Black subjects internalized anti-Black bias by preferring white dolls and straight hair

Evidence

E. Franklin Frazier was hardly alone in his assimilationist preference for becoming White. Psychologists Mamie Clark and Kenneth Clark found that the majority of the 253 Black children in their study in 1940 and 1941 preferred the white doll over the dark doll. Some junior high school students associated light to medium skin tones with intelligence and refinement, and dark tones with meanness and physical strength. The lighter, the better, paralleled the assimilationist idea of the straighter, the better. Since the 1920s and the craze of the conk—short for the recipe called congalene—Black men had joined Black women in straightening their hair. One teenager, “Shorty,” gave his friend from Michigan his first conk in Boston in 1941 or 1942. “We both were grinning and sweating,” Malcolm Little remembered. He stood there, looking in the mirror, “lost in admiration of my hair now looking ‘white.’” Two decades later, Malcolm X reflected on his “first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair.” Malcolm by then realized that he “had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are ‘inferior’—and white people ‘superior’—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 883

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete evidence that assimilationist ideas become behavioral self-degradation — the exact mechanism by which Kendi says racist policy produces racist ideas that then get internalized by the oppressed. Connects to the racist-ideas-are-engineered-by-structures thesis. — connects to: Black Baptists deliberately manufactured black dolls to build healthy race identity in children. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 763
• ADDENDUM: The conk and Malcolm X’s hair-straightening neatly parallel the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s thesis that bodily self-modification signals conformity to dominant-group standards of respectability.