The cross-examination got off to a contentious start. “You appear to be of rather light color,” drawled the chief defense attorney, T. Justin Moore, eyeing the slender, dapper man on the witness stand before him. “What percentage, as near as you can tell us, are you white and what percentage some other?”
Dr. Kenneth Bancroft Clark returned Moore’s gaze with a cool stare.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Clark responded, his diction formal and precise. “What do you mean by ‘percentage’?”
“I mean, are you half white, or half colored, or half Panamanian, or what?”
“I still can’t understand you,”
“You don’t understand that question?”
The more insolent the lawyer became, the more dignified was his witness. In due time, Moore elicited from Clark that he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, of Jamaican parents, and moved to the United States when he was four; that he grew up in Harlem, attended college at Howard University and graduate school at Columbia University; and that he was now an assistant professor at the City College of New York.
Earlier, under friendlier questioning by plaintiff’s lawyer Robert Carter, Clark had been more forthcoming, talking freely about his work with black children in Harlem. Though he was a psychologist who studied personality, Clark did not focus on inborn preferences, or unconscious psychodramas, or modes of perception—any of the factors that his predecessors believed make people who they are.
Instead, he spoke of the unrelenting pressure of large social forces on the individual personality. “I have come to the conclusion that prejudice, discrimination, and segregation in general, each has a basic corroding and distorting effect upon the personality of the Negro child who is a victim of these,” Clark testified. Racism, he continued, warps the personalities of its victims in different ways: “Some human beings may react by withdrawing, becoming submissive, seeking to avoid as many contacts with this punishing society as it is possible for them to avoid,” Clark observed. “Others may react aggressively, become rebellious, and try to fight back against the society that is trying to tell them they are almost substandard human beings.”
It was this novel approach to personality that had brought the thirty-seven-year-old Clark to the courtroom in Richmond, Virginia, in February 1952. Robert Carter was one of a small band of lawyers then working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), suing local governments to desegregate their schools. This particular case—Dorothy E. Daws v. County School Board of Prince Edward County—concerned a school for black children located in Farmville, Virginia, about seventy miles southwest of the courthouse. The facilities of Robert R. Moton High School were so miserably inadequate that they had prompted an angry walkout by students a year earlier. Their school had no gym, no cafeteria, no science labs; it was filled to bursting with pupils, some of whom were taught in a school bus or in tar-papered outbuildings known as the “chicken shacks.”
The material deficiencies of Moton, and the many amenities of the all-white Farmville High School a few blocks away, made a mockery of Supreme Court rulings permitting public facilities to be “separate but equal.” But the NAACP advocates didn’t just want to secure equally good schools for black children. They wanted to overturn the whole regime of segregation, to force the public schools to educate white and black children together. To accomplish their bold aim, they would call on a surprising ally: a quietly passionate man and his revolutionary personality test.
To persuade hostile Southern judges to overturn segregation, NAACP staffers recognized, they would need to prove an elusive proposition: that segregation in itself was harmful. Such proof required a way to measure the nature and extent of the damage, a seeming impossibility until Carter heard about the work of Kenneth Clark. The psychologist claimed he had developed a technique capable of probing “the delicate, complex areas” of race and personality, a tool that made the wounds of racism visible to the eye.
In the Richmond courtroom, Carter now asked: “Dr. Clark, are there any methods which are scientifically accurate with which a psychiatrist can test a child and determine whether or not an isolated fact like racial segregation has any effect upon his personality growth or development ?”
There were several ways such an assessment could be attempted, Clark replied: psychologists might conduct interviews or administer pencil-and-paper questionnaires. But “the most promising methods,” he said, “which are being more and more used for this, are what are called projective methods. These are methods which have the advantage of eliciting certain responses from your subject which ordinarily you would not get in those cases in which you are dealing with the kinds of problems, or the kinds of ideas, or the kinds of attitudes which the individual might not want to deal with directly.” The psychological scar of racism, in other words, was for many blacks the kind of shameful secret, half-hidden even from themselves, that projective tests were designed to reveal.
Clark cited the Rorschach and the Thematic Apperception Test as examples but noted that these instruments were less than ideal for work with school-age children. Rather than presenting youngsters with an inkblot or a drawing, Clark explained, he and his wife, Mamie (also a psychologist), gave them two dolls. Made from the same mold, the dolls differed only in the color of their skin: one was white, the other black. “Then we ask them questions such as, ‘Which doll do you like best?’ ‘Which doll is a nice doll?’ ‘Which doll is a nice color?’” Clark said from the stand. “Well, on the face of it, this seems to be a kind of situation in which a child was just reacting to dolls. Actually, the results which we get are much more fundamental, more profound, in telling us not only how this child reacts to himself but how he reacts to himself in terms of the personal problem of the factor of race.”
Under Carter’s gentle prompting, the usually reserved Clark grew voluble. Throughout his testimony, an impatient Moore repeatedly interrupted, complaining that the witness was talking too much. (One of the three judges hearing the case agreed, asking irritably, “Can’t you abbreviate, Dr. Clark?”) At last it was Moore’s turn to interrogate the psychologist from up North. Wasn’t it a fact, Moore asked, that the NAACP was out to make trouble, to “stir up and foment critical situations?” Wasn’t it true, he demanded, that “the Chinaman and the Indian have, in their own way, pride of race?” So why, he inquired, couldn’t “the Negro” be happy in his place and not try, as Moore put it, to be “a suntanned white man”?
Working himself into a rhetorical lather, Moore mounted an attack on the NAACP’s fragile new strategy, the claim that it was not only material deprivation but psychological harm that made segregation so invidious. He conjured up a vision of a sparkling new school, “just as good as any high school in Virginia,” in which teachers, “every one of them,” have twenty years’ experience and a PhD in education, in which the students “have brand-new buses to ride to school every day in.” If black children attended such a school, he asked, would Dr. Clark still insist that they were being damaged, just because there were no white children present?
Robert Carter and the other NAACP lawyers held their breath. Would their star witness, an able but mild-mannered psychologist, come through?
Kenneth Clark drew back to look his questioner in the eye. “I insist that, Mr. Moore. And I insist it most sincerely, because I do not believe material things are as important as your question would suggest that they are.” In a tone of quiet authority, he continued: “No amount of that kind of material attempt at equality can ever substitute for the kind of essential dignity, acceptance, and humanity, which every human being, without regard to his color, his religion, or national background, must feel, if he is going to be a fully mature and fully adult human being. You cannot buy it with bricks and mortar.”
The very presence of a psychologist in the courtroom was a sign of the times. In the years following World War II, the weight of cultural authority had shifted to men like Benjamin Spock and Alfred Kinsey, social scientists with expert knowledge of human nature. Increasingly, these doctors and professors took the place of ministers and priests, replacing religious dictates with commandments of a different kind. The NAACP became the latest cause to seek the blessing of social science when it entreated psychologist Kenneth Clark to testify on its behalf. Clark had impressive academic credentials: a PhD from a prestigious university, a decade of research and clinical work, more than two dozen published papers. But his power as a witness followed from a less traditional qualification: those dolls.
