Bag of Worms Yet Words

Religion and Social Science

The Midcentury White House Conference report*, that provided essential social science support for the Brown decision of 1954, emphasized the importance of religion for the formation of the healthy child's personality. The report's discussion is so forthright that, from today's perspective, it is surprising; it provides a measure of the secularization the social sciences have undergone in the past fifty years.

"Children's well-being is dependent in large part upon their parents' sense of self-worth and ... that sense is intimately related to the values and workings of the society in which they live. The ethical and moral affirmations of religion constitute the base on which all this rests and from which social malfunctioning can be criticized. In this widest sense, then, religion is basic to healthy personality."(P. 160.)

The role of religion, the report said, was to provide ideas of the meaningfulness of life that the child requires. The healthy child has an inner assurance of her importance to the world. She believes that the world is set up so that she can make sense of her life.

"The individual must have some conception of the universe as meaningful and benevolent, and of his place in it. He must integrate his life around some ethical or religious concepts. Honor, grace, faith, courage: some integrating idea or idea must replace his parents as the objects of dependency and trust."(P. 159.)

The Judaeo-Christian tradition makes the individual responsible for what she does with her life. It provides a framework for a realistic understanding of human agency. Each person has both strengths and weaknesses. No situation is ordained; no situation is hopeless. No weakness or fault makes a person utterly worthless. Persons have the opportunity to transcend their weaknesses and faults and thereby to activate their strengths.

Religious education is an important part of child rearing. The spiritual qualities of each child must be cultivated and strengthened. They bind together the material circumstances of life and our psychological attitudes toward those material circumstances. Spiritual education helps create a total personality - whole and balanced.

Religion also provides ideals. Ideals are important as goals toward which the growing child should strive. During adolescence, the child learns of the sordid aspects of life and about failure of society to live up to its ideals; religion teaches the child not to accept failings with dismay, but to have hope in the child's and humankind's ultimate ability to overcome those failings.

"To be able to look squarely at the life that is before them without blinders or rosy glasses and to deal with it without either false stimulation or an opiate, children and youth need faith in God."(P. 222.)

The report does not blink before the issue of teaching the child about the existence of God. The healthy child learns to believe in God and to have faith in God as the source of ultimate meaning and hope for human ventures.

The belief in God is important, finally, in teaching the child to live in harmony with other peoples. God is God of all peoples. God is the source of meaning of everyone's experiences.

At a distance of fifty years, we can stand back from this report and evaluate its position on religion. We can see that religious faith was an important part of the lives of African Americans, strengthening them to cope with segregation and to fight against it. We can also see that religion was an important ingredient in making African American culture healthy (in contradistinction to the conclusions of the Myrdal report, American Dilemma).

Why did this acknowledgment of the importance of religious faith to American life  disappear from American social science? Here we can only suggest answers. The allegiance of many social scientists to Marxism and co-existence with communism during the Cold War would have led them diminish the importance of religion to American life. The influence of European secular humanist philosophies - especially existentialism and post-modernism - helped to deprive religion of intellectual legitimacy. Radical feminism spurned religion, viewing religion as conservative and opposed to the complete social emancipation of women.

Public schools, too, played a role, because of the total school program. The total school program, impelled by the Brown decision, turned over the emotional development of children to the state through the public schools. With much of the child's growth controlled by schools, religion would have to be removed from children's lives, because of constitutional prohibition of state sponsorship of religion.

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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.). Esp. chapter VII, "Religion as an Aid to Healthy Personality Development," and chapter X, "The Church and the Synagogue."

The Reign of Subjectivity (9) Past Future

A Concluding Discussion of How Ideas Work

Placing the injured subjectivity of segregated minority children at the center of the inequality of segregated education, in the Brown decision, the Supreme Court provided the template of debate for social science research in education for the next several generations. But the decision did more; it set out an agenda for philosophical exploration of subjectivity that came, eventually, to dominate philosophical thinking, ideology, and pedagogy in the U.S.

When we examine philosophy and intellectual history, for instance, in Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989), ideas seems to be born, grow, expand, and pass away in insulated intellectual traditions. But ideas do not have a life of their own; they must be lived in the minds of persons. These persons in turn must live in society.  All history, life, and vitality of ideas we discuss today must exist in a sociology that sponsors them.

The Brown decision, as the law that shapes American education, replaced a deeply rooted sociology of race relations and education that existed in law for nearly sixty years, with a new sociology of race relations and education. The strengths, weakness, and  political contests of this new sociology created and shaped the way ideas about subjectivity would be discussed.

