race doll experiment

What I learned when I recreated the famous ‘doll test’ that looked at how Black kids see race

Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, Texas A&M University-Commerce

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Toni Sturdivant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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A little Black girl smiles as she is holding a white doll.

Back in the 1940s, Kenneth and Mamie Clark – a husband-and-wife team of psychology researchers – used dolls to investigate how young Black children viewed their racial identities .

They found that given a choice between Black dolls and white dolls, most Black children preferred to play with white dolls . They ascribed positive characteristics to the white dolls but negative characteristics to the Black ones. Then, upon being asked to describe the doll that looked most like them, some of the children became “ emotionally upset at having to identify with the doll that they had rejected.”

The Clarks concluded that Black children – as a result of living in a racist society – had come to see themselves in a negative light.

Two Black scientists sit together while conducting their research.

I first heard about the Clarks’ doll experiment with preschool children during a Black studies class in college in the early 2000s. But it wasn’t until one of my daughters came home from preschool one day in 2017 talking about how she didn’t like being Black that I decided to create the doll test anew.

Struggling with identity

When my daughter attended a diverse preschool, there weren’t any issues. But when she switched over to a virtually all-white preschool, my daughter started saying she didn’t like her dark skin. I tried to assuage her negative feelings about the skin she was in. I told her, “I like it.” She just quipped, “You can have it.” But it wasn’t just her skin color she had a problem with. She told me she also wanted blue eyes “like the other kids” at her school.

Perturbed, I spoke with others about the episode. I began to suspect that if my daughter had identity issues despite being raised by a culturally aware Black mom like me – an educator at that – then countless other Black children throughout America were probably experiencing some sort of internalized self-hatred as well.

In search of the cause

The Clarks’ research was used in the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education case to advance the cause of integrated schools. Their findings about Black children’s negative view of themselves were attributed to the effects of segregation . But I knew from experience that the preference for whiteness that the Clarks found was not limited to just Black kids in segregated schools in the 20th century. It was affecting Black kids in integrated schools in the 21st century as well.

Maybe, I thought, the racial bias wasn’t related to schools as much as it was to the broader society in which we live. Maybe it was much more nuanced than whether Black kids attended an all-Black school or went to school alongside other kids.

But to verify that Black kids were still viewing their Blackness in a negative light the way the Clarks found that they were back in the 1940s, I would have to do so as a researcher. So I set out to get my doctorate in early childhood education and began to look deeper into how children develop racial identities.

A new approach

In their doll test studies, the Clarks prompted young children to respond to questions of character. They would ask questions like, which doll – the Black one or the white one – was the nice doll? This required the children to select a doll to answer the question. This experiment – and prior research by the Clarks – showed that young children notice race and that they have racial preferences .

While these studies let us know that – contrary to what some people may think – children do, in fact, see color, the tests were far from perfect. Although I respect the Clarks for what they contributed to society’s understanding of how Black children see race, I believe their doll tests were really kind of unnatural – and, I would even argue, quite stressful. What if, for instance, the children were not forced to choose between one doll or the other, but could choose dolls on their own without any adults prodding them? And what if there were more races and ethnicities available from which to choose?

With these questions in mind, I placed four racially diverse dolls (white, Latina, Black with lighter skin, and Black with medium skin) in a diverse preschool classroom and observed Black preschool girls as they played for one semester. My work was published in Early Childhood Education, a peer-reviewed journal.

I felt choosing to watch the children play – rather than sitting them down to be interviewed – would allow me to examine their preferences more deeply. I wanted to get at how they actually behaved with the dolls – not just what they said about the dolls.

Three young girls play with dolls together at a table outside.

Observing play in action

Without asking specific questions as the Clarks did, I still found a great deal of bias in how the girls treated the dolls. The girls rarely chose the Black dolls during play. On the rare occasions that the girls chose the Black dolls, they mistreated them. One time a Black girl put the doll in a pot and pretended to cook the doll. That’s not something the girls did with the dolls that weren’t Black.

When it came time to do either of the Black dolls’ hair, the girls would pretend to be hairstylists and say, “I can’t do that doll’s hair. It’s too big,” or, “It’s too curly.” But they did the hair for the dolls of other ethnicities. While they preferred to style the Latina doll’s straight hair, they were also happy to style the slightly crimped hair of the white doll as well.

The children were more likely to step over or even step on the Black dolls to get to other toys. But that didn’t happen with the other dolls.

What it means

Back in the 1950s, the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, used the Clarks’ doll test research as evidence for the need to desegregate schools. Yet in my own doll test study, more than half a century later in an integrated setting, I found the same anti-Black bias was still there.

Children are constantly developing their ideas about race , and schools serve as just one context for racial learning. I believe adults who care about the way Black children see themselves should create more empowering learning environments for Black children.

Whether it be in the aisles of the beauty section of a grocery store, the main characters selected for a children’s movie or the conversations parents have at the dinner table, Black children need spaces that tell them they are perfect just the way they are.

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A Revealing Experiment

Brown v. board and "the doll test", doctors kenneth and mamie clark and "the doll test".

In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known colloquially as “the doll tests” to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children. Drs. Clark used four dolls, identical except for color, to test children’s racial perceptions. Their subjects, children between the ages of three to seven, were asked to identify both the race of the dolls and which color doll they prefer. A majority of the children preferred the white doll and assigned positive characteristics to it. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” created a feeling of inferiority among African-American children and damaged their self-esteem.

The doll test was only one part of Dr. Clark’s testimony in Brown vs. Board – it did not constitute the largest portion of his analysis and expert report. His conclusions during his testimony were based on a comprehensive analysis of the most cutting-edge psychology scholarship of the period.

A "Disturbing" Result

In an interview on the award-winning PBS documentary of the Civil Rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize,” Dr. Kenneth Clark recalled: “The Dolls Test was an attempt on the part of my wife and me to study the development of the sense of self-esteem in children. We worked with Negro children—I’ll call black children—to see the extent to which their color, their sense of their own race and status, influenced their judgment about themselves, self-esteem. We’ve now—this research, by the way, was done long before we had any notion that the NAACP or that the public officials would be concerned with our results. In fact, we did the study fourteen years before Brown , and the lawyers of the NAACP learned about it and came and asked us if we thought it was relevant to what they were planning to do in terms of the Brown decision cases. And we told them it was up to them to make that decision and we did not do it for litigation. We did it to communicate to our colleagues in psychology the influence of race and color and status on the self-esteem of children.”

In a particularly memorable episode, while Dr. Clark was conducting experiments in rural Arkansas, he asked a black child which doll was most like him. The child responded by smiling and pointing to the brown doll: “That’s a nigger. I’m a nigger.” Dr. Clark described this experience “as disturbing, or more disturbing, than the children in Massachusetts who would refuse to answer the question or who would cry and run out of the room.”

