Dr. Mamie Clark And The Clark Doll Experiment

It demonstrates that even without juridical discrimination; hate speech, lowered expectations, and dismissive behavior can have devastating effects on achievement. Black members of the blue-eyed group forcefully remind whites that they undergo similar stresses, not just for a few hours in a controlled experiment, but every day of their lives. Although these concepts are food for thought… they are merely preludes to the main course. The most important lesson to be learned here is that just one person can make a difference.       Next we join a group of 40 teachers, police, school administrators and social workers in Kansas City - blacks, Hispanics, whites, women and men.

Racial discrimination has a great impact on people of various races. Throughout the past generations, many people have faced discrimination because of the way that they look. People have been hated, beaten, killed and made fun of. Many people have been put down because of the way that they look. Adults, teens and even children began thinking less of themselves after the incidents. Many African Americans started considering themselves inferior to whites, which lead them to perform worse in school and daily activities. Looking at the play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the video experiment Brown Eyes and Blue Eyes performed by Jane Elliott, it is evident that African Americans faced discrimination for hundreds of years, which lead them to consider themselves inferior amongst all other people.

Her and her husband were also involved in the Brown vs. Board of Education Topeka because of their expertise with African American children influenced the case to end segregation in schools. After the Supreme Court heard these findings and were very impressed he awarded Clark and her husband with the Nicholas Murray Butler Silver Medal.

On April 5 1968 Jane Elliot preformed the historical experiment in her 3rd grade classroom separating blue-eyed and brown-eyed children. After the death of Martin Luther King her students raised quiestions and she wanted to think of a way to make her students understand what minorities in the U.S feel like. Jane believed that her students would understand what it felt like to be discriminated against by separating them by their eye color. She asked her students if they wanted to be treated like a person of color for a day, judging their peers by the color of their eyes. The students went along with it and that coined the experiment that would later be known as “A Class Divided”.

Author, Dr. Beverly Tatum a clinical psychologist whose main study of interest is Black children’s racial identity development wrote the text Why Are All the Black Kids sitting Together in the Cafeteria? After receiving a letter from a school principal in New Jersey applauding her on her reason of why, in racially mixed schools all over the country, Black kids were still sitting together in school cafeterias. In the text Tatum shares her thoughts about the development of racial identity faced by the African American population and how it is interrelated to racism at the turn of the twentieth century while highlighting the Black-White relation in childhood and adolescence age group. The book entails controversy in that, Dr. Tatum understanding of racism is centered heavily on race. Tatum’s explanation of racism suggest that Blacks cannot be racist based on the fact their racial bigotry do not stand or rest on a structure of advantage.

In 1934, Mamie Clark graduated magna cum laude from Howard University, Mamie then immediately enrolled in the psychology graduate program. In 1939 Mamie was studying African American children that were in segregated nursery schools as a topic for her project. Her master's thesis was, "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children," and that started the beginning of a line of research that later became historic when it was used to help make racial segregation unconstitutional in American public schools. Her thesis concluded that the children became aware of their "blackness" early on in their childhood. She used pictures of both white and black boys with numerous animals and a clown. She concluded that the children did not self-identify with the different images, and it was this conclusion that later became the foundation

Byron and Kenny, however, experience prejudice as they attend a predominantly African American school. The author clarifies this prejudice as their school teacher emphasizes, “I 've often told you that as Negroes the world is many times a hostile place for us” (pg. 23). The two sons of the Watsons may not experience racism in Michigan since they aren’t around many non-African American individuals as compared to the south.

To address the concerns of social justice, while Clark was in office, he helped develop the Board of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Psychology in 1972 (Pickren, 2002). Though Dr. Kenneth Clark has contributed much more to the world of psychology, he most importantly opened up and investigated racism and the psychological effects it has on children and has helped change the face of education in the process.

The time of racism, segregation, and discrimination in the Civil Rights era was a difficult time for many people: whites, other races, and even children. Racism brought the realization to many people to think about how racism might affect their children and the way they were brought up. The real interesting fact is, that even though most Americans showed concern towards children there wasn 't a large percentage that took in consideration the feelings, thoughts, and affects that African- Americans and other racial children, including whites had towards the consent segregation, discrimination, and racism that went on in the Civil Rights era. Even the

Inequalities in skin color at Wilson were very prevalent. This wasn’t because of the teacher, but the world around them. Each different color segregated themselves to “keep with their own.” The differences like this kept the students at Wilson from reaching their potential. When

It is often said that kids don’t usually understand race or racism, and that is true until Janie is met with kids who have faced oppression all their lives. Janie is a young girl who is raised by her grandmother in the deep South during the 1930’s. Janie lives among many white kids and doesn’t realize that she is not white until she sees a photo of the children and cannot identify herself in the picture. “Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast, ‘where is me?’ Ah don’t see me’”(9). Janie didn’t know that she was a black girl because she had always been treated the same as the white kids, and they never treated her any differently than anyone else. The only kids that ever abused her with their words were the other black kids at school, they always teased her for living in

I have always thought and been taught that racism was a form of ignorance; people used stereotypes are the easy route, instead of looking at the individual outside of the whole. But Kelley’s thoughts on the topic rang very true to me—“Racism is knowledge…is learned behavior…” (7). When we are babies, we don’t notice or care if someone is of a different race, socioeconomic standing, sexuality; we just see them as people. It’s through repeated actions that we learn what separates us from the “other”. As a young child, my neighbor was my best friend. We played every day until I moved, but our families still kept in touch. It was until probably the 3rd or 4th grade that I realized he wasn’t like me, he had Down syndrome. Of course, that didn’t make a difference to me then or now, but I find it to be a striking example in my own life that as a young person, I was unable to see anything different about us, to me we were the same, we were

Mary Whiton Calkins, is best known for two things: becoming the first woman president of The American Psychological Association and being denied her doctorate from Harvard. However, these two aspects only make up a small portion of what she accomplished in her life. Her entire life was dedicated to her work, especially the development of her Psychology of selves. She founded an early psychology laboratory and invented the paired-associate technique. She passionately dove into the new field of Psychology but also was highly active in the field of Philosophy. She was not deterred by being a woman and used her struggles to gain a voice to speak out against women's oppression. (5)

Kenneth B. Clark, born in 1914, was a psychologist and educator. He became the first full-time African-American professor at City College in 1942. He worked alongside his wife Mamie, conducting studies related to race. Through his research Clark became a huge contributor to the Civil Rights movement. His findings were used in the "Brown vs Board of Education" Supreme Court case in 1951. "Brown vs Board" was a landmark case which eventually led to the desegregation of American public schools. His legacy is derived from his studies on race. He specifically researched the psychological effects segregation had on children. During his time as a City College professor, Clark conducted a study entitled the "doll test". The objective of the "doll

Through the research of scholarly articles and publications, it has been found that the intersection of the racial and ethnic identity of an individual both shapes and affects their personal growth and development in childhood and adolescence (Rivas-Drake, et al.). According to French, et al., this has been a more recent conversation with racial preference being researched in the 1940’s and 1950’s using dolls, and research involving the ethnic identity of children, under the age of 10, beginning only in the early 1990’s (2). Furthermore, earlier data involved mostly African American adolescents and focused on their negative experiences and internalization of racism rather than positive