Clark’s doll tests were no dry laboratory experiments, but tiny dramas inflamed by the pain of racism. Responding to Clark’s queries, black children did not just choose the white doll to play with; they actively disparaged the dark-skinned doll, calling it “dirty” and “bad.” When he asked his young subjects which doll was “like you,” they often became agitated. “A great many of the children react as if I were the devil in hell, myself, when I ask this final question,” Clark recounted ruefully. “Some of them break down and leave the testing station; they cry … It is as if I had tricked them. We were all friendly before, they were expressing very freely their spontaneous reaction, and then I put them on the spot.” Such reactions, he said, were proof that his technique was tapping “the flagrant damage to the self-esteem, the self-respect of the Negro child.”
There were skeptics, of course, even within the NAACP. William Coleman Jr., an assistant attorney working on the desegregation cases, was one of the doubters. “Jesus Christ, those damned dolls!” he exclaimed later. “I thought it was a joke.” He and others heaped ridicule on the test, but Robert Carter and lead lawyer Thurgood Marshall believed that the skillful use of psychology was their best hope for a legal victory.
As it turned out, Carter and Marshall were correct in predicting that psychological expertise would play a central role in the case of Davis v. County School Board—though in a way they had not anticipated. Two days after Clark offered his testimony, another psychologist ascended the witness stand. This was Henry Garrett, chairman of the psychology department at Columbia University and past president of the American Psychological Association. Garrett knew Clark and his work well; in fact, he had served as Mamie Clark’s adviser and as a member of Kenneth Clark’s doctoral committee. But if Carter and Marshall imagined that psychology would be a dependably loyal ally in their fight against segregation, they were mistaken: Garrett, an unapologetic racist, was testifying for the defense.
In the months before the Davis trial, the NAACP had called Kenneth Clark to the stand in two other desegregation trials, and the defense in these cases had been unprepared to rebut his psychological testimony. Not this time. The powers who wanted to keep white and black children separate had recruited their own social science experts. “If a Negro child goes to a school as well equipped as that of his white neighbor,” Garrett confidently professed, “if he had teachers of his own race and friends of his own race, it seems to me he is much less likely to develop tensions, animosities, and hostilities, than if you put him into a mixed school where, in Virginia, inevitably he will be a minority group.”
Clark’s tests did not persuade him otherwise, he said; in his testimony, Garrett spoke condescendingly of the “idealistic person” who is “so strongly prejudiced on the side of abstract goodness that he does not temper the application of the general principle with a certain amount of what might be called common sense.” (Clark in particular was “none too bright,” in Garrett’s opinion: “He was about a C student, but he’d rank pretty high for a Negro.”)
In addition to Garrett, the defense called on another psychologist, John Buck. Like Clark, Buck had created a personality test for children, in his case while working at the Lynchburg State Colony, a Virginia mental hospital. Buck believed that his own test, which required youngsters to draw a house, a tree, and a person, provided a revealing “self-portrait” of the drawer. But he could see no connection between these insights and larger social problems; he did not believe, he testified, that personality tests had “any substantial validity as applied to the public school situation in Prince Edward County.”
In his closing statement, defense attorney Moore seized on Garrett’s and Buck’s statements as proof that segregation was not psychologically harmful, after all, and that Clark’s tests were worthless. “In summary,” he proclaimed, “the testimony of all our experts shows that these so-called projective tests which are being used are really of very little value in this field.” One thing was certain, however: “We do know that a perfectly terrible situation would be created, which would be detrimental to the colored children as well as the white, if by court decree the system we now have were done away with.”
The judges concurred. “It indisputably appears from the evidence that the separation provision rests neither upon prejudice, nor caprice, nor upon any other measureless foundation,” wrote Judge Albert Vickers Bryan, author of the opinion. “Rather the proof is that it declares one of the ways of life in Virginia. Separation of white and colored ‘children’ in the public schools of Virginia has for generations been a part of the mores of her people. To have separate schools has been their use and wont.” With finality he declared: “In this milieu we cannot say that Virginia’s separation of white and colored children in the public schools is without substance in fact or reason. We have found no hurt or harm to either race. This ends our inquiry.”
The decision did not, however, end a long-running tension in the use of psychology to mold the shape of society. Though the profession had only recently gained the general attention and approbation of the public (thanks in large part to the help it provided during World War II), it had a longer history of taking positions, and not always admirable ones, on matters of importance to public life.
Personality psychology and testing had an especially checkered past. As often as it had been used to question our ideas about who we are, it had offered a convenient prop for the status quo. Minorities and women, for example, were early on regarded as too undifferentiated even to possess unique personalities. Variations among ethnic groups began to attract more attention around the turn of the century, when changing patterns of immigration led researchers to compare Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock with newer arrivals from southern and eastern Europe (what one psychologist called “these oxlike men”). Not surprisingly, the results of their tests confirmed the assumed superiority of northern Europeans, leading some social scientists to urge restrictions on immigration from less-favored countries.
This was “race psychology,” a doctrine that held that individuals’ personality and other characteristics were determined by their ethnicity. The discipline, which made its first appearance in the Psychological Index (an annual listing of research studies) in 1912, expended its most vigorous efforts on documenting the differences between whites and blacks (and, sometimes, American Indians). An article in Psychological Bulletin described “the mental qualities of the Negro” this way: “lacking in filial affection; strong migratory instincts and tendencies; little sense of veneration, integrity, or honor; shiftless, indolent, untidy, improvident, extravagant, lazy, untruthful, lacking in persistence and initiative, and unwilling to work continuously at details.” A book titled Race Psychology: A Study of Racial Mental Differences reported that American Indians were “decidedly inferior” to whites in the areas of “judgement, breadth, intensity, reasonableness, independence, refinement, unselfishness, and integrity.”
Within a few decades, however, beliefs about race and personality had begun to shift. First came the recognition that even if minority groups were, in fact, different from the white majority, it might be these groups’ enforced role in society rather than some inherent defect that made them so. This insight animated an important book of the period, An American Dilemma, by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. Asked by the Carnegie Corporation to investigate America’s “Negro problem,” Myrdal in 1944 issued a report that noted personality differences between blacks and whites but posited a firm opinion on their source: such differences “have no basis in biological heredity” and “are of a purely cultural nature,” he wrote. Though the personality traits he attributed to blacks were often unattractive (they are “more indolent, less punctual, less careful” than whites, Myrdal asserted), he offered a sympathetic explanation for such flaws: “They know that all the striving they may do cannot carry them very high anyway, and they feel the harshness of life—the caste pressures are piled on top of the ordinary woes of the average white man.”
The next step was an acknowledgment that the environment shapes all of us, men and women, majority and minority. Social scientists now trained their attention on that “average white man,” not in his customary role as benchmark of normality but as just another crooked creature of society. This was the perspective adopted by another classic of the era, The Authoritarian Personality. The product of a group of social scientists based at the University of California at Berkeley, the book, published in 1950, advanced the theory that “authoritarianism”—the propensity to blindly follow a reactionary leader—was actually a personality type rooted in childhood experiences. Led by the German philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno, the group developed personality tests to identify the type, characterized by obsessive conformity, extreme rigidity, and deep insecurity expressed as a hatred of outsiders and minorities.