"The Doll Test" in Brown v. Board of Education

The Brown team relied on the testimonies and research of social scientists throughout their legal strategy. Robert Carter, in particular, spearheaded this effort and worked to enlist the support of sociologists and psychologists who would be willing to provide expert social science testimony that dovetailed with the conclusions of “the doll tests.” Dr. Kenneth Clark provided testimony in the Briggs, Davis , and Delaware cases and co-authored a summary of the social science testimony delivered during the trials that were endorsed by 35 leading social scientists.

The Supreme Court cited Clark’s 1950 paper in its Brown decision and acknowledged it implicitly in the following passage: “To separate [African-American 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.” Dr. Kenneth Clark was dismayed that the court failed to cite two other conclusions he had reached: that racism was an inherently American institution and that school segregation inhibited the development of white children, too.

An "Incorrigible Integrationist"

Although Dr. Kenneth Clark is most famous for the “Doll Tests,” his personal achievements are equally as prestigious. He was the first African American to earn a PhD in psychology at Columbia; to hold a permanent professorship at the City College of New York; to join the New York State Board of Regents; and to serve as president of the American Psychological Association. His wife Mamie Clark was the first African-American woman and the second African-American, after Kenneth Clark, to receive a doctorate in psychology at Columbia.

In 1946, the Clarks founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, where they conducted experiments on racial biases in education. During the ’50s and ’60s, the Clarks focused on New York City schools. Dr. Kenneth Clark was a noted authority on integration, and in particular, he and his wife were closely involved in the integration efforts of New York City and New York State. Dr. Kenneth Clark said of Harlem that “children not only feel inferior but are inferior in academic achievement.” He headed a Board of Education commission to ensure that the city’s schools would be integrated and to advocate for smaller classes, a more rigorous curriculum, and better facilities for the poorest schools.

The Clarks also created Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, or Haryou, in 1962 which was endorsed by then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose administration earmarked $110 million to finance the program. Haryou recruited educational experts to better structure Harlem schools, provide resources and personnel for preschool programs and after-school remedial education, and reduce unemployment among blacks who had dropped out of school. Dr. Clark was a staunch advocate of the total integration of American society — his peers described him as an “incorrigible integrationist.”

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The Doll Test for Racial Self-Hate: Did It Ever Make Sense?

The landmark 1954 civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education is credited with shutting down “separate but equal” education for African-American kids and paving the way for school integration. Its other legacy? The tradition of questioning small children about black and white dolls in order to measure their sentiments about race.

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Nettie Hunt explaining to her daughter Nickie the meaning of the high court's ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Dolls are for kids. So why were they in front of the most esteemed judges in the United States?

As they deliberated on Brown v. Board of Education , the landmark 1954 case that eventually overturned “separate-but-equal” segregation in the United States, the Supreme Court Justices contemplated oral arguments and pored over case transcripts. But they also considered baby dolls—unexpected weapons in the plaintiffs’ fight against racial discrimination.

The dolls were part of a group of groundbreaking psychological experiments performed by Mamie and Kenneth Clark, a husband-and-wife team of African American psychologists who devoted their life’s work to understanding and helping heal children’s racial biases. During the “doll tests,” as they’re now known, a majority of African American children showed a preference for dolls with white skin instead of Black ones—a consequence, the Clarks argued, of the pernicious effects of segregation.

The Clarks’ work, and their testimony in the underlying cases that became Brown v. Board of Education , helped the Supreme Court justices and the nation understand some of the lingering effects of segregation on the very children it affected most.

For the Clarks, the results showed the devastating effects of life in a society that was intolerant of African-Americans. Their experiment , which involved white- and brown-skinned dolls, was deceptively simple. (In a reflection of the racial biases of the time, the Clarks had to paint a white baby doll brown for the tests, since African American dolls were not yet manufactured.) The children were asked to identify the diapered dolls in a number of ways: the one they wanted to play with, the one that looked “white,” “colored,” or “Negro,” the one that was “good” or “bad.” Finally, they were asked to identify the doll that looked most like them.

The dolls used in Kenneth and Mamie Clark's studies at their Northside Center for Child Development, founded in 1946. (Credit: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Kate Clark Harris in memory of her parents Kenneth and Mamie Clark, in cooperation with the Northside Center for Child Development)

All of the children tested were Black, and all but one group attended segregated schools. Most of the children preferred the white doll to the African American one. Some of the children would cry and run out of the room when asked to identify which doll looked like them. These results upset the Clarks so much that they delayed publishing their conclusions.

Mamie Clark had connections to the growing legal struggle to overturn segregation—she had worked in the office of one of the lawyers who helped lay the foundation for Brown v. Board of Education. When the NAACP learned of the Clarks’ work, they asked them to participate in a case that would later be rolled into the class-action case that went to the Supreme Court. So Kenneth Clark headed to Clarendon County, South Carolina, to replicate his test with Black children there. It was a terrifying experience, he recalled later, especially when his NAACP host was threatened in his presence.

“But we had to test those children,” he recalled . “These children saw themselves as inferior and they accepted the inferiority as part of reality.”

Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark shot for Vogue in 1968. (Credit: Cecil Beaton/Condé Nast via Getty Images)

Thurgood Marshall was eager to use the Clarks’ work in the bigger class-action case that would become Brown v. Board of Education , but not everyone was convinced. Attorney Spotswood Robinson told an observer that it was “crazy and insulting to persuade a court of law with examples of crying children and dolls,” writes historian Martha Minow.

But the court didn’t think so. Kenneth Clark testified at three of the trials and helped write a summary of all five trials’ social science testimony that was used in the Supreme Court case. He told judges and juries that African American children’s preference for white dolls represented psychological damage that was reinforced by segregation.

“My opinion is that a fundamental effect of segregation is basic confusion in the individuals and their concepts about themselves conflicting in their self images,” he told the jury in the Briggs case. The sense of inferiority caused by segregation had real, lifelong consequences, he argued—consequences that started before children could even articulate any information about race.

Dr. Kenneth Clark, a New York psychologist and educator, at the North Side Center for Child Development he and his wife founded in Harlem. (Credit: AP Photo)

The Clarks’ work and testimony were part of a much broader case that combined five cases and covered nearly every aspect of school segregation—and some historians argue that the doll tests played a relatively insignificant part in the court’s decision. But echoes of the Clarks’ results ring through the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court justices.

“To separate [Black 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,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren in the opinion. The Clarks’ work had helped strike down segregation in the United States.

Today, one of the Black dolls is on display at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Kansas, and integration is the law of the land. But the racial biases the couple documented in the 1930s and 1940s still exist. In 2010, CNN commissioned an updated version of the study using cartoon depictions of children and a color bar that showed a range of skin tones—and found results that were strikingly similar to those shown by the Clarks.

