Mamie Phipps Clark Essay

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Mamie Phipps Clark
Although Mamie Phipps Clark is not a common name in discussions of scientific and academic achievement, she remains a very influential psychologist over the course of history. Her work contributed to the disestablishment of school segregation and increased awareness in racial bias in children. She was well educated despite all the barriers against her. And she was a loving mother, husband, and friend to those who knew her. Mamie Phipps Clark is, for all intents and purposes, an extremely talented woman and an expert in her field of developmental psychology.
Mamie Phipps Clark was a renowned psychologist who researched on the detrimental effects of school segregation on black children. She was born to Katy Florence and Harold
One experiment that Phipps Clark is famous for is the Doll Experiment, in which she had black children chose between two dolls, one with light skin and one with dark, and assign them characteristics. She asked this of over 100 children from both segregated and integrated schools. The data she collected suggested that all though the majority of black children identified the darker doll to look like them, they assigned the black doll with negative traits and wanted to play with the white doll instead. However, it was shown that the children from integrated schools were more aware of the injustice and had more equal opinions on which doll was better. This research and discovery gave new knowledge on the perception of self image, and more particularly race, in children. It demonstrates how we are shaped from an early age by our environment, conditioned to think what is ‘nice’ or ‘mean’, ‘pretty’ or
This influenced the livelihood of countless children and their families by providing them with the psychiatric care they needed. Many of the children they served were racial minorities, and Phipps Clark and her husband observed that the children were often misdiagnosed at their schools compared to their white counterparts. Not only did the pair work tirelessly to provide aid to their community, but also they aimed to close the racial gap that scientific research and experimentation was often guilty of. The research and experiments that Phipps-Clark conducted were also integral in the Supreme Court case determining whether segregated schooling was unconstitutional or not; had that research not been presented in the case, history could have turned out very

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