My Daughter’s White Doll
Was I right to worry?
By Ibram X. Kendi
In 1947, the photographer Gordon Parks documented one of Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll tests for ‘Ebony’ magazine. (Gordon Parks / Courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation) June 7, 2022, 6 AM ET Share This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
I noticed . I didn’t make much of it. The day care was closing. I walked over to Imani, took the blue-eyed white doll out of her hands, picked her up off the carpet, and raised her high. She frowned. I smiled. Her frown turned to a smile.
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View More It was the summer of 2017. My partner, Sadiqa, and I had just moved to Washington, D.C. We’d selected our neighborhood, Columbia Heights, because we liked its walkability, access to public transit, and racial diversity. We had enrolled Imani, our 1-year-old daughter, in a day care about 10 minutes from our new home.
The next day, when Sadiqa picked Imani up, she, too, noticed our daughter playing with the white doll. We laughed it off. We expected Imani to start playing with a different doll or toy soon.
But she didn’t. Her frown on day one turned into a sharp “No!” on day two, when Sadiqa tried to take the doll out of her hands, which turned into a car ride of whining on day three, and into an all-out tantrum on day four as she held on firmly to the doll, not wanting to go home.
Sadiqa and I were probably unduly sensitive about the whole situation. But we wondered if our Black child’s attachment to a white doll could mean she had already breathed in what the psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum has called the “smog” of white superiority.
Maybe our minds were sounding a false alarm. Maybe the eye and skin color and hair texture of the doll had no bearing on why Imani had become attached. I did not know. No one knew. But I did know why the alarm was ringing.
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In 1897, the father of American child psychology, G. Stanley Hall, published his influential A Study of Dolls with Alexander Caswell Ellis. They found that white dolls with “fair hair and blue eyes are the favorites.” Children who played with nonwhite dolls, Hall and Ellis posited, often did so because the dolls’ appearance made them “ ‘funny’ or exceptional.”
Mass-produced toys of all kinds had begun to enter American homes around this time, and many of them exploited racist tropes. Consider the mechanical banks then popular among children. The kids who played with the “Always Did ’Spise a Mule” mechanical bank could push a button and make a Black man fly off a mule face-first, a simulation of racial violence presented, during the lynching era, as a game. Playing with the “Shamrock Bank,” later nicknamed “Paddy and the Pig,” children pulled a lever to make a pig kick a penny into an Irishman’s mouth. The “Reclining Chinaman” mechanical bank featured a Chinese man flashing a handful of aces with a rat at his feet. The cards suggested a deceitful competitive advantage, evoking the idea, widely held at the time, that Chinese immigrants were stealing work from white people.
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What lessons did these toys teach the children who played with them? For the social scientist Mamie Phipps, such racist caricatures were anything but humorous. Growing up in segregated Arkansas in the 1920s, Phipps lived in the shadow of that racism. “You had to have a certain kind of protective armor about you, all the time,” she later said .
In 1934, Phipps enrolled at Howard University, where she met a psychology master’s student named Kenneth Clark. He encouraged her to major in psychology; the two later married.
The Clarks entered a discipline dominated by eugenicists determined to prove, scientifically, the superiority of the white race. But some social scientists, at least, had come to recognize the dangers of eugenicists’ work. These researchers wanted to use social science, instead, to understand the origins of racist sentiment. Were humans born prejudiced or were they socialized to be that way? This question turned scholarly attention to the racial attitudes of children.
Research in the late 1920s by the social worker and writer Bruno Lasker had demonstrated that “race prejudice,” as he called it, was not an inborn trait but the result of acquired habits—habits that even children as young as 5 years old could develop.