We will explore one of the major conditions of subjectivity created by the Brown decision in future articles. This condition is the weakness of empirical social science research upon which the Brown decision rested. For two decades, social scientists conducted research to shore up and to test the empirical basis of Brown's social science. But evidence was slow to come, slow to decide debate; while the law moved forward. To compensate for the weakness of empirical research, I believe, philosophy began a great preoccupation with subjectivity.

It is true that Western society has been preoccupied with subjectivity for hundreds of years. It is true also that in the first half of the twentieth century, before the Brown decision, psychology, as in Freud, child psychology, and psychological therapeutics, and philosophy, as in the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger and Sartre, made subjectivity a central concern. But the mere existence of these traditions and developments in books and seminars did not compel anyone to devote a second of their time to subjectivity. It is sociology, including political conflict, that compels attention to philosophy. A great shift in social relations was required to set off the great development of subjectivity philosophy in postmodernism, pedagogy, and feminism. And a great shift of social relations was required to stop Marxist-Stalinist philosophy, which denigrated subjectivity in favor of objectivity, in its tracks in the 1970s. The Brown decision was the cause of this shift.

The Reign of Subjectivity (8)

Pathological Subjectivity

One of the most famous social science sources cited by the Supreme Court in the Brown decision is Gunnar Myrdal's The American Dilemma, published in 1944 in two volumes (1483 pages plus front matter). Myrdal's study resulted from an invitation by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1937, which committed itself to the study of the African American in the 1930s.

Myrdal, a Swedish economist, laid out the initial research plan for the study. He assembled a group of social scientists, including African American scholars, and consulted with a much larger group of scholars and social scientists, including the African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier. The Carnegie Corporation paid for a large staff that included Ralph J. Bunche, and utilized African American scholars for special research tasks, including St. Clair Drake and Frazier. As research materials accumulated, the Carnegie Corporation published four specialized volumes, in addition to Myrdal's work.

In view of the vast collaboration, we may say that The American Dilemma had  African American scientific compliance. Myrdal stated his acknowledgments this way:

"The collaboration in the study--which embraced, in friendship and concerted efforts, white and Negro men and women of different specialties, ages, and different accomplishments--gave more than is contained in the 15,000 typewritten pages of manuscript. Even about the specific problems of race relations, which we were studying together, I learned much more from our informal conferences than I can ever duly account for in this book."(P. xiv.)

I have emphasized the contribution of African American scholars and social scientists to the composition of The American Dilemma, because I want to bring forward one theoretical premise of this study that bore directly on the Supreme Court's Brown decision.

One problem Myrdal faced was how African American community, society, and culture, as they were studied in the late 1930s, should be conceived. This problem was a different problem from studying Negro sociological characteristics or accumulating vital statistics or reciting anecdotes from literary sources. How the community was to be interpretively portrayed would be important for the findings and recommendations of the research. Presumably, this interpretation would have the stamp of approval of the African American scholars and social scientists who contributed to the research.

So it is of interest to read that Negro culture, to use the vocabulary of the 1940s, was pathological. Here is appropriate quotation, with the original italicization:

"In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture. The instability of the Negro family, the inadequacy of educational facilities for Negroes, the emotionalism in the Negro church, the insufficiency and unwholesomeness of Negro recreational activity, the plethora of Negro sociable organizations, the narrowness of interests of the average Negro, the provincialism of his political speculation, the high Negro crime rate, the cultivation of the arts to the neglect of other fields, superstition, personality difficulties, and other characteristic traits are mainly forms of social pathology which, for the most part, are created by the caste pressures."(Pp. 928-929.)

Eventually, Black Americans reacted against the attribution of pathology; this was, generally speaking, the genesis of the intellectual component of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and later. Black Power is another story apart from our current subject; here we need to note what this characterization of the African American did for the Brown decision and the reign of subjectivity.

When the Supreme Court justices ruled that segregated education created negative self-evaluation--inferiority and humiliation--in segregated minority children, the justices were drawing upon the Myrdal work, as well as upon child psychology and mental hygienist theory of the Midcentury White House Conference. For Myrdal and coauthors stated that all segregated Black society was pathological. The Court would have had reason to believe it had the authority of African American scholars themselves for their conclusions. To be a Black person in segregated America was to suffer a pathological subjectivity. In education and by implication in American society at large, the main task of the reform of racial relations would be, focusing on each person's subjectivity, to end the pathological deformation of personhood due to the inherent, nearly metaphysical, contradiction between American ideals of universal equality and American practice of segregation. So the Court ruled.

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* Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944).

