Mamie Phipps Clark and her husband, Kenneth, worked closely together on some of the first and most crucial psychology research into our implicit racial biases.
They were the first two Black people to earn doctoral degrees in psychology from Columbia University, and they went on to found the Northside Center for Child
Development, the first center offering psychological guidance and casework for children in Harlem.
Some of their most influential work — cited in the
famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case — was the "doll test." For this study, they gave children four dolls that were identical except for their skin color.
They asked the kids which one they liked best and which ones they identified with. A majority of the children, regardless of their own skin color, preferred the dolls
with light skin and associated more positive traits with it. But the Black children said the darker-skinned dolls looked like them and were "bad."
This work
provided evidence that African-American kids internalized negative messages about themselves from a very early age — and that continued segregation enforced those ideas.
Learn more about Mamie Phipps Clark…