preference research nevertheless operates as a contested site of U.S. racial politics: test results have varied with trends in racial ideologies. For example, the Clarks’ finding that “white preference behavior” indicated psychic damage


accorded with post–World War II conceptions of African American identity; social scientists of the ’40s and ’50s often invoked such “damage imagery” to fight segregation.11 With the rise of black power and black pride in the ’60s and ’70s, the damage paradigm fell out of favor. Not only did social scien-tists attack the Clarks’ findings as biased and Eurocentric; they also reported findings of black preference behavior in doll tests among African American children, which they attributed to improved self-esteem stemming from the black consciousness movement. In the late 1980s, as the neoliberal backlash against race-conscious equalization policies such as affirmative action gained force, researchers again conducted doll tests, this time finding white prefer-ence among African American children and cause to argue for a multicultural school curriculum. This shifting discourse about African American children’s self-esteem—from the civil rights through the black power and multicultural eras—constitutes what Howard Winant terms a racial project. It is “simultane-ously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics and an effort to organize and distribute resources along particular racial lines.”12 Although the Clarks did not originate the low self-esteem theory—which was widely held by social scientists for most of the twentieth century—the doll test, its link to Brown, and the subsequent tradition of racial preference test-ing constitute a powerful nexus of forces within social science’s racial project. Brown might not have ended school segregation with “all deliberate speed,” but it did create a juggernaut for the racial preference paradigm—while simultane-ously reinforcing social psychology’s centrality to U.S. public policy.

The doll test discourse not only reflects shifting racial politics but also configures notions of racial identity.13 Though researchers purport only to measure the psychic effects of systemic racial discrimination, they actually construct an essentialist view of racial identity, whereby black children must choose black dolls to demonstrate “accurate” racial preference. Thus the logic of the doll test discourse is consistent across time even if the results are not: white preference behavior indicates that African American children idealize whiteness, denigrate blackness, and therefore disavow their racial identity. Black preference behavior indicates a healthy self; whereas white preference behavior is pathological. To these researchers, the children who exhibit white preference behavior experience a horrible self-division that can only be rem-edied by, in historical order, integration, black militancy, and multicultural education. This interpretation presumes the existence of a unitary and coherent African American culture with which children can identify; it further presumes that strong identification with an essentialized racial group is necessary for positive self-image and, also, that children’s only “authentic” identification


can be with African American culture. According to this framework, there is no way to reconcile the “race dissonance” of white preference behavior with a healthy personality for African American children.

But the now widely replicated finding that African American children have positive self-esteem—even if they identify themselves as black while choosing white dolls—indicates a more flexible racial subjectivity whereby children embrace aspects of blackness and whiteness without incurring damage. Al-though white preference behavior may indicate a subjective split or double consciousness stemming from children’s understanding that African Americans are denigrated by the dominant culture, it may also be an adaptive response that allows for positive self-concept through multiple, shifting, and negotiated processes of identification. Such a reading allows for children’s agency or power of self-constitution in reaction to racist discourses.14 And although it is painful to think of a majority of African American children choosing the white doll over the black, the researchers’ interpretation of this behavior lacks the flex-ibility to conceptualize how “actors, both individual and collective, manage incoherent and conflictual racial meanings.”15 Social psychology’s emphasis on quantitative evidence, which requires a methodology that compartmentalizes identity into discrete and isolated components, works against the development of a complex and holistic theory of racial identification.

If the racial preference and self-esteem discourse supports policies meant to remedy racial inequality, why worry that the claims are based on bad science or misconceptions of African American identity? Perhaps the most important reason is that public policies promoted with the doll test and self-esteem discourse, from desegregation to multiculturalism, have not remedied the deep disparities of racial inequality in U.S. education. A holdover from the “damage imagery” that experts developed in the interwar years, and that liberals invoked for racially compensatory public policies in the postwar era, the low self-esteem strategy, now orthodoxy, is not inherently progressive and no longer serves the goal of racial equality. Conservatives can and have used it to oppose racial equalization policies such as desegregation and affirmative action.16 Furthermore, as Daryl Michael Scott argues, such “damage imagery” often grounds equalization policies in appeals for white sympathy rather than in a demand for equal rights.17 Finally, the strategy depends on an outmoded and essentialist conception of racial identity at odds with policy trends toward accommodating bi- and multiracial identity formations and poststructuralist conceptions of “race” and subjectivity. We need to link progressive public policy to reconceptualized notions of racial identity that account for performativity, agency, and negotiation.


Social psychology’s demand that children demonstrate “accurate” racial preference is symptomatic of the binary logic of racial formation in the United States, a permutation of the one-drop rule, whereby one’s psychic identifica-tion must match one’s assigned race as either black or white. This logic cannot accommodate racial admixture of identity or identification.18 Accordingly, I would reinterpret black children’s white preference behavior as signifying a form of psychic hybridity or mixed-race identification that eludes our historic black/white binary. Toward this reinterpretation, I draw on recent articulations of mixed-race identity to posit a model of hybridity in racial identification. In an article on the crisis caused by mixed-race individuals for our binary logics of racial classification, Naomi Pabst argues that “racial hybridity should be emplotted not as a third space between bifurcations, but as an interrogation of received categorical imperatives and classification schemes. Treating black-ness and mixedness simultaneously is but one way to go about this, one way to place in relief the conundrums and paradoxes of race.”19 I would suggest that white preference behavior exemplifies the subjective interpenetration of blackness and mixedness, instructing us to abandon our efforts to align children’s psychic identification with an “authentic” racial classification. I thus extend theories of mixed-race identity based on parentage to psychic processes of identification.

The suggestion that we replace the model of “authentic” racial identification with a model of adaptive, negotiated, and hybrid racial identification no doubt raises the specter of incoherence and erasure for African American identity politics. Nonetheless, I join others who have recently called for new forms of political cohesion that are not based on racial essentialisms or notions of cultural authenticity.20 Authenticity is too closely tied to the regime of racial purity used to establish and maintain racial hegemony in the United States. Moreover, new forms of mixed-race identities are already gaining political stature through such racial projects as the U.S. census, which, beginning in 2000, allowed individuals to identify themselves with more than one racial category. This is not to say that mixed-race identity offers a panacea for racism or an escape from the racializing project. David Theo Goldberg reminds us that “the normalcy, the seeming naturalness, of racial fabrication is at once fixed in place and challenged by the admission of mixed race-ness. . . . At best, then, the condition of mixed-race formation constitutes an ambivalent challenge to the racial condition from within the fabric of the racializing project.”21 Given such political ambivalence, I suggest that we recognize mixed-race identification while still acknowledging the historic and continued significance of African American identity to progressive politics. In this, I echo Pabst’s


call to abandon the “battle of essentialisms” in favor of “a more productive negotiation of mixed race [that] would ground and normalize hybridity as integral to race and culture while also highlighting the issues of difference and belonging mixed-race subjectivity raises. Accordingly, black/white inter-raciality and transculturalism could be fruitfully situated within a framework of black difference.”22

Let me clarify. I have no beef with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Nor do I mean to detract from the Clarks’ important contributions to civil rights in this case and in their later careers. Given the constraints of U.S. constitutional law, the historic contingencies of racial discrimination, and the contemporary climate of divided public opinion on desegregation, the social science approach worked as an effective strategy for overturning Plessy. I want to examine the genesis and afterlife of that strategy in order to explore public investments in such research and its attendant conceptions of “race.” Yet even as I suggest that we jettison the self-esteem discourse, I advocate sustained analysis of the psychic dimensions of racial formation as necessary to public policy debates.23 Progressive arguments based purely on econom-ics or civil rights alone have proved unsuccessful in garnering support for equalization policies, in part, because conservatives have appropriated these strategies to replace race-conscious policies with color-blind, class-conscious policies.24 Moreover, I question whether theories that address the intangible dimensions of racial formation necessarily constitute “damage imagery,” rest-ing on pleas for white sympathy at the expense of demands for equal rights. Ever since Emancipation, the “race problem” has combined the intangibles of attitude, culture, and identity with concrete issues of rights and resource allocation. We must address both the ideological and the material to devise effective public policy, not least to counter conservatives’ effective campaign against race-conscious policies such as affirmative action.

Social Psychology as Legal Strategy

Within the framework of U.S. law, segregation’s constitutionality would seem to devolve from claims of rights, not psychology. Specifically, the Plessy Court considered whether segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But, surprisingly, the 1896 decision resorts to a psychologizing of sorts in order to find that segregation does not violate this requirement: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff ’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of


anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”25 Segregation, the Plessy Court insisted, does not stigmatize African Americans; they just imagine that it does. Of course, this finding of neutrality overlooks the fact that whites established segregation to exclude African Americans from their company and not the reverse—as Justice Harlan pointed out in his lone dissent. The eight-justice majority admitted as much in a separate passage: “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.”26

The Court thus suggests that African Americans’ social inferiority underlay the segregation statute but asserts that segregation does not signal inferiority. To resolve this contradiction, the Court makes a specious distinction between social and political equality, claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment protects only the latter and thereby justifying the separate-but-equal principle. Plessy’s convoluted rationale shows that the systemic structure of racially discrimina-tory law always works in tandem with the psycho-ideological dimension of stigma and opinion.27