The Reign of Subjectivity (7)

Misleading the Evidence, II, The African American Family

One of the social science sources cited by the Supreme Court in support of the claim of the detrimental emotional effect of segregation on segregated minority children was work of E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States (1949).* The Court referenced pages 674-681 of Frazier's work. The citation of Frazier's detailed sociological study of Black people was especially significant in light of the effort of the Social Science Statement to disentangle the effects of discrimination generally and the social condition of African Americans from the effect of segregation specifically on school children. We have already seen that the Statement glossed over both the difficulty of disentangling these effects and the lack of direct empirical evidence for the effect of segregation on children on their later adult life. Frazier, a Black sociologist, received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was the most important social scientist studying the Black family and the successor to the W. E. B. Du Bois, who had pioneered the scientific study of the African American family fifty years earlier.

The cited passage discusses, to quote its section heading, the "effects of discrimination on the Negro."(P. 674.) The passage reviews the effect of discrimination of the African American and on the white Americans who do the discriminating. Frazier  began by stating that separate but equal education produces inferior education and has been responsible for causing "the high rate of illiteracy to continue among Negroes since Emancipation."(Pp. 675-675.) This illiteracy led to the "mental isolation of Negroes" that later migrations around the United States did not alleviate. Then the passage goes on to discuss how discrimination prevented African Americans from "[achieving] the full stature of a man through competition with whites."(P. 676). Because of prejudice and discrimination, white Americans do not know the African American; white Americans cannot test their prejudices against reality. Over time, social isolation caused by illiteracy and discrimination led to the creation of the African American an a distinct minority in American life, which, Frazier argued, they had not been under slavery.

Frazier's argument that discrimination had profound effects on Black people certainly was based on an extraordinarily extensive and deep knowledge of African Americans and their history. Nonetheless, Frazier did not argue that segregated education causes a sense of inferiority in African American children, and that the sense of inferiority caused by segregated education leads to diminished achievement later in the child's life (the argument for which the Supreme Court argument cited social science support and cited Frazier).

Frazier did not make this argument, because he did not believe it. Indeed, he did not think that segregated education was the primary cause for the diminished educational accomplishment of Black children or the lack of achievement later in life. As he made abundantly clear, on the basis of decades of study of the African American family, he thought the disorganized state of the African American family was the primary reason for the lack of educational accomplishment of African American children. And he made this argument at great length in this book cited by the Supreme Court.

He devoted two long chapters to the Black family - chapter XIII, "The Negro Family," in Part 3, "The Negro Community and Its Institutions," and chapter XXIV, "Family Disorganization," in Part 5, "Problems of Adjustment." He also treated the problem of family disorganization in relation to education in chapter XVII, "Elementary and Secondary Schools," in Part 4, "Intellectual Life and Leadership."

By family disorganization, Frazier referred specifically to desertion and illegitimacy. By desertion, he meant men, whether as common law or legal husbands or as long-term partners, who have sired children, abandoning their families and family responsibilities. By illegitimacy, he meant bearing children out of wedlock.  He thought that promiscuity contributed to both problems (i.e., the problems were not simply matters of unemployment, poverty, or an unhealthy environment, but also had to do with morals). He demonstrated statistically that poor families were less stable (i.e., more prone to desertion and illegitimacy) and middle class families more stable; but middle class families became unstable when their economic security was removed.

Frazier drew an important conclusion about the effect of family disorganization on African Americans. He related his conclusion directly to the issue of education. I quote his conclusion at length, because it contradicted, not subtly, the argument of the Social Science Statement to the Supreme Court and the Court decision itself.

"General Effects of Family Disorganization on Negro Community.

"The widespread disorganization of family life among Negroes has affected practically every phase of their community life and adjustment to the larger white world. Because of the absence of stability in family life, there is a lack of traditions. Life among a large portion of the urban Negro population is casual, precarious, and fragmentary. It lacks continuity and its roots do not go deeper than the contingencies of daily living. This affects the socialization of the Negro child. With a fourth to a third of Negro families in cities without a male head, many Negro children suffer the initial handicap of not having the discipline and authority of the father in the home. Negro mothers who have the responsibility for the support of the family are forced to neglect their children who pick up all forms of socially disapproved behavior in the disorganized areas in which these families are concentrated.

"Without the direction provided by family traditions and the discipline of parents, large numbers of Negro children grow up without aims and ambitions. The formal instruction provided by the public schools cannot make up for the deficiency in family training. In fact, much of the Negro child's lack of interest in education is attributable to the fact that it is unrelated to the experiences in the family. Moreover, the lack of employment opportunities for Negro youth helps to encourage the aimlessness and lack of ambition among Negro youths without a normal family life. Thus family disorganization and social and economic forces in the community unite to create a sense of irresponsibility among Negro youth. Out of such an environment comes the large number of criminals and juvenile delinquents in the cities of the country."(Pp. 636-637.)**

Segregation was related to the problems faced by the African American child in school. It exacerbated problems, but did not, however, create them. In the chapter on education, Frazier stated:

"There are important factors in the cultural background of the Negro that have an unfavorable influence on the relation of the Negro children to the public school in the northern city. There is a large amount of family disorganization among Negroes in northern cities which results from the impact of city life upon the simple family organization which developed in the South. This affects not only the school attendance of Negro children and their behavior in school but it affects their learning and their interest in school. The influence of the cultural background is intensified where the Negro child is segregated and does not expect the reward of an improved economic status when he has completed his education. The situation is aggravated by the tendency on the part of vocational guidance teachers to discourage Negro students from preparing themselves for jobs other than those traditionally held by Negroes."(Pp.443-444.)

