The Coloring Test

The coloring test was another experiment that was involved in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Mamie and Kenneth did this experiment in order to investigate the development of racial identity in African American children and examine how a negro child’s color and “their sense of their own race and status” influenced “their judgment about themselves” and their “self esteem.” The coloring test was administered to 160 African American children between the ages of five and seven years old. The children were given a piece of coloring paper with a leaf, an apple, an orange, a mouse, a boy and a girl on it. They were all given a box of crayons and asked to first color the mouse to make sure they had a basic understanding of the relationship between color and object. If they pass, they were then asked to color a boy if they were a boy and a girl if they were a girl. They were told to color the boy or girl the color that they are. They were then told to color the opposite sex the color that they want that sex to be. The Clarks categorized the responses into reality responses (accurately colored their skin color), phantasy responses (very different than their skin color), and irrelevant responses (used bizarre colors like purple or green). The Clarks examined the reality and fantasy responses to conclude that children typically color themselves noticeably lighter than their actual color, while the phantasy responses reflect children trying through wishful thinking to escape their situation. Although 88% of the children did draw themselves brown or black, they oftentimes drew themselves a lighter shade than the mouse. Children that were older generally were more accurate at determining how dark they should be. When asked to color the picture of the child that was the opposite sex, 52% put either white or an irrelevant color.