Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T07:27:08.972Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

RECONSIDERING KENNETH B. CLARK AND THE IDEA OF BLACK PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE, 1931–19451

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2011

Damon Freeman
Damon Freeman*
Affiliation:
School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania
*
Damon Freeman, School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania, 3701 Locust Walk, Caster Building, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6214. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

One of the most controversial figures in Black intellectual history is psychologist Kenneth B. Clark. Prominently identified as the main proponent of the idea that racial segregation led to psychological damage in Black children, Clark's work heavily influenced the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1954Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. Almost immediately afterwards, his research methods and conclusions were challenged as incomplete and biased. Scholars now argue that Clark and other racial liberals became solely wedded to the idea of racial psychological damage in order to secure victory in Brown. Yet a closer analysis of his thought reveals a more complex picture. During the early 1940s, he developed a new psychological concept which he called the “zoot effect.” He defined the zoot effect as the attempt by a person to gain psychological security in a society which mandated that individual's inferiority. The zoot effect or zoot personality reflected the larger society's pathology, which manifested itself internally in individuals. This concept was heavily shaped by ideas about race, class, and in particular the work of Alfred Adler, which he first learned as a student at Howard University. Using archival and secondary sources, I argue for a reconceptualization of Clark within the broader context of his social thought, suggesting that the zoot-effect concept grounded his research on Black children and set the stage for his later views on desegregation, civil rights, and American society.

Keywords

SegregationBrown v. Board of EducationPsychological DamageDoll TestRacial Self-EsteemBlack Children
Type
Learning Lessons from the Past
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 8 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Racial Inequality and Health , Spring 2011 , pp. 271 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

I wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of the Du Bois Review for their helpful criticism. I also presented this paper and received valuable feedback in April 2010 at the Harvard University Public Intellectuals Conference and at a University of Pennsylvania Race and Empire Group meeting. I especially thank my colleagues, Joan Davitt, Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, Andrea Doyle, and Toorjo Ghose for their suggestions. I am also thankful to my former students, Amy Bastianelli, Pita Lacenski, and Lauren Willner for research assistance.