Frazier's discussion reveals to us the decisions made by the authors of the Social Science Statement regarding their rhetorical strategy in the Statement. Clark, the principal author, could well have made the argument following the line of Frazier's research, which certainly documented the effect of discrimination and segregation on the education of the child and the child's opportunity to use education later in life. But doing so would have led Clark and other social scientists to the problem (as Frazier saw it) of African American family disorganization, rather than segregated education as the primary issue.

Frazier also discussed the motivational discouragement of African American children in school, as the quotation above makes clear, but he ascribed this discouragement primarily to family conditions. If the authors of the Social Science Statement were to make the segregated school's emotional impact on the child the linchpin of the claim that segregated education was unequal, they would need a different approach from Frazier's research. As we saw in a previous article, however, there was little direct research to the point that Clark wished to make. Hence, the authors of the Statement relied on theory - child psychology and mental hygienist theory.

It is important to note, in conclusion, that subjectivity was raised as the test of inequality on theoretical grounds; for theory would be the main support of subjectivity in its subsequent career in American education.

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* E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949).

** A recent scientific study brings us back to Frazier's insight. See, Kenneth I. Maton and Freeman A. Hrabowski III, "Increasing the Number of African American PhDs in the Sciences and Engineering; A Strengths-Based Approach,"  59 American Psychologist (September 2004), pp. 547-556. Maton and Hrabowski studied African American students in the University of Maryland Baltimore County's Meyerhoff Scholars Program, which is intended to increase African American students and graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics curricula. They studied the academic careers of the first four entering cohorts (1989-1992), along with several control groups. They looked particularly at the "contextual factors" of African American student success. They found family background and household type to be crucial. Here is their brief summary of findings:

"... A number of common themes emerged [from the study of successful students]. Specifically, the combined importance of determined and persistent parental academic engagement, strict discipline, child-focused love, and community connectedness appeared important to counteract potentially negative contextual influences of neighborhood, peers, schools, and society."(P. 552.)

The Reign of Subjectivity (6)

Learning to be an Agent of Accomplishment

Let us place the characterization of segregated minority children by the Social Science Statement of 1953 in the context of the child psychology and mental hygienist theories of the Midcentury White House Conference of 1950.

According to the child psychologists, the preschool stages of personality growth saw the successive development of trust, autonomy, and initiative. The fourth stage brought development of the "sense of duty and accomplishment."* The Midcentury Conference report cited the wording of psychiatrist, Erik Erikson, who described the fourth stage as creating, in the child, "the sense of industry." (P. 17.) This stage began at about six years of age and lasted for five or six years; that is, it coincided with the lower elementary grades of school.

Here is how the report explains what happens to the child in this stage:

"This is the period in which preoccupation with phantasy subsides and the child wants to be engaged in real tasks that he can carry through to completion."(P. 17.)

In the elementary school years, the child learns how to engage reality by making goals, planning their execution, and working through the plan. Growth in this stage would be thwarted if the child never experiences success in her plans. Failure would affect the child's adult years by crippling her sense of her ability to be effective in living. Here is how the report put the issue:

"The chief danger of this period is the presence of conditions that may lead to the development of a sense of inadequacy and inferiority. This may be the outcome if the child has not yet achieved a sense of initiative, or if his experiences at home have not prepared him for entering school happily, or if he finds school a place where his previous accomplishments are disregarded or his latent abilities are not challenged. Even with a good start the child may later lapse into discouragement and lack of interest if at home or school his individual needs are overlooked--if too much or too little is expect of him or if he is made to feel that achievement is beyond his ability. It is most important for health of personality, therefore, that schools be conducted well, that methods and courses of instruction be such as will give every child the feeling of successful accomplishment."(P. 18.)

In the absence of adequate empirical evidence regarding the effect of school segregation on the young minority student, the Social Science Statement drew inferences from psychological theories. The inference to be drawn from the theory of the stage of duty and accomplishment was that segregation crippled the minority child's sense of industry. Minority children could not grow up into industrious adults, because that portion of their personalities required for such active agency had been stunted by segregation.