Given that separate-but-equal rested as settled law, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which mounted the legal campaign against segregation of the late ’40s and early ’50s that culminated in Brown, first challenged segregated education on the basis that states did not provide equal resources for children of both races. The group won sev-eral equalization orders in lower courts on grounds that facilities, curricula, and financial expenditures for black schools were inferior to those for white schools in the same district. Although the courts ordered school districts to remedy the disparities, they left intact the principle of separate but equal. This equalization approach had another major drawback: because such challenges had to be made case by case, the NAACP faced a decades-long campaign of bringing suit against each discriminating school district in each segregating state. To end school segregation per se, the NAACP needed to demonstrate that racial separation was inherently discriminatory, regardless of whether separate facilities were equal. Significantly, in two cases concern-ing postgraduate education, the Court found that intangible factors such as a school’s prestige and the standing of its alumni constituted a real aspect of educational opportunity. Although it crafted its decisions in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents (1950) so as to leave Plessy stand-ing, the Court’s willingness to consider educational intangibles broadened the criteria for evaluating equality.28

After Sweatt and McLaurin, Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Committee (LDC), developed a new and controversial strategy to


prove that separate could never be equal: he recruited social scientists to testify to the crippling psychological effects of segregation. Though the strategy had its detractors within the ranks of the LDC,29 the Supreme Court accepted the argument and, in a reversal of Plessy’s claim that segregation did not constitute a “badge of inferiority,” found that it did—and that African American children internalized this sense of inferiority. Writing for the unanimous court, Chief Justice Earl Warren upheld a lower court’s “finding of fact” in the Kansas case that segregation inflicted psychological injury: “The policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children.”30 The Court needed an ostensibly objective basis on which to reverse Plessy ; the NAACP had provided them one that seemed to be based on new scientific evidence not available in 1896. “Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson,” continued Warren, “this finding is amply supported by modern authority.” The “modern authority” invoked by the Court in its famous footnote 11 consisted of recent works by social scientists on racial prejudice and discrimination in U.S. society.31 Legal scholars have criticized the Court for relying on “murky” social science rather than legal precedent and constitutional law,32 but psychologists hail Brown for granting them a mandate to shape public policy.33

The exemplary publications of footnote 11 included, among others, po-litical economist Gunnar Myrdal’s influential An American Dilemma (1944) and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s formidable The Negro in the United States (1949) as well as a published survey of social psychology opinion.34 But the footnote listed first of all an unpublished work by an unknown assistant pro-fessor of psychology at City University of New York: Kenneth Clark’s report to the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth (1950), which cited the results of quantitative tests that he and his wife, Mamie, had conducted to assess the effect of prejudice on children’s racial identity. Clark’s prominent position in the footnote was likely due to the key role he played in executing the NAACP’s social science strategy rather than the strength of his research. Recruited by the NAACP, Clark testified in three of the four lower court cases consolidated as Brown and coauthored a summary state-ment on social science evidence on the detrimental effects of segregation that the NAACP submitted to the Court as an appendix to its brief.35 Although a number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists also testified in the lower court cases—arguably to greater benefit than Clark36—Clark’s organiz-


ing role with the LDF and the Court’s citation of his work catalyzed his rise to prominence as “the best-known and most highly regarded black social scientist in the nation.”37

In their studies, published in a series of articles between 1939 and 1950, the Clarks used four tests to analyze racial identity: line drawing, coloring, and doll tests, plus a questionnaire.38 All but the dramatic doll test are largely forgotten. Here the Clarks presented African American children from several northern integrated and southern segregated schools, ages three to seven, with four sex-neutral dolls. The dolls were identical in all aspects except skin and hair color; two were “brown with black hair and two were white with yellow hair.” All four were clothed only in white diapers. The Clarks asked each child to give them the doll “that you like to play with,” “that is a nice doll,” “that looks bad,” and “that looks like you.” The Clarks found that a majority of children chose a white doll to play with and as the nice one, but identified a brown doll as looking bad and also looking like them. The psychological literature terms this finding “white preference behavior” and “race dissonance.” Concluding that African American children preferred whiteness and denigrated blackness, the Clarks’ called for remedial programs to heal black children’s racial identity: “These results . . . would seem to point strongly to the need for a definite mental hygiene and educational program that would relieve children of the tremendous burden of feelings of inadequacy and inferiority which seem to become integrated into the very structure of the personality as it is developing.”39 The Supreme Court echoed the Clarks’ translation of psychological damage into a mandate for desegregation as hygienic public policy, citing the role of education as the “very foundation of good citizen-ship” and “the principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment.”40

Critics argued then and now that the social science evidence constituted weak grounds for a constitutional decision. Moreover, even as Brown was ar-gued before the Supreme Court, social scientists and legal experts noted that the preference tests did not isolate the effects of segregation per se on children’s racial identity. In fact, children in northern, integrated schools displayed slightly greater rates of white preference than children from the southern, segregated schools.41 In writing the majority opinion in Brown, Chief Justice Earl Warren conveniently ignored these shortcomings in order to craft a deci-sion based on supposedly new scientific knowledge. This rationale allowed the Court to overturn established precedent, skirt the Fourteenth Amend-ment question, and avoid direct criticism of the Plessy Court and the South


for blatant racial discrimination. With this strategy, Warren consolidated a unanimous decision that, he hoped, would encourage Southern compliance with desegregation.42 After Brown, these strategic legal maneuvers were gener-ally forgotten, as were the gaps in the Clarks’ data. Moreover, Clark and other social psychologists cited the legal victory as a mandate for shaping future law and public policy.43

From Scientific Racism to the Mark of Oppression

The Clarks’ premise that racial prejudice damaged the personalities of African Americans correlated with prevailing paradigms for studying racial difference in the ’30s and ’40s. This theory, sometimes called “the mark of oppression” or “black rage” approach after so-titled major books on black psychology, constituted a paradigm shift in the study of race.44 Prior to the 1920s, social science, dominated by anthropology, engaged in what we now call “scientific racism.” Scientists categorized, classified, and measured supposed natural dif-ferences between the races to rationalize a racial hierarchy that placed whites at the top and other races in descending positions, with blacks at the bottom.45 Such “science” ostensibly proved blacks’ inferiority and justified sociopolitical inequalities. In the ’20s and ’30s, researchers such as Columbia University anthropologists Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict and psychologist Otto Kline-berg helped shift the focus of study from cataloging “natural” racial differences to examining the causes and effects of racial prejudice.46 This new culturalist account held that disparities between whites and blacks were the result of discrimination, not inherent racial difference. The Clarks, who each received a PhD from Columbia University—a hotbed of pioneering work in cultural-ism—came of professional age in this era, which also marked the legitimization of psychology as a science to be used for directing public policy.47

World War II catalyzed social psychology’s centrality to U.S. public policy, raising concerns about both anti-Semitism and fascism, which experts inter-preted as psychological manifestations of “intergroup conflict.” Easing racial and ethnic tensions thus came to be seen as critical to the U.S. war effort, and the U.S. government employed psychologists to develop policies related to civilian and military race relations. After World War II, the focus on group dynamics blended with developing trends in the psychology of individual personality. As the “therapeutic ethos” gained force in U.S. public life, ensur-ing that all citizens could develop a healthy personality was seen as critical to fortifying U.S. democracy against the Cold War threat of communism. The 1943 race riots in Detroit and Los Angeles showed Americans the importance


of addressing racial conflict at home. In this historical context, social scientists’ assertion that discrimination kept African Americans from achieving, in part by damaging their psyches, enabled claims for social justice and civic equality in the postwar years.48

Although the Clarks’ research seemed to crystallize, with quantitative and empirical evidence, the growing consensus among social scientists that Afri-can Americans suffered personality damage as a consequence of racism, their research methods reveal an unconscious bias toward producing evidence of damage. In one of their published papers, the Clarks explain that they chose to ask the racial preference questions (e.g., Which doll do you like best?) to the children before the racial group knowledge and self-identification ques-tions (e.g., Which doll looks like you?) because they had found in a pretest that “children who had already identified themselves with the colored doll had a marked tendency to indicate a preference for this doll and this was not necessarily a genuine expression of actual preference, but a reflection of ego involvement.”49 In other words, children who had identified themselves as black tended to prefer the black doll. The Clarks assumed this was a false result and reversed the order of the questions to control for this “potential distortion of the data.”50 Thus the Clarks developed a methodology that actually skewed for white preference behavior. Their candid revelation of this methodology suggests that research bias shaped results and that the study lacked controls for researcher expectations. Such glaring methodological flaws went largely unnoticed until the post–civil rights era.

From Black Rage to Black Power

The Clarks’ findings held sway throughout the civil rights era of the ’50s to the mid-’60s, during which time social psychologists continued to measure racial preference using the doll test and other “forced choice” methods. The rise of the black power movement and concomitant ideological shifts toward black pride in the ’60s and ’70s, combined with institutional developments such as the rise of black studies departments, brought the Clarks’ tests and the whole “black self-hatred” paradigm under attack. Psychologists and social scientists now criticized the Clarks and other earlier race analysts for pathologizing the black psyche. Writing in the Journal of Black Psychology in 1979 while holding a position in an Afro-American studies department, Joseph Baldwin argues that the methodology of racial preference studies indicates “the operation of a fundamental ‘Eurocentric’ posture in psychology and social science.”51 In such research, writes Baldwin, “Black people, despite their history of overcom-


ing adversity, are generally viewed in the role of reactors rather than actors, of the manipulated rather than the manipulators in the ongoing process of social exchange in human society.”52 In the wake of the black power move-ment and at the inception of African American studies as an academic field, Baldwin wants to dispel a myth of black self-hatred, to take researchers to task for pathologizing black responses to racism, and to reclaim agency for African Americans.

