Mamie Phipps Clark: biography of this social psychologist

This researcher is best known for her black and white dolls experiment.

Mamie Phipps Clark (1917-1983) was a social psychologist who studied the development of identity and racial self-consciousness during childhood in relation to the context of segregation in the United States. Together with Kenneth Clark, she developed one of the most classic experiments in psychology on the development of racial consciousness: the doll test.

The following is a biography of Mamie Phippa a biography of Mamie Phipps Clarkone of the pioneers in the consolidation of American social psychology in 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 homemaker.

After graduating from Langston College, and despite the despite the context of double discrimination against black women, Mamie received several grant offers.Mamie received several grant offers to pursue higher education. 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 entrance criteria were based on merit. They represented almost the only options for the elite black community.

Mamie decided to study in Washington. In 1934 she took courses in mathematics and languages. However, his motivation for his studies clashed significantly with the impersonal approach of his mathematics teachers, which was especially marked towards women, so he soon decided to change his choice (Phipps Clark, in O'Connell and Russo, 1983).

Beginnings in Child Psychology

While studying at Howard University, Mamie met Kenneth Barcroft Clifford met Kenneth Barcroft Clack, who was pursuing a master's degree in psychology.. This relationship was an important influence on Mamie's interest in psychology. Among other things, psychology seemed more promising professionally for her (especially more so than medicine, physics or mathematics). In addition, psychology would allow her to get closer to child development, a subject she was also curious about and which intensified especially while working on her master's thesis.

Barcroft introduced her, for example, to Francis Summer and Max Meenes, two psychologists who later became well known in educational psychology, pedagogy and child development, and with whom she worked on various research projects. With them, Mamie said, she felt a sense of welcome and shared interests. After finishing her studies, she worked in the psychology department of the same university.

Later she moved to New York and met Ruth and Gene Hartley, who were doing a lot of research on preschool childhood. Specifically, the Heartlys were interested, as was Phipps, in how self-identity developed. how the self-identification of preschoolers developed, and to analyze this they used drawings of children in preschool.They used drawings of black and white children to analyze this.

In this context of security, Mamie Phipps Clark did not even question how it was that a black woman had made it so far professionally in a white male field of study such as psychology. Mamie herself explains this as a silenced challenge that she recognized until she was doing her graduate studies, which led her to question in a major way 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 recounts that for the first time she found herself being the only black student in a doctoral department where all 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 conscious of their racialized identityand how this impacted the formation of their self-concept. Her research was entitled "The Development of Self Consciousness in Black Preschool Children." This soon became a line of research that became defining, both for psychology and in American politics.

Through his master's research, and as an extension of the same, the famous test or dummy test was developed. The latter consisted of presenting pre-school children with a white and a black doll.. They then measured their preferences (by asking them, for example, to give them the one they liked best); attitudes (by asking which one they thought was good or bad); and their ability to identify different groups racially. Finally, they assessed the children's ability to recognize themselves as members 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 later impacted should be recognized as Mamie's main project, in which he joined and collaborated later (Karera, 2010).

What is racial consciousness?

Mamie defined racial science as an awareness of the self as belonging to a group that is differentiated from other groups by phenotypic characteristics. The largest of their findings was that black children become aware of their racial identity around age 3, and simultaneously develop a fundamentally negative self-concept. Their findings established that the latter was determined by society's negative and racist definition of them in various spheres. Largely as a consequence of segregation policies.

His studies generated much 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-twentieth century. Likewise, the effects of racial segregation had an important legal impact on U.S. educational legislation.

Political impact

When Mamie Phipps finished school, she began clerking in a law office run by William Houston, among other important figures in the history of U.S. civil law. This office was one of the first to work on cases challenging racial segregation laws..

Among others, they dealt with what is currently known as the "Brown Case," in which American law declared it unconstitutional for public schools to separate black and white students. Something fundamental to argue in favor of the latter, and finally achieve it, was precisely the doll experiment.

Bibliographical references:

• Karera, A. (2010). Profile. Mamie Phipps Clark. Psychology's Feminist Voices. Retrieved July 05, 2018. Available at http://www.feministvoices.com/mamie-phipps-clark/.
• Guerrero Moreno, S. (2006). The development of racial awareness: a developmental study with Spanish children aged 3 to 5 years. PhD dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
• O'Connell, A. and Russo, N. (1983). Models of achievement: Reflections of eminent women in psychology. New York: Columbia University Press.