The key to power of the inferential conclusion drawn by the Social Science Statement was its setting aside other explanations of the crippling of the minority child's sense of industry. In the long quotation above, from the Midcentury Conference report, it is clear that preschool life and home life were considered important factors in making the child ready to obtain a sense of its agency in the real world. The school was but one institution that could stunt the child in the elementary school years. The statement, "If his experiences at home have not prepared him for entering school happily," points to the major problem: a crippling home life.

The Social Science Statement set aside scientific concerns about the home life and family life of Black school children in order not to dilute the power of its conclusion regarding the negative psychological impact of segregated education on minority children. This was a rhetorical strategy that would create one of the great ideological and political divisions in American racial policy. Progressive liberal opinion would generally side with the Social Science Statement; it would call for the "total school" to solve minority children's psychological problems. Conservative opinion would disagree with the Statement, maintaining that the disordered state of the African American family was the crucial problem; the schools could not solve psychological problems created by chaotic families. Conservatives would call for reconstitution of the Black family and limiting the schools to academic education.

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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.), p. 17 ff. The report is hereafter cited only by page number.

The Reign of Subjectivity (5)

The Feeling Child

By requiring the end of segregation on the basis of segregation's emotional impact on the segregated pupil, the Supreme Court mandated a new pedagogy based on a new child psychology for all schools and all children. This apparently unintended consequence sprang out of the theoretical source of the Social Science Statement's conclusions. This theoretical source was an extreme extension of progressive, child-centered pedagogy called "the mental-hygiene approach" to education.*

Two streams of understanding about child psychology came together in the mental-hygiene approach to education. One stream was the child psychologists' theory of "periods of emotional development" of children. The other stream was mental-hygienists' theory of "stages of socialized emotional maturation."#

According to the Midcentury White House Conference's summary of then current understanding of child psychology, every child grows from birth to adulthood through a sequence of stages (or periods). In each stage, one particular emotional development is central and is required for the eventual emergence of a healthy adult personality. These stages with their emotional development are**:

Birth to 12-15 months = trust
1 year to 3 years = autonomy
4 years to 5 years = initiative
6 years to 12 years = duty and accomplishment
adolescence = (personal) identity
late adolescence = intimacy
early adulthood = parenting sense
adulthood = integrity

Each developmental level involves the relationship of a child with other persons, that is, is social; or (to put it in my own words) is social enframing of emotional development. Mental-hygienists looked at the periods of emotional development in terms of the child who had difficulty fulfilling - or failed to fulfill - the particular emotional growth that was the central problem of a developmental level. Incomplete growth changed the kinds of purposive behavior the child was capable of expressing as she grew older. It also changed the dynamics between the child and the teacher. For the emotionally immature child at any stage of development, the teacher would become the focus of the central issue of that stage.

Consider the example of the child who is not permitted to say "no!" in the 1 to 3 year period.

"If he is not given opportunity to do this, he may fail to develop an adequate sense of himself as an operating force in his world and so continue throughout life to assert himself with a persistent and relatively incorrect negativism, or in some other ways equally inappropriate and unfortunate. Or he may remain always ineffective and unassertive, full of doubt."(Pp. 245-246.)

The child's teacher in the lower grades would have to deal with the child's emotional immaturity before the teacher could teach a subject matter. The child would not be capable of being an active agent of her own learning. Readiness to learn is not intellectual; readiness to learn is emotional.

The Midcentury Conference report clearly laid out the conclusion of this line of reasoning.

"[The mental-hygienist approach] emphasizes the predominance of feelings toward persons in the child's experience, and the extent to which these feelings pervade his response to all new situations, whether primarily social in nature of not. And it holds, furthermore, that the feeling life is prior and basic, playing such a fundamental role in experience that all other learnings are acquired in its terms."(P. 252.)

The child's (hence, the pupil's) emotional development precedes and conditions cognitive development. Academic curriculum must be made secondary to the school's fosterage of the child's emotional development.

"... Purposes, feelings, attitudes, ways of life, and  personal dedications are seen to be learned as well as subject matter, and ... subject matter is not and cannot be learned without at the same time learning attitudes and ways of life."(P. 258.)

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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.), p. 238 ff.

# The phrase, socialized emotional maturation, is mine. It is intended to point to the major elements of the mental hygienists' theory.

** Witmer and Kotinsky, Personality in the Making, pp. 5-26. The chronological boundaries are general or overlapping, because each child's development is individual.