The black power or black consciousness movement considered the “black self-hatred” or “mark of oppression” approach not only outdated, but also out-and-out racist. Critics argued that it ignored the cultural richness and support systems within African American communities and the history of strategies African Americans had used to survive centuries of slavery, segrega-tion, and discrimination. Further, the self-hatred thesis had ultimately become detached from a history of oppression and instead came to represent the es-sential character of the black psyche. This approach, also known alternately as the “tangle of pathology,” “cultural deprivation,” or “culture of poverty” thesis, often “substituted a model of cultural for economic determinism and placed the blame for failure and poor self-image not on the system but on the individual’s involvement in a subcultural tradition that stressed personal disorganization and fatalism.”53 Researchers such as sociologist Carol Stack countered this paradigm through studies of the social structure of what they characterized as the resilient black underclass. Stack mapped a network of supportive kinship and community systems that differed from the normative model but, she argued, were adaptive to available resources.54 According to Scott, the “radical research effort that promoted the image of the resilient black psyche constituted a massive offensive that literally drove damage imagery from the field.”55 By the end of the 1960s, such damage imagery came to be seen as a tool of conservatives, thus counterproductive to social psychology’s liberal bent.56

As the era of black consciousness pushed aside the black self-hatred para-digm, researchers reevaluated the Clarks’ data and methodology, finding that the Clarks’ tests had failed to set up adequate controls for factors including subjects’ region, sex, class, age, interracial contact, shade of skin color, and interviewer’s race.57 Separate studies found, for example, that subjects’ choice between pictures of white and black children varied depending on whether the pictured child was smiling or looked sad, that children tended to choose the object presented on their right, and that “cleanliness of the characters in the pictures was a more powerful determinant of the preference choice ten-dencies of both Black and White children than was the race of the stimulus


characters.”58 Furthermore, the Clarks’ various test methods (e.g., doll, line drawing, coloring) yielded inconsistent results. Moreover, their data did not yield statistically significant indications of racial preference.

As evidence against the Clarks’ methods mounted, researchers performed new racial preference tests—using the same methods as the Clarks. Research-ers asked children to choose among dolls, puppets, and drawings meant to represent racial difference. However, in the new climate of black consciousness, similar research methods produced conflicting results. Some studies now found high rates of black preference among African American children, whereas other researchers reported findings of white preference behavior consistent with the Clarks’ original findings. In sum, new racial preference testing, following the Clarks’ test paradigm, produced contradictory results, with various studies finding evidence of both black and white preference behavior. Nevertheless, as the number of racial preference studies proliferated, white preference behavior seemed to be on the wane. A preponderance of studies conducted between 1970 and 1975 using doll tests and line-drawing techniques reported that a majority of African American preschool children expressed “own-race prefer-ence.”59 For example, in two studies using puppets, conducted in 1970 and 1972, 80 percent or more of the black children chose a black puppet as the nicer puppet and as having the nicer color.60 Most of the studies from this era asserted that new findings of black preference behavior prove that African American children’s self-esteem had increased due to the “black conscious-ness movement.”61 Researchers’ conclusion that black children’s self-esteem increased due to a rise in racial pride accorded with trends in psychology and sociology during the ’60s and early ’70s, such as that exemplified by William Cross’s theory of “nigrescence,” a process whereby individuals progress from negative to positive self-image through the development of black conscious-ness.62

Although children’s racial pride and self-esteem may well have increased by the ’60s and ’70s, the new findings of black racial preference are undermined by many of the same methodological flaws as the Clarks’ findings of white preference. As with the Clarks’ studies, these new racial preference studies lacked controls for children’s age, regional origin, skin tone, and so on. For example, many of the new studies showing higher black preference involved elementary and secondary rather than preschool children, but older children had always demonstrated stronger black racial preference—even in the Clarks’ studies.63 As one clear-sighted review essay from 1979 states, “conclusions about the effect of the black consciousness movement on racial self-esteem cannot be drawn from a comparison of recent findings on elementary school


samples with earlier findings on preschoolers.”64 Furthermore, because test methods varied in terms of subjects’ and interviewers’ identity characteristics and studies lacked controls for such variables, the earlier and current results were not comparable; thus an increase in self-esteem could not be proven. Finally, even if African American children now demonstrated black racial preference, these studies did not establish the cause of that behavior. Nonethe-less, the doll test and other racial preference studies from this era repeatedly concluded that African American children’s self-esteem had increased with their internalization of the “Black is beautiful” message.

During the black consciousness era, researchers also started to perform “di-rect” tests of self-esteem (or what they sometimes called “global” or “personal self-concept”) rather than the “forced choice” racial preference test. In these tests, researchers asked subjects to respond to questions about their sense of self and racial attitudes rather than to choose between images or objects meant to represent racial difference (the “forced choice” method). The direct tests indicated that African American children’s self-esteem was equal to or greater than that of white children. But even though the direct tests may have yielded more accurate data about black children’s self-concept than the racial prefer-ence tests did, they also failed to establish a causal relationship between racial identity and self-esteem. Nevertheless, researchers again conflated racial group identity with personal self-esteem in order to validate the prevailing political paradigm of black pride. For example, some studies measured children’s at-titudes toward “racial militancy” as an index of self-esteem.65 In other words, if subjects scored high in racial militancy, they were assumed to have high self-esteem. Comparing the self-concept of black children and white children from different socioeconomic levels, a 1973 study by Shirley Samuels found that black and white lower-class children had similar levels of self-esteem, and black and white middle-class children had similar levels of self-esteem, but black middle-class children had higher self-esteem than black lower-class children. In other words, disparities of self-esteem were not interracial but intraracial, and these correlated with class. Although the researcher did not assess the children’s attitude or exposure to black consciousness ideologies, she nonetheless surmised that the “recent emphasis by the Negro on his black heritage and pride in himself may indeed be positively affecting black middle-class children.”66 African American children’s racial pride may have increased after the civil rights era and such an increase may have positively impacted personal self-esteem. The variation of test methods and the lack of controls, however, make it impossible to determine the extent and cause of such change.


Whereas many researchers accepted findings of increased self-esteem among black children and attributed the cause to the black consciousness movement, others acknowledged the inconsistencies of methods and results. By 1980, a number of review essays noted the correspondence between racial ideologies and self-esteem findings in both the black self-hatred and black power eras. This observation was itself fraught with the racial politics of the day, how-ever, as evidenced by a debate in the journal Social Psychology between two researchers who agree that ideology is influencing interpretations, but disagree vehemently on the implications for understanding racial identity.

In the first article, Barry Adam defends the low self-esteem findings and argues that the rise of “black militancy” as an ideology is influencing contem-porary research findings of equal self-esteem between whites and blacks. This claim was so controversial that the editor of Social Psychology agreed to publish it only on the condition that rebuttals would be published in the same issue.67 Noting the correspondence between research findings and racial ideologies, Adam argues that, in the early 1970s, “when black militancy becomes a reality that cannot be ignored,” social science researchers rejected the low self-esteem theory in order to rescue black people from what now seems like a shameful complicity with their own oppression. He fears that the current trend empha-sizing equal self-esteem between blacks and whites evacuates politics and social context from research: “Sympathy with minority members, and a desire to free them from the stigma of low self-esteem, has led not to the de-reification of the issue, but to attempts to deny its existence completely. . . . This oblit-eration of the problem ironically lends itself to the modern ‘benign neglect’ policy toward black problems and to the rationale undermining affirmative action.”68 Although Adam credits the rise of black studies for making clear how the earlier model of black self-hatred led to a “blame the victim” stance that let white society off the hook for racial inequalities, he worries that recent findings of equal self-esteem “absolves the larger society of any need to evaluate persecutory practices or opportunity structures.”69 He concludes that the black pride emphasis on African Americans’ constructive and adaptive responses to discrimination undermines arguments for political change and insists that the low self-esteem hypothesis is crucial to a politics of racial equality.

In her rebuttal, Roberta Simmons reviews the research trends, acknowl-edging the parallel between recent findings of blacks’ healthy self-esteem and black power ideology. She identifies three potential explanations for the new findings of higher self-esteem among African Americans: (1) “the increase in black militancy has been responsible for an improvement in black self-esteem”; (2) research methods between early and later studies differ; and (3) the early


projective choice and later direct studies of self-esteem measure different aspects of identity.70 She notes that the new studies have not yet proved a causal link between “black militancy” and self-esteem, and she acknowledges that research methods and study types are noncomparable. Nonetheless, she ultimately supports the new findings of equal self-esteem, stating that “the most interesting puzzle becomes why blacks are not more likely to have lower self-esteem than whites” given widespread discrimination, prejudice, and poverty.71 Though Simmons’s assessment of the research trends is nuanced, her critique of Adam is less so. She rightly notes that he ignores important research developments indicating African Americans’ resilience to racism and discrimination in his desire to retain the low self-esteem findings, but she sets aside his concern for progressive racial politics in her accusation that his conclusions “seem erroneous and informed by his apparent bias—that is, he seems to believe that the oppressed must have lower self-esteem no matter what the studies show.”72 Thus both researchers acknowledge the correspondence between ideology and findings and note the faulty research methods, but each vociferously defends the self-esteem paradigm he or she finds ideologically and politically felicitous.

The Adam-Simmons debate encapsulates the ideological struggle over the social psychology of race in the late ’60s and ’70s. Proponents of black resilience condemn as biased or racist virtually any mention of “negative” traits in black families, cultures, or personalities, even if researchers espouse liberal goals and blame racism and discrimination for such traits. This is not to say that such liberal policy documents were totally free of racial bias, but that they were condemned wholesale, in part because the media and conservative politicians used them to popularize the image of a violent, dysfunctional black underclass, especially in the wake of the 1965 Watts and 1967 Detroit riots. Ironically, the black power emphasis on cultivating pride, self-worth, and racial conscious-ness implicitly assumes and works to correct low personal and group esteem. Nevertheless, racial liberals who promulgated theories of low self-esteem or other pathologies were seen as “all too willing to exchange black dignity for something other than justice, for social policies that reinforced white America’s age-old belief in black inferiority.”73 By the end of the 1970s, conservatives had co-opted discourses of black social and individual pathology.

