Dolls: The Baby Dolls of Brown v. Board of Education (Part 2)

A young African-American girl in a purple sweatshirt sits in front of a table with $2
on it. One white and one black. Off camera, an interviewer questions
the girl about the dolls. And can you show me the doll that looks bad?
And can you give my did that look bad? He
is black. What do you think? That’s a nice doll.
There she is, flight.
And can you give me the doll that looks like you, the little girl pauses for
a moment, touching the white doll. Then she pushes the black doll forward toward the interviewer.
The camera fades to black. This scene comes from a 2005 documentary
called A Girl Like Me, but it speaks to a much longer history. A Girl Like Me recreates
the Clark doll, tests the 1940s experiments that use black and white baby dolls to test
the effect of racial prejudice on African-American children. Doctors Kenneth and Mamie Clark
found that the majority of black children and their experiments preferred playing with the white baby dolls
and identified white dolls as good and black dolls as bad. These findings were used to help
overturn legalized segregation through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision
making, the clerks and their experiments famous. A girl like me was directed
by a young African-American filmmaker named Kiri Davis. Davis was a teenager
when she made the short film and she wanted to recreate the Clark experiments to see, in her words,
how we’ve progressed since then. Fifteen out of twenty one children and
Davises experiments preferred the white doll, suggesting that we haven’t progressed very far.
But a girl like me is about more than the doll tests most of Davis, a seven minute film,
focuses on racialized beauty standards and cultural norms. In the documentary, young
African-American women reflect on the messages they’ve received about their appearance and the effect
these messages have had on them, that they have permed hair, relax their
stray hair or light blond hair always or something.
And it is natural. That’s even that’s the good hair. Like bad hair
is here. You have to relax because it’s kinky. The film paints a bleak picture
of the messages our children receive about race, beauty and self-worth. And the doll tests
are really important to the work the film is doing. By recreating the doll tests, Davis hammers
home that children start to absorb these messages at a young age. She connects the young
children, choosing their favorite doll to the older teenagers wrestling with beauty standards.
And she draws a direct link between the historical experiments and our present moment.
A girl like me is just one example of a contemporary recreation of the doll tests.
In fact, the experiments have been re-created many times between the 1940s and today, sometimes
by individuals like Kiri Davis and sometimes by major magazines and news outlets like CNN.
And the experiments continue to have a real emotional impact on audiences. Here are some comments
from viewers who watched a girl like me on YouTube. When the kids are choosing their favorite
dolls, I feel pretty upset. Shame on America. I cried.
This is sad. I hope as a society we can help to change this. This is
heartbreaking. Clearly, these tests resonate just as powerfully today as they
did when Thurgood Marshall first decided to use the Clerks research in Brown v. Board of Education.
But it’s less clear how we should interpret the results of these experiments. The doll tests
have been recreated and cited so many times that we take their meaning for granted. But
in this episode of Death in Numbers, what exactly the tests reveal is not as simple or
straightforward as it seems.
As we discussed on the last episode of DFA, members Brown v. Board of Education relied on proving
that segregation inflicted psychological damage on African-American children. You can
hear that emphasis in the language of the decision 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. The justices cited the research of the clerks,
among other scholars, to support this claim, which is interesting because as the clerks themselves
admitted, their research didn’t actually demonstrate anything conclusive about segregation
per say, the clerks worked with children in both segregated and integrated communities.
Their experiments did not indicate that children growing up in segregation were more damaged by racial prejudice
than other children. In fact, some of their results suggested that kids in integrated communities
experienced higher levels of frustration and distress during the experiments.
What the class test did seem to show was that black children had internalized cultural messages about
race that were upsetting and damaging to their sense of self in making their case to
the Supreme Court. The NAACP interpreted these findings in the context of the prevailing
racial problem of the day, which was segregation. They argued that segregation was the cause
of these damaging messages and that ending segregation was therefore the solution.
But in the years that followed, changing issues and conversation surrounding racial justice
shaped the interpretation of the doll tests in new and different ways. Since
outlets and individuals. Gwen Burgner is a professor at West Virginia University
and she studies the history of these recreations. Bergner writes that over time
the meaning of the tests shifted along with the dominant conversations and controversies around
race. For example, in the 1970s, a new wave of doll test was cited
by black power activists to support the need for black independence rather than integration.
In the late 1980s, doll test results were used to push for multicultural education, and Kiri
Davis’s documentary uses the doll has to draw attention to beauty standards.
