Hmmm....

I can just see Chris Rock on saturday night live doing a skit to this.....

How Did a Child's Doll Help End Segregation?

in the 1940's two African American psychologists, Mamie Phipps Clark and her husband Kenneth B. Clark, conducted a series of experiments with young African American children. When offered a choice between black and white dolls, the children tended to choose the white dolls. The children's explanation was that the black dolls were ugly and the white dolls were pretty. The Clarks' conclusion was that black children become aware of racial identity at the age of three, and by age five they develop negative personal self-images derived from the prejudiced values of the larger society. In the Clarks' own words, "the child himself must be identified with that which he rejects."

The findings of the Clarks' studies would have remained academic, but they shared their conclusions with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP had been involved for years in legal battles against unequal racial treatment, especially in education. The NAACP's work culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case handed down on May 17, 1954. It ended the legality of racially segregated public education. Perhaps for the first time, however, a Supreme Court decision used psychological data as well as legal precedents to support its decision.

Using the Clarks' findings, the Court stated, "To separate [African American children] 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 Court's decision thus struck not only at inequality, but at segregation itself. "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," the Court determined. When Mamie and Kenneth Clark first presented a child with a choice of dolls, they could not have realized that they were documenting psychological information that would help bring the walls of segregation crashing down.

Seriously though.... it makes me wonder a tad bit about these types of things with my kids. They just turned 3...is this type of stuff that I need to be concerned with?