Unhinging Racial Identity from Self-Esteem

Although researchers continued to perform racial preference testing through the 1970s, thus preserving the assumed link between racial group identity and


personal self-esteem, at least one other review essay from 1979 comprehensively criticizes the methodologies and conclusions of both earlier and contemporary racial preference research. Noting the correspondence between trends in find-ings and ideologies, Judith Porter and Robert Washington observe, “The stress on low black self-esteem in the early 1960s was used as a lever in the struggle for civil rights. In the 1970s, black pride having increased, emphasis on low self-esteem among blacks has been less popular.”74 Porter and Washington explain that methodological problems ranging from inadequate controls for influencing factors to noncomparable test paradigms make it impossible to draw any definitive conclusions from the racial preference and self-esteem literature. They argue that research from the ’50s and ’60s focused on racial self-esteem because that was the dominant paradigm for understanding the psychology of race and racism. Studies from the late ’60s and ’70s yielded different results because, the damaged self-esteem paradigm having fallen out of favor, researchers now focused on personal self-concept, a dimension in which African Americans were equal or superior to whites. The different research focuses are not comparable, however, because they do not explain the relationship between racial preference and personal self-concept. Moreover, neither of these research paradigms demonstrates the relationship between the personality characteristic being measured—whether racial preference or self-concept—and sociopolitical conditions. Porter and Washington thus call for a more complex formulation of the interaction between various and multifaceted personality characteristics and our social structure.

Following Porter and Washington, in the early 1980s, researchers began more consistently to conceive of self-esteem as multifaceted and to unhinge racial preference from personal self-concept. In other words, they hypothesized that racial group preference operated independently from personal self-esteem. Increasingly, they measured African American children’s personal self-concept using standardized sets of questions that asked subjects how they felt about as-pects of self, including popularity, school success, appearance, and control over their lives. This “direct” test of self-concept differed from the “forced choice,” projective, preference tests like the doll, line-drawing, and coloring tests. Direct tests were meant to measure all aspects of subjects’ self-esteem, not their racial preferences or identification with black culture. Most showed no significant differences in self-esteem between African American and white children. In many cases, African American children demonstrated higher self-esteem than whites, even if they exhibited white preference behavior.75 For example, in the early to mid-’80s, at least two studies measured both self-esteem (using direct methods) and racial preference.76 These studies found that African American


children exhibited white preference, but scored high on self-esteem assessment. In his summary of these findings, psychologist Michael McMillan concludes that “there is some outgroup orientation, but that the negative inference con-cerning personality or psychological structure of African American children is unfounded.”77 In other words, African American children’s preference for whiteness does not seem to harm their self image.

One hypothesis posited to explain the seeming contradiction between African American children’s high self-esteem and white preference is that self-esteem comes from family, friends, and teachers, not from the larger society, and so is “insulated from systems of racial inequality.”78 Researchers favoring this hypothesis concluded that African Americans develop self-esteem from their immediate family and peers, not from white society, and that de facto community segregation provides a “consonant environment” for the develop-ment of adequate self-esteem. On the other hand, some studies suggested that racial inequality might impair what social psychologists call “personal efficacy,” or a sense of competence and control over one’s life.79 If so, educational policy should focus on efficacy rather than esteem.80 Another explanatory hypothesis is that children learn social stereotypes through cognitive processes unrelated to those involved in forming self-image.81 In any case, self-esteem might not be affected by the experiences of the group, and there is no relationship between racial preference and self-esteem.82

By the mid-1980s, a substantial number of social science studies indicated that (1) the doll test does not measure self-esteem; (2) racial preference and self-esteem are not related; (3) self-esteem is multifaceted; and (4) African American children’s self-esteem seems to be equal to or greater than that of white children. In light of these findings, researchers called for rethinking both the concept of self-esteem and the relationship between African American identity and personal self-esteem.

Doll Test Redux

Despite significant criticism of racial preference testing by the early 1980s, the doll test reappeared in full force in the late ’80s, this time in the service of the multicultural education movement. In 1988, the Journal of Black Psychology devoted an entire issue to two contemporary doll studies that received con-siderable media attention in magazines such as Time and Jet and in television and radio interviews with the authors.83 These two studies used the Clarks’ basic methods and came up with similar results: white preference behavior by black children, which the researchers interpreted to mean that black chil-


dren internalize negative stereotypes about African Americans conveyed by the media. On these grounds, they called for programmatic multicultural education in order to “promot[e] self-esteem and self-acceptance in Black children.”84 A 1988 study by Darlene Powell-Hopson and Derek Hopson, for example, called on parents, educators, and mental health professionals to educate children

about the positive contributions of Black Americans in areas such as science, politics, busi-ness, athletics, arts, music, literature, and entertainment. Parent education programs can assist parents in developing their child’s racial pride and acceptance of others. We must begin as early as preschool age to expose children regularly to Black Americans in positions of authority and power. In addition, children can be provided positive role models through class trips to environments, activities, and engagements that are controlled, produced, man-aged, or contributed to by Black people. Every child should be able to identify and talk about Blacks of earlier times and of the present. They should know who Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, Malcolm X were, as well as who Jesse Jackson is.85

A multicultural curriculum, the implied logic went, would introduce positive role models and instill racial pride, which would, in turn, enhance self-esteem and lead to greater academic achievement. Though a multicultural curriculum is certainly desirable, and there might be a relationship between curriculum and self-esteem or achievement, the test data do not show that relationship. Even if the study did indicate low self-esteem in African American children, it does not prove the efficacy of this remarkably specific curriculum in increasing either self-esteem or learning ability.

As these researchers returned to the doll test and white preference behavior findings in order to campaign for multicultural education, they reenacted the methodological and interpretive flaws of the earlier racial preference studies because they did not control for various factors that might influence the children’s choices. In addition, the test design assumed a simple and direct relationship among white preference behavior, personal self-esteem, and racial identity that had and has not been proven. Indeed, even though these researchers had not shown that the preference for white dolls among black children indicated anything other than a preference for white dolls, their find-ings were marshaled in support of multicultural education in the context of the “Culture Wars” of the 1980s, arguably with some success, given the media attention they attracted.86 By contrast, sober policy papers that reasonably advocated multicultural education to “address the psychological separation that . . . prevents some students who differ racially from the mainstream from


bridging cultural gaps” and as “socially relevant” rather than on the basis of the more spectacular doll tests and the “self-esteem” hot button never made it beyond the professional journals.87 The media frenzy surrounding these doll test studies suggested there was something both scandalous and tantalizing about the image of a black child choosing a white doll—that it confirmed our sense of “race” even as it generated outrage.

But though the doll test studies of 1988 made a media splash, their call for multicultural education was drowned out by a tidal wave of conserva-tive opposition to race-conscious equalization policies—also on grounds of damage to self-esteem. The late ’80s and early ’90s marked the rise of neoconservative African American intellectuals’ opposition to affirmative action, school integration, and multiculturalism. Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character, Stephen Carter’s Affirmative Action Baby, and Ellis Cose’s The Rage of a Privileged Class, for example, argue that race-conscious policies such as affirmative action, not conventional discrimination and prejudice, undermine the self-esteem of blacks by casting doubt on their professional qualifications and intellectual abilities.88 What is more, Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court in 1991 served to tip the Court against race-conscious policies and toward a color-blind judicial philosophy, a trend further consolidated by George W. Bush’s recent appointments of two more conservative justices, Samuel Alito and John Roberts.89 From the 1980s on, conservatives linked the low self-esteem rhetoric to claims that the welfare state cultivates a psychology and culture of dependency in order to marshal opposition to civil rights equalization and Great Society social welfare policies. Thus we have seen a shift in political climate from the postwar belief that the state bore responsibility for the legacy of systemic racial discrimination, including its psychological effects, to an ideology of personal responsibility and deregulation. This shift is, perhaps, emblematic of a depoliticization of psychology dating from the rise of “humanist” psychology in the 1960s, a school of social psychology that emphasized “self-actualization” through in-dividual psychotherapy as the route to national mental health.90

Self-Esteem in the “Post-Race” Era

Although the doll test lives on in social science and popular notions of racial identity, some of the self-esteem research from the late 1990s and early 2000s acknowledges that racial preference is not an indicator of self-esteem. As with some earlier research, these studies test for an association between African American racial identity (how strongly subjects identify with being black) and


self-esteem—with varying results. But none has identified a mechanism that controls that relationship. Nonetheless, these recent studies conceptualize racial identity as more complex and multifaceted than did earlier research models. A 1998 study by Stephanie J. Rowley et al., for example, uses a “multidimensional model of racial identity,” which not only defines four dimensions of racial identity but also assesses them using the subject’s self-perception, an approach the social science literature terms phenomenological.91 In other words, Rowley et al. asked subjects to report on their own level of identification with being black, warning against assumptions that “simply because an individual belongs to the societally defined category of African American that his or her subjec-tive identification with that category can be inferred.”92 Thus they recognized variations of racial identification among individuals and, furthermore, did not “presume that race is the most central aspect of self concept for all African Americans.”93 The Rowley et al. study, which also ruled out the effect of gender on results, found no correlation between racial identification and personal self-esteem.94 Although other recent studies do claim a correlation between racial identity and self-concept, their methods also reflect an understanding of racial identity as multiple, partial, shifting, and decentered.95 Still, conflicting results indicate that the complexity of racial identity continues to challenge social psychology’s disciplinary demand that researchers isolate, quantify, and correlate components of racial and personal identity.