Their F Scale (for fascism) probed for signs of “underlying antidemocratic trends in the personality” with items like “America is getting so far from the true American way of life that force may be necessary to restore it,” and “Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life.” The authors’ psychoanalytic orientation led to a predictable emphasis on sexuality—for example, “The sexual orgies of the old Greeks and Romans are nursery school stuff compared to some of the goings-on in this country today, even in circles where people might least expect it”—but, interestingly, the item that yielded some of the most useful information concerned young people: “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.”
Though the Berkeley group’s work on authoritarianism was stimulated by some of its members’ experiences as Jews in Europe (and by the increasingly appalling developments on that continent), research for the F Scale was conducted on Americans: ordinary citizens drawn from service clubs, public speaking classes, and adult education courses in West Coast cities like Oakland, California, and Eugene, Oregon. Studies employing the F Scale indicated that there was plenty of conformity, rigidity, and ethnic hatred right here at home—an unsettling observation that would be borne out by the often-violent reaction to the civil rights movement just then getting underway. Adorno and his colleagues used the conventional categories of normal and abnormal in an unconventional way: to suggest that it was the majority that was diseased, the whole society that was sick.
Social science’s approach to personality had been spun around by a surge of strong historical and intellectual currents. The traumas of the twentieth century—two world wars, the Great Depression—made it abundantly clear that events could alter personality. Adolf Hitler’s atrocities made horrifyingly real the dangers of classifying people by supposedly inherent characteristics. And the ascendance of psychoanalytic and anthropological perspectives on personality placed new emphasis on environmental influences, especially child rearing. “The majority of mankind quite readily take any shape that is presented to them,” wrote anthropologist Ruth Benedict, whose work emphasized the role of culture in the formation of individual personality. “Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable,” affirmed another anthropologist of this school, Margaret Mead. Such views seemed to have ready application to the dilemmas of minority children growing up in a racist country. Offered only a cramped corner of society, the child contorts himself to fit it. “He is the little creature of his culture,” Benedict observed, and “its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.”
By midcentury, social science’s approach to personality was a swirl of exciting and provocative ideas. And in the middle of it all was Kenneth Clark.
Clark came late to an awareness of the relationship between culture and personality. Growing up in several different Harlem neighborhoods, attending an elementary school full of Irish and Jewish as well as black children, he rarely encountered racial segregation. That confrontation would occur when he enrolled in college at age seventeen, leaving New York City for the almost-South of Washington, D.C. “At Howard University was the first time in my life that I became aware of what it really meant to be a Negro in America,” Clark said later. It was, he added, “an education in race relations which will stay with me for the rest of my life.”
His dormant political consciousness was roused by the bigotry he met in Washington. When he was turned away from a public restaurant located in the Capitol Building because of his color, for example, he and a group of classmates returned with picket signs, “in order to see if we could not get them to treat us like the loyal Americans which we felt we were.” Such experiences transformed him into “a quite different person,” he reflected, someone with “a very intense feeling of race and with a very, I think decided tendency to be disturbed about racial problems.”
Clark had arrived at Howard intending to become a doctor. In his sophomore year, however, he happened to take a psychology class. “To hell with medical school,” he decided. “This is the discipline for me.” For Clark, psychology held out the possibility of a “systematic understanding of the complexities of human behavior and human interaction”—including insight into “the seemingly intractable nature of racism.” While at Howard he also met Mamie Phipps, the woman who would become his lifelong collaborator. Clark first persuaded Mamie to become a psychology major, and then persuaded her to marry him.
Following graduation, Clark moved back to New York to study for a PhD at Columbia University. His mentor there would be social psychologist Otto Klineberg, whose 1935 book, Race Differences, concluded that “there is no adequate proof of fundamental race differences in mentality, and that those differences which are found are in all probability due to culture and the social environment.” At the time, in fact, Columbia was buzzing with activity at the intersection of culture and human development, its anthropology department home to both Ruth Benedict and her (and Margaret Mead’s) influential mentor, Franz Boas. Inspired by this heady atmosphere, Clark began exploring the ideas that would later emerge full-blown in his doll tests. He served on the staff of the Carnegie Corporation, doing research for Gunnar Myrdal. He consulted for the American Jewish Committee, the organization that underwrote the Adorno group’s studies on the authoritarian personality. And he wrote articles of his own, notably a case study of an eighteen-year-old race riot participant, “R.,” published in 1945.
Clark’s sharp skills of observation were apparent in his description of the young man’s distinctive clothing—“rusty brown shoes, striped blue socks, extremely pegged pants (narrow at ankles and wide at knee), a quite long jacket”—and his slangy speech: “John the Man” (for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia) and “Castle-a-Bunk-a” (for house). Looking for a vocabulary to describe the influence of racism on personalities of young people like R., Clark coined a phrase that made reference to his subject’s audacious style. “The ‘zoot effect’ in American culture appears to manifest itself when the human personality has been socially isolated, rejected, discriminated against, and chronically humiliated,” Clark wrote. “It is the consequence of the attempts of the individual to stabilize himself and maintain some ego-security in the face of these facts.” As always, Clark’s concern was for the way individuals fashion their personalities in response to powerful social forces.
Clark received his doctorate in 1940 and became an instructor at the City College of New York in 1942. Four years later, he and Mamie opened the Northside Testing and Consultation Center, a youth clinic in Harlem; eight years later, he prepared a landmark report on the effects of prejudice on children’s personalities for the Midcentury White House Conference on Children. Without quite being aware of it, Clark had been preparing for years to play a major role in the nation’s racial politics. He’d overcome many barriers along the way: he was the first black person to receive a PhD from Columbia’s psychology department, the first black person to become a full professor at City College. When his side lost the Davis v. County School Board case in 1952, the defeat only strengthened his resolve. This was Kenneth Clark’s reaction to racism: the harsher it was, the more determined he got.
The NAACP was determined, too. It appealed the Davis decision, which the U.S. Supreme Court bundled with four other suits to form the case known as Brown v. Board of Education.
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its verdict. Not only did it declare segregation unconstitutional, but it offered psychological reasons for doing so: “To separate [black schoolchildren] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The opinion, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, attributed this finding to “modern authority”—that is, psychology—and referred in a soon-to-be-famous footnote to a review of social science research (including the doll tests) that Clark had helped produce for the court.
Clark was teaching a class at City College when he was summoned to take a call from Thurgood Marshall. Learning of the unanimous ruling, Clark was swept by “tremendous exhilaration,” he remembered. “I just felt so enthusiastic. I felt joy at being an American. I was full of hope and optimism.” Across town, a celebration broke out at the Clarks’ Northside Center when the news came over Mamie’s radio. For the first few days after the decision, Clark recalled, “we were in the clouds.” Many of Clark’s professional colleagues shared his jubilation, viewing the decision as a victory not only for civil rights, but for psychology. The Brown judgment was the most important Supreme Court decision to rely so heavily on social science research, a gesture that constituted “the greatest compliment ever paid to psychology by the powers-that-be in our own or any other country,” exulted Otto Klineberg, Clark’s Columbia mentor.
