{"id":49,"date":"2018-06-11T00:00:10","date_gmt":"2018-06-11T00:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/?post_type=podcast&p=49"},"modified":"2020-07-10T18:20:32","modified_gmt":"2020-07-10T18:20:32","slug":"dolls-the-baby-dolls-of-brown-v-board-of-education-part-2","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/podcast\/dolls-the-baby-dolls-of-brown-v-board-of-education-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Dolls: The Baby Dolls of Brown v. Board of Education (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

How have the Clark doll tests, used the overturn legalized segregation in Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>, held up to modern analysis?<\/p>\n

This episode is a part two in a series examining the impact of dolls in American history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How have the Clark doll tests, used the overturn legalized segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, held up to modern analysis? This episode is a part two in a series examining the impact of dolls in American history.","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/06\/Death-and-Numbers-Dolls-Series-Ep-2.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"14.57M","filesize_raw":"15278048","date_recorded":"02-06-2018","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[70,66,32,31,26,28,29,33,68,30,69,72,67,34,71],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-49","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-a-girl-like-me","6":"tag-anderson-cooper","7":"tag-board","8":"tag-brown","9":"tag-brown-v-board-of-education","10":"tag-doll-tests","11":"tag-dolls","12":"tag-education","13":"tag-gwen-bergner","14":"tag-history","15":"tag-kiri-davis","16":"tag-of","17":"tag-robin-bernstein","18":"tag-segregation","19":"tag-v","20":"series-death-and-numbers","21":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":584,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-25 17:31:53","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-25 17:31:53","post_content":"\n

Caroline Pinkston is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work brings education into conversation with childhood studies and cultural memory. She holds a B.A. in American Studies and English from Northwestern University (2008), an M.S. in English Education from Lehman College (2010), and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Texas (2014). A former high school English teacher, she has taught and worked in public, private, and nonprofit settings in New York City and Austin, Texas.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Caroline Pinkston","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"caroline-pinkston","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-25 17:31:53","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-25 17:31:53","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/?post_type=speaker&p=584","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":"","transcript":"