References

REFERENCES

Adler, A. (1929). The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.Google Scholar
Alvarez, L. (2008). The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Armor, D. J. (1995). Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banks, W. C. (1976). White Preference in Blacks: A Paradigm in Search of a Phenomenon. Psychological Bulletin, 83(6): 1179–1186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bettelheim, B. (1956). Review of Prejudice and Your Child by Kenneth B. Clark. Commentary, 12(April): 384–386.Google Scholar
Brown, S. A. (1932). Southern Road. New York: Harcourt and Brace Company.Google Scholar
Brown, S. A. (1933). Negro Character as Seen by White Authors. Journal of Negro Education, 2(2): 179–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). 347 U.S. 483.Google Scholar
Bunche, R. J. (1936). A World View of Race. Washington, DC: The Associates in Negro Folk Education.Google Scholar
Cahn, E. (1955). Jurisprudence. New York University Law Review, 30(January): 150–169.Google Scholar
Capshew, J. H. (1999). Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice, and Professional Identity in America, 1929–1969. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, K. B.Interviews. Oral History Research Office Collection. Columbia University Libraries, New York.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B.Papers. Manuscript Division. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1936). The Attitude of Negro College Students Toward Their Parents. Unpublished master's thesis, Howard University, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1938) Indices of a Racial Inferiority Feeling Among American Negroes. Unpublished Manuscript, 10 January 1938, p. 2, box 168, folder 5, Kenneth Bancroft Clark Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1940). Some Factors Influencing the Remembering of Prose Material. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, New York.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1944). Group Violence: A Preliminary Study of the Attitudinal Pattern of its Acceptance and Rejection: A Study of the 1943 Harlem Riot. Journal of Social Psychology, 19(2): 319–337.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1945). A Brown Girl in a Speckled World. Journal of Social Issues, 1(2): 10–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1946). Candor About Negro-Jewish Relations. Commentary, 1(February): 8–14.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1948). Social Science and Social Tensions. Mental Hygiene, 32(January): 15–26.Google ScholarPubMed
Clark, K. B. (1950). Racial Prejudice Among American Minorities. International Social Science Bulletin, 2(4): 506–513.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1952). The Effects of Prejudice and Discrimination. In Witmar, H. L. and Kosinsky, R. (Eds.), Personality in the Making, The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, pp. 135–158. New York: Harper and Brothers.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1955). Prejudice and Your Child. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1965). Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1967). The Implications of Adlerian Theory for the Understanding of Civil Rights Problems and Action. Journal of Individual Psychology, 23(3): 181–189.Google ScholarPubMed
Clark, K. B. (1970). Psychotherapy, Social Pathology, and Social Change. In Zubin, J. and Freedman, A. M. (Eds.), The Psychopathology of Adolescence, pp. 203–211. New York: Grune & Stratton.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. (1974). Pathos of Power. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Clark, K. B. and Barker, J. (1945). The Zoot Effect in Personality: A Race Riot Participant. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 40(2): 143–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cross, W. E. Jr. (1991). Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American Identity. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Dollard, J. (1937). Caste and Class in a Southern Town. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward A History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.Google Scholar
Frazier, E. F. (1932). The Negro Family in Chicago. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Graglia, L. A. (1976). Disaster By Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Greenberg, C. (1992). The Politics of Disorder, Reexamining Harlem's Riots of 1935 and 1943. Journal of Urban History, 18(4): 395–441.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guthrie, R. V. (1998). Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Harris, A. and Spero, S. (1931). The Black Worker, The Negro and the Labor Movement. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Holloway, J. S. (2002). Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Jackson, J. P. Jr. (2001). Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case Against Segregation. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Keppel, B. (1995). The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kluger, R. (1976). Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewin, K. (1948). Self-Hatred Among Jews. In Lewin, K., Resolving Social Conflicts, Selected Papers on Group Dynamics, pp. 186–200. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Locke, A. (1925). The New Negro, An Interpretation. New York: Albert and Charles Boni.Google Scholar
Markowitz, G. and Rosner, D. (1996). Children, Race and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
McWilliams, C. (1943). The Zoot-Suit Riots. New Republic, 108(25): 818–820.Google Scholar
Myrdal, G. (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers.Google Scholar
Pandora, K. (1997). Rebels Within the Ranks: Psychologists' Critique of Scientific Authority and Democratic Realities in New Deal America. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patterson, J. T. (2001). Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, L. (2000). Recontextualizing Kenneth B. Clark: An Afrocentric Perspective on the Paradoxical Legacy of a Model Psychologist-Activist. History of Psychology, 3(2): 122–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Philogene, G. (Ed.) (2004). Racial Identity in Context: The Legacy of Kenneth B. Clark. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, A. C. (2009). Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sancton, T. (1943). The Race Riots. New Republic, 109(1): 9–13.Google Scholar
Sawyer, T. F. (2000). Francis Cecil Sumner: His Views and Influence on African American Higher Education. History of Psychology, 3(2): 122–141.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Scott, D. M. (1997). Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spencer, M. B. (2008). Lessons Learned and Opportunities Ignored Since Brown v. Board of Education: Youth Development and the Myth of a Color-Blind Society. Educational Researcher, 37(5): 253–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sumner, F. C. (1931a). Mental Health Statistics of Negro College Freshman. School and Society, 33(April 25): 574–576.Google Scholar
Sumner, F. C. (1931b). The Mental Health of White and Negro College Students. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 26(April–June): 28–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van den Haag, E. (1960). Social Science Testimony in the Desegregation Cases—A Reply to Professor Kenneth Clark. Villanova Law Review, 6(Fall): 69–79.Google Scholar
White, W. (1943). Behind the Harlem Riot. New Republic, 109(7): 220–222.Google Scholar
Wolters, R. (1984). The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Woodson, C. G. (1933). The Mis-Education of the Negro. Washington, DC: The Associated Publishers.Google Scholar