The Doll Test, and Fault vs. Responsibility

Portraits by Fabrice Monteiro

Did you play with dolls (or action figures) when you were a child? If so, did you get to choose them, or were they given to you? What skin tone did they have? Did they look like you? Perhaps you’re a parent of a young child now – what skin tone do your kids’ dolls have?

Back in the 1940s, Kenneth and Mamie Clark – a husband-and-wife team of psychology researchers (and the first African American man and the first African American woman, respectively, to earn Ph.D.s in psychology from Columbia University) – used dolls to investigate how young Black children viewed their racial identities. Over the course of 14 years they developed and conducted what became known as “the Doll Tests.”

The children who took part in the study were all Black children, aged 3–7, and all but one of them attended segregated schools. The children were asked a series of questions about four dolls, which were all identical except for skin color. When asked which doll was the ‘nicest’ or ‘prettiest’ one, they overwhelmingly picked the doll with the lightest skin. When asked which doll they wanted to play with, they again picked the whitest doll. When asked which doll was ‘bad’ they picked the one with the darkest skin, and for ‘good’ they picked the lightest. When asked to pick which doll looked most like them, the Clarks reported that some of the children became “emotionally upset at having to identify with the doll that they had rejected.” Some of them cried and ran out of the room. These results upset the Clarks so much that they delayed publishing their conclusions, but the research was later used as key evidence in school desegregation lawsuits, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

The test has been replicated on many times, including at Texas A&M University and on CNN – sometimes expanded upon to include white children in the study also. Some tests have looked at still images as well as dolls, but the results still speak clearly: Black children and white children show a bias toward lighter skin. It’s worth noting that I haven’t been able to locate a study using other BIPOC groups, but researchers, activists and historians like Ibram X. Kendi argue that anti-Black racism is prevalent for everyone; as mentioned in last week’s article, David Foster Wallace’s metaphor is that anti-Black racism is the water we’re swimming in – we were each of us brought up in a society that favored lighter-skinned people and shunned darker-skinned people. It’s not our fault. But unless and until we make conscious effort to swim against the tide, we are passively or actively contributing to it. So even if it’s not our fault, it is our responsibility.

While Will Smith has fallen out of favor with a lot of people following his behavior at the 2022 Oscars, his video highlighting the difference between fault and responsibility continues to be salient and resonant, and it is worth reflecting on when thinking about the Doll Test. As long as children favor light-skinned dolls in these tests, it is our responsibility to move the needle toward a more equitable society. And if we can free ourselves from blame for our own internalized racism, perhaps we can move forward and take responsibility for it instead.

How can this be relevant to your work this week?

This Week’s Tip:

• Regardless of your own ethnicity, take steps to confront your own internalized racism. This is a lifelong journey, not a simple task, and involves reflection, conversations, resources, and structures. You might consider publications such as The Emancipator, courses such as Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism, or social media groups like White People DOING Something.
• Consider that fault and responsibility are two distinct things. Where have you denied responsibility for something because it’s not your fault? If those two things are separate, what would that make possible? Are there any conversations you could have this week to take responsibility for something and move forward? Are there any ways you have put both fault and responsibility on a member of your team and now need to separate them?

Try these out this week, and let us know how it goes! We’d love to hear from you.

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