black children

Decades after the classic 1940s experiment by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clarke, we meet a sobering reality. They published three major papers between 1939 and 1940 on children’s self perception related to race. They found that black children often preferred to play with white dolls over black ones; that, asked to fill in a human figure with the color of their own skin, they frequently chose a lighter shade than was accurate; and that the children gave the color “white” attributes such as good and pretty, but “black” was qualified as bad and ugly. […]