In the new test, child development researcher Margaret Beale Spencer tested 133 kids from schools with different racial and income mixes. This time, the studies looked at white children, too. And though Black children seemed to hold more positive views toward Black dolls, white children maintained an intense bias toward whiteness.

“We are still living in a society where dark things are devalued and white things are valued,” Spencer told CNN. Jim Crow segregation may no longer exist in the United States, but racial bias is alive and well.

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How a Psychologist’s Work on Race Identity Helped Overturn School Segregation in 1950s America

Mamie Phipps Clark came up with the oft-cited “doll test” and provided expert testimony in Brown v. Board of Education

Leila McNeill

From a young age, Mamie Phipps Clark knew she was black. “I became acutely aware of that in childhood, because you had to have a certain kind of protective armor about you, all the time … You learned the things not to do…so as to protect yourself,” she would say later, when asked in an interview how she first became aware of racial segregation. Growing up attending an all-black school in Hot Spring, Arkansas left an indelible impression on Clark; even as a young child, she knew that when she grew up she wanted to help other children.

And help children she did. Clark would go on to study psychology and develop valuable research methodology that combined the study of child development and racial prejudice— helping her field incorporate the felt experience of childhood racism. Ultimately, her work in social psychology crossed over into the Civil Rights Movement: Her research and expert testimony became instrumental to ending school segregation across the country in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954.

Although she was born into the Jim Crow South, Clark’s childhood was not what one might consider typical. Compared to other black children in her city, she had a “very privileged childhood,” Clark recalled in a 1976 interview. Her father, Harold H. Phipps, was a well-respected physician, a rare occupation for a black person to hold in the early 20th century. Because of Phipps’ well-paying career, Clark’s mother, Kate Florence Phipps, was able to stay home with Clark and her younger brother, whereas many black mothers worked outside the home in labor or service jobs out of financial necessity. In a 1983 personal essay, Clark credits this “warm and protective” environment to later career success.

When Clark finished high school in 1934, the United States was slowly recovering from the Great Depression, and college was out of reach for many. For black Americans, the obstacles were even greater; Clark wrote in her personal essay that “a southern Negro aspiring to enter college had relatively few choices ... and was absolutely prohibited to be accepted in larger southern universities.” Still, the Phipps’ were determined to send their children to college, and with persistence and familial support, Clark received a merit scholarship to Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C.

When Clark started at Howard, she intended to study mathematics and physics in order to become a math teacher. But she later wrote that she found the mathematics professors “detached” and “impersonal,” particularly “toward the female students.”

While rethinking her educational ambitions, she met a psychology student named Kenneth Clark. Kenneth encouraged Clark to pursue psychology as a way to fulfill her wish to help children, advice Clark would later describe as “prophetic.” And her meeting Kenneth was prophetic in more ways than one. Clark did decide to pursue psychology, which ultimately turned into a 36-year career. But she also began a relationship with Kenneth, which would ultimately grow into a long-term professional collaboration and a 46-year marriage.

How a Psychologist’s Work on Race Identity Helped Overturn School Segregation in 1950s America

After graduating magna cum laude in psychology 1938, she spent the summer working as a secretary in the law office of Charles Hamilton Houston, a formidable NAACP lawyer whose office served as a planning ground for racial segregation cases. She later recalled that this experience was “enormously instructive and revealing in relation to my own identity as a ‘Negro.’” She also noted the “total absence of Negro females with advanced degrees in psychology at Howard University,” calling this a “‘silent’ challenge.” When Clark began graduate study at Howard in the fall, she entered with a new challenge to address these racial disparities in her work.

Her master’s thesis, “ The Development of Consciousness in Negro Pre-School Children ,” surveyed 150 black pre-school aged boys and girls from a DC nursery school to explore issues of race and child development—specifically the age at which black children become aware that they were black. For the study that formed the basis of her thesis, she and Kenneth recruited the children and presented them with a set of pictures: white boys, black boys, and benign images of animals and other objects. They asked the boys to pick which picture looked like them, and then asked the girls to pick which picture looked like their brother or other male relative.

The conclusion of the study showed a distinct racial awareness of self in boys aged three to four years. The results were, in Kenneth's words, "disturbing."

In 1939, she and Kenneth applied for the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship program, which was created to fund, support and advance the achievements of black people. Their proposal included two new methods for studying racial identity in children: a coloring test and a doll test. They were awarded the fellowship in 1940 with renewals in 1941 and 1942. The goal of the Clarks’ fellowship, specifically, was to demonstrate that awareness of racial difference negatively affected development in black children and that, subsequently, black people were not limited by innate biological difference but by social and economic barriers to success.

Psychologist Alexandra Rutherford of York University, who wrote a 2012 biographical essay on Clark titled “Developmental Psychologist, Starting from Strengths,” describes the decades preceding Clark, the 1920s-1930s, as psychology’s “era of scientific racism.” It was “literally the height of a period in psychology marked by the study of racial differences in intelligence, presumed to be innate and biologically based,” says Rutherford. There was, however, increasing pushback from psychologists in the latter 1930s from black psychologists, and even a group of progressive white psychologists formed the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in 1936.

By the time Clark came on the scene with her graduate research, “psychologists were moving away from race difference research and hereditarianism to investigate what contributes to the development of race prejudice,” Rutherford says. “The Clarks were at the vanguard of this kind of work.”

However, just because scientific racism was losing its supremacy within the field did not mean that many practitioners no longer held those views. When Clark entered the doctoral program at Columbia University in 1940 as the only black student in the department, she intentionally chose to study under a professor Henry Garrett, a scientific racist and eugenicist. “She wanted the challenge,” says Rutherford. Garrett, unsurprisingly, did not encourage Clark to pursue a career in psychology, despite the fact that Clark not only continued her Rosenwald-funded research but also wrote a dissertation on separate research titled, “ Changes in Primary Mental Abilities with Age .”

Despite Garrett’s discouragement, in 1943, Clark graduated from Columbia with a PhD in psychology, making her the first black woman to do so.

But it was the work she did with Kenneth, namely the Doll Test, that has had the most lasting impact on the field of psychology and on the Civil Rights Movement. The Doll Test looked at 253 black children aged three to seven years old: 134 of the children attended segregated nursery schools in Arkansas and 119 who attended integrated schools in Massachusetts. They each were all shown four dolls: two with white skin and yellow hair, and two with brown skin and black hair. Each student was asked to identify the race of the doll and which one they preferred to play with.

The majority of the black students preferred the white doll with yellow hair, assigning positive traits to it. Meanwhile, most discarded the brown doll with black hair, assigning it negative traits. The Clarks concluded that black children formed a racial identity by the age of three and attached negative traits to their own identity, which were perpetuated by segregation and prejudice.