A young African-American girl in a purple sweatshirt sits in front of a table with $2
\non it. One white and one black. Off camera, an interviewer questions
\nthe girl about the dolls. And can you show me the doll that looks bad?
\nAnd can you give my did that look bad? He
\nis black. What do you think? That’s a nice doll.
\nThere she is, flight.
\nAnd can you give me the doll that looks like you, the little girl pauses for
\na moment, touching the white doll. Then she pushes the black doll forward toward the interviewer.
\nThe camera fades to black. This scene comes from a 2005 documentary
\ncalled A Girl Like Me, but it speaks to a much longer history. A Girl Like Me recreates
\nthe Clark doll, tests the 1940s experiments that use black and white baby dolls to test
\nthe effect of racial prejudice on African-American children. Doctors Kenneth and Mamie Clark
\nfound that the majority of black children and their experiments preferred playing with the white baby dolls
\nand identified white dolls as good and black dolls as bad. These findings were used to help
\noverturn legalized segregation through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision
\nmaking, the clerks and their experiments famous. A girl like me was directed
\nby a young African-American filmmaker named Kiri Davis. Davis was a teenager
\nwhen she made the short film and she wanted to recreate the Clark experiments to see, in her words,
\nhow we’ve progressed since then. Fifteen out of twenty one children and
\nDavises experiments preferred the white doll, suggesting that we haven’t progressed very far.
\nBut a girl like me is about more than the doll tests most of Davis, a seven minute film,
\nfocuses on racialized beauty standards and cultural norms. In the documentary, young
\nAfrican-American women reflect on the messages they’ve received about their appearance and the effect
\nthese messages have had on them, that they have permed hair, relax their
\nstray hair or light blond hair always or something.
\nAnd it is natural. That’s even that’s the good hair. Like bad hair
\nis here. You have to relax because it’s kinky. The film paints a bleak picture
\nof the messages our children receive about race, beauty and self-worth. And the doll tests
\nare really important to the work the film is doing. By recreating the doll tests, Davis hammers
\nhome that children start to absorb these messages at a young age. She connects the young
\nchildren, choosing their favorite doll to the older teenagers wrestling with beauty standards.
\nAnd she draws a direct link between the historical experiments and our present moment.
\nA girl like me is just one example of a contemporary recreation of the doll tests.
\nIn fact, the experiments have been re-created many times between the 1940s and today, sometimes
\nby individuals like Kiri Davis and sometimes by major magazines and news outlets like CNN.
\nAnd the experiments continue to have a real emotional impact on audiences. Here are some comments
\nfrom viewers who watched a girl like me on YouTube. When the kids are choosing their favorite
\ndolls, I feel pretty upset. Shame on America. I cried.
\nThis is sad. I hope as a society we can help to change this. This is
\nheartbreaking. Clearly, these tests resonate just as powerfully today as they
\ndid when Thurgood Marshall first decided to use the Clerks research in Brown v. Board of Education.
\nBut it’s less clear how we should interpret the results of these experiments. The doll tests
\nhave been recreated and cited so many times that we take their meaning for granted. But
\nin this episode of Death in Numbers, what exactly the tests reveal is not as simple or
\nstraightforward as it seems.
\nAs we discussed on the last episode of DFA, members Brown v. Board of Education relied on proving
\nthat segregation inflicted psychological damage on African-American children. You can
\nhear that emphasis in the language of the decision to separate children from others of
\nsimilar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority
\nas to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely
\never to be undone. The justices cited the research of the clerks,
\namong other scholars, to support this claim, which is interesting because as the clerks themselves
\nadmitted, their research didn’t actually demonstrate anything conclusive about segregation
\nper say, the clerks worked with children in both segregated and integrated communities.
\nTheir experiments did not indicate that children growing up in segregation were more damaged by racial prejudice
\nthan other children. In fact, some of their results suggested that kids in integrated communities
\nexperienced higher levels of frustration and distress during the experiments.
\nWhat the class test did seem to show was that black children had internalized cultural messages about
\nrace that were upsetting and damaging to their sense of self in making their case to
\nthe Supreme Court. The NAACP interpreted these findings in the context of the prevailing
\nracial problem of the day, which was segregation. They argued that segregation was the cause
\nof these damaging messages and that ending segregation was therefore the solution.
\nBut in the years that followed, changing issues and conversation surrounding racial justice
\nshaped the interpretation of the doll tests in new and different ways. Since
\noutlets and individuals. Gwen Burgner is a professor at West Virginia University
\nand she studies the history of these recreations. Bergner writes that over time
\nthe meaning of the tests shifted along with the dominant conversations and controversies around
\nrace. For example, in the 1970s, a new wave of doll test was cited
\nby black power activists to support the need for black independence rather than integration.
\nIn the late 1980s, doll test results were used to push for multicultural education, and Kiri
\nDavis’s documentary uses the doll has to draw attention to beauty standards.
\nSo each of these examples uses the results of the doll test to make slightly different points.
\nBut they are linked by an important assumption that the doll tests reveal a deep seated lack
\nof self-esteem in African-American children. But the Supreme Court called in 1954