A 2005 study of multiracial identity by Marie L. Miville et al. surrepti-tiously navigates between the disciplinary demand for empirical evidence and the complexity of (multi)racial identity that militates against quantitative analysis. After asserting that multiracial identity is not necessarily coherent or unified and that its form varies from individual to individual, Miville et al. underscore the need for empirical evidence on this amorphous subject.96 To gather such empirical evidence, they propose a “phenomenological research design based on interviews as being most appropriate for isolating and defining racial identity development themes.” These statements reveal a tension between social psychology’s demand for empirical evidence to isolate and define identity components, on the one hand, and a burgeoning recognition that the com-plexity of racial identity works against such disciplinary requirements, on the other. For the “phenomenological research design based on interviews” rather than on easily measurable and quantifiable responses to test questions seems inherently contradictory to “isolating and defining” racial identity themes in a usefully quantitative way. Nonetheless, it appears that some strains of social psychology research are attempting to revise constructs of racial identity in accordance with contemporary, “postmodern” conceptions.


Fetish Dolls

Although some recent social psychology research formulates a more nuanced relationship between racial identity and personal self-concept, the industry of racial preference and self-esteem research continues to produce various and conflicting methodologies, results, and policy arguments. The contra-dictions within social science discourse between contemporaneous studies that uphold and those that undercut the original doll test studies make it difficult to trace a linear history, although overarching trends do reveal a trajectory of opinion that racial identity, or what I would term identification, must match an individual’s socially prescribed racial category. With respect to the doll test, researchers’ interpretation of “white preference behavior” as necessarily dissonant for African American children rests, in part, on a common misconception that we necessarily identify with ideals, heroes, and role models—that is, with positive characteristics—when, in fact, we can also identify with “a certain failure, weakness, guilt of the other.”97 The doll test researchers presume that black children choose the white dolls because they idealize whiteness. But the children may, in fact, choose the white doll precisely because they identify with negative attributes associated with whites such as consumerism, acquisitiveness, domination, and so on. Some of the children’s comments when choosing dolls, as reported in Powell-Hopson and Hopson’s 1988 study, suggest this possibility. One child declared, “‘White people have a lot of money’”; another child complained, “‘Wait, let me get one; there aren’t going to be any white ones left.’”98 The researchers interpret these comments as “rejection of Blackness,” but they might as well indicate consumerist values of the black children that are in line with the dominant culture. Positive African American role models would not necessarily attract the children’s identification, and children could as easily identify with “nega-tive” African American models.99 It is questionable, therefore, whether forced choice doll tests even measure racial group identification.

That the studies from 1988 blamed the media for promulgating nega-tive (or no) images of blacks and, consequently, positive images of whites that the children internalized raises the question of how mass and popular culture affects racial identity, self-image, and self-esteem. Although I cannot fully address this topic here, I do want to mention Toni Morrison’s influen-tial novel The Bluest Eye (1970), which represents the effect of World War II–era Hollywood, dolls, advertising, and grade school primers on African American children’s self-image.100 Although set in the early 1940s, the novel fictionalizes the cultural matrix of Brown from the temporal perspective of


the black consciousness era. The novel’s central, but silent, character Pecola Breedlove, unloved and abused by her parents, tragically wishes for blue eyes so she can be loved as little white girls are. She devours Mary Jane candies out of desire for (desire to consume and to be) the blond-haired, blue-eyed white girl depicted on the wrapper, and she drinks quantities of milk out of a Shirley Temple cup to appropriate the double whiteness.101 Pecola’s wish-ful identification with whiteness is clearly tied to her lack of self-worth, but this survival strategy fails at the moment of success: Pecola achieves blue eyes (or so she believes) and an improved self-image at the cost of sanity. Pecola’s story is painful and tragic, as contemporary critics and readers attest.102 Yet the novel also presents an alternative to Pecola’s nonadaptive negotiation of white-dominated mass culture in another African American child, the novel’s narrator, Claudia, who destroys the “big, blue-eyed Baby Dolls” her relatives give her at Christmas and rejects the white ideal represented by the child star Shirley Temple (although the narrator’s defiance is tempered by her admission that she will have to accommodate herself somewhat to dominant norms as she matures).103 Thus the novel represents racist American culture as damag-ing to African American children’s sense of self and also represents African American children’s identity as resilient and adaptive. Both, no doubt, are true, but it is the wrong done to Pecola that resonates through the novel and converts readers to sympathy and outrage.

Morrison’s novel helps illustrate the cultural resistance to relinquishing the doll test paradigm of African American identity. Brown’s importance to U.S. history and the Clarks’ role in Brown make the doll test more than psychological dogma; it is a cultural icon of sorts. At least three major documentary film and television treatments of Brown feature the Clarks’ role and dramatize the doll test.104 A photo of two dolls representing those used in the Clarks’ test serves as the main photo for the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum Web site.105 The correlative doctrine of African American children’s low self-esteem has saturated the culture of the United States to the degree that Hallmark can rely on it to market greeting cards (fig. 1). A two-page advertisement in Working Mother (September 2000) shows an African American girl, about eight to ten years old, at an unspecified school athletic competition (she appears to be dressed in sweats, in a gym, and a background figure wears a competitor’s number). She holds a greeting card in her hands as she looks off into the distance. A red line is drawn from the card to the facing page where the word “self-esteem” appears in large red letters and the price, 99¢, appears underneath. In the bottom right corner of the page is Hallmark’s brand logo with a tagline underneath that reads, “Cards work.” The advertisement suggests that African American


children need a psychological booster shot to their self-esteem, which will, ostensibly, guarantee their success—at least in athletic competitions. Hallmark can deliver this inoculation for a pittance.106 In ver-sions of this ad featuring white children, the cards

“worked” to shape other emotional responses, not self-esteem. In November 2006, Highmark, a Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurance licensee, ran a television spot promoting their “Highmark Healthy High 5” program for children’s well-being and “healthy habits,” which showed children, apparently of various ethnicities, engaged in activities related to mental and physical health. An African American girl, dressed as a ballerina, appears in the scene promoting “confidence” and “self-respect.”107

The latest iteration of the doll test comes in the form of an independent film, A Girl Like Me, directed by seventeen-year-old Kiri Davis and produced by Reel Works Teen Filmmaking. Davis films girls from her high school speaking in sophisticated—and resilient—terms about how dominant norms of beauty affect their self-images. At the end of the short film, Davis “reconducts the ‘doll test’” on much younger girls, and films several heartbreaking scenes in which they exhibit what has been termed white preference behavior. The film has been viewed widely on the Web, with links circulating through Listservs. It was also shown at West Virginia University’s 2007 Martin Luther King Jr. Day Unity Breakfast.108

Obviously, the Clarks’ racial preference research retains its authoritative and celebrated status because of its association with the landmark case Brown v.

Figure 1.Advertisement for Hallmark’s “Warm Wishes” greeting card line, Working Mother magazine, September 2000.


Board of Education. But why, more precisely, does the doll test retain its grip on social science discourse and recollections of the civil rights movement? I would argue it is because of Brown’s significance to our national imaginary in suturing the ideological trauma of the racial conflict of the ’50s and ’60s, with the doll test serving as an emblematic visual image for Brown. Certainly, Brown was the most significant legal victory for the civil rights movement. Moreover, it constitutes a particularly palatable, palliative, and poignant representation of the proper workings of democracy in the United States for liberal citizens negotiating the historic trauma of the country’s systematic racial inequality. As Ben Keppel notes, “Brown has become one of a small cluster of moments now seen as symbolically central to the collective narrative of the United States’ coming of age as a great nation after World War II.”109 In its focus on children, the “innocent victims” of racism, and public education, the crucible of democratic citizenship and the conduit to capitalist opportunity, Brown seems to mark the end of systemic discrimination and the fulfillment of U.S. democratic ideals.

This legal landmark merges with the cultural role of psychology to give us an interpretive frame for racism that is consistent with the “creed of our time,” that is, with the “‘romance’ of American psychology.” This “romance” makes “Americans today . . . likely to measure personal and civic experience according to a calculus of mental and emotional health—‘self-esteem’ in the current vernacular” rather than “whether our society lives up to its reputation of democracy and equality, ideals that appear increasingly abstract, difficult to grasp, and remote from the dilemmas of daily life.”110 In other words, we prefer to see our social problems as psychological rather than political, and the doll test facilitates this interpretation. It presents a melodramatic tableau, blending children (the “innocent” victims of racism) and dolls (the quintes-sential marker of childhood fantasy)—while leaving the perpetrators invisible (and the spectator guiltless). Given the symbolic significance of dolls to our cultural construction of childhood (a significance we can trace in the impas-sioned call for black dolls during the 1970s and continued debates about the tyranny of Barbie on girls’ gender and ethnic identities), the visible and volatile mix of children, dolls, and seeming self-hatred facilitates a sympathetic liberal response.

Brown’s Fiftieth Anniversary and the Ills of Public Education

As evidence that a sympathetic response does not necessarily translate into progressive racial politics, witness the significant and worsening racial achieve-


ment gap in education. The failure of legislation from the civil rights era to produce real racial equality is evident in popular commentary marking the fiftieth anniversary of Brown in 2004. A raft of newspaper and magazine articles, exhibits, and interdisciplinary academic conferences celebrated its key contribution to the civil rights movement but lamented Brown’s “failure to live up to its promise,” that is, to deliver educational equality for African Americans.111 Progressive critics and educators rightly called attention to the de facto segregation currently operating in many school systems, wherein “the vast majority of poor children are relegated to an inferior education” measured by less-educated and less-trained teachers, large classes, a curriculum stripped down to the three Rs, not enough textbooks, and deteriorating buildings.112 But others noted the persistent “academic achievement gap [that] separate[s] Black and Latino students from their white and Asian counterparts,”113 a gap that is not confined to poor urban areas and that pertains within the middle classes and integrated school systems.114 These often divergent lines of debate indicate the fraught relationship between two measures of educational equality: opportunity versus achievement. Desegregation, it seems, delivered neither. Though educators and politicians continue to wrangle over the constitu-ent conditions of equal opportunity, most recently in relation to the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” policy,115 until we eliminate the achievement gap, the “promise” of Brown will remain unfulfilled.

