Robin Bernstein
Guest Lecturer and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University
Psychological Damage or Resistance? Re-Evaluating the Clark Doll Tests through the Lens of Performance Studies
In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted their famous “doll test” in which they asked African American children whether they preferred black or white dolls. Most children identified white dolls as “nice” and black dolls as bad”—proof, the Clarks argued, that segregation damaged black children psychologically. These findings figured pivotally in Brown v. Board of Education. Bernstein defamiliarizes the “doll test” by locating it not in the history of Civil Rights but instead in the history of representational play involving racialized dolls. Bernstein argues that a black child’s rejection of a black doll might indeed reveal internalized racism; but it could also constitute a rejection of violently racist practices of play that had, for a century, been coordinated through black dolls. Thus Bernstein offers a new understanding of the Clarks’ child-subjects not as passive internalizers of racism instead as agents who resisted inherited traditions of performance.
Location: Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Harvard University.
Free and Open to the Public. Please Feel Free to Bring a Lunch.