Mamie Phipps Clark: biography of this social psychologist

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

We'll see now a biography of Mamie Phipps Clark, one of the pioneers in the consolidation of twentieth century North American social psychology.

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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 context of double discrimination against black women, Mamie received various grant offers to pursue higher education studies. Options included Fisk University in Tennessee; and Howard University in Washington. They were also two of the most prestigious in the United States and their entry criteria was based on merit. They represent almost the only options for the elite of the black community.

Mamie decided to study in Washington. In 1934 she took courses in mathematics and also in languages. However, her motivation for her studies collided in an important way with the impersonal approach of her mathematics teachers, which was especially marked towards women, so she soon decided to change her option (Phipps Clark, in O'Connell and Russo, 1983).

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Beginnings in Child Psychology

While studying at Howard University, Mamie she met Kenneth Barcroft Clack, who was pursuing a master's degree in psychology. This relationship greatly influenced Mamie's interest in psychology. Among other things, psychology seemed more promising professionally for her (especially more than medicine, physics or mathematics careers). In addition, the psychologist would allow her to approach child development, a subject that also caused her curiosity and that she especially intensified while she was doing her master's thesis.

Barcroft introduced him, for example, to Francis Summer and Max Meenes, two later highly recognized psychologists her in educational psychology, pedagogy and child development, and with whom she worked on various research. With them, Mamie said, she was welcomed and with shared interests. After finishing her study, she worked in the psychology department of the same university.

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

In this security context, Mamie Phipps Clark did not even question how a woman the black woman had come so far professionally in a field of study for white men, as the psychology. Mamie herself explains this as a silenced challenge that she recognized until she was completing her graduate studies, and that led him to question in a significant way the racial segregation of public schools Americans.

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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, she tells Mamie that she for the first time found herself being the only black student in a doctoral department where all the members were white students. In fact, her husband, Kenneth Clark, had been the first black student to graduate as a doctor of 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 aware of their racialized identity, and how this impacts on the formation of their self-concept. Her research was titled "The Development of Self Awareness in Black Preschool Children." This soon became a line of inquiry that became decisive, both in psychology and in American politics.

Through her master's research, and as an extension of the same, the famous test or test of the dolls was developed. The latter consisted of present preschoolers with a white and a black doll. Later, they measured their preferences (for example, asking them to give them the one they liked the most); of attitudes (asking which one seems good or bad); and their ability to racially identify different groups. Finally, they evaluated the children's ability to recognize themselves as a member 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 subsequently impacted, should have been recognized as Mamie's main project, in which he later joined and collaborated (Karera, 2010).

What is racial consciousness?

Mamie defined racial science as a consciousness of the self that belongs to a group that is differentiated from other groups by phenotypic characteristics. The biggest of his results was that black children become aware of their racial identity around 3 years of age, and simultaneously develop a fundamentally negative self-concept. His results established that the latter was determined by the negative and racist definition that society made in different spheres. Largely as a consequence of segregation policies.

Her studies generated a lot of 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 US educational legislation.

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Political impact

When Mamie Phipps finished studying, she began working as a secretary in a legal office in charge of William Houston, among other important figures in the history of United States civil law. United. This office was one of the first to work with cases that challenged laws in favor of racial segregation..

Among others, they addressed what is currently known as the “Brown Case”, from which, the North American laws declared unconstitutional for public schools to be separated between black students and students white. Something fundamental to argue in favor of the latter, and finally to achieve it, was precisely the experiment of the dolls.

Bibliographic references:

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