No doubt disparities of educational resources between poor, urban, and largely minority populations and their more affluent suburban counterparts contribute to the achievement gap. But even the inconsistent and contradic-tory social science research suggests that, beyond resources and integration, cultural constructions of race affect black children’s academic success. Race, the findings indicate, affects education in two ways: in bias against African American students (more severe discipline, lower teacher expectations, cur-ricular and testing bias) and, possibly, in the psychic attitudes and cultural practices of some black children and parents (parenting practices, perception that academic success means acting white, fear of upholding racial stereotypes through academic failure).116 In fact, some school districts, including those in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Mount Vernon, New York, have improved black and Latino achievement by instituting multipronged approaches that address all three factors of financial resources, racial bias, and student motivation.117

Despite such examples of local success, there is no consensus among poli-ticians, educators, policymakers, and social scientists about how to equalize public education. And not only does the achievement gap persist—despite ameliorative, if inadequate, measures aimed at eliminating it, such as charter


schools, multicultural curricula, and standardized testing; it has increased since the late 1980s.118 The lack of consensus is not surprising given the complex racial politics of education and ongoing opposition to integration and affir-mative action. Moreover, social science research on inequality has produced a plethora of piecemeal and often conflicting data on racial identity and edu-cation. There is, then, a lack both of political commitment to equality and of coherent research to guide policy. Within this contentious and confused policy landscape, even progressive responses to the achievement gap reflect the tension between material and discursive approaches. For example, the Nation’s May 2004 issue “Brown at 50” focuses primarily on material issues of resource inequality and de facto segregation, largely omitting mention of cultural factors contributing to education inequality.119 We can understand the contributors’ reluctance to take on discursive aspects of racial formation, including how psychic processes of identification affect academic success. Such discussions smack of stereotyping and blaming the victim. There’s good reason to worry that any attention to the psychology of education might just weaken the claim for more resources and fuel specious but resilient arguments of blacks’ inherent inferiority such as those propagated by the infamous “bell curve” or the “culture of poverty” paradigm associated with the Moynihan Report.120 But it is worth surmounting liberal squeamishness on this count to address education inequality comprehensively.

We cannot achieve racial equality by neatly separating the political and economic from the social and psychological. Neoliberals and neoconservatives have mounted effective resistance to race-conscious policies of equalization, in part, by calling for African Americans to exhibit “personal responsibility” and, ironically, by labeling policies such as affirmative action both “antidemocratic” for giving preference to minorities and “racist” for operating through the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” We are still struggling to mount an effective campaign against the now popular belief that race-conscious policies provide special treatment and enable pathological psychologies. It therefore behooves us to enlist more flexible conceptions of hybrid racial identity in developing effective strategies for the evolving racial projects of social justice.

Notes I would like to thank John Ernest, the members of Robyn Wiegman’s discussion group at the 2003

Dartmouth Institute in American Studies, and members of the 2003 WVU English faculty research


group for helpful comments on drafts of this essay. I also thank JoNell Strough, Tim Sweet, and Katy Ryan for their feedback and support.

1. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 74 Sup. Ct. 686 (1954).2. Kenneth Clark, “Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development,” Midcentury

White House Conference on Children and Youth, 1950. Clark’s manuscript was incorporated without specific attribution into Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, ed. Helen Witmer and Ruth Kotinsky (New York: Harper Brothers, 1952). The Clarks’ racial preference tests were first developed by Mamie Phipps Clark in the 1930s as part of her MA thesis at Howard University. For more on Mamie Clark’s often overlooked contribution to the Clarks’ legacy, see Shafali Lal, “Giving Children Security: Mamie Phipps Clark and the Racialization of Child Psychology,” American Psychologist 57.1 (2002): 20–28.

3. The Clarks asked the children to respond to a series of eight requests: “1. Give me the doll that you like to play with—like best. 2. Give me the doll that is a nice doll. 3. Give me the doll that looks bad. 4. Give me the doll that is a nice color. 5. Give me the doll that looks like a white child. 6. Give me the doll that looks like a colored child. 7. Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child. 8. Give me the doll that looks like you.” Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” in Readings in Social Psychology, ed. Eleanor Maccoby, Theodore Newcomb, and Eugene Hartley, 3d ed. (1947; New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1958), 602.

4. Serge Madhere, “Self-Esteem of African American Preadolescents: Theoretical and Practical Consid-erations,” Journal of Negro Education 60.1 (1991): 47.

5. Arthur Whaley, “Self-Esteem, Cultural Identity, and Psychosocial Adjustment in African American Children,” Journal of Black Psychology 19.4 (1993): 407–8. Though literature reviews regularly credit the Clarks with originating the research on racial preference, earlier racial preference studies preceded theirs, including Ruth Horowitz’s “Racial Aspects of Self-Identification in Nursery School Children,” which the Clarks cite (Journal of Psychology 7 [1939]: 91–99).

6. By the mid-1960s, researchers developed “direct” tests of self-esteem and racial group identity consist-ing of questions posed directly to subjects. This method differed from the doll test and other “forced choice” tests in which researchers inferred subjects’ self-esteem levels and racial preference based on subjects’ choice between dolls, line drawings, puppets, and so on.

7. APA Online: “Segregation Ruled Unequal, and Therefore Unconstitutional,” Psychology Matters, www.psychologymatters.org/clark.html/ (accessed January 13, 2004). See also American Psychologist 57.1 (January 2002), an APA journal issue devoted to a celebration of the Clarks’ legacy, and the APA’s Monitor on Psychology 35.8 (2004), an issue titled “50 Years Post-Brown.”

8. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice (New York: Knopf, 1976), 353.9. For a standard textbook account of the Clarks’ doll test, see Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson,

Robin M. Akert, eds., Social Psychology, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), 458–60.

10. For histories of social psychology’s central role in shaping American public policy, see Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995). For an account focused on public policy related to race, see Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

11. Scott categorizes as “damage imagery” the wide range of social science theories about the negative effects of racism and discrimination on African American individuals, families, and cultures (Contempt and Pity, xii).

12. Howard Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1994), 24.

13. For an examination of the challenge posed to social psychology’s claim of scientific objectivity by poststructuralist theory, generally, and by Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis, specifically, see Ian Parker and John Shotter, eds., Deconstructing Social Psychology (New York: Routledge, 1990).

14. For a corroborating theory of African Americans’ pleasurable and negotiated consumption of American mass culture, see Jacqueline Stewart’s analysis of African American spectatorship of 1930s Hollywood film. Stewart argues that “black enjoyment of such films [does not] necessarily signify a posture of self-deprecation.” Her theory of “reconstructive spectatorship” analyzes how “black viewers attempted to reconstitute and assert themselves in relation to the classical cinema’s racist social and textual op-


erations.” Stewart, “Negroes Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 29.4 (Summer 2003): 652, 653. Michele Wallace also suggests that black women’s identification with and viewing pleasure of classic Hollywood film stars in the 1950s “might have been about problematizing and expanding one’s racial identity instead of abandoning it.” She urges us to view spectatorship as potentially “multiracial and multiethnic.” Wallace, “Race, Gender, and Psychoanalysis in Forties Film: Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave, and The Quiet One,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 263–64. See also Ann duCille, Skin Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 8–59.

15. Winant, Racial Conditions, 18.16. After Brown, segregation’s supporters argued that separating the races would be more conducive

to healthy self-esteem and, therefore, educational achievement (Scott, Contempt and Pity, 38–39, 145).

17. Ibid., xi–xii.18. Here I use the term racial identity to designate an individual’s assignment to a socially sanctioned

racial category based on parentage; I use identification to designate the (primarily unconscious) psychic processes of desire and fantasy that are central to subjectivity. These distinctions are conflated in social science’s use of the term racial identity.

19. Naomi Pabst, “Blackness/Mixedness: Contestations Over Crossing Signs,” Cultural Critique 54 (Spring 2003): 209.

20. See, for example, Tracey Sedinger, “Nation and Identification: Psychoanalysis, Race, and Sexual Dif-ference,” Cultural Critique 50 (Winter 2002): 40–73.

21. David Theo Goldberg, “Made in the USA: Racial Mixing ’n Matching,” in American Mixed Race, ed. Naomi Zack (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 252, 254.

22. Pabst, “Blackness/Mixedness,” 180. Barack Obama has undoubtedly raised consciousness of mixed-race identity in the United States, especially through his widely disseminated speech of March 18, 2008, in which he attempted to calm outrage over his association with black liberation theologist Jeremiah Wright. In that speech, he explained his racial identification with both black and white culture while identifying as an African American. See also William Cross on “biculturalism” in Shades of Black (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 119, 123, 141.

23. In this I differ from Scott, who argues that “given the history of the political use of social science, . . . experts who study social groups, particularly those who engage in policy debates, should place the inner lives of people off limits” (Contempt and Pity, xix).

24. In Meredith v. Jefferson County School Board, 127 Sup. Ct. 575 (2006) and Parents Involved in Com-munity Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 127 Sup. Ct. 574 (2007), the Supreme Court decided, in 5–4 decisions, that two school districts in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle could no longer achieve integration by assigning students to schools based on race. In this finding, the Court drew on the Bush administration’s amicus brief that “cited socioeconomic integration as a ‘race neutral’ alternative to race-based assignment plans.” However, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurrence to the Court’s opin-ion sustains the goal of achieving racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity in public school student bodies, thus leaving some legal room to consider racial diversity as part of drawing school districts; Emily Bazelon, “The New Kind of Integration,” New York Times Magazine, July 20, 2008, 40.

