Miss Dominica-Natural Hair Beauty Queen (Miss World 2013)

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

138. For those who still may need to understand this debate, remember Brown v. Board of Education?

Thurgood Marshall and his team of lawyers had to show how detrimental segregation was to black children. In other words, they felt that they need to demonstrate that segregation (unequal treatment) did not only have a negative impact on educational achievement, but that it also impacted black children on a very psychological level.

So, to prove how horrible racism affected black children, a black psychologist name Dr. Kenneth Clark developed the "Doll Test" whereby he would ask very young impressionable black children several questions about the qualities of whites v. blacks. His researchers would present a white doll and put it beside a black doll and would ask questions like:

1. Which one is more beautiful?
2. Which one is good?
3. Which one is better? Which one is worse?
4. Which one is smart? Which one is dumb?

In every instance and in every test trial, the black children associated the white doll with having good characteristics ("good hair," being smart, being good, etc.) and associated the black doll with having bad characteristics (bad hair, ugly, etc.).

It was the Doll experiments that provided the compelling evidence that Marshall and his attorneys needed to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that racism has deleterious affects on black children, black families, etc., but that dejure segregation also had tremendously negative psychological impacts on black children, thus affecting their ability to build self esteem, to learn, to feel like a valuable part of society.

There have been similar experiments since Dr. Clark's Doll Tests, but I thought the one conducted by Anderson Cooper was quite provocative:

I believe that black people--and ALL people of color--continue to battle with internalized self hatred (or racism). People of African descent, in particular, have trouble with this.

Kenneth Clark and the Doll Test:

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Who taught black children self hatred:

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