In leading up the 1954 ruling in the Supreme Court ruling of Brown v Board of Education , Clark and Kenneth testified in many school segregation cases in the South. In one particular case, Clark was called to testify in the desegregation case of Davis v County School Board of Prince Edward County Virginia to rebut the testimony of none other than her former advisor, Henry Garrett. He testified in favor of segregation, arguing that black and white children were innately different. Clark argued against his testimony directly, and the court ruled in favor of integration. That was last time Clark and Garrett would meet.

In regard to the Brown ruling itself, the NAACP lawyers asked Kenneth to pen a statement that described the social psychology research that supported school integration, which included the Clarks’ research and the Doll Test. Rutherford says that the work “was quite influential as part of the integrationist case in the Brown v Board decision. It was also the first time social science research was used in a Supreme Court Case.” Yet while history books often credit Kenneth with the Doll Test, even he acknowledged that “The record should show [The Doll Test] was Mamie’s primary project that I crashed. I sort of piggybacked on it.”

Despite all of Clark’s accomplishments and pioneering work with children, Clark could not find an academic job. A “black female with a PhD in psychology was an unwanted anomaly in New York City in the early 1940s,” she wrote in her personal essay. Eventually, Clark stopped doing original research and utilized her knowledge of child development and race in social services. There was no organization that provided mental health services to black children in New York City, so she decided to fill that need herself.

In 1946, the Clarks opened the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, the only organization in the city that provided mental health services to black children. They provided psychological testing, psychiatric services, and social services, and after the first year of operation, they also offered academic services. Northside became a bulwark of activism and advocacy for Harlem, working to provide personal mental health service and to help alleviate some of the social barriers to success. Clark ran Northside until her retirement in 1979, though the center continues even today.

Even though Clark left academic research, in 1973 she was awarded the American Association of University Women achievement award for “admirable service to field of mental health,” and ten years later the National Coalition of 100 Black Women awarded her the Candace Award for humanitarianism.

Clark died in 1983 of lung cancer. But from the Doll Test to Civil Rights to Northside, her devotion to children endures. Late historian Shafali Lal perhaps describes Clark best: “Mamie Clark’s comprehensive efforts to ameliorate the pain attached to skin color have had a lasting impact in the fields of child development and the psychology of race. Her vision of social, economic, and psychological advancement for African American children resonates far beyond the era of integration.”

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Leila McNeill | | READ MORE

Leila McNeill is an American writer, editor, and historian of science. She is an Affiliate Fellow in the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma and the co-founder and co-editor in chief of Lady Science magazine. She has been a columnist for Smithsonian magazine and BBC Future, and she has been published by The Atlantic , The Baffler , JSTOR Daily , among others.

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Mamie phipps clark: the pioneering psychologist behind the famed “dolls test” .

Fourteen years before the landmark court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka desegregated American public schools, Howard University graduate and psychologist Mamie Phipps Clark (BS ’38, MA ’39), with the help of her husband Kenneth Bancroft Clark, was already doing revolutionary work on the profound impact of segregation and racism on Black children’s self-esteem. The “Dolls Test” developed by the Clarks and administered to over 250 Black children would become an important part of the expert testimony they provided during the Brown v. Board case.

When the Clarks published the dissertation “The Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Racial Identification in Negro Preschool Children” in 1939, little experimental research had been done concerning the development of children’s consciousness and sense of self. This research grew from Mamie Clark’s interest in racial identification in Black students, which Kenneth Clark would later say “was Mamie’s primary project that [he] crashed.” The paper is now a classic of developmental psychology.

By 1943, the Clarks’ studies grew to include the famous “Dolls Test,” in which Black children ages 3 through 7 were shown four dolls that were identical, save for a few key features: skin, hair, and eye color. This experiment found that many of the Southern children attending segregated schools internalized and passively accepted the idea that they were inferior to white children, while the children from racially mixed schools were more aware that racial discrimination against them was unjust. The Clarks concluded that integration was key to helping children develop healthy racial self-identification and presented their findings to the Supreme Court during the Brown v. Board case. The “Dolls Test” was only a small part of their expert testimony, but it served as powerful evidence for the impact of segregation on children.

Though she was an innovator in psychology, Mamie Phipps Clark did not initially plan on a career in the field. The daughter of a doctor and a homemaker, Clark graduated from high school with plans to become a math teacher. She received a scholarship to Howard University, where she began studying mathematics and physics. However, she felt a lack of support from faculty, which caused her to reconsider her career path.

Clark met her future husband early on in her time at the university, and when she became disillusioned with mathematics, he encouraged her to go into psychology. The couple married during Mamie’s senior year, while Kenneth continued his doctoral studies at Columbia University. After completing her master’s in psychology at Howard, Clark went to Columbia University for her doctoral degree as well. The Clarks were the first Black man and woman to earn psychology doctorates at Columbia.

Despite her credentials and her incredible research, Clark had difficulty finding work as a Black female psychologist in the early 1940s. After feeling stuck in jobs where she was mistreated for years, she found a position as a testing psychologist at the Riverdale Home for Children, where she counseled homeless Black girls. This experience had a profound impact on Clark, who felt that the issues her patients faced were a product of a racist society that failed to provide social services for minority children.

In response to her experience at the Riverdale Home for Children, Clark and her husband opened the Northside Center for Child Development in 1946, where they provided psychological services to minority children in Harlem and conducted experiments on racial biases in education. In 1962, the Clarks created Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, which provided resources for Harlem schools and reduced unemployment among Black citizens who had dropped out of school.

Mamie Phipps Clark was a fierce advocate for integration, working at a time when a Black woman in psychology was a rare sight and job opportunities were scarce. Together, she and her husband advanced the field of psychology, making it more inclusive and using their findings for justice.

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The Clarks Doll Experiment

An African American baby doll. The doll has open- and close- eye functionality and wears a cloth diaper.

The Clarks psychological research tested children’s perceptions of race.

The Legal Defense Fund used multiple strategies to demonstrate segregation’s harm. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s research showed how segregation created psychological damage. In their study, Black children were asked to describe Black and white dolls with traits like “good” or “bad.” Black children identified with Black dolls but said that Black dolls were “bad.”

Lucinda Todd’s Dining Room Table

Carlotta Walls LaNier’s Dress

Cases Fought in Multiple States

The Doll Experiments

A set of famous experiments from the 1940’s demonstrates how children reflect the information they collect about race. Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted these studies, often called the “doll test.” The Clarks used Black and White toy dolls to talk to young kids about race. Their experiment showed that children understand some aspects of racial inequality. And this influences how they feel about themselves and others. The doll experiments have been repeated a number of times by many researchers. Even in our current ‘post-racial’ era, researchers find similar results. On the next page, you’ll watch a short clip of a version of the Clarks’ Doll Study made just a few years ago. As you will see from the video, children are very aware of society’s beliefs about race. In fact, the Clarks’ Doll Studies were used as evidence of the harmful effects of segregation in the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The case ultimately found that “separate, but equal” schooling was in fact unequal and hurtful.