25. Plessy v. Ferguson, 16 Sup. Ct. 1138 (1896).26. Ibid., 551.27. Cheryl Harris analyzes Plessy’s implications for the racialization of property or racial identity as property

in “Whiteness as Property,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement,” ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (New York: New Press, 1995), 276–91.

28. Sweatt v. Painter, 70 Sup. Ct. 848 (1950), and McLaurin v. Oklahoma, 70 Sup. Ct. 851 (1950); Kluger, Simple Justice, 282–84.

29. Kluger, Simple Justice, 321 and 555.30. Brown v. Board of Education.31. Ibid.32. For criticisms of Brown’s reliance on social science, see Herbert Wechsler, “Toward Neutral Principles

of Constitutional Law,” Harvard Law Review 73.1 (November 1959): 1–35; Louis H. Pollak, “Racial Discrimination and Judicial Integrity: A Reply to Professor Wechsler,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 108.1 (November 1959): 1–34; and Charles L. Black Jr., “The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions,” Yale Law Journal 69 (January 1960): 421–30.


33. Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. and Ellen M. Crouse, “The American Psychological Association’s Response to Brown v. Board of Education: The Case of Kenneth B. Clark,” American Psychologist 57.1 (2002): 38.

34. Max Deutscher and Isidor Chein, “The Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation: A Survey of Social Psychology Opinion,” Journal of Psychology 26 (1948): 259–87.

35. “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation: A Social Science Statement,” Minnesota Law Review 37.6 (1953): 427–39.

36. For example, the testimony of sociologist Louisa Holt greatly influenced the Kansas District Court’s finding of fact, quoted in the Supreme Court’s decision, that state-sanctioned segregation is harm-ful to children (Kluger, Simple Justice, 424). Other notable psychologists who testified in the lower court cases consolidated as Brown included David Krech, Otto Klineberg, Isidor Chein, and Frederic Wertham.

37. For an index of Clark’s notable accomplishments, see Ben Keppel, “Kenneth B. Clark and the Patterns of American Culture,” American Psychologist 57.1 (2002): 29–37.

38. Clark and Clark, “Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” 602. See also Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “The Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Racial Identification in Negro Preschool Children,” Journal of Social Psychology, S.P.S.S.I. Bulletin 10 (1939): 591–99; “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” Journal of Negro Education, 19.3 (1950): 341–50; “Segregation as a Factor in the Racial Identification of Negro Pre-School Children: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of Experimental Education 8.2 (1939): 161–63; “Skin Color as a Factor in Racial Identification of Negro Preschool Children,” Journal of Social Psychology, S.P.P.S.I. Bulletin 11 (1940): 159–69.

39. Clark and Clark, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification,” 350.40. Brown v. Board of Education.41. Clark and Clark, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification,” 607.42. Kluger, Simple Justice, 705.43. Kenneth B. Clark, “Desegregation: An Appraisal of the Evidence,” Journal of Social Issues 9.4 (1953):

2–8.44. Major social psychology works of the “black rage” era include Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey,

The Mark of Oppression (1951; New York: Meridian, 1962), and William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968). For a history of the theoretical development of the “black self-hatred” model, see Joseph Baldwin, “Theory and Research Concerning the Notion of Black Self-Hatred: A Review and Reinterpretation,” Journal of Black Psychology 5.2 (1979): 52–56. The argument that segregation damages the black psyche represented a shift from pro-segregation arguments, common to the interwar years, that proximity to whites damaged the black psyche.

45. For a discussion of Franz Boas’s effect on the social sciences’ approach to race, see Claudia Roth Pierpont, “The Measure of America: How a Rebel Anthropologist Waged War on Racism,” New Yorker, March 8, 2004, 48–63.

46. Ben Keppel defends Clark’s emphasis on the negative effects of discrimination rather than on children’s positive coping mechanisms as a reflection of the “conventional wisdom” of the 1950s (“Kenneth B. Clark,” 33).

47. Psychological work on ethnicity originally focused on European immigrants to the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century but shifted to African Americans as pressure for integration created a demand for social science research on racial attitudes; Judith Porter and Robert Washing-ton, “Black Identity and Self-Esteem: A Review of Studies of Black Self-Concept,” Annual Review of Sociology 5 (1979): 53.

48. Although early research in intergroup conflict addressed both the psychology of prejudice in whites and the psychological damage such prejudice ostensibly did to blacks, social scientists subsequently focused on black personality and culture, especially in relation to an ostensibly pathological family structure in which matriarchy destroyed black men’s masculinity. Ellen Herman notes that social psychology’s focus on gender and family structure in the 1950s and ’60s evinces the popularization of psychoanalytic theory in the United States (Romance of American Psychology, 191).

49. Clark and Clark, “Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” 602–3.50. Ibid., 603.51. Baldwin, “Theory and Research Concerning the Notion of Black Self-Hatred,” 70.52. Ibid., 54.


53. Porter and Washington, “Black Identity,” 66.54. Carol Stack, All Our Kin (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 55. Scott, Contempt and Pity, 162.56. Scott marks the Watts riot of 1965 as the moment conservatives co-opted damage imagery, locating the

cause of the riot in the dysfunctional black family structure. The famously controversial “Moynihan Report,” coincidentally released at the time of the Watts riot, became a lightning rod for attacks on damage imagery in social science. The report was meant to garner support for race-conscious state programs to aid poor African American communities, but Moynihan, “a prominent social scientist and racial liberal, was pilloried as a racist and the foremost neoconservative on matters of race” by “scholars in the mainstream of the academy” who “accus[ed] him of blaming the black community for its plight” (Scott, Contempt and Pity, 152–59). See Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” in L. Rainwater and W. L. Yancey, eds., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Boston: MIT Press, 1967), 39–78.

57. Whaley, “Self-Esteem,” 408; Michael McMillan, “The Doll Test Studies: From Cabbage Patch to Self-Concept,” Journal of Black Psychology 14.2 (1988): 69; Porter and Washington, “Black Identity,” 55.

58. Baldwin, “Theory and Research,” 64–65.59. Porter and Washington, “Black Identity,” 55; and Saul Feinman, “Trends in Racial Self-Image of

Black Children: Psychological Consequences of a Social Movement,” Journal of Negro Education 48.4 (1979): 488–99.

60. Baldwin, “Theory and Research,” 65.61. Porter and Washington, “Black Identity,” 56.62. Although Cross later revised his theory of nigrescence after realizing that self-esteem and racial group

identity operate independently, he nonetheless maintained that “the black movement apparently did enhance both the PI [personal identity] and RGO [racial group orientation] domains of black identity” (Shades of Black, 138).

63. Psychologist Margaret Beale Spencer explains that preschool children (the age of most of the Clarks’ test subjects) are not likely to have the cognitive ability or “operational thinking” to make the complex associations of “Eurocentric thinking” inferred from white preference behavior. In her study, “black preschool children . . . were able to maintain positive self-concept while showing the traditional findings of Eurocentric cultural stereotyping.” Spencer, “Preschool Children’s Social Cognition and Cultural Cognition: A Cognitive Developmental Interpretation of Race Dissonance Findings,” Journal of Psychology 112.2 (1982): 276–77.

64. Attempting to standardize methodology, Saul Feinman compared four doll test studies performed at different points over a period from 1947 to 1970 in order to determine whether black children’s racial preference for blackness had increased as a result of the civil rights and black power move-ments. The comparison indicated some increase in preference for the black doll over time, but did not demonstrate the cause of such increase. Feinman hypothesizes that one reason for this increase might be children’s increased familiarity with black dolls as they became more prevalent. All the test results were inconclusive, however, since they did not control for region, sex, class, skin color varia-tion, or familiarity with black dolls (“Trends in Racial Self-Image,” 488–89).

65. Porter and Washington note this faulty reasoning (“Black Identity,” 60–61).66. Shirley Samuels, “An Investigation Into the Self Concepts of Lower- and Middle-Class Black and

White Kindergarten Children, Journal of Negro Education, 42.4 (1973): 468–70.67. Editor’s Note, Social Psychology, 41.1 (1978): 47.68. Barry D. Adam, “Inferiorization and ‘Self-Esteem,’” Social Psychology 41.1 (1978): 49.69. Ibid., 51, 50.70. Roberta Simmons, “Blacks and High Self-Esteem: A Puzzle,” Social Psychology 41.1 (1978): 54–55.71. Ibid., 56.72. Ibid., 54.73. Scott, Contempt and Pity, 185.74. Porter and Washington, “Black Identity,” 70.75. See, for example, Maxine Clark, “Racial Group Concept and Self-Esteem in Black Children,” Journal

of Black Psychology 8.2 (1982): 75–88, and Elaine King and Frank Price, “Black Self-Concept: A New Perspective,” Journal of Negro Education 48.2 (1979): 216–21.


76. Maxine Clark, “Racial Group Concept,” and Spencer, “Preschool Children.”77. McMillan, “Doll Test Studies,” 69.78. Michael Hughes and David Demo, “Self-Perceptions of Black Americans: Self-Esteem and Personal

Efficacy,” American Journal of Sociology 95.1 (1989): 132; see also Porter and Washington, “Black Identity,” 63.

79. Porter and Washington, “Black Identity,” 62, 65.80. Some studies indicated that there was no correlation between African American children’s high self-

esteem and academic achievement or between desegregation and academic achievement. See Darrel W. Drury, “Black Self-Esteem and Desegregated Schools,” Sociology of Education 53.2 (1980): 88–103; and Walter Stephen, “School Desegregation: An Evaluation of Predictions Made in Brown v. Board of Education,” Psychological Bulletin (APA) 85.2 (1978): 217–38.