So each of these examples uses the results of the doll test to make slightly different points.
But they are linked by an important assumption that the doll tests reveal a deep seated lack
of self-esteem in African-American children. But the Supreme Court called in 1954
a feeling of inferiority. That lack of self-esteem is revealed by the
children’s preference for white dolls and by their frustration at acknowledging their resemblance to the black
doll. Surely everyone can agree on that much. Right. Well,
maybe not in her 2009 article on the doll tests. Burgner argues that the link between the
tests and self-esteem is anything but clear. The doll tests are an example of what Burgner
describes as a forced choice test. Kids have to pick between a few options
and their choices are supposed to reveal something about their internal world. But starting
in the 1960s and 70s, researchers began administering so-called direct tests
of self-esteem to children. In these tests, researchers directly
asked kids questions about themselves and their view of the world. The direct test got
different results. In fact, they revealed that African-American children self-esteem was equal
to or greater than that of white children. So the conclusion researchers came
to about the self-esteem of African-American children depended a great deal on how they measured self-esteem
in the first place. In other words, using the doll tests alone might have provided researchers
with an incomplete picture. What’s more, it turns out that the results
of the first all tests might have been misleading. In the clerk’s experiments, they asked children
a series of questions about which doll they liked best, which doll was the good doll, which doll was the bad doll
and so on. Then the final question ask the child to pick the doll that looked most like them.
This is the point in the experiment where many children became upset, providing the clerks with their evidence
of trauma. But it turns out that an early versions of the experiments the Clarks
reversed the question order. They asked the child to start by pointing to the doll that looked like
them, and when they did, they got different results. Kids were much more likely
to have positive feelings about the black doll if they had started by associating the doll with themselves.
The clerks thought this meant that a child’s ego was too bound up and the doll to answer the questions
honestly. So they flipped the order. But some critics have argued that reversing the question
order meant that the clerks disregarded findings that works against their conclusion and structured
the experiment to ensure they would get the result they wanted. What does all this mean?
The research of the clerks and the findings of many similar tests over the next half century all
point to a clear pattern around racial preference, meaning that African-American children indicated
in the experiment that they preferred white dolls. That pattern is clear
and it’s interesting, important and troubling. But Gwen Burgner warns us that,
as she puts it, there’s no indication that the preference for white dolls among black children
indicates anything other than a preference for white dolls. This preference might alarm
and upset us, and it certainly points to something alarming and upsetting about our culture. But it does not
necessarily imply anything definitive about black children’s self-esteem. In other words,
black children could have a healthy sense of self and a love for their own appearance and still not choose the black doll.
Why? Cultural historian Robin Bernstine has one possible explanation. Her book,
Racial Innocence, deals in-depth with the history of black dolls. And she suggests that
the clerks might not have been attributing enough importance to the objects they used for their test.
The dolls themselves. Bernstein writes that the clerk’s questions encourage children to think about
the doll as a toy, something that you play with. For Bernstein, this matters
because kids know how you were supposed to play with dolls and doll play has a long
and racist history. Historically, black dolls often portrayed racist stereotypes
and were frequently used for racist and violent forms of play. When African-American children and
doll tests selected the white doll, they might well have been doing nothing more and nothing less than
competently interpreting and reacting to the cultural messages they’ve received about the kind of play
scripted, to use Bernstein’s phrase by each doll. None of this means
that the dollhouse are unimportant, but they might be important for slightly different reasons than we once thought.
Perhaps they tell us less about the psychological well-being of African-American children and more
about the warped messages that these children observe and respond to. Perhaps we should focus less
on how African-American children are damaged and more on how our society is.
If nothing else. Complicating the way we think about Dollhouse reminds us that children’s culture is itself
complicated. But Klerk’s might have thought they were setting up an experiment in which neutral objects like
baby dolls could be used to show us something about the internal world of children. Maybe they thought of the
dolls like blank slates onto which children would project their thoughts and feelings about themselves,
or echo what they learned from the culture around them. But the dolls were never neutral.
They came with their own racial, political and cultural history. We’ll be diving into that history
next time on death in numbers.
This has been Death A Numbers, a podcast created and produced by the Humanities Media Project in the College
of Liberal Arts at U.T. Austin and Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. I’m
Caroline Pinkston. Notes for the show, including links and photos can be found on our Web site manatee’s.
Media projects dot org. Our theme music is enthusiast by choice. Thank you for listening.