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The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education dealt a lethal blow to the "separate but equal" doctrine of segregation established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896; it did so largely on the grounds that segregation damages African American children's self-esteem. In the Court's words, "to separate [children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."1 Because of this psychological harm, the Court determined, African American children could never get an education equal to white children's in a segregated school, no matter how good the physical facilities or curriculum. To support its finding of psychological damage, the Court cited in a footnote a number of social science works, most notably a report by psychologist Kenneth Clark that summarized the results of "racial preference" tests he and his wife, Mamie, had conducted to assess African American children's racial identification.2 In the most famous of these tests, the Clarks asked children to choose between brown and white dolls in response to a series of questions, including which doll was the good one and which the bad, which doll they wanted to play with and which looked most like him or her.3 A majority of children identified a brown doll as looking like them, but chose a white doll to play with, as the nice one, and as the one with a nice color. The Clarks concluded that the children had internalized society's racist messages and thus suffered from wounded self-esteem. Effectively legitimating the Clarks' research, Brown established a discursive link between educational achievement and self-esteem for African Americans and spurred a veritable industry of racial preference testing that continues to this day. Social scientists have used racial preference tests to advocate policies on multiculturalism, self-segregation, affirmative action, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, resegregation, and the racial achievement gap.4
After Brown, the Clarks' studies set the parameters for virtually all subsequent research on racial identity, self-esteem, and child development5-even though they were discredited on methodological and statistical grounds in the late '60s and '70s. Moreover, subsequent research using direct tests of selfesteem, as opposed...