81. Spencer, “Preschool Children,” 284.82. Whaley, “Self-Esteem,” 410.83. Sharon-ann Gopaul-McNicol, “Racial Identification and Racial Preference of Black Preschool

Children in New York and Trinidad,” Journal of Black Psychology 14.2 (1988): 65–68; and Darlene Powell-Hopson and Derek Hopson, “Implications of Doll Color Preferences Among Black Preschool Children and White Preschool Children,” Journal of Black Psychology 14.2 (1988): 57–63. The same issue includes critiques of the doll test studies and the media attention they received, see McMillan, “Doll Test Studies”; Halford Fairchild, “Glorification of Things White,” 73–74; and Samella Abdul-lah, “The Media and the Doll Studies,” 75–77.

84. Gopaul-McNicol, “Racial Identification,” 68.85. Powell-Hopson and Hopson, “Doll Color Preferences,” 61–62.86. See also Frederick Harper, “Developing a Curriculum of Self-Esteem for Black Youth,” Journal of

Negro Education 46.2 (1977): 133–40.87. See Debbie Thomas et al., “Multicultural Education: Reflections on Brown at 40,” Journal of Negro

Education 63.3 (1994): 460–69; and Carl Grant, “Reflections on the Promise of Brown and Multi-cultural Education,” Teachers College Record 96.4 (1995): 707–21.

88. Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Stephen L. Carter, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (New York: Basic Books, 1991); and Ellis Cose, Rage of a Privileged Class (New York: Harper Collins, 1993).

89. See, for example, Adarand Constructors v. Pena, 115 Sup. Ct. 2097 (1995).90. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 264–75.91. Stephanie J. Rowley et al., “The Relationship Between Racial Identity and Self-Esteem in African

American College and High School Students,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74.3 (1998): 715–24. This study explains that “researchers have failed to explicate the mechanism by which a strong racial identity should result in higher levels of self-esteem” (716).

92. Ibid., 723.93. Ibid., 716.94. Rowley et al. conclude: “The extent to which African American college students view race as a central

aspect of their self-concept is not directly related to their level of personal self-esteem. It seems that strongly identifying with one’s racial group does not necessarily result in positive feelings about oneself. Concomitantly, lack of identification with one’s racial group does not necessarily result in personal self-hatred” (“Racial Identity and Self-Esteem,” 719). None of the early racial preference research considered the effects of gender on children’s responses to dolls, racial identity, or self-esteem. Ad-ditionally, dolls have not been used to test the relationship between gender and self-esteem, although they are widely used in research on gender role development.

95. John Wilson and Madonna Constantine, “Racial Identity Attitudes, Self-Concept, and Perceived Family Cohesion in Black College Students,” Journal of Black Studies 29.3 (1999): 363.

96. Marie L. Miville et al., “Chameleon Changes: An Exploration of Racial Identity Themes of Multiracial People,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 52.4 (2005): 508.

97. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 105.98. Powell-Hopson and Hopson, “Doll Color Preferences,” 60.99. According to Zizek, there are always two kinds of identification operating: imaginary identification,

which is identification “with the image representing ‘what we would like to be,’” and symbolic iden-tification, which is identification with the gaze of the other who is watching us. That is, we adopt an image in order to appear likable to someone else (Zizek, Sublime Object, 105). In psychoanalytic terms,


doll test researchers posit, in effect, that black children’s preference for white dolls is an imaginary identification indicating that the children would like to be white and a symbolic identification with an internalized white gaze that values whiteness over blackness.

100. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970; repr., New York: Plume/Penguin, 1994). For criticism related to issues of racial and gender identity, popular culture, and aesthetic norms, see, for example, Susan Willis, “I Shop Therefore I Am: Is There a Place for Afro-American Culture in Commodity Culture?” in Changing Our Own Words, ed. Cheryl Wall, 173–95 (New York: Routledge, 1989); Anne Anlin Cheng, “Wounded Beauty: An Exploratory Essay on Race, Feminism, and the Aesthetic Question,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 19.2 (2000): 191–217; Patrice Cormier-Hamilton, “Black Natural-ism and Toni Morrison: The Journey Away from Self-Love in The Bluest Eye,” MELUS 19.4 (1994): 109–27; Gina Hausknecht, “Self-Possession, Dolls, Beatlemania, Loss,” in The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women, ed. Ruth O. Saxton, 21–42 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); and Debra T. Werrlein, “Not So Fast, Dick and Jane: Reimagining Childhood and Nation in The Bluest Eye,” MELUS 30.4 (2005): 53–72.

101. Morrison, Bluest Eye, 50, 23.102. For a discussion of the novel’s reception since its selection for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, see John

Young, “Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and Postmodern Popular Audiences,” African American Review 35.2 (2001): 181–204. For an argument that the novel induces moral shame in the white reader, which can galvanize her to action in support of racial justice, see Kathleen Woodward, “Trau-matic Shame: Toni Morrison, Televisual Culture, and the Cultural Politics of the Emotions,” Cultural Critique 46 (Autumn 2000): 210–40.

103. Morrison, Bluest Eye, 20–22, 19, 23.104. William Elwood and Mykola Kulish, The Road to Brown, documentary film, 56 min., University

of Virginia, 1989; George Stevens, Separate but Equal, historical drama, 3 hr., 14 min., Republic Pictures, USA, 1991; and Helaine Head, Simple Justice, one-hour televised documentary on The American Experience, WGBH, Boston, 1993.

105. National Civil Rights Museum, “Interactive Tour: Resistance,” www.civilrightsmuseum.org/tour/it261.html/ (accessed December 14, 2001).

106. Working Mother, September 2000. This advertisement promotes Hallmark’s “Warm Wishes” card line, an inexpensive greeting card line geared toward marking a range of casual relationships and occasions; “Facts About Hallmark Warm Wishes,” June 2000, www.hallmark.com/ (accessed March 4, 2004).

107. Highmark Healthy High 5 is an initiative of the Highmark Foundation that has been made possible through a grant from Highmark, Inc. (Paint, 60 sec., Highmark Foundation, 2006, DVD).

108. Kiri Davis, A Girl Like Me, 7.08 min., Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, 2006, www.mediathatmat-tersfest.org/6/a_girl_like_me/ (accessed June 3, 2007).

109. Keppel, “Kenneth B. Clark,” 35.110. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 1–2. 111. See, for example, Gary Orfield and Erika Frankenberg, “Where Are We Now?” Teaching Tolerance,

Spring 2004, 57; Pedro Noguera and Robert Cohen, “Beyond Black, White, and Brown: A Forum,” Nation, May 3, 2004, 18; Peter Schrag, “What’s Good Enough,” Nation, May 3, 2004, 41; Amanda Paulson, “Brown’s Promise: Yet to be Fulfilled,” Christian Science Monitor, May 11, 2004, www.csmonitor.com/2004/0511/p01s04-1gn.html/ (accessed May 15, 2007); Peter Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York: Viking, 2002); Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). The “failed promise” of Brown served as a slogan or catch phrase for many commemorative conferences, colloquia, and Web sites; see, for example, University of Michigan, “Brown v. Board of Education Commemoration 1954–2004, ‘Beyond Brown’” (2004), www.umich.edu/~urel/brown50/beyond.html/ (accessed May 15, 2007); Howard University School of Law, “Brown@50: Fulfilling the Promise,” www.brownat50.org/ (accessed May 15, 2007); Carol Bash and Lullie Haddad, “Beyond Brown: Pursuing the Promise,” 1 hr. documentary aired by Public Broadcasting Service, May 2004.

112. Noguera and Cohen, “Beyond Black, White,” 18.113. Michael Fletcher, “Long Division,” Crisis 108.5 (2001): 27. I examine social psychology’s discourse of

race and self-esteem in the context of debates about school segregation and achievement, a discourse that took shape in relation to a black-white racial binary; more recent debates over Latino and Asian achievement are beyond the scope of this article.


114. See Fletcher, “Long Division,” 26–27; Schrag, “What’s Good Enough,” 41; and Claude M. Steele, “Not Just a Test,” Nation, May 3, 2004, 38. For a discussion of cultural and psychological contributions to the achievement gap, see also Christopher Jencks and Meredith Philipps, eds., The Black-White Test Score Gap (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998); and James Traub, “What No School Can Do,” New York Times Magazine, January 16, 2000, sec. 6, 52–57, 68, 81, 90–91.

115. See Wayne Au, “Brown v. Bush,” Rethinking Schools—Online 18.3 (2004), www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/18_03/nclu183.shtml/ (accessed May 15, 2007), and U.S. Department of Education, “Remarks by Secretary Paige at the Kennedy School of Government,” April 22, 2004, www.ed.gov/new/speeches/2004/04/04222004.html/ (accessed May 15, 2007).

116. Fletcher, “Long Division,” 26–31; Meredith Phillips et al., “Family Background, Parenting Practices, and the Black-White Test Score Gap,” in The Black-White Test Score Gap, ed. Jencks and Philipps, 103–45; and Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Test Performance of Academically Successful African Americans,” in The Black-White Test Score Gap, ed. Jencks and Philipps, 401–27.

117. Fletcher, “Long Division,” 31.118. Ibid., 29–30. See also Center for Education Policy, “It Takes More Than Testing: Closing the

Achievement Gap” (April 2001), and National Education Association, “Brown v. Board,” www.nea.org/brownvboard/index2.html/ (accessed May 15, 2007). As late as 1986, Kenneth Clark acknowl-edged that the aggregate of social science evidence to date had not proved that desegregation led either to increased self-esteem or academic achievement among African American students; “The Social Sciences and the Courts,” Social Policy 17.1 (Summer 1986): 37.

119. “Brown at 50” (special issue), Nation, May 3, 2004.120. R. J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

(New York: Free Press, 1994).

61.2.bergner

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