Opinion: Black History, White Students

One of the most meaningful items in the collection of the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Park in Topeka is a dark-skinned doll. The doll is one of those used by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in tests of Black children in the 1940s that exposed how our racial caste system was created, taught and reinforced by white adults and white institutions.

The Clarks showed the children a Black doll and a white doll during the study and asked them, which “doll is the nice doll?” Which doll “looks bad,” and what doll “looks like you?” among other questions.

The heartbreaking results influenced the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to attempt to move society forward by outlawing school segregation. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that segregation leads Black children to feelings of inferiority “as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

Lost in the historical discussion since has been racism’s impact on white students.

As the Kansas Legislature attempts to whitewash relevant racial history from classrooms through proposals like the “Freedom from Indoctrination Act,” it ignores the negative impact on Black students and overlooks the damaging impact on white students.

A Government Oversight Committee meeting in December offered a case in point.

“Are students who go to a public university being forced into a woke curriculum that is intended to indoctrinate them into a certain way of thinking?” asked state Rep. Francis Awerkamp, a St. Mary’s Republican.

“Woke” indoctrination has come to mean any material the majority subculture doesn’t like. Material that might make white students uncomfortable also has appeared on the chopping block.

That concern, however, has not extended to Black students’ classroom comfort.

The Clarks’ study found that segregation and discrimination taught Black children whiteness as a virtue and blackness as a negative, but it also harmed white children.

The study found that white children learned whiteness as the default “good,” and normalized racial hierarchy as common sense.

Perhaps this is why simple Black resistance to discrimination (Black Lives Matter countered by All Lives Matter) seems so triggering for those who still subconsciously believe they belong atop the hierarchy. Threats to their status illicit reflexive opposition.

According to the online archives at the City University of New York, where Kenneth Clark gained distinguished professor status, a sense of superiority shaped white children’s worldview long before they could understand or articulate it.

The result?

It meant generations of white children had learned to see unequal treatment as ordinary, expected and deserved. They learned to accept or to ignore injustice while developing an unearned sense of superiority.

This, the Clarks argued, damaged all of society, not just those oppressed by it.

The Supreme Court cited the Clarks’ research in Brown v. Board because it revealed something white Americans had refused and still largely refuse to see: children learn racism from the world adults have created.

For all the talk about closing the achievement gap, we know what to do, but refuse to act.

We fund schools too much via property tax revenue, which secures the status quo. Schools remain segregated because of housing patterns. We know from Brown what continues to damage one group of children at the expense of another.

And even a child can see it.

Mark McCormick is a Fellow at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics and previously served as editor of The Journal. A former journalist at The Wichita Eagle, McCormick was inducted this year into the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame.

This article first appeared on KLC Journal and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Previously Published on The Journal with Creative Commons License

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