The Color Doll Experiments...Where are we today?

The Color Doll Experiments 

The Clarks' doll experiments grew out of Mamie Clark's master's degree thesis. They published three major papers between 1939 and 1940 on children's self-perception related to race. Their studies found contrasts among Black children attending segregated schools in Washington, DC versus those in integrated schools in New York.  The doll experiment involved a child being presented with two dolls. Both of these dolls were completely identical except for the skin and hair color. One doll was white with yellow hair, while the other was brown with black hair. The child was then asked questions inquiring as to which one is the doll they would play with, which one is the nice doll, which one looks bad, which one has the nicer color, etc. The experiment showed a clear preference for the white doll among all children in the study. These findings exposed internalized racism in Black children, self-hatred that was more acute among children attending segregated schools. This research also paved the way for an increase in psychological research into areas of self-esteem and self-concept.  Have our minds been changed?

today

yesterday

Free but not Equal? Are we going back?

Now we are free. What do we want? We want education; we want protection; we want plenty of work; we want good pay for it, but not any more or less than any one else...and then you will see the down-trodden race rise up.

—John Adams, a former slave   Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot. —Frederick Douglass, 1865 We went every day about nine o’clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them...After school we left the same way we entered, one by one, when we would go to the square about a block from school, and wait for each other. —Susie King, who attended a secret school in Savannah, Georgia Have we really actually been free?

Happy Valentine's Day--Love is In the Air!

Love Is Such a Beautiful Thing

 

How Do I Really Move On After A Breakup?

Unfortunately, there is no quick fix to a painful breakup, but there are a few things you can do to try and ease the emotional pain.

Love is such a beautiful thing, but if you find that you are physically, mentally, emotionally, financially and sexually drained, you are fighting for love with the wrong person, now you are beginning to know, feel, and think that love hurts. Reality has now set in and you now are at the fork in the road; your relationship has ended and your heart is fully broken, now you may find that it is difficult to find that happy place you once were in before, thinking, feeling, wondering, asking, what will my family, friends, and co-workers think and sometimes all of the emotional craziness begin, shame, guilt, pity party and mentally, physically, and spiritually hiding.  Let’s get started!

Get Walking…..Exercise!

Exercise is like natural pain killers and are far healthier than brewing. Exercising is one of the best ways to produce this natural pain killers. Working up a sweat is not only great for your physical health, but your emotional health, too. So get to it!

Avoid Becoming a Glutton for Punishment.

After a breakup, memory lane during a break-up phase is a dead end. Do not become a stalker via social media or through any other means of communication.  Do not try to get the latest gossip through their friends, and do not re-read old love notes and texts, delete and trash them all.  When you are trying to mend a broken heart it is best to avoid everything that has to do with him or her and anything that reminds you of him or her.

Go through the Grieving Period.

But do not stay there!  What is done is done. Sometimes when it is over, it is over, and it is what it is, over!  Then you forget why you ended it and the emotional craziness start all over again. Then you start having doubts about your decision. Then you start thinking, “I cannot live without him or her” or “What is wrong with me?” This is called the grieving period, the rough time, but keep going forward and do not look back; do not back track. Think of yourself, your worth, and who you are! Then comes the breakthrough!  Re-vamp your living space and work space. Begin to re-invent your life imagine a new you and become that new you.   

Remember who loves you.

Your love ones! Call your friends and family and tell them about the new you.  Now you are in a position to uplift their spirit and maybe even make them smile.  Or better yet, become the sounding board or great buffer for them during a hard time.  And as the old saying goes, “It is better to have loved and lost, then to have never loved at all”. Give love another chance for the first time.

The white-only clause: Charlie Sifford, first black golfer on PGA Tour, Joins the Circle of Ancestor

A personal note:  Charlie taught my niece golf lessons while he and his wonderful wife lived in Hurston, Texas.  Maybe one day she and my nephew will pick up their golf clubs again and pursue their greatness….

Charlie Sifford, who only wanted a chance to play and broke the color barrier in golf as the first PGA Tour member, died Tuesday night, the PGA of America said.Sifford, who recently had suffered a stroke, was 92.  "His love of golf, despite many barriers in his path, strengthened him as he became a beacon for diversity in our game,"  "By his courage, Dr. Sifford inspired others to follow their dreams. Golf was fortunate to have had this exceptional American in our midst." A proud man who endured racial taunts and threats, Sifford set modest goals and achieved more than he imagined.  Sifford challenged the white-only clause and the PGA rescinded it in 1961. He won the Greater Hartford Open in 1967 and the Los Angeles Open in 1969. He also won the 1975 Senior PGA Championship, five years before the Champions Tour was created.  His career was fully recognized in 2004 when he became the first Black inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. Last November, President Barack Obama presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer are the only other golfers who received that honor. Charlie won tournaments, but more important, he broke a barrier,” and what Charlie Sifford brought to the game has been monumental.

The one goal that eluded him was a chance to play in the Masters, which did not invite its first Black player until Lee Elder in 1975. Sifford remained bitter, though the pain was eased when Tiger Woods won the first of his four green jackets in 1997.

The road was never easy.

Sifford was born on June 22, 1922 in Charlotte, North Carolina. He worked as a caddie and dominated the all-black United Golfers Association, winning five straight national titles. He longed to play against the best players, only to run into the same barriers that Teddy Rhodes and Bill Spiller faced — the white-only clause.  In his autobiography, "Just Let Me Play," Sifford told of meeting Jackie Robinson in California about the time Robinson was trying to break the color barrier in baseball.  "He asked me if I was a quitter," Sifford wrote. "I told him no. He said, 'If you're not a quitter, you're probably going to experience some things that will make you want to quit.'"  During the 1952 Phoenix Open, one of the few events that Blacks could play, Sifford found human feces in the cup when he got to the first green. He received death threats over the phone at the 1961 Greater Greensboro Open and heard racial slurs as he walked the fairways. He finished fourth, and didn't quit.  During his induction ceremony, Sifford told of his first meeting with Palmer. They were playing in the 1955 Canadian Open and Sifford opened with a 63 to lead Palmer by one shot. He recalled Palmer standing in front of the scoreboard saying, "Charlie Sifford? How the hell did he shoot 63?" "I'm standing right behind him," Sifford said. "I said, 'The same damn way you shot 64.' That's how we met."  Sifford was proud of the role in played in making the PGA Tour accessible to Blacks. “If I hadn't acted like a professional when they sent me out, if I did something crazy, there would never be any Blacks playing," he said. "I toughed it out. