Doll Experiments

The Clarks' doll experiments grew out of Mamie Clark's master's degree thesis. They published three major papers between 1939 and 1940 on children's self-perception related to race. Their studies found contrasts among African-American children attending segregated schools in Washington, DC versus those in integrated schools in New York. The doll experiment involved a child being presented with two dolls. Both of these dolls were completely identical except for the skin and hair color. One doll was white with yellow hair, while the other was brown with black hair. The child was then asked questions inquiring as to which one is the doll they would play with, which one is the nice doll, which one looks bad, which one has the nicer color, etc. The experiment showed a clear preference for the white doll among all children in the study. One of the conclusions from the study is that a Black child by the age of five is aware that to be "colored in ... American society is a mark of inferior status." This study was titled, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” and was not created with public policy or the Supreme Court in mind, lending credibility to its objectiveness. The study was published only in the Journal of Negro Education before appearing before the Court. These findings exposed internalized racism in African-American children, self-hatred that was more acute among children attending segregated schoolscitation needed. This research also paved the way for an increase in psychological research into areas of self-esteem and self-concept.

This work suggests that by its very nature, segregation harms children and, by extension, society at large, a suggestion that was exploited in several legal battles. The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in several school desegregation cases, including Briggs v. Elliott, which was later combined into the famous Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In 1954, Clark and Isidor Chein wrote a brief whose purpose was to supply evidence in the Brown v. Board of Education case underlining the damaging effects racial segregation had on African-American children. Brown v. Board was a test case supported by the NAACP to end the precedent of legal segregation when conditions are “separate but equal,” established by the case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. In a 9-0 decision for Brown, the Court decided that segregation based on race in public schools violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. 

The Supreme Court declared that separate but equal in education was unconstitutional because it resulted in African American children having "a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community." The Doll Study is cited in the 11th footnote of the Brown decision to provide updated and “ample” psychological support to the Kansas case. The Brown decision quotes that, “segregation of white and colored children in public schools has detrimental effect upon the colored children” and this sense of inferiority “affects the motivation of a child to learn.” The evidence provided by Clark helped end segregation in the public school systems. Regarding Brown, this question of psychological and psychic harm fit into a very particular historical window that allowed it to have formal traction in the first place. It was not until a few decades prior (with the coming of Boas and other cultural anthropologists) that cultural and social-science research—and the questions that they invoked—would even be consulted by the courts and therefore able to influence decisions.

Response to Doll Testsedit

Not everyone accepted the Doll Tests as valid scientific studies. Henry E. Garrett, Mamie Clark’s former professor and advisor at Columbia, was an avid supporter of segregation and a witness in Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, VA (one of the five court cases that combined to form Brown v. Board). Garrett argues that no tests could adequately gauge a student’s attitudes toward segregation, and that the Clarks’ tests in Virginia were biased and had too small of a sample size. Garrett advocated in his Virginia school board testimony that if a negro child had access to equal facilities surrounded by his own teachers and friends, “he would be more likely to develop pride in himself as a Negro, which I think we would all like to see him do – to develop his own potential, his sense of duty…” and Garrett even claims that they would “prefer to remain as a Negro group” instead of mixing and facing hostility, animosity, and inferiority. Garrett and his colleague Wesley C. George’s 1964 letter to the Science journal further questioned the Brown decision, claiming the only reference to science in the entire decision is in footnote 11. Garrett and George argue that the Court overlooked the “mental difference” between races, and that Clark’s evidence was invalid and misleading because “integration, not segregation, injured the Negro child’s self-image.” In an alternative interpretation of the Clark doll experiments, Robin Bernstein has recently argued that the children's rejection of the black dolls could be understood not as victimization or an expression of internalized racism but instead as resistance against violent play involving black dolls, which was a common practice when the Clarks conducted their tests. Historian Daryl Scott also critiques the logic of the Doll Study, because contemporary studies suggest that black children with greater contact with whites experience more psychological distress. The Clark Doll Study was influential scientific evidence for the Brown v. Board decision, but a few academics questioned the study.

In 2005, filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated the doll study and documented it in a film entitled A Girl Like Me. Despite the many changes in some parts of society, Davis found the same results as did the Drs. Clark in their study of the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the original experiments, the majority of the children chose the white dolls. When Davis repeated the experiment 15 out of 21 children also chose the white dolls over the black doll.

CNN recreated the doll study in 2010 with cartoons of five children, each with different shades of skin color. The experiment was designed by Margaret Beale Spencer, a child psychologist and University of Chicago professor. Children were asked to answer the same doll test questions, such as “who is the nice child” or “who has the skin color most adults like” and choose between the cartoon people arranged in order of lightest to darkest skin. The results indicated “white bias,” meaning that children (mostly white, but also “black children as a whole have some bias”) continue to associate positive attributes with lighter skin tones, and negative attributes with darker skin tones.