During the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth Bancroft Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark

designed a test – The Doll Test, to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-
American children. This research and related work that attracted the attention of Robert
Carter of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Carter believed that Clark's findings could be
effectively used in court to show that segregation damaged the personality development of
black children. The Supreme Court specifically cited Clark’s 1950 paper in the Brown
decision. A majority of the African-American children from segregated schools preferred the
white doll and rejected the black doll. When the kids were asked to fill in a human figure
with the color of their own skin, they frequently chose a lighter shade than their actual skin
color. The children also gave the color 'white' positive attributes like good and pretty.
Whereas, 'black' was attributed to being bad and ugly. This result is same as the Kiri Davis ’s
project in 2006. She decided to replicate the famous Clark doll test after fifty-three years of
desegregation because she wanted to know if black school children would still prefer the
white doll to the black.

There are many people try to figure out the reason why African American children still prefer
the white doll to the black doll. Until now, we still do not know the correct answer because
they also depend on many reasons, including effects on the black kids of living in a racist
society. I think their living environment is the main reason affecting their choice. In fact,
there are still have many African-American children live in the bad condition, lack of their
parent’s love, and face to the contempt of the white friends of the same age. Through the
video “Black or White something to think about,” I feel there is a reluctance in the selection
of white and black dolls. I mean this coercion does not come from those who work in peace,
but from within them. Their attitude is unhappy, especially as they talked that they like the
black doll - bad and ugly. As Thelma Dye, Ph.D. shared her view in the video about the
feeling of their selection that it likes a painful what every black child self-esteem is suffering.
It may be because they thought that their choice would help them to reduce the mockery of
people in the surrounding environment after the results were announced because they selected
the answer that was always correct. This result shows how racial segregation interfered with
students' personality development, and there are still many people in the country who racist
and have a discrimination against African American. It actually affected psychologically to
black children about race.

Nowadays, although racial discrimination has been reduced and the government enacted rules
to protect these blacks from racial segregation, this problem still appears on television or
society every day. This thing will make the segregation bigger because the African-American
children can recognize the difference between themselves and the white people. They feel shy
and hate themselves because they are not the white people who the black children believe are
better and prettier than them. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSFqnUFOns 

https://www.theroot.com/the-doll-test-for-racial-self-hate-did-it-ever-make-se-1790875716 

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/13/doll.study/index.html