Clark himself became an instant celebrity, known nationwide as “the doll man.” For his contribution to the watershed case he received effusive plaudits, countless speaking requests, and a clutch of honorary degrees. Thurgood Marshall even insisted that those NAACP lawyers who had doubted the value of the psychologist’s testimony bow down to Clark and admit their mistake. Energized by his stunning success, Clark allowed his expectations and ambitions to expand. He would become a “psychologist for society” engaged in “public therapy,” a healer who would treat not only individuals but the country’s entire population. “American children can be saved from the corrosive effects of racial prejudice,” he declared a year after the Brown decision. “These prejudices are not inevitable; they reflect the types of experiences that children are forced to have. Such prejudices can be prevented—and those already existing can be changed—by altering the social conditions under which children learn about and live with others.” Clark boldly concluded: “When human intelligence and creativity tackle the problem and bring about the changes in the society, then these prejudices and their detrimental effects will be eliminated.”
For those who sought to heal society’s ills, children made ideal patients. Still malleable, they readily accepted the impress of their environment, whether it was the pernicious racism of the segregated South or the enlightened egalitarianism promoted by Clark in books such as Prejudice and Your Child, published in 1955. Clark realized just how susceptible youngsters were to the biases of their elders while administering his doll tests. “The fascinating thing, the thing which we did not expect, was the getting of evidence that this damage began as early as it did,” he reported. Earlier research had revealed the injuries that racism inflicted on adolescents, but “this was the first time we had evidence that it could begin as early as four or five years old, and the more sensitive and intelligent the child, the earlier it began.”
If the personalities of blacks (and whites, for Clark believed that they too were deformed by bigotry) were not to be irreparably damaged, interventions must be made early. Facilitating his strategy was the fact that parents were by this time accustomed to accepting child-rearing advice from psychological experts; from now on that counsel would address not just sleep schedules and feeding times but issues of racial identity and self-esteem. Clark and other socially minded psychologists were going to change the world, and they were going to start with the children.
Before he could act as psychologist to America’s youth, however, Clark had to prove that they needed his help. As he had noted during the Davis v. County School Board trial, using personality tests to examine children was fraught with difficulty. Their literacy was limited, so written questionnaires were of little use. They often lacked a grasp of abstract concepts that would allow them to compare themselves to a hypothetical norm: “more than most people,” “as often as others.” And they were frequently frightened or intimidated by the testing situation, leading to bashful reticence. Almost inevitably, the special demands of testing children led psychologists to employ projective techniques, which didn’t require their young clients to read or perform abstract mental operations and which often resembled disarming forms of play.
Dolls were used to gather information about children’s inner lives as early as the 1920s, when New York psychiatrist David Levy developed an approach he called “activity play therapy.” Levy would actually “get under the desk and play with the child for perhaps an hour; that’s where the patient put the interview, and that’s where he went,” recalls an observer. “He would say to the child, ‘This is the mother doll, this is the father doll, this is the child doll. What do they say?’ And the child would start talking.” Psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Melanie Klein also introduced dolls into play sessions with young patients.
A more focused approach was taken by Ruth Horowitz of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Horowitz was interested not in dispensing therapy but in exploring “children’s emergent awareness of themselves, with reference to a specific social grouping”—that is, race. Her Show Me Test, published in 1939, was designed especially “to get below the level of active language, to utilize the vast reservoir of understanding which comes before the organization of verbal expression, the child’s fund of passive language.” Children aged two to five were shown pictures of a white boy and a black boy and told, “Show me which one is you.” Minority children were more accurate in their selections, leading Horowitz to speculate that they early on developed a sense of being different.
The Show Me Test caught the attention of Clark, and with Mamie he embarked on a series of similar investigations (eventually employing dolls instead of pictures). Their early experiments were modeled closely on Horowitz’s, but by the mid-1940s they had added a crucial component: asking their young subjects to “Give me the doll that you like best,” “Give me the doll that is a nice color,” and “Give me the doll that looks bad.” Such requests were intended to establish the children’s racial preferences, not just their capacity for racial self-identification. The results were sobering. In a 1947 study, two-thirds of the black children tested said they liked the white doll best; nearly as many said that the white doll was a “nice color” and that the black doll “looks bad.”
The Clarks concluded: “It seems justifiable to assume from these results that the crucial period in the formation and patterning of racial attitudes begins at around four and five years.” At this age, the psychologists wrote, minority children adopt attitudes about themselves that “conform with the accepted racial values and mores of the larger environment.” By 1950, the Clarks were stating these views even more emphatically: “It is clear that the Negro child, by the age of five, is aware of the fact that to be colored in contemporary American society is a mark of inferior status.” It was up to the educational system, they contended, to relieve “the tremendous burden of feelings of inadequacy and inferiority which seem to become integrated into the very structure of the personality as it is developing.”
Dolls weren’t the only playthings in the odd toy chest of children’s projective techniques: balloons, blocks, dough, clay, and finger paints were all put to use as diagnostic devices. By far the most popular play technique, however, required just a piece of paper and a pencil or crayon. Clark himself often added a drawing component to his doll test, giving children a sheet with outlines of a girl and a boy and objects like a leaf and an apple, along with a box of crayons. He found that black children often colored the human figures yellow, pink, or white, even when they had chosen appropriate hues for the objects. Some applied to the girl and boy strange shades like red and green—indicating, Clark suggested, deep psychic conflicts on the subject of skin color.
The earliest drawing test, which asked children themselves to sketch a human figure, had been introduced in 1926 by psychologist Florence Goodenough. She intended her Draw-a-Man Test as a measure of intelligence, not personality, and awarded points based on the number of details—facial features, fingers, embellishments of hair and clothing—a child included in the drawing. Some psychologists who administered the test soon began to suspect, however, that the drawings children produced revealed far more than their IQ. One who saw a world of feeling and fantasy in a few penciled lines was Karen Machover.
Machover, a clinician at Bellevue and other New York City mental hospitals, was a brilliant but brittle woman who had herself survived a singularly grim childhood. Her father died the same month she was born; when she was eight years old, she emigrated from Minsk, Belarus, to New York but was left to raise herself when her mother died a short time later. Machover (then Sophie Karen Alper) supported herself throughout her adolescence, managing to finish college and graduate school. (Though she received a master’s degree and not a PhD, she referred to herself as “Dr.,” and most of her colleagues followed suit.) While working as a clinician she also taught at New York University, and in 1936 married one of her students, Solomon Machover. A year later, their son Robert was born.
Only half-joking, Robert Machover today recalls his mother as “a witch” (she died in 1996). “My mother had X-ray vision about drawings, especially mine,” he says. “What she could see in them were often truths that were hidden from the person who did the drawing, including myself. I always assumed that there was something supernatural about how she would interpret them.” Karen Machover developed her own technique, similar to Goodenough’s, which she named the Draw-a-Person Test. The subject was given a blank piece of paper and a medium-soft pencil; he or she was instructed simply to “draw a person,” then to draw a person of the other sex. She gave the test to her young son “hundreds” of times, he says—until, as a self-conscious teenager, he refused to draw for her, nervous about what his spookily perceptive mother could see.
