The Brown decision’s damaged-self-esteem claim rested on the Clark doll studies

Evidence

It is significant that Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice was published the same year that Brown v. Board of Education declared that racial segregation in public education was inherently unequal. The basis for that conclusion rested partly on the research reported in the Social Science Statement (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, fn. 11), which cited (among other research) the famous doll studies by Clark and Clark (1947). In that work, Black children who chose a White, blond haired, blue-eyed doll in response to the directive to “show me the doll that is pretty, nice and you want to play with” were determined to have damaged self-esteem. This damage, it was argued, reflected the inevitable consequence of legally enforced racial segregation. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1061

Categorization

• XREF: The historical anchor for the whole chapter: the doll studies’ damaged-self-esteem inference came to ground desegregation doctrine; later meta-analytic results overturn the psychological premise the doctrine leaned on.
• SEED: Essay angle: how much public-policy doctrine was built on a parade of social-science findings later shown shaky — the doll studies as a case of consequential inference outstripping method.