Race Today: What Kids Know as They Grow

Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Stories of Our Children
Inequities Exist (1/3)
Inequities Exist (2/3)
Inequities Exist (3/3)
Defining Race and Racism
Racism is a Social Product of Race
Systemic Racism
The Conveyor Belt
The Consequences of Inaction
What Do Children Understand About Race?
Children’s Evolving Understanding of Race (1/2)
Children’s Evolving Understanding of Race (2/2)
Setting the Stage for Social Identity
Questionnaire
Knowledge Check
Additional Resources
Cited References
Bias the belief that some people or ideas are better than others, usually resulting in unfair treatment Biological race physical racial features such as skin color, hair textures, and facial features Explicit racism/bias racism that is plainly expressed through words and or actions Implicit racism/bias racism that hides in our unconscious biases and gets expressed in our actions Racism the beliefs and practices that uphold and reinforce inequalities based on race Social identity a person’s sense of self that is based on group membership Social race The social norms, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that accompany racial groups Systemic racism policies, practices, and laws that reinforce social inequalities by discriminating against groups of people, either directly or indirectly, and limiting their rights

What I Learned When I Recreated the Famous ‘Doll Test’ That Looked at How Black Kids See Race

Summary: A new take on the Clark Doll Test reveals little Black girls still show racial bias in their treatment of Black dolls. Findings reconfirm Black children still view their Blackness in a negative way. Researchers say more focus should be placed on empowerment for young children in order to boost their cultural esteem and personal identity.

Source: The Conversation

Back in the 1940s, Kenneth and Mamie Clark – a husband-and-wife team of psychology researchers – used dolls to investigate how young Black children viewed their racial identities .

The Clarks concluded that Black children – as a result of living in a racist society – had come to see themselves in a negative light.

Struggling with identity

In search of the cause

A new approach

This shows a little black girl holding a white doll

Observing play in action

The children were more likely to step over or even step on the Black dolls to get to other toys. But that didn’t happen with the other dolls.

What it means

About this psychology research news

Source: The Conversation Contact: Toni Sturdivant – The Conversation Image: The image is adapted from The Conversation

This is an interesting project. It’s sad that the girls see a representation of themselves as something that can be abused. I do hope that the researcher looks further into how these kids are treated at home. They are at an age where a significant amount of their time is spent with family and family friends. What do they hear their families saying about their shade of skin colour, hair, physical attributes, potential? Do their parents use violence or discipline? Do they use empowering words or denigrating terms when referring to their children? I believe in taking the plank out of your own eye before takin the speck out of someone else’s. We also need to be aware that wherever someone is different whether that be skin colour, language, culture, or even height, there will always be a feeling of being disconnected. It is not necessarily evidence of racism; people are generally more comfortable being part of a group than being different. Even within nationalities there are different ethnic groups and just because they have the same skin tone does not mean they’ll accept each other.

Six years ago I moved into subsidized housing near downtown Minneapolis. Most of the other tenants in this 250 apartment building were black. I had raised two kids in the Phillips neighborhood in the 80’s and 90’s and had already seen a lot of discord over race.

In this building, I found early on that most people were respectful of me. But something disturbing happened over the next year. Black women seemed to dislike the fact that I was friendly, even bubbly, when on the elevator or in other public areas. I have been subjected to hateful behavior because I am white.

It has bothered me for years to hear black mothers yelling at their kids, threatening to beat them if they don’t behave. Sometimes I said nothing but watched to see what would happen. The verbal abuse is bad enough, but one wonders how they are treated when at home. On occasions where I witnessed and spoke up about what I considered to be out-and-out abuse I have been accused of harassment by black women, and been given lease violation notices.

My struggle has become worse during the pandemic, though the results get better the cooler I act. When I call people out over refusing to wear a mask in the building, or to wear it correctly,I have gotten threats of physical violence, though at least a half a dozen people realized that I was not going to stop being their PITA and started wearing them. I like to think that my persistence made the difference.

Black children or ANY child that is yelled at and threatened is going to have a hard time reacting calmly to much of anything as they grow and try to become working members of society.Verbal abuse seems to have become something people think they have a right to use as they have “freedom of speech”. I’ve been told that paying any notice to these kinds of things is just another manifestation of white people telling black people what to do. I have pointed out to a few black neighbors that they comprise about 12% of the population here in Minneapolis, so most of their interactions in any area of life are going to involve talking to white people; thus they need to simmer down and not get angry just because a white person has to make decisions affecting them. But here in the ol’ USA we don’t think before we react. Haters gonna hate. It makes life so much harder when such negativity is promoted.

I understand where the anger comes from, I just want kids to be truly nurtured, valued, and respected. Too many black adults cannot keep their composition and behave in such a way as to be accepted in the workplace or any other place. They do not accept themselves.

Of course, there are many groups within the black population. I have witnessed groups of kids with one adult behaving in such a fine manner that I have to be forward and congratulate the caregiver and whoever else is involved in creating such calm, considerate behavior. I try to speak up about that as well.

I know from personal experience about being verbally abused as a child. I heard my mother say over and over and over, “What’s wrong with you?” or “There must be something wrong with you.” I live with depression and anxiety and have difficulty with relationships. I live alone now. People suck. American people especially suck because so many are informed by TV and take pleasure in firing off the latest ‘witty’ put down they heard on TV or read on the internet.

American culture is deeply sick and our 45th president made it okayk even admirable, to put people down in the most scathing terms and in the most public ways. Social media is a real monster in this process.

Social media ruin children and adults. So many people read public posts and spend a lot of energy trolling. Negativity has been raised to the level of being an admirable thing. WE do not listen to know what people mean, we attack and deny and condemn.

Until Americans learn to pay more positive attention to each other at every stage of life, we will continue the downward slide into pre-intellectual discourse. We need to speak the positives and reinforce positive behaviors. Listening and trying to see someone else’s point of view needs to happen as a matter of course.

Kindness, goodness, warm heartedness; these are what we all need from our family, our friends, and every one else. Goodness ultimately is easier because it gives people what they need to survive and get along and have the love to give their and other people’s kids.

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The famous “doll test” and understanding racial identity.

The “Doll Test” was a psychological study conducted to test the racial perceptions of young children that proved to be crucial for understanding segregation’s effect on black children.

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In the 1940's, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted a series of experiments where they had identical dolls, different only in color, and asked black children which color of doll they preferred. They found that two-thirds of the children preferred the white doll to one of their own race.

The Clarks concluded that the racism found in American institutions affects the sense of self in African American children. Their findings proved to be instrumental in the famous Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision to remove racial segregation in American schools.

The story of the doll test and the Clarks is detailed in the new book “ What the Children Told Us “. We talk with the author who gives us more insight on this time in history and what other doll tests have shown in later years.