In 1949, Machover published a book describing the interpretation of the Draw-a-Person Test and laying out its theoretical rationale. There is, she explained, “an intimate tie-up between the figure drawn and the personality of the individual who is doing the drawing”; the sketches children produce are less literal renderings of actual people than visual metaphors for the fears and desires that populate their emotional lives. Machover’s interpretations of these metaphors were recklessly loose, heavily Freudian, and occasionally (unintentionally) hilarious. She looked first at the style of the drawing: shading was indicative of anxiety, while erasures and dark, heavy lines suggested inner conflict. The size and shape of body parts was significant. A small nose reflected a sense of sexual inadequacy; a large head, “intellectual or perhaps moral vanity.”
Clothes and accessories were also revealing: barrettes, bows, shoelaces, and other “restraining yet socially decorative devices,” for example, hinted at a struggle for self-control. Ties, pipes, and cigarettes signaled a preoccupation with sex, while buttons and pockets were telltale signs of an excessive dependence on mother. Machover gathered additional clues from the discussions she held with test takers after they had finished drawing. When a paranoid patient was asked why he had emphasized his figure’s neck, for instance, he explained that without a neck, “you could not turn your head to see who was after you.” In the course of her questioning, Machover often uncovered dark depths beneath an apparently innocent scribble. A girl’s omission of one eye in the male figure she drew, Machover reports, “was admittedly associated with sadistic fantasies of annihilating a rival brother by gouging out one of his eyes with her knitting needle.”
Machover’s psychoanalytic bent led her to discover sexual perversities everywhere in the drawings: oddly shaped hands showed guilt about masturbation, while accentuated breasts were hallmarks of the “orally deprived.” Boys who elaborated the waist and hips were suppressing “homosexual panic”; girls who drew wide shoulders were engaging in “masculine protest” (i.e., they wished they were male). Later in life Machover rejected Freud, however, renouncing psychoanalytic precepts with the same certitude with which she had once propounded them. She became a zealous feminist, and began accepting only women as therapy patients, a practice she described as “reparations.” Though she remained proud of the Draw-a-Person Test and convinced of its accuracy, she came to regret her participation in “boxing people into categories,” says her son—“this whole psychodiagnostic game of which she had been part.”
Around the same time that Karen Machover sought to improve on the Draw-a-Man intelligence test, John Buck was becoming frustrated with the limits of another technique: the interview. Buck, a clinician at the Lynchburg State Colony in Virginia (and one of the psychologists who testified in defense of segregation), was trying “to persuade a nine-year-old girl to answer questions—any questions,” he recalled. “She steadfastly refused.” Finally, “in sheer desperation,” Buck asked his young patient if she would be willing to draw instead. “She nodded assent. She was given paper and pencil, and she immediately produced a series of drawings in which sexual symbols predominated.”
Buck took up his questions again, and to his astonishment, “the child responded with a fluency that contrasted strikingly with her previous stony silence.” He resolved to create a test that would take advantage both of the insights offered by the drawings themselves and of what he called the “pencil-release factor,” the fact that children spoke more freely while absorbed in the activity of sketching. Informal experiments revealed that asking clients to draw not just a human figure, but also a house and a tree, yielded the richest trove of information. Like Machover, Buck interpreted these designs with an imaginative abandon unburdened by evidence: the drawing of a person reflects how the test taker feels about herself, he decided; the house reflects how she feels about her family life; and the tree reflects how she feels about her general environment. Buck’s first major publication on what he called the House-Tree-Person Technique appeared in 1948, and almost immediately became a favorite of clinicians working with children.
The success of Buck’s and Machover’s tests, not surprisingly, inspired many imitators: the Draw-a-Family Test and the Draw-a-School Test were two of the earliest, along with the Kinetic House-Tree-Person Test, which asked subjects to show the person in the drawing doing something active. These were followed by the Kinetic Family Drawing and the Kinetic School Drawing, and by now the floodgates were open wide to the Draw-an-Animal Test, the Draw-a-Car Test, the Draw-a-Person-in-the-Rain Test, even the Draw-a-Person-Picking-an-Apple-from-a-Tree Test.
As child psychology and psychiatry emerged as distinct disciplines, personality tests suited for use with young people proliferated. The Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Study, introduced in 1948, was a set of cartoon panels depicting people in exasperating situations, such as missing a train or getting splashed with mud. The characters had empty bubbles above their heads, ready to express children’s angry or destructive urges. The Blacky Pictures, appearing in 1949, were a set of cards presenting the exploits of a cartoon cocker spaniel. The stories children told about Blacky, his sibling Tippy, and their parents were analyzed for the presence of Freudian favorites like oral eroticism, anal sadism, Oedipal complexes, castration fear, and penis envy. Special adaptations of popular adult personality tests were eventually developed: child or adolescent versions of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Thematic Apperception Test, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are available. (Teenagers may also be given the standard adult versions of the Rorschach and the TAT.)
Once relatively unusual, personality testing of children has now become routine, incorporated into the admissions process at private schools, the evaluation of learning and behavioral problems, and the investigation of child custody and child abuse cases. A 2002 survey of child psychologists found that they spent more than a quarter of their time testing their young clients; a recent poll of school psychologists revealed that they spend about 50 percent of their time conducting assessments (and only 19 percent offering treatment). Even more striking is the rapid rise of an industry based on healthy children’s personalities: teaching to them, parenting to them, making them the basis of self-esteem and communication-skills programs. Kenneth Clark—who bought the dolls he used in his test at the Harlem Woolworth’s for fifty cents each—might be surprised to see how widespread, and how elaborate, children’s personality tests have since become.
Lancaster High School in Buffalo, New York, is the kind of place that the students at Virginia’s Moton High School could only have dreamed of. Built in the years just after the Brown decision, it’s a sleek, modern building with rows of lockers lining long hallways, floors buffed until they gleam. In the classrooms are banks of whirring computers; in the parking lot is a fleet of yellow school buses. But Lancaster’s crowning glory is its field house: finished in 2000, the gymnasium spans 31,500 square feet and cost $1.7 million to build. On the last day of June 2003, it is quiet and dark—but in anticipation rather than disuse.
First the music starts up: a thumping beat so loud the air vibrates. Then the laser show begins, sending showers of light streaming over the walls and floor. Finally, at the back of the building two sets of double doors burst open, letting in a blast of midday sun. The kids come in stomping, cheering, chanting, dancing. They keep coming and coming until the space, chilled meat-locker cold, grows warm with the heat of almost two thousand pubescent bodies. These are “student leaders” from all over the country, here for the annual conference of the National Association of Student Councils. Lancaster High School is their host this year, and they’ve already been treated to awards ceremonies, motivational speakers, and a trip to Six Flags amusement park. Now it’s time to learn about their personalities.
The crowd settles down and turns its attention to a stage, flanked by two huge video screens, set up at the front of the field house. The pounding rock music is replaced by a sprightly pop tune—“True Colors, green and blue/Gold and orange, which are you?”—as a young woman bounds onstage.
“Hi everybody, I’m Letitia Fox, host of the True Colors show!” she exclaims. Her amplified voice booms through the building and her gigantic visage grins from the two screens. “Stand up, everyone, and tell the people around you what color you are!” Earlier today, the teens participated in workshops in which they read descriptions of four personality types, each represented by a color, and chose the one that fit them best. “How many of you are fun-loving Orange?” Fox yells, pointing to her own orange shirt. The room fills with cheers and shrieks. “Let’s give it up for the responsible Golds! What about the curious Greens? I feel the love in this room—who are the caring Blues?” More screams and whistles.
