Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells

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prejudice and discrimination.) Indeed, stories of white children being reprimanded by their parents when they ignored the rules of contact across the ‘colour line’ are very common in white narratives of growing up in the American South (Ritterhouse 2006: 78–80; Quinn 1954) and in settler colonies. (Nor was this insistence on refusing polite forms of address to Black adults a private matter. In the 1940s white sociologist Arthur Raper was called before a grand jury for using courtesy titles for Black people (Ritterhouse 2006: 81).)

      If the class privilege of middle-class African Americans could not insulate them from racism, conversely the class oppression of working-class whites did not prevent them from being included in the politics of white supremacy. Sara Brooks in her autobiography comments that their white neighbours were as poor as her own family but they still ‘musta thought they was more than we were because when we’d go to the spring to get water, Mr Garrett [the white neighbour] had to drink the water first . . . he’d drink and his kids would drink and then we’d drink’ (cited in Ritterhouse 2006: 127).

      One of the roles of a parent is to protect their children. This is a difficult role for Black parents in a racist society. In the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) newsletter there was constant debate about how parents could counter their children’s exposure to racist violence and disrespect. Strategies to counter the influence of white racism on the child’s sense of self ranged from the politics of respectability to a refusal to discuss white racism while insisting that, in the interests of their safety, their children should accept the limits that racism placed on their freedom (Ritterhouse 2006: 98–102).

       Public violence

      One of the starkest instances of how even those children who were supposed to be living a sheltered childhood, that is to say white children, were not sheltered from racist violence, indeed were encouraged to participate, as actors or spectators, in acts of racist violence is found in accounts (written and photographic) of the lynching of Black men by white mobs (Ritterhouse 2006: 64, 71–8). Lynchings and race riots (attacks by whites on Black neighbourhoods) were a common experience in the South, and children were as exposed to the possibility and reality of violence as adults were. Walter White, the future executive of the NAACP, describes his experience of being caught up, at the age of 13, in a race riot. The riot taught him, he says, ‘that there is no escape from life’ (Ritterhouse 2006: 109). This telling phrase grasps exactly why children’s lives cannot be considered as if children live in a separate space from adult society and politics: there is only one life and children are as much a part of it as adults are.

      ‘Jim Crow’ is shorthand in the USA for the legal and social structures and processes that white Southerners constructed after the end of the Civil War to reverse the gains in the civil rights of Black Americans that Union victory should have guaranteed. Slavery could not be reinstated but all kinds of other legal, political, economic and social obstacles were erected to prevent African Americans from attaining social, economic or political equality with white Americans. One of these obstacles was that children were educated in segregated schools. The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution makes it unconstitutional for Americans to be treated unequally before the law. White Southerners got around this by arguing that Black and white children were getting an education that was separate but equal. This was a blatant lie. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, in 1950, US$179 was spent on public (state) schools for each white child and less than a quarter of that sum, US$43, for each Black child. There were sixty-one schools for Black children, ‘more than half of them ramshackle or plain falling-down shanties that accommodated one or two teachers and their charges, and twelve schools for whites’ (Kluger 2004: 8). The total value of the Black schools, attended by over six and half thousand Black students, was less than US$200,000; the total value of the white schools, attended by less than two and half thousand students, was US$673,850, over three times as much as the Black schools (Kluger 2004: 8). White children had thirty publicly funded school buses to get them to school; there was not one school bus for Black students.

      The NAACP chose school segregation as its major legal case to argue that segregation and unequal treatment of African Americans were unconstitutional. Schools were an excellent starting point for the campaign to use the law to force the ending of Jim Crow in the South because by 1950 there was not a dual ideology of childhood; all children were regarded as innocent, dependent and vulnerable. Who could regard it as right to prevent respectable children, eager to learn, from having an equal right to learn? Who in the North would not be shocked by the sight of white adults screaming at Black children and trying to prevent them from doing something as ordinary and worthwhile as going to school?

      To pursue their case the NAACP wanted to demonstrate in court that segregation caused damage to the self-esteem of Black students. They asked Kenneth Clark to give expert evidence to the court using his ‘doll tests’ in the 1951 case of Briggs v. Elliott, one of five suits that collectively were known as Brown v. Board of Education (Patterson 2002: 25).

      The Clarks had been publishing their work on the impact of racism on the self-identity of Black children since 1939. The doll tests involved showing Black children aged 4 to 7 two brown and two white dolls and asking them to ‘give me the white doll’, ‘give me the colored doll’ and ‘give me the Negro doll’, and then asking which doll was nice, which they would like to play with, which doll looked bad and which doll had a nice colour. The Clarks found that wherever they did these tests the children showed ‘an unmistakeable preference for the white doll and a rejection of the brown doll’ (Kluger 2004: 317). Another series of tests, using outline drawings of different objects and of a boy and a girl which the subject child was asked to colour in selecting a colour or colours from a choice of black, brown, white, yellow, pink and tan, found that Black children displayed a preference for white and yellow colours and random mixtures of colours when colouring in the outlines of the boy and girl. The Clarks interpreted their data to mean that Black children suffered from self-rejection (Kluger 2004: 318). In 1955 Kenneth Clark was commissioned to write a report on their findings for the White House Midcentury Conference on Youth. It cited other studies, including those done by Marian J. Radke and Helen G. Trager, who had run similar tests in Philadelphia. They used cut-out brown and white dolls; both Black and white children were asked to say which they preferred. The researchers found that 57 per cent of the Black children and 89 per cent of the white children preferred the white cut-out doll.

      To prepare his evidence for the Briggs case Clark did the doll test on sixteen randomly selected children at a Black segregated school in Clarendon County. The children, all between 6 and 9 years old, were asked to choose the doll which most looked like them: seven of them chose the white doll. The findings were consistent with the other studies that the Clarks had conducted (Kluger 2004: 331).

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