Tim Spofford

Author, "What The Children Told Us"

Richelle Whittaker

Educational Psychologist
Founder, Providential Counseling and Consulting Services
Founder, Next Steps Educational Counseling

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Professor Revisits Clark Doll Tests

The Clark doll tests, a series of experiments regarded since the 1940s as evidence that black children were taught to ascribe negative attributes to their own race, actually reflect media portrayals of black dolls rather than psychological damage, a Harvard professor argued Wednesday.

Robin Bernstein, a professor of African and African American studies and women, gender, and sexuality, presented a critique of the historic study at a W.E.B. DuBois Institute Colloquium.

The Clark doll tests were a series of experiments conducted by black psychologists Kenneth B. and Mamie P. Clark to study children’s attitudes about race. Black children in the study were given white and black dolls and then asked which dolls were “good,” “bad,” “nice,” and “mean.” The majority of children associated positive qualities with the white dolls and negative qualities with the black ones.

Bernstein said Wednesday that the Clarks’ tests were scientifically flawed. But she said that the tests did reflect a negative portrayal of black dolls in American theater and media that dates back to the Civil War era.

Bernstein studied the history of black dolls and found that they were often featured in theatrical scenes of servitude and comic violence. Black bodies, often the subject of this violence, were portrayed as unfeeling to pain.

These representations sent the message to children that they should play with white and black dolls very differently, Bernstein said.

White children in the 19th and 20th century commonly beat, hanged, dismembered, and buried their black dolls, but they were punished for committing the same atrocities against white dolls, which their elders expected them to cherish rather than abuse.

Thus, Bernstein said, the choices made by the subjects of the Clark doll tests was not necessarily an indication of black self-hatred. Instead, it was a cultural choice between two different toys—one that was to be loved and one that was to be physically harassed, as exemplified in performance and popular media.

According to Bernstein, this argument “redeems the Clarks’ child subjects by offering a new understanding of them not as psychologically damaged dupes, but instead as agential experts in children’s culture.”

Attendees said they were impressed by Bernstein’s ability to shift the evaluation of the Clarks’ experiment from a scientific perspective to a cultural one.

“It was fascinating the way that [Bernstein] presented the Clark doll test not [as] great science, but as a test that had a narrative arc,” said Elliot A. Wilson ’15.

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What i learned when i recreated the famous ‘doll test’ that looked at how black kids see race.

| February 23, 2021 | 0 responses

Back in the 1940s, Kenneth and Mamie Clark – a husband-and-wife team of psychology researchers – used dolls to investigate how young Black children viewed their racial identities .

The Clarks concluded that Black children – as a result of living in a racist society – had come to see themselves in a negative light.

Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark in 1945. Washington Area Spark/flickr

Struggling with identity

In search of the cause

A new approach

Observing play in action

The children were more likely to step over or even step on the Black dolls to get to other toys. But that didn’t happen with the other dolls.

What it means

Author Bio: Toni Sturdivant is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas A&M University-Commerce

Tags: racial identities

What a Doll Tells Us About Race

"GMA" examines race relations by revisiting a famous doll experiment.

March 31, 2009 -- With a black first family and fewer people citing racism as a "big problem," just how much have the country's race relations changed?

It's a question "Good Morning America" posed in its three-part series "Black and White Now," which takes a look at the current state of race relations.

In Part 1, "GMA" recreated a famous doll experiment, which gave insight into race relations and the self-esteem of children.

In the 1940s, the nation was captivated by an electrifying experiment by legendary sociologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark . They asked black children about two dolls, one white and one black.

The majority -- 63 percent of them -- said they'd rather play with the white doll. Most said the white doll was nicer than the black doll and in the most poignant answer of all, 44 percent of the black children said the white doll looked most like them.

"[It was] groundbreaking in that it sort of changed the way we look at race relations," Harvard University professor William Julius Wilson said. "Here are kids who felt that [...] being white was more beautiful than black. And that's pretty devastating."

Sixty years and one biracial president later, "GMA" gathered 19 black children, ranging in age from 5 to 9 years old, in Norfolk, Va.

Some of our results differed vastly from those of the original experiment. For example, 88 percent of our children happily identified with the dark-skinned doll.

Forty-two percent of the children wanted to play with the black doll compared to 32 percent for the white doll.

"GMA" then moved on to that question about which doll is nice and which is not. Sixty years ago, 56 percent of the children chose the white doll. The majority of our kids chose black or both and 32 percent chose the white doll.

Sometimes the choice had nothing to do with race.

"The bad doll is on my right because that's just the way it looks at me. It kind of creeps me out with the beady eyes," said 9-year-old Chareese Hicks, a fourth-grade participant who picked the white doll as bad.

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Stereotypes and the Clark Doll Test

The Clark Doll Test illustrates the ill effects of stereotyping and racial segregation in America. It illustrated the damage caused by systematic segregation and racism on children's self-perception at the young age of five.

This article is a part of the guide:

Social Psychology Experiments
Milgram Experiment
Bobo Doll Experiment
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1 Social Psychology Experiments
2.1 Asch Figure
3 Bobo Doll Experiment
4 Good Samaritan Experiment
5 Stanford Prison Experiment
6.1 Milgram Experiment Ethics
7 Bystander Apathy
8 Sherif’s Robbers Cave
9 Social Judgment Experiment
10 Halo Effect
11 Thought-Rebound
12 Ross’ False Consensus Effect
13 Interpersonal Bargaining
14 Understanding and Belief
15 Hawthorne Effect
16 Self-Deception
17 Confirmation Bias
18 Overjustification Effect
19 Choice Blindness
20.1 Cognitive Dissonance
21.1 Social Group Prejudice
21.2 Intergroup Discrimination
21.3 Selective Group Perception

Experiment Background

The Clark Doll test was conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie Clark for her master's degree thesis. The study focused on stereotypes and children's self-perception in relation to their race. The results of Clark's study were used to prove that school segregation was distorting the minds of young black kids, causing them to internalize stereotypes and racism, to the point of making them hate themselves.

The Clark Doll Test is well known due to its social relevance and impact although some say that the results lack experimental weight. It found contrasts among children attending segregated schools in Washington, DC versus those in integrated schools in New York.

In 1954 in Brown v Board of Education, the experiment helped to persuade the American Supreme Court that "separate but equal" schools for blacks and whites were anything but equal in practice and is therefore illegal or against the law. This made the experiment even more controversial. It marked the beginning of the end of Jim Crow.

Methodology

In the experiment, Clark showed black children with ages ranging from 6 to 9, two dolls, one white and the other black, and were asked the following questions in order:

Show me the doll that you like best or that you would like to play with.

Show me the doll that is the 'nice' doll.

Show me the doll that looks 'bad.'

Give me the doll that looks like a white child.

Give me the doll that looks like a colored child.

Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child.

Give me the doll that looks like you.