“Now, let’s welcome the True Colors Players!”
The first actor to ascend the stage is a nerdish young man in a yellow button-down shirt. In a pinched voice, he tells the audience that he believes in being organized and planning ahead. “Otherwise, I won’t get into Harvard,” he explains. A moment later he’s replaced by an actress in an orange tank top. “We spend too much time in class,” she declares, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “I’m bored just sitting around talking!” She makes way for another woman, wearing green, who clutches a book to her chest and announces solemnly, “I prefer to work alone.” Finally, a blue-shirted young man leaps onstage. “I’m sorry I was late,” he says sweetly. “I was helping a friend.”
The four actors proceed to put on a skit about planning a prom, a task that goes predictably awry. Green calls Gold a control freak; Orange agitates for a pizza break; Blue makes a mushy plea for a group hug. A few minutes later, they’ve worked it all out. “We’re different, and that’s okay,” Blue concludes. Adds Orange: “We each have our own way of doing things—and together, we can have the perfect prom.”
Letitia Fox reappears, wielding a microphone, and several audience members are called up onstage. “So, what did you learn?” Fox prompts a young woman.
“I learned more about myself and how I behave with other colors,” the girl answers obligingly. A second girl chimes in: “I learned that I’m a Green, and so I have to be more patient with people.” The microphone is passed to a smirking teenage boy.
“I learned …” he drawls, “… that Orange is number one!” Whoops and hollers fill the field house, right up to its expensive rafters.
True Colors is the brainchild of a California man named Don Lowry. Bluff and self-assured, with the craggy good looks of a soap-opera patriarch, Lowry admits that in his youth he was painfully insecure. He remembers, as a high school football player, taking a good look at his teammates. “I noticed that the most successful athletes were not necessarily the most gifted and talented,” he says. “What they had was personal confidence. I felt I lacked that in a lot of areas.” As an adult, Lowry became a teacher and a coach. Then, in 1978, his life was changed by a personality test: “All of a sudden I had an awareness of who I was and what I wanted and what I’m about. It was an awakening for me.”
Looking for a way to share this epiphany with others, Lowry adapted his insights about personality to a format he calls “edutainment.” He borrowed heavily from the work of psychologist David Keirsey (who had borrowed from Isabel Myers, who had borrowed from Carl Jung) in delineating four different personality types, then wrote a role for each in a short play. He put on the first True Colors show in the early 1980s, playing all four characters himself. “The reaction was phenomenal,” he recalls. Twenty years later, there are half a dozen four-person casts of “True Colors Players,” performing for children all over the country. The True Colors system, which now includes a line of products like books, games, and stickers (Orange kids get a sticker that says “Where’s the action!”; Blue kids get one that reads, “Do you need a hug?”), has been used by more than fourteen thousand schools and by organizations like the Girl Scouts and the 4-H Club. Lowry has even worked with the writers of children’s television shows to help them develop characters that represent all four personality types.
Lowry’s ambitions for his creation, however, have barely been tapped. “We’re now working with a whole town—Anaheim, California,” he says proudly. “I intend to reduce all of the social problems in that city.” He plans to introduce the True Colors approach to personality into every Anaheim institution, from the Walt Disney Company (already a client) to the public schools and the city government. Even the Anaheim McDonald’s, he says, will have placemats featuring True Colors games. “It will be a True Colors city,” he says excitedly. “A True Colors city is a place where everyone is valued for who they are.”
After Anaheim comes the whole country: Lowry dreams of designing a national personality test, to be aired on television on Sunday nights. (Perhaps this idea isn’t so far-fetched: on October 25, 2003, more than 230,000 TV viewers in Austria participated in what was billed as the “world’s largest personality test,” and Britain’s BBC is preparing a similar televised personality test to air sometime in 2004.) After America, the world: Lowry has already begun licensing the True Colors format for use overseas. “There are twenty million teachers in China,” he says meaningfully. He seems to take seriously the injunction printed on a pamphlet distributed at Lancaster High School: “Make It a True Colors World.”
In the fervor of his commitment and the scope of his ambition, he is not unlike Kenneth Clark. But Lowry has turned the psychologist’s central insight on its head. Clark saw that human nature is formed in a complex interaction between the individual and his society, between who he might be and who his culture tells him he must be. In the case of black people living in America, this exchange was tainted by racism, producing personalities that were warped by anger or bitterness or passivity. The healthy development of every American demanded change on a society-wide scale, Clark asserted, and this was a duty all of us bore together. Lowry, by contrast, sees human nature as a set of simple, inborn preferences that vary only in superficial ways. Neither society nor its members require fundamental change; all that’s necessary is that we recognize and celebrate our “differences.” In a True Colors world, personality is an individual problem with an individual solution.
In fact, Lowry sees an ignorance of personality type at the root of every major social crisis, from poverty to school violence to terrorism. He has taken a special interest in bringing True Colors to the inner city, convinced that minority children in particular need to know if they are Orange or Blue, Green or Gold. A study conducted by his organization, says Lowry, concluded that personality type—and not, say, quality of educational opportunity—is the major determinant of academic success. A simple awareness of personality preferences can make a difference, the company promises, “from Harvard to the ghettos.”
Don Lowry calls himself “a pretty far-out guy.” But the idea of assigning children—even toddlers—a personality type is gaining mainstream popularity. In 1987, a youngsters’ version of the Myers-Briggs, called the Murphy-Meisgeier Type Indicator, was introduced. Intended for use with children in grades two through eight, it labels kids on the same dimensions as the grown-up test: extroversion-introversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, and judging-perceiving. Parenting books emphasizing personality type have also begun to appear. “Type affects everything—the way you talk to your kid, the kind of activities you encourage them to do, how you discipline them,” declares Paul Tieger, coauthor with his wife, Barbara Barron-Tieger, of the 1997 title Nurture by Nature: Understand Your Child’s Personality Type—And Become a Better Parent. “It’s helpful to start getting an awareness of type very early, when they’re babies,“ he adds.
But it’s in the nation’s schools that personality testing has really taken off. Starting as early as the 1970s and gaining momentum through the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of “learning styles” has become enormously popular among teachers and administrators. The idea is that each child has a preferred way of taking in information, a preference that can be identified by one of the many learning-styles tests now on the market. Bold claims are made for the concept: it can boost students’ academic achievement, raise their self-esteem, address attention-deficit disorder, even reduce delinquency and dropout rates.
Some of these questionnaires have a cognitive focus (claiming to determine, for example, whether kids are “visual,“ “auditory,“ or “tactile“ learners). But others are personality tests by a different name. The Student Styles Questionnaire, for example, is also based on the four axes of the Myers-Briggs. Introduced in 1996 by Thomas Oakland, professor of education at the University of Florida and past president of the International School Psychology Association, it provides young test takers with a computer printout telling them “what their strengths are, and, toward the end of the report, areas that they want to work on,“ says Oakland. “Wouldn’t it have been great to have had that at the age of ten?“
The Learning Preference Inventory is yet another children’s test grounded in Jungian personality type. The Learning Styles Inventory, the Learning Style Identification Scale, and the Learning Style Inventory measure a mix of intellectual and personality characteristics. And the Style of Learning and Thinking test classifies children as “left-brain dominant” or “right-brain dominant” (the first group is said to be conforming, organized, and logical, the second explorative, intuitive, and creative). No matter which test they favor, however, learning-styles proponents must confront the fact that little evidence supports their claim that children learn better when “taught to” their preferred style, or that a test can identify what that style might be. And there’s no proof at all that learning styles can ameliorate ADHD or rescue delinquents and dropouts.
