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ravenI am having an immensely frustrating morning. Immensely. Aaargh. Okay, this week's reading: Plessy v Ferguson, the infamous 1896 Supreme Court case that decrees that "separate" can be "equal", and there is nothing unconstitutional about making black people ride in separate railway carriages. The opinion contains such gems as:
"...underlying fallacy... the enforced separation of the two races stamps the coloured race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found but soletely because the coloured race chooses to put that construction upon it."
and
"If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane."
Then comes Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954), possibly the most famous case in American jurisprudence, which decides that separate is not equal and thus segregation in schools is unconstitutional. I apologise for the Legal History 101 going on here. Anyway, the point of it for my purposes at the moment is that it made the use of social science evidence in courtrooms mainstream. The study in question, the Clark doll study, involved two groups of black children - about 200 of them from the segregated South, and another group from somewhere in Massachusetts, where schools were integrated. Each child was given two dolls - one white, with yellow hair, and one brown with dark hair. They were asked which doll they wanted to play with, which doll has a nice colour, and which doll was "bad", etc., and were told to hand the relevant doll to the experimenter.
Of course, a significant percentage of the children in both groups picked the white doll - the white doll is "nice", the white doll is the one I want to play with, etc.
Then came a cute study, done by some high school students. Here it is - it's quick and telling. Same idea, same methodology, same results, only now it is not 1954. Small children are socialised, at an early age, into believing white is good and anything else is bad. Hi, I could have told you that. I wasn't a playing-with-dolls kind of child, but I do remember the only brown doll I ever had. It was wearing a sari - do I, or the brown people I know, wear saris every day? - and was probably called Exoticism Barbie or some such thing.
But the class were very impressed. Oh, the things that you learn! Isn't it surprising, and interesting that small children should think that even now! I mean, it's not like anything in their culture might make them thing that being brown was bad, for heaven's sake! It's not like everyone on TV is white and everyone in authority is white and brown people are exotic, angry, foreign, strange and ugly, or anything like that, is it!
You know, it's amazing how often I find myself moved to quote from Angels in America, but, seriously, I am trapped in a world of white people.
What do you even do, though? If you jump up and down and shout, "hi, you are all WRONG, about EVERYTHING", you come across as the freakish foreign brown girl, again.
Oh waaaaaaail. I want a muffin and a chocolate bar and for everyone to just GO AWAY.
"...underlying fallacy... the enforced separation of the two races stamps the coloured race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found but soletely because the coloured race chooses to put that construction upon it."
and
"If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane."
Then comes Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954), possibly the most famous case in American jurisprudence, which decides that separate is not equal and thus segregation in schools is unconstitutional. I apologise for the Legal History 101 going on here. Anyway, the point of it for my purposes at the moment is that it made the use of social science evidence in courtrooms mainstream. The study in question, the Clark doll study, involved two groups of black children - about 200 of them from the segregated South, and another group from somewhere in Massachusetts, where schools were integrated. Each child was given two dolls - one white, with yellow hair, and one brown with dark hair. They were asked which doll they wanted to play with, which doll has a nice colour, and which doll was "bad", etc., and were told to hand the relevant doll to the experimenter.
Of course, a significant percentage of the children in both groups picked the white doll - the white doll is "nice", the white doll is the one I want to play with, etc.
Then came a cute study, done by some high school students. Here it is - it's quick and telling. Same idea, same methodology, same results, only now it is not 1954. Small children are socialised, at an early age, into believing white is good and anything else is bad. Hi, I could have told you that. I wasn't a playing-with-dolls kind of child, but I do remember the only brown doll I ever had. It was wearing a sari - do I, or the brown people I know, wear saris every day? - and was probably called Exoticism Barbie or some such thing.
But the class were very impressed. Oh, the things that you learn! Isn't it surprising, and interesting that small children should think that even now! I mean, it's not like anything in their culture might make them thing that being brown was bad, for heaven's sake! It's not like everyone on TV is white and everyone in authority is white and brown people are exotic, angry, foreign, strange and ugly, or anything like that, is it!
You know, it's amazing how often I find myself moved to quote from Angels in America, but, seriously, I am trapped in a world of white people.
What do you even do, though? If you jump up and down and shout, "hi, you are all WRONG, about EVERYTHING", you come across as the freakish foreign brown girl, again.
Oh waaaaaaail. I want a muffin and a chocolate bar and for everyone to just GO AWAY.
