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 Press

DOI: 10.1353/aq.0.0070
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aq/summary/v061/61.2.bergner.html
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Black Children, White Preference | 299
Black Children, White Preference:

Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests, and
the Politics of Self-Esteem
Gwen Bergner
T
he 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
©2009 The American Studies Association

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
Figure 1. children need a psychological booster shot to their

Advertisement for Hallmark’s self-esteem, which will, ostensibly, guarantee their
“Warm Wishes” greeting card
success—at least in athletic competitions. Hallmark
line, Working Mother magazine,
September 2000. 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.
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.
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.
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).

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Black Children, White Preference: Brown v.

Board, the Doll Tests,

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Vassar College Libraries at 05/30/10 5:24PM GMT

Black Children, White Preference:

©2009 The American Studies Association

accorded with post–World War II conceptions of African American identity;

can be with African American culture. According to this framework, there is

Social psychology’s demand that children demonstrate “accurate” racial

call to abandon the “battle of essentialisms” in favor of “a more productive

Social Psychology as Legal Strategy

Within the framework of U.S. law, segregation’s constitutionality would

for blatant racial discrimination. With this strategy, Warren consolidated a

From Scientific Racism to the Mark of Oppression

of addressing racial conflict at home. In this historical context, social scientists’

From Black Rage to Black Power

samples with earlier findings on preschoolers.”64 Furthermore, because test

Whereas many researchers accepted findings of increased self-esteem among

projective choice and later direct studies of self-esteem measure different

Unhinging Racial Identity from Self-Esteem

Although researchers continued to perform racial preference testing through

children exhibited white preference, but scored high on self-esteem assessment.

Doll Test Redux

dren internalize negative stereotypes about African Americans conveyed by

A multicultural curriculum, the implied logic went, would introduce positive

Self-Esteem in the “Post-Race” Era

self-esteem—with varying results. But none has identified a mechanism that

Although some recent social psychology research formulates a more nuanced

Figure 1. children need a psychological booster shot to their

Brown’s Fiftieth Anniversary and the Ills of Public Education

As evidence that a sympathetic response does not necessarily translate into

schools, multicultural curricula, and standardized testing; it has increased since

53. Porter and Washington, “Black Identity,” 66.

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