Robert Brown, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, says he “is not aware of any instrument with sufficient theoretical or psychometric support to warrant use for making prescriptive statements for individual students.” He adds, “Being attentive to and responding to the needs, interests, and abilities of individual students seems like a worthwhile goal for teachers. However, doing so is much more complex than administering a learning-style inventory and matching teaching strategies to student learning styles.”
Other skeptics within psychology have weighed in with criticisms of specific instruments: the Murphy-Meisgeier’s authors “propose many possible uses that are not warranted by the evidence.” The Learning Preference Inventory “may be a futile and unwarranted exercise.” The Learning Styles Inventory is so unreliable as to require “great caution in making educational prescriptions for individual students.” The Learning Style Identification Scale “cannot be recommended for use.” The Learning Style Inventory is “a psychometric disaster” with “no redeeming values.” And the Style of Learning and Thinking test relies on a theory that is “too simplistic” and “not well supported.”
Faulty science is only one hazard associated with giving personality tests to children. Such tests impose limiting labels on young people who are still developing a sense of themselves and their capacities. Asked if children are growing and changing all the time, Thomas Oakland retorts, “Nope. These are biologically based qualities. They are there from the beginning.” Although such classifications are presented as a boon for kids—”Children typically say, ‘My gosh, I wish every child in my classroom could know this about themselves!’” Oakland reports—in truth the labels seem to serve the convenience of adults. Fuzzy, feel-good rhetoric (“Just as each snowflake, tree, and star in the universe is different, so it is with children,” coos the promotional materials for Oakland’s Student Styles Questionnaire) disguises the fact that these tests are used to rank and track children in disturbing ways.
For example: according to Oakland, gifted students are 29 percent more likely than nongifted students to score as “imaginative” on his test. (The Student Styles Questionnaire substitutes the terms “imaginative” and “practical” for the Myers-Briggs’s “intuitive” and “sensing.”) It’s troubling, then, to hear Oakland proclaim that “blacks and Hispanics generally prefer a practical approach to instruction, which generally focuses on facts and smaller details, while whites are more inclined to an imaginative style, dealing with theories and broad details.” Oakland also contends that black students may drop out of school at a higher rate because they “are more likely than whites to base their decisions on ‘thinking’ rather than ‘feeling’ styles. ‘Thinkers’ value honesty even if it hurts the feelings of others, while people with a ‘feeling’ orientation are more inclined toward harmony.”
Stereotypes of gender as well as race are reinforced by this personality test: starting as early as age eight, says Oakland, female students are more likely than their male counterparts to score as “feelers.” In order “to be more effective in life,” he opines, girls who are labeled “thinkers” “need to acquire a respect for harmony and for relying on and developing their feeling capacities and displaying other feminine qualities.” In this way, the apparently benign personality testing of children provides convenient cover for the less appealing agendas of adults. Miriam Hanson is a counselor at Woodstock High School near Atlanta, Georgia, who uses Don Lowry’s True Colors system with her students. “It doesn’t pigeonhole or get offensive,” she enthuses. “Instead of telling someone, ‘You’re not college prep material,’ you can tell them what they might be interested in based on the color they are.”
Alongside the relatively new learning-styles tests, projective and play techniques are still used to assess youngsters’ personalities. Dolls continue to be employed by those who work with children, though the dolls are now likely to be anatomically detailed models designed to investigate the possibility of abuse. In one study, more than two-thirds of child protection workers used anatomically detailed dolls, along with about a third of law enforcement officers and mental health professionals. Storytelling tests such as the Blacky Pictures and the Children’s Apperception Test still have their champions. And drawing tasks such as the Draw-a-Person Test and the House-Tree-Person Test continue to inspire a devoted following: on surveys of test use conducted over the past forty years, they’re consistently ranked among the instruments psychologists use most often. (A 2001 survey of testing practices in custody evaluations suggests that projective drawing tests are being used more often than before; likewise, a recent study showed that 85 percent of graduate programs in clinical psychology require students to learn about projective techniques, an increase over past levels.) Their popularity persists despite the fact that, again and again, research has demonstrated these tests to be dangerously flawed.
For example: starting in the 1970s, anatomically detailed dolls have been used to identify abused children; sexualized play with the dolls is thought to indicate the experience of abuse. But as numerous studies have since shown, children who have not been abused (as well as those who have) often play with the dolls in a sexually suggestive manner. Two recent experiments—conducted by proponents of the dolls—found that a majority of children who had not been abused engaged in touching, rubbing, poking, and pinching body parts, and that a quarter of non-abused five-year-old boys responded to the request “Show me what the dolls can do together,” by placing the dolls “in a position suggestive of sexual intercourse.” Another study reported that, among a group of non-abused two-to six-year-olds given anatomically detailed dolls to play with, 75 percent spontaneously undressed the dolls and 71 percent touched the male doll’s penis. Curiosity about sex and the human body, it seems, is more normal than not.
The Children’s Apperception Test, an adaptation of the TAT introduced in 1949, was revised in 1991 and is still used by almost a quarter of clinicians. Researchers, however, have rendered an unequivocal verdict on the instrument: there is “no objective evidence to suggest that the responses to these pictures can be interpreted in a manner that is useful in any scientific sense,” a reviewer concludes. “The use of the technique as a method of developing a personality description is entirely unjustified by any scientific standard.” Declaring the test “an historical anachronism,” another psychologist states that “despite its following, the CAT should not be available to clinicians in its present form.” The Blacky Pictures Test, which has no norms and has not been updated since its creation in 1949, has even less to recommend it.
It is drawing tests, however, that have received the harshest rebukes from scientists. Calling the Draw-a-Person Test “embarrassing,” one critic derides it as “phrenology for the twentieth century.” Another asserts that the technique “more properly belongs in a museum chronicling the history of simpleminded assessment practices in school psychology.”
Researchers point out that the “sign” approach to interpreting drawings—inferring personality characteristics from particular details—has no solid evidence behind it, while more global assessments of the sketches are likely to pass judgment on artistic ability and general intelligence rather than personality. The quality of the original research performed by test creators Karen Machover and John Buck has been judged extremely poor: a reviewer called Buck’s manual “certainly one of the worst horrors ever perpetrated in the field of clinical psychology,” displaying “incredible naïvete, fanaticism, and arrant disregard for any attempt at scientific validation of the material presented.” More recent efforts to improve the accuracy of projective drawing techniques have also fallen short.
Yet clinicians who work with children continue to administer drawing tasks to their young patients: 27 percent of clinicians use the Draw-a-Person Test, according to a 1998 survey, and 34 percent use the House-Tree-Person Test. More important, they continue to believe that the conclusions they draw from the tests are correct. Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon: “illusory correlation,” or the human tendency to associate two variables that are actually unrelated—to assume, for example, that test takers who draw figures with large heads must have an inflated sense of their own intellectual abilities. A 1995 study suggests that around nine out of ten psychologists who use the Draw-aPerson Test to make diagnoses generate such dubious conclusions.