The Reign of Subjectivity (4)

Misleading the Issue of Evidence

The Social Science Statement submitted to the Supreme Court in the Brown hearings in 1953, was an excerpted draft from a report, "The Effects of Prejudice and Discrimination," presented at the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1950.*

The 1950 Draft and the 1953 Social Science Statement are different documents, of course, because the Statement is only (est.) 3800 words, while the Draft is (est.) 10,000 words. The Statement generally addresses "segregated groups," while making it clear it was focusing on the American Negro. The Draft addresses, in addition to Black Americans, Jews, Mexicans, and Italians as minorities who had received prejudice and discrimination. The Draft drew extensively on social science studies of Anti-Semitism. This subject was omitted from the Statement.

The main difference between the Statement and the Draft concerns the evidence for findings about the effect of segregation on African American children. Presented to other social scientists, and to a federal agency that employed social scientists, the Draft made it clear that there was little scientific evidence regarding the effect of prejudice, discrimination, and/or segregation on the personality formation of African American children.

"In spite of a wealth of material on the existence of prejudice and discrimination, on its origins, and on means of reducing these un-American attitudes, there is little in the scientific literature on the precise effects of prejudice and discrimination on health of personality."(Pp. 135-136.)

There was more research conducted on the effects of segregation on other ethnic and racial minorities, than on African Americans; so the author of the Draft intended to draw upon those studies. Making inferences was difficult, however, because children of different groups reacted differently to segregation; caution was warranted:

"In connection with what follows it must be remembered, however, the various minority groups that are affected by prejudice and discrimination differ greatly in their situation, and that the impact of adverse circumstances varies considerably from individual to individual. There are great differences between the situations of, say, Jews and Negroes, and within each group there are further differentiations."(Pp. 136.)

The admonition about evidence was repeated later in the Draft in a cautionary remark about research methods:

"Unfortunately for scientific accuracy and adequacy, thoroughly satisfactory methods of determining the effects of prejudice and discrimination on health of personality have not yet been devised, nor has a sufficient number of studies dealing with the various minority groups been made."(Pp. 140.)

Concern about inaccurate research methods was reinforced by quoting from scientific study by the social scientist, Otto Klineberg:

"'Conclusions obtained through the use of tests cannot be more valid than the test used.... Completely satisfactory research in this field will have to wait until psychologists have devised more adequate measure for the study of personality.'"(Pp.140.)

Such frank characterization of inadequacy in previous research studies and caution regarding available research methods is expected and appropriate in scientific study. Within the context of such prefatory explanation, the Draft then draws tentative conclusions, carefully qualifying inferences to restrict them to the available evidence.

The Statement** abandoned the tone of scientific caution. While disentangling the effects of segregation from other forms of discrimination was difficult, the Statement acknowledged, evidence permitted social scientists to present findings  confidently. Notice the shift in language in the Statement's characterization of the Midcentury White House Conference's findings.

"It [the Conference's report] highlighted the fact that ..."(P. 495).

"The report goes on to point out that ..."(P. 496.)

"The report indicates ..."(P. 496; this language is repeated several times, p. 496.)

"The evidence suggests ..."(P. 496.)

"Studies have show ..."(P. 496.)

"On the basis of this general fund of knowledge, it seems likely ..."(P. 497.)

"It may be noted that many of these social scientists supported their opinions on the effects of segregation ... by reference to one or another or several of the following four lines of published and unpublished evidence..."(P. 498.)

"The available scientific evidence indicates that much, perhaps all, ..."(P. 498.)

"The most direct evidence available on this problem comes from observations and systematic study of instances in which desegregation has occurred. Comprehensive reviews of such instances clearly establish the fact that ..."(P. 498.)

"The available evidence also suggests ..."(P. 499.)

Only at the end of the Statement do its authors acknowledge that the language of the Statement constitutes a shading and an interpretation of incomplete and inadequate research:

"The problem with which we have here attempted to deal is admittedly on the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Inevitably, there must be some differences of opinion among us concerning the conclusiveness of certain items of evidence, and concerning the particular choice of words and placement of emphasis in the preceding statement. We are nonetheless in agreement that this statement is substantially correct and justified by the evidence ..."(P. 499.)

Whether the social science research summarized in the Statement constituted a sufficiently strong rock for the Court to anchor its findings on inequality of segregated schools is not the point of this brief article. Rather, the point has to do with the consequences of the Brown decision.

The Brown decision did more than end segregated public education; it forced a new educational philosophy into the schools, profoundly reshaping the content of instruction and changing the role of schools in American society for all students, not just formerly segregated students. It was for those other consequences, a revolution in the ontology of American life, that the social science research was an inadequate anchor.

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* [Kenneth B.Clark], "The Effects of Prejudice and Discrimination," pp. 135-158, in Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.). The White House conference was apparently sponsored by the Children's Bureau, Federal Security Agency.