The researchers found that black children often chose to play with the white dolls more than the black ones. When the kids were asked to fill in a human figure with the color of their own skin, they frequently chose a lighter shade than their actual skin color. The children also gave the color 'white' positive attributes like good and pretty. On the contrary, 'black' was attributed to being bad and ugly.

The last question asked by the researchers was considered the worse since by that point, most of the black children had already identified the black doll as the bad one. Among the subjects, 44% said the white doll looked like them. In past tests however, many of the children refused to pick either doll or just started crying and ran away.

The results were interpreted as good and reliable evidence that black children had internalized racism caused by being discriminated against and stigmatized by segregation.

The study shows the stereotyping of black people as bad and white as nice and more desirable.

Criticisms of the Study

The study has been criticized for being well known only for the reference in the court case as opposed to the intrinsic and experimental value of the work. Many argue that the study lacks theory and control of variables . According to critics, given that an African American couple was the team who conducted the studies, the desirable outcome of wanting to prove African Americans were negatively stereotyped may have caused some partiality or biases , and may have skewed the results.

The Classic Experiments of Aggression, Prejudice and Stereotypes in Social Psychology by Bec Blair

The Clark Doll Experiment

Kenneth and Mamie Clark

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Explorable.com (Jul 3, 2010). Stereotypes and the Clark Doll Test. Retrieved Sep 01, 2024 from Explorable.com: https://explorable.com/stereotypes

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Alerts in effect, kenneth and mamie clark doll.

the U.S. Supreme Court had set a precedent that allowed segregation under the doctrine of separate but equal for 55 years by that point.

In prior cases, the NAACP won by showing the unequal conditions of segregated schools. By 1950, Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers hoped to convince the U.S. Supreme Court segregation itself was unconstitutional. To make their case, Marshall and his team needed to prove separate couldn't be equal.

Marshall and his legal team relied upon the work of a group of social scientists. These scientists had been studying the effect of segregation on black children. In preparation for the case, Marshall asked Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark to repeat experiments with school children from Clarendon County, South Carolina. Both psychologists, Kenneth and Mamie had conducted studies in New York City in the 1930s. In the experiment, the Clarks handed black children four dolls. The dolls were the same except two had a dark skin and two had light skin. The Clarks asked the children questions such as which dolls were "nice" and which were "bad" and "which doll is most like you?"

The results showed the majority of black children preferred the white dolls to the black dolls. The children would say the black dolls were "bad" and the white dolls looked most like them. To the Clarks, these tests provided proof segregation gave African American children a sense of inferiority. That sense of inferiority would last the rest of their lives.

The evidence persuaded U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. In the Court's opinion, Warren noted the legal separation of black children gave them "a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone."

Because of the impact on the Court's decision, the doll tests have become symbol for the case. If asked, what would they most like to have in their museum collection, the staff at Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park would answer the Clark dolls. In 2013, the park received a call asking if they would be interested in acquiring one of the dolls.

A pair had been given by Dr. Clark to one of his students who later passed them on to one of her close friends to be used as toys for her children. While the white doll has been lost to time, the black doll remained. The original diaper was gone and the face now had a green tint after years of being exposed to sunlight.

Park staff researched the doll's journey and conducted an examination of the doll comparing it to photographs of those used by the Clarks. Staff breathed a collective sigh of relief when everything checked out. Brown v. Board of Education NHP prepared the doll for exhibit in 2014, making this important symbol of one of the most transformative cases in American history available for all to see.

The mission of the African American Experience Fund of the National Park Foundation is to preserve African American history by supporting education programs in National Parks that celebrate African American history and culture. There are 26 National Parks identified by the African American Experience Fund:

Last updated: April 11, 2024

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WATCH: Intriguing “doll test” experiment showing effects of racism on black Italian children

Racism has lived on from generation to generation and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any better despite the level of awareness created through education and the level of achievements by black people who are the most prejudiced.

In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark created an experiment known as “the doll test” to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children.

The test is done using identical dolls with two colours and children are asked to identify the race of the dolls and which doll they prefered.

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Drs. Clark’s test concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” created a feeling of inferiority among African-American children and damaged their self-esteem.

This test led to the Supreme Court’s monumental decision in Brown v. Board of Education, demanding the racial integration of American public schools.

The perception of children and the feeling of inferiority among black children in the 1940s is not any different from black children in Italy in 2016 when Italian media company Fanpage.it conducted t he “doll test” experiment.

Watch the experiment in this video and tell us what you think in the comment section below :

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Study: white and black children biased toward lighter skin.

New study shows black and white children are biased toward lighter skin
Test aimed to re-create landmark Doll Test from 1940s
Study also showed children's ideas on race change little between ages 5 and 10
See the children take the test on tonight's "AC360" 10 p.m. ET

Watch children take and talk about the test on racial biases with Anderson Cooper and Soledad O'Brien on tonight's "AC360" 10 pm ET

(CNN) -- A white child looks at a picture of a black child and says she's bad because she's black. A black child says a white child is ugly because he's white. A white child says a black child is dumb because she has dark skin.

This isn't a schoolyard fight that takes a racial turn, not a vestige of the "Jim Crow" South; these are American schoolchildren in 2010.

Nearly 60 years after American schools were desegregated by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and more than a year after the election of the country's first black president, white children have an overwhelming white bias, and black children also have a bias toward white, according to a new study commissioned by CNN.

Renowned child psychologist and University of Chicago professor Margaret Beale Spencer, a leading researcher in the field of child development, was hired as a consultant by CNN. She designed the pilot study and used a team of three psychologists to implement it: two testers to execute the study and a statistician to help analyze the results.

Her team tested 133 children from schools that met very specific economic and demographic requirements. In total, eight schools participated: four in the greater New York City area and four in Georgia.

Full coverage: Kids on Race

In each school, the psychologists tested children from two age groups: 4 to 5 and 9 to 10.

Since this is a pilot study and not a fully funded scientific study, the sample size and race selection were limited. But according to Spencer, it was satisfactory to yield conclusive results. A pilot study is normally the first step in creating a larger scientific study and often speaks to overall trends that require more research.

Full doll study results

Spencer's test aimed to re-create the landmark Doll Test from the 1940s. Those tests, conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, were designed to measure how segregation affected African-American children.

The Clarks asked black children to choose between a white doll and -- because at the time, no brown dolls were available -- a white doll painted brown. They asked black children a series of questions and found they overwhelmingly preferred white over brown. The study and its conclusions were used in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, which led to the desegregation of American schools.

1947 Doll Test results

In the new study, Spencer's researchers asked the younger children a series of questions and had them answer by pointing to one of five cartoon pictures that varied in skin color from light to dark. The older children were asked the same questions using the same cartoon pictures, and were then asked a series of questions about a color bar chart that showed light to dark skin tones.

The tests showed that white children, as a whole, responded with a high rate of what researchers call "white bias," identifying the color of their own skin with positive attributes and darker skin with negative attributes. Spencer said even black children, as a whole, have some bias toward whiteness, but far less than white children.