The ease of arriving at these false assumptions was demonstrated in a classic 1967 experiment conducted by psychologists Loren and Jean Chapman. The Chapmans showed a series of Draw-a-Person sketches to undergraduates who had no knowledge of the test. The college students “discovered” the very same associations-large eyes indicate paranoia, and so on—claimed by the test’s promoters and repeatedly debunked by research. “Again and again,” the Chapmans write, “the DAP signs have failed to hold up.” Still, they note, such connections seem so natural and obvious that we remain convinced of them even when we are shown evidence to the contrary. As a clinician assured the two researchers: “I know that paranoids don’t seem to draw big eyes in the research labs, but they sure do in my office.”
Kenneth Clark’s most crucial point, the one he devoted his career to making, was that the personalities of children are invariably affected by the society in which they grow up. As he testified in the Davis v. County School Board trial, some people react with rage when confronted with the implacability of racism; others become helplessly passive. A few respond by fortifying their resolve, “by seeking to prove that they are not as inferior as people say.” Clark himself was one of these few: in the face of prejudice, he became more ambitious, more industrious, more certain of his goals.
These characteristics served him well in the years following the historic Brown v. Board of Education victory. Clark was elected the first black president of the American Psychological Association. He taught at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California at Berkeley. He wrote important, widely read books such as Prejudice and Your Child. But as time went by, and America did not become the just society he envisioned, Clark’s determined optimism began to waver.
A major blow to his confidence was the country’s vehement and often violent resistance to integration. In Farmville, Virginia, for example, whites closed down their own school rather than admit black students from Robert R. Moton, and then—with state funds—established a private academy for white children only. They shut Moton’s doors as well, leaving blacks to fend for themselves; many never graduated and came to be called the “lost generation.” The county kept its public schools closed for five years, until the federal courts forced it to open integrated institutions in 1964. In the elation that followed the Brown decision, Clark had predicted that America would be rid of its racial problems “within ten years or so.” A decade on, with peaceful civil rights protesters being greeted by teargas and billy clubs, the situation seemed more desperate than ever.
A blow struck closer to home was the stinging criticism directed at his research after it was cited in the Brown ruling. Sociologist Ernest van den Haag sneered that Clark’s sample size was “too small to test the reaction to a new soap.” Writing in the Villanova Law Review in 1960, van den Haag patronizingly pronounced that “the best conclusion that can be drawn is that he did not know what he was doing; and the worst, that he did.” Edmond Cahn, a law professor at New York University, was less insulting but no less severe in his judgment: “I would not have the constitutional rights of Negroes—or of other Americans—rest on any such flimsy foundation as some of the scientific demonstrations in these records,” he wrote in the N.Y.U. Law Review.
Clark’s critics were justified in their claim that the doll tests suffered from serious weaknesses, a fact that even his supporters eventually came to acknowledge. For example, Clark reported that black children from the North often became upset when asked which doll was like them, while those from the South “either laughed or tried to appear casual about the whole question.” Yet students in the second group were far more likely to attend segregated schools. The psychologist explained his results by reasoning that racism was still a raw subject for the Northern children, while their Southern counterparts had more completely, and more troublingly, absorbed racist assumptions into their identities. To many observers, however, it seemed that Clark was intent on finding psychological damage from segregation no matter what the responses of his young subjects.
Specific criticisms of Clark’s methods soon led to larger questions about whether social science deserved a place at all in public affairs, especially the courts. Here Clark rose to offer a ringing defense of his profession and the importance of its insights. “Man’s relations with his fellow man,” he declared, “involve matters far too grave and crucial to be left to lawyers and judges alone.” The nature of these relations could be illuminated by a socially engaged psychology: “I believe that to be taken seriously, to be viable, and to be relevant, social science must dare to study the real problems of men and society, must use the real community, the marketplace, the arena of politics and power as its laboratories, and must confront and seek to understand the dynamics of social action and social change,” he affirmed.
But for all his resounding conviction, Clark was beginning to suspect a terrible truth. From its founding, psychology had been embraced by institutions eager to take advantage of its tools. “Should social scientists play a role in helping industry function more efficiently-make larger profits—develop better labor management relations—increase the sense of satisfaction among the workers?” he asked rhetorically. “Should social scientists play a role in helping governmental agencies and key policy makers make more effective and valid decisions? Should social scientists play a role in attempting to solve the many human and psychological problems faced by the military arm of our government?” Institutions had long answered yes. So why the shrill objections when social science ventured to participate in America’s debate about race?
The answer was as dismaying as it was inescapable: because in this case, psychology supported the weak against the strong, the minority against the majority. Clark’s research had abetted a legal ruling that demanded, in his words, “fundamental changes in the power alignments and group status patterns which prevail in our society.” The many who resisted such fundamental changes now regarded psychology not as a useful ally, but a dangerous threat to the status quo. The contributions of social science were welcome, it seemed, only as long as they kept America’s injustices intact.
As this sobering realization set in, Clark’s sanguine determination slipped away, replaced by a weary sense of defeat. “To be quite candid about the success of my attempts at being a psychologist for society, I have to state that I have failed,” he remarked in 1968. He had sought to heal what he called the country’s “moral schizophrenia”—the way it promised equality for all, then denied true equality to many of its citizens. But, he discovered, the patient did not wish to be cured. “I fear the disease has metastasized,” he lamented. Clark’s despair seemed to deepen after his beloved Mamie died in 1983; a short while later he said in a speech: “Thirty years after Brown, I must accept the fact that my wife left this earth despondent at seeing that damage to children is being knowingly and silently accepted by a nation that claims to be democratic.”
As he grew older, this once proud figure became almost bent with bitterness. He told an interviewer that when a friend asked him, “With your cynicism, your pessimism, as intense as it is, why haven’t you committed suicide?” he replied, “I’m curious. I really want to see this process, this joke, up until I die.” It was surely no comfort to him to know that the changes in his character were a tragic confirmation of his central thesis: social forces like racism have the power to distort individual personality.
On April 23, 2001, the town of Farmville, Virginia, held a celebration. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the student walkout at the Robert R. Moton High School, the pivotal event that led to Davis v. County School Board (and, some say, started off the civil rights movement). Spectators clapped as a ribbon was cut in front of the old school building, now a national historic landmark and a civil rights museum. They applauded again for a series of speakers whose inspiring words—given American race relations’ freighted past and complicated present—sometimes seemed tinged with unintended irony. First at the podium was African-American journalist Juan Williams.
“It’s always been about the children,” he declared—though if history has taught us anything, it’s that the clash of powerful social forces is almost always about the agendas of adults. After Williams came John Stokes, one of the students who walked out of his school in anger five decades ago. He read a poem taught to him by a favorite teacher at Moton, and again an awareness of past and present lent the verse’s sweet words an unanticipated bitterness.
“Look not at the face nor the color of a person’s skin, but look at that heart which is deep within,” Stokes recited. “For the face and the skin will one day fade away, but the deeds of a good person will never decay.”