** Kenneth B. Clark, Isidor Chein, and Stuart W. Cook, "The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation; A Social Science Statement," reprinted in American Psychologist 59 (September 2004), 495-501.

The Reign of Subjectivity (3)

Inferiority and Humiliation

In the hearings before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, some of America's leading social scientists submitted an amicus curiae statement regarding "The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation."* This testimony, the evidence it cited, and other scientific testimony cited by the Court in its decision, were the basis for the argument that separate-but-equal education devastated the psyche of segregated minority children. The statement was signed by thirty-two scientists, most of whom were well-known professors.

The statement reports two key findings from social science and psychological studies presented at a 1950 conference.**

The first finding was that segregated minority children "often react with feelings of inferiority and a sense of personal humiliation" to their segregation. Here is how the statement put the matter:

"The report indicates that as minority children learn the inferior status to which they are assigned--as they observe the fact that they are almost always segregated and kept apart from others who are treated with more respect by the society as a whole--they often react with feelings of inferiority and a sense of personal humiliation. Many of them become confused about their own personal worth." (Pp. 495-496.)

The second finding was that the psychological effects of segregation on children last beyond their school years and often produce destructive behavior. Here is the relevant language.

"... the evidence suggests that all of these children are unnecessarily encumbered in some ways by segregation and its concomitants." (Pp. 496.)

The statement acknowledged the difficulty of isolating, observing, and measuring the psychological effects of segregated education, as distinguished from the effects of general prejudice against minority children and as distinguished from social disorganization in the minority community. The scientists believed they had nonetheless found in empirical research that segregation was especially powerful in its adverse effects on children. The power of segregated education derived in part from the "symbols of authority, the full force of the authority of the state" involved in enforcing segregation. (Pp. 497.)

It was important to note that the inferiority and humiliation produced by segregation often produced, in the children, "a generally defeatist attitude and a lowering of personal ambitions. This, for example, is reflected in a lowering of pupil morale and a depression of the eduational aspiration level among minority group childen in segregated schools. In producing such effects, segregated schools impair the ability of the child to profit from the educational opportunities provided him." (Pp. 496.)

The implication of the scientists' findings was that the highest priority need was to raise the minority children's self-worth (through integrating schools) first, so the children could then learn more effectively. Enhancing self-worth through family reconstitution or reducing minority social disorganization would not be effective without de-segregation, because the positive effects of family and social betterment would out-weighed by the deleterious effects of segregation enforced by the state.

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* Kenneth B. Clark, Isidor Chein, and Stuart W. Cook, "The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation; A Social Science Statement," reprinted in American Psychologist 59 (September 2004), 495-501.

** Kenneth B. Clark, "Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development," Fact Finding Report Mid-century White House Conference on Children and Youth, Children's Bureau, Federal Security Agency 1950 (mimeographed at the time, but subsequently published in book form).

The Reign of Subjectivity (2)

Feelings of Inferiority

The Brown decision [ BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) ], decided on May 17, 1954, and delivered by Chief Justice Warren in June, declared that state-funded public educational segregation of white and Negro students, even when the physical facilities of the segregated students are equal, violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and is therefore unconstitutional. The ruling ended "separate but equal" educational policy based on the 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson [PLESSY v. FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)].

The Court found that substantive equality of physical facilities did not provide equality before the law as required by the Fourteenth amendment. The issue of equality had to be judged in terms of an extended understanding of how learning occurs in education and the role of education in American life. Drawing upon scattered lower court findings [esp. Briggs v Elliott (see Dissenting Opinion of Judge Waites Waring ...), the Supreme Court concluded that inequality arises in the effect of segregated education on the quality of learning the student achieves and the opportunities opened to students by their schooling.

For segregated Black students, the mere fact of segregation means they are, in the view of white citizens and students, inferior to white students. Black students come to feel inferior. Their sense of inferiority lowers their motivation to learn, leaving them with an incomplete education. When they leave school, their incomplete education reduces their opportunities for success in American life. Their assumption of inferiority leads to the fact of inferiority, hence inequality.

Justice Warren quoted the key logic from a lower court decision:

"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system."

A close look at this logic would reveal assumptions.

The Court assumed that separation would induce a feeling of inferiority; rather than separation providing the segregated students with the opportunity for self-defined fields to earn feelings of merit.

It also assumed that a feeling of inferiority would cripple motivation to compete and to succeed; rather than motivating a desire to compete and overcome odds.

We should point out here, as a theme to which we will return later, what the Court effectively did. The Court made the subjective feelings of the students the test of inequality. Those feelings would have objective products and indicators, such as diminished achievement in adult life, but the Court did not provide any reason to believe that lack of objective indicators of subjective feelings of inferiority would negate the existence of such feelings as the test of inequality.

