Mamie Phipps Clark: Biography Of This Social Psychologist
Mamie Phipps Clark (1917-1983) was a social psychologist who studied the development of identity and racial self-awareness during childhood, in relation to the context of segregation in the United States. She, along with Kenneth Clark, developed one of psychology’s most classic experiments on the development of racial consciousness: the doll test.
We’ll see now a biography of Mamie Phipps Clark one of the pioneers in the consolidation of North American social psychology of the 20th century.
Mamie Phipps Clark: biography of a social psychologist
Mamie Phipps Clark was born on April 18, 1917 in Arkansas, United States, into a family that Phipps herself described as privileged. Her father was a doctor and her mother was a housewife.
After graduating from Langston College, and despite the context of double discrimination against black women, Mamie received different grant offers to pursue higher education studies. Among the options were Fisk University in Tennessee; and Howard University, in Washington. They were also two of the most prestigious in the United States and their access criteria were based on merit. They represent almost the only options for the elite of the black community.
Mamie decided to study in Washington. In 1934 she took courses in mathematics and also in languages. However, her motivation for studies clashed significantly with the impersonal approach of her mathematics teachers, which was especially marked towards women, so she soon decided to change her option (Phipps Clark, in O’Connell and Russo , 1983).
While studying at Howard University, Mamie He met Kenneth Barcroft Clack, who was studying for a master’s degree in psychology This relationship had an important influence on Mamie’s interest in psychology. Among other things, psychology seemed more professionally promising for her (especially more than medicine, physics or mathematics majors). In addition, the psychologist would allow her to get closer to child development, a topic that also caused her curiosity and that intensified especially while she was writing her master’s thesis.
Barcroft introduced him, for example, to Francis Summer and Max Meenes, two psychologists who were later highly recognized in educational psychology, pedagogy and child development, and with whom he worked on various investigations. With them, Mamie said, she felt welcomed and had shared interests. Once she finished her studies, she worked in the psychology department of the same university.
Some time later he moved to New York and met Ruth and Gene Hartley, who were doing a lot of studies on preschool childhood. Specifically, the Heartlys were interested, as was Phipps, in How preschool children’s self-identification developed and to analyze this they used drawings of white and black children.
In this context of security, Mamie Phipps Clark did not even question how a black woman had come so far professionally in a field of study for white men, such as psychology. Mamie herself explains this as a silenced challenge that she recognized until she was in graduate school, and that led her to significantly question the racial segregation of American public schools.
Studies on racial self-identification in childhood
The success and recognition of her master’s studies led her to enter Columbia University for her doctorate. In this context, Mamie tells that for the first time she found herself being the only black student in a doctoral department where all the members were white students. In fact, her husband, Kenneth Clark, had been the first black student to graduate with a doctorate in psychology in 1940. In 1943, Mamie was the second.
In her master’s thesis, Mamie Phipps Clark had investigated how and when black children became aware of their racialized identity, and how this impacts the formation of their self-concept. Her research was titled “The Development of Self-Awareness in Black Preschool Children.” This soon became a line of research that became decisive, both for psychology and in American politics.
Through his master’s research, and as an extension of them, the famous doll test was developed. The latter consisted of present preschool children with a white doll and a black doll Subsequently, they measured their preferences (for example, asking them to give them the one they liked the most); of attitudes (asking which one seems good or bad); and its ability to racially identify different groups. Finally, they assessed the children’s ability to recognize themselves as a member of a racial group (racial self-identification).
This experiment is generally cited and attributed to Kenneth Clark. However, the same psychologist stated that the legal records where this study subsequently impacted should have been recognized as Mamie’s main project, in which he later joined and collaborated (Karera, 2010).
What is racial consciousness?
Mamie defined racial science as an awareness of the self that belongs to a group that is differentiated from other groups by phenotypic characteristics. Her biggest finding was that black children become aware of their racial identity around age 3, and simultaneously develop a fundamentally negative self-concept His results established that the latter was determined by the negative and racist definition that society made in different spheres. Largely as a consequence of segregation policies.
Her studies generated a lot of interest in the world of psychology and were even replicated by different people, among them perhaps the most popular is Mary Ellen Goodman, in the mid-20th century. Likewise, the effects of racial segregation had an important legal impact on American educational legislation.
Political impact
When Mamie Phipps finished studying, she began working as a secretary in a law office run by William Houston, among other important figures in the history of civil law in the United States. This office was one of the first to work with cases challenging laws in favor of racial segregation
Among others, they addressed what is currently known as the “Brown Case,” based on which North American laws declared it unconstitutional for public schools to be separated between black students and white students. Something fundamental to argue in favor of the latter, and finally achieve it, was precisely the doll experiment.
