Essay 916

Study shows it’s not all about race

By Stanley Crouch

Our culture is so debased by the startling renditions of black Americans — portrayed as predominantly pornographic, misogynistic and with buffoon garishness — that it is hard to understand how a new version of “the brown doll, the white doll” tells us anything important at all.

The doll test was used by the NAACP to make its case as Brown vs. Board of Education was argued before the Supreme Court in 1954. The fate of segregation hung in the balance. Would it legally continue or would it not?

The doll test proved a dramatic high point. When shown both a brown doll and a white one, the majority of black kids preferred the white doll to the black doll, picking the black doll as looking “bad”; more than half identified themselves with the “bad” doll. The children said the white one was “pretty” and “good.” Prof. Kenneth Clark, a psychologist employed by the City College of New York, provided what was explosive testimony.

When asked to explain the results of the test, Clark testified, “The conclusion which I was forced to reach was that these children in Clarendon County [S.C.], like other human beings who are subjected to an obviously inferior status in the society in which they live, have been definitely harmed in the development of their personalities; that the signs of instability in their personalities are clear, and I think that every psychologist would accept and interpret these signs as such.”

As Gordon Beggs wrote in the American University Law Review in 1995, “NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall, arguing on behalf of plaintiff schoolchildren, asserted the broadest inference that could be drawn from results of these tests: they proved actual harm done by segregated schools. Thus, minority schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment because they could not satisfy the separate but equal standard announced by the Court in Plessy vs. Ferguson.”

The rest was surely history because that Supreme Court ruling in 1954 provided the legislation, or the decision, that would bring official and casual segregation to an end.

Now, after all of these years, 16-year-old Kiri Davis has made a short film sponsored by HBO called “A Girl Like Me.”

Davis asks black children in New York the same question asked of kids in South Carolina 50 years ago. The results were the same! Fifteen of the 21 kids in the study said the white doll was good and pretty, the brown one bad. This evidence is sure to produce a second wave of concern, but I am not so sure it is right to be concerned because I do not believe, nor have I ever seen evidence, that white people actually believe that they have superior looks.

When I taught large numbers of white students at the Claremont Colleges from 1968 to 1975, I was surprised to find white women and white men as insecure as anyone else about their looks, which is proven by the multibillion-dollar business in cosmetics and cosmetic surgery. And whites are not alone. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons says that the number of cosmetic surgery procedures on black Americans, Asians and Hispanics in this country jumped 65% last year. And, according to an analysis published in the Psychological Bulletin last month, white and nonwhite women are about equally unhappy with their looks. Ah, equality!

What I find most interesting and provocative about “A Girl Like Me” is that young black women feel that they suffer from stereotypes about being “loud, obnoxious and less than intelligent.” When one steps away from the news, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and any of the true-crime documentaries (which always feature a wide array of minorities in law enforcement), it is easy to see how those stereotypes are not only held in place but continually projected. Black entertainers, like those spewed from the world of hip hop, are maintaining a strong lead when it comes to proving that minstrelsy is an equal-opportunity endeavor.