The Supreme Court was aware that their assumptions might be challenged. They asserted, therefore, that their assumptions were proved to be fact by contemporary social science research. Oral and written testimony from social scientists had been presented to the Court when the case was argued before it. In the opinion, the Court made the following footnote reference (#10):

K. B. Clark, Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development (Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, 1950); Witmer and Kotinsky, Personality in the Making (1952), c. VI; Deutscher and Chein, The Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation: A Survey of Social Science Opinion, 26 J. Psychol. 259 (1948); Chein, What are the Psychological Effects of [347 U.S. 483, 495] Segregation Under Conditions of Equal Facilities?, 3 Int. J. Opinion and Attitude Res. 229 (1949); Brameld, Educational Costs, in Discrimination and National Welfare (MacIver, ed., (1949), 44-48; Frazier, The Negro in the United States (1949), 674-681. And see generally Myrdal, An American Dilemma (1944).

In our next article, we will start examining this cited social science literature and its authors.

The Reign of Subjectivity (1)

The Landmark

For nearly a generation, American society has been in the thrall of self. The subjective self has been the single most important ontological reality in the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans. We have even characterized two entire generations - boomers and generation X - in terms of self-obsession. Social policy, educational policy, law, and popular culture have been reshaped in obedience to the perspectives and needs of each self-centered person. The U.S. Census asks persons to identify themselves in terms of their self-identified ethnic or racial identity. Educational doctrine is reshaped to build self-esteem in pupils as a distinct objective, separate and prior to academic learning. Sexual harassment policy roots grievances in a person's subjective perception of discomfort and hostility, without the need for injury or objective standards. We don't need to say anything about popular culture. Popular culture indulges and promotes a narcissism that sucks the life out of any universal social values.

How did America arrive at such a state? One explanation might focus on boomers and generation X living in a time of relative international stability and peace. No one has asked these generations for self-sacrifice or contribution to any cause greater than their self-indulging satisfaction. Ending the universal male military draft symbolizes the license of release from civil responsibility. While this hypothesis might explain the personal pursuit of self by these generations, it does not explain the profound reorientation of social policy, education, and law.

Another explanation looks to the second-wave feminism, the entry of married women into the wage labor force, and the decline of mothers who stay at home, raise children, and keep house. The phenomenon of married women in the labor force explains a great deal about recent American social life, for instance, the decline of community voluntarism; but it is difficult to see how it should necessarily lead to self-obsession. Why shouldn't it have led to self-sacrifice? In fact, it could be said it has contributed to service for others, as many married women in the labor force are now caring for their parents in their own home or their parents' home, expending their hard-earned money and time for this noble purpose.

Other social commentators have pointed to the extraordinary wealth and consumerism of America since the 1950s. Consumption has become personalized. Buyers consult only their own tastes and needs when deciding to buy clothes, automobiles, personal computers, homes, vacations, and the myriad of other goods and services we demand. Manufacturers produce for the personal self. Retailers create markets that glorify consumption and instant gratification. The constant flow of radio, television, movies, public conversation, and advertising, that fills our minds, speaks to consumption and serving self, not serving others. Consumption is an important economic and social force, but, nonetheless, I am not convinced of its profundity. People modify their consumption easily, by marrying, for instance, in ways that require them to modify their self-satisfaction to take into consideration the wants of others.

What about the secularization of American society? Do not the opposition to the display of religion in public affairs, the decline of the historic mainline American Protestant churches, and the eradication of religious reference in public education speak to the loosening of absolute standards? We can easily dismiss this explanation; for the United States has been in the midst of a multi-generational religious revival. Compared to the 1920s, which were a benchmark in the decline of American churches, America is today a religious society. Christianity is an extraordinarily powerful and growing social force, spreading its messages of personal humility, religious redemption, and spiritual confidence to a larger American public every day.

Much public discussion has been made in conservative circles of the existential and post-modern philosophers whose philosophical ideas have focused on the denial of universality in human nature, cultural relativity, and the construction of personhood and gender. They have argued that the socially constructed-self is the primary reality of each person's life. Many of their ideas have been adopted by radical feminists, influencing feminist social and education ideologies. Still, not denying the influence of post-modern philosophy in academic circles, it difficult to see how these ideas directly changed the world view of ordinary Americans. Most Americans don't discuss Sartre, or Foucault, or Derrida at breakfast and implement their programs after lunch.

I will argue there was a much more important basis for this shift in American social character - more profound and more influential, because it is the law. This basis is the Supreme Court's landmark decision declaring separate-but-equal social policy as unconstitutional: Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 1954. In the next several articles, I shall examine the Brown v Board of Education decision and the reasoning behind it.