"All kids on the one hand are exposed to the stereotypes" she said. "What's really significant here is that white children are learning or maintaining those stereotypes much more strongly than the African-American children. Therefore, the white youngsters are even more stereotypic in their responses concerning attitudes, beliefs and attitudes and preferences than the African-American children."

Spencer says this may be happening because "parents of color in particular had the extra burden of helping to function as an interpretative wedge for their children. Parents have to reframe what children experience ... and the fact that white children and families don't have to engage in that level of parenting, I think, does suggest a level of entitlement. You can spend more time on spelling, math and reading, because you don't have that extra task of basically reframing messages that children get from society."

iReport: Where do we go from here?

Spencer was also surprised that children's ideas about race, for the most part, don't evolve as they get older. The study showed that children's ideas about race change little from age 5 to age 10.

"The fact that there were no differences between younger children, who are very spontaneous because of where they are developmentally, versus older children, who are more thoughtful, given where they are in their thinking, I was a little surprised that we did not find differences."

Spencer said the study points to major trends but is not the definitive word on children and race. It does lead her to conclude that even in 2010, "we are still living in a society where dark things are devalued and white things are valued."

CNN's Jill Billante and Chuck Hadad contributed to this report.

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What I learned when I recreated the famous 'doll test' that looked at
Girls play with dolls at a table set up in a yard. Derek Davis/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images. A researcher recreates a famous 1940s doll experiment to probe how Black preschool ...
Brown v. Board: The Significance of the "Doll Test"
In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known colloquially as "the doll tests" to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children. Drs. Clark used four dolls, identical except for color, to test children's racial perceptions.
Doll test
The "doll test" is a psychological experiment designed in the 1940s in the USA to test the degree of marginalization felt by African American children caused...
The Doll Study
And a child may try to escape the trap of inferiority by denying the fact of his own race." 1. During the study, the following questions were asked: 1. Give me the doll that you want to play with. 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.
The Doll Test for Racial Self-Hate: Did It Ever Make Sense?
Still, the doll test survived—and thrived. But it has since been used to measure attitudes about race unrelated to segregation. The experiment has been re-created time after time. In 2006 a ...
How Dolls Helped Win Brown v. Board of Education
Their experiment, which involved white- and brown-skinned dolls, was deceptively simple. (In a reflection of the racial biases of the time, the Clarks had to paint a white baby doll brown for the ...
Kenneth and Mamie Clark
The doll experiment involved a child being presented with two dolls. Both of these dolls were completely identical except for the skin and hair color. ... In a 9-0 decision for Brown, the Court decided that segregation based on race in public schools violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
How a Psychologist's Work on Race Identity Helped Overturn School
How a Psychologist's Work on Race Identity Helped Overturn School Segregation in 1950s America. Mamie Phipps Clark came up with the oft-cited "doll test" and provided expert testimony in ...
Mamie Phipps Clark: The Pioneering Psychologist Behind the Famed "Dolls
Fourteen years before the landmark court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka desegregated American public schools, Howard University graduate and psychologist Mamie Phipps Clark (BS '38, MA '39), with the help of her husband Kenneth Bancroft Clark, was already doing revolutionary work on the profound impact of segregation and racism on Black children's self-esteem.
PDF Simon Howard, Ph.D. and Kalen Kennedy, M.S. Marquette University
The experiments colloquially known as the "doll studies" were a series of studies. performed by Mamie P. Clark and her husband Kenneth B. Clark in the 1940's. The purpose of. the experiments was to explore how African-American children developed a sense of self. Additionally, the Clarks were interested in Black children's racial ...
The Clarks Doll Experiment
The Clarks psychological research tested children's perceptions of race. The Legal Defense Fund used multiple strategies to demonstrate segregation's harm. Kenneth and Mamie Clark's research showed how segregation created psychological damage. In their study, Black children were asked to describe Black and white dolls with traits like ...
Clark Doll experiments
The Kenneth en Mamie Clarks' doll experiments grew out of Mamie Clark's master's degree thesis. They published three major papers between 1939 and 1940 on ch...
The Doll Experiments
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume. A set of famous experiments from the 1940's demonstrates how children reflect the information they collect about race. Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted these studies, often called the "doll test.". The Clarks used Black and White toy dolls to talk to young kids about race.
What I Learned When I Recreated the Famous 'Doll Test' That Looked at
A new take on the Clark Doll Test reveals little Black girls still show racial bias in their treatment of Black dolls. Findings reconfirm Black children still view their Blackness in a negative way. Researchers say more focus should be placed on empowerment for young children in order to boost their cultural esteem and personal identity.
The famous "Doll Test" and understanding racial identity
Town Square with Ernie Manouse airs at 3 p.m. CT. Tune in on 88.7FM, listen online or subscribe to the podcast. Join the discussion at 888-486-9677, [email protected] or @townsquaretalk ...
Professor Revisits Clark Doll Tests
December 1, 2011. The Clark doll tests, a series of experiments regarded since the 1940s as evidence that black children were taught to ascribe negative attributes to their own race, actually ...
What I learned when I recreated the famous 'doll test' that looked at
Back in the 1940s, Kenneth and Mamie Clark - a husband-and-wife team of psychology researchers - used dolls to investigate how young Black children viewed their racial identities. They found that given a choice between Black dolls and white dolls, most Black children preferred to play with white dolls.They ascribed positive characteristics to the white dolls but negative characteristics to ...
Re-examining the baby doll study and its impact
It was an experiment that changed the course of U.S. history-- baby dolls helped to desegregate schools and alter the way race in this country is viewed. Now...
What a Doll Tells Us About Race
What a Doll Tells Us About Race. "GMA" examines race relations by revisiting a famous doll experiment. March 31, 2009 -- With a black first family and fewer people citing racism as a "big problem ...
Stereotypes and the Clark Doll Test by Clark & Clark
Experiment Background. The Clark Doll test was conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie Clark for her master's degree thesis. The study focused on stereotypes and children's self-perception in relation to their race. The results of Clark's study were used to prove that school segregation was distorting the minds of young black kids ...
Kenneth and Mamie Clark Doll
This doll was one of four dolls, two black and two white, used in the experiment conducted by Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark that would later be used in Brown v. Board of Education. NPS Photo by Visual Information Specialist Preston Webb. Children's toys aren't usually talked about by the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet a set of baby dolls - two black ...
WATCH: Intriguing "doll test" experiment showing effects of racism on
In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark created an experiment known as "the doll test" to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children.
Study: White and black children biased toward lighter skin
New study shows black and white children are biased toward lighter skin. Test aimed to re-create landmark Doll Test from 1940s. Study also showed children's ideas on race change little between ...

What I learned when I recreated the famous ‘doll test’ that looked at how Black kids see race

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