\na feeling of inferiority. That lack of self-esteem is revealed by the
\nchildren’s preference for white dolls and by their frustration at acknowledging their resemblance to the black
\ndoll. Surely everyone can agree on that much. Right. Well,
\nmaybe not in her 2009 article on the doll tests. Burgner argues that the link between the
\ntests and self-esteem is anything but clear. The doll tests are an example of what Burgner
\ndescribes as a forced choice test. Kids have to pick between a few options
\nand their choices are supposed to reveal something about their internal world. But starting
\nin the 1960s and 70s, researchers began administering so-called direct tests
\nof self-esteem to children. In these tests, researchers directly
\nasked kids questions about themselves and their view of the world. The direct test got
\ndifferent results. In fact, they revealed that African-American children self-esteem was equal
\nto or greater than that of white children. So the conclusion researchers came
\nto about the self-esteem of African-American children depended a great deal on how they measured self-esteem
\nin the first place. In other words, using the doll tests alone might have provided researchers
\nwith an incomplete picture. What’s more, it turns out that the results
\nof the first all tests might have been misleading. In the clerk’s experiments, they asked children
\na series of questions about which doll they liked best, which doll was the good doll, which doll was the bad doll
\nand so on. Then the final question ask the child to pick the doll that looked most like them.
\nThis is the point in the experiment where many children became upset, providing the clerks with their evidence
\nof trauma. But it turns out that an early versions of the experiments the Clarks
\nreversed the question order. They asked the child to start by pointing to the doll that looked like
\nthem, and when they did, they got different results. Kids were much more likely
\nto have positive feelings about the black doll if they had started by associating the doll with themselves.
\nThe clerks thought this meant that a child’s ego was too bound up and the doll to answer the questions
\nhonestly. So they flipped the order. But some critics have argued that reversing the question
\norder meant that the clerks disregarded findings that works against their conclusion and structured
\nthe experiment to ensure they would get the result they wanted. What does all this mean?
\nThe research of the clerks and the findings of many similar tests over the next half century all
\npoint to a clear pattern around racial preference, meaning that African-American children indicated
\nin the experiment that they preferred white dolls. That pattern is clear
\nand it’s interesting, important and troubling. But Gwen Burgner warns us that,
\nas she puts it, there’s no indication that the preference for white dolls among black children
\nindicates anything other than a preference for white dolls. This preference might alarm
\nand upset us, and it certainly points to something alarming and upsetting about our culture. But it does not
\nnecessarily imply anything definitive about black children’s self-esteem. In other words,
\nblack children could have a healthy sense of self and a love for their own appearance and still not choose the black doll.
\nWhy? Cultural historian Robin Bernstine has one possible explanation. Her book,
\nRacial Innocence, deals in-depth with the history of black dolls. And she suggests that
\nthe clerks might not have been attributing enough importance to the objects they used for their test.
\nThe dolls themselves. Bernstein writes that the clerk’s questions encourage children to think about
\nthe doll as a toy, something that you play with. For Bernstein, this matters
\nbecause kids know how you were supposed to play with dolls and doll play has a long
\nand racist history. Historically, black dolls often portrayed racist stereotypes
\nand were frequently used for racist and violent forms of play. When African-American children and
\ndoll tests selected the white doll, they might well have been doing nothing more and nothing less than
\ncompetently interpreting and reacting to the cultural messages they’ve received about the kind of play
\nscripted, to use Bernstein’s phrase by each doll. None of this means
\nthat the dollhouse are unimportant, but they might be important for slightly different reasons than we once thought.
\nPerhaps they tell us less about the psychological well-being of African-American children and more
\nabout the warped messages that these children observe and respond to. Perhaps we should focus less
\non how African-American children are damaged and more on how our society is.
\nIf nothing else. Complicating the way we think about Dollhouse reminds us that children’s culture is itself
\ncomplicated. But Klerk’s might have thought they were setting up an experiment in which neutral objects like
\nbaby dolls could be used to show us something about the internal world of children. Maybe they thought of the
\ndolls like blank slates onto which children would project their thoughts and feelings about themselves,
\nor echo what they learned from the culture around them. But the dolls were never neutral.
\nThey came with their own racial, political and cultural history. We’ll be diving into that history
\nnext time on death in numbers.
\nThis has been Death A Numbers, a podcast created and produced by the Humanities Media Project in the College
\nof Liberal Arts at U.T. Austin and Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. I’m
\nCaroline Pinkston. Notes for the show, including links and photos can be found on our Web site manatee’s.
\nMedia projects dot org. Our theme music is enthusiast by choice. Thank you for listening.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2018\/03\/DeathandNumbers.jpg","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/podcast-download\/49\/dolls-the-baby-dolls-of-brown-v-board-of-education-part-2.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/death-and-numbers\/podcast-player\/49\/dolls-the-baby-dolls-of-brown-v-board-of-education-part-2.mp3","audio_player":"

Dolls: The Baby Dolls of Brown v. Board of Education (Part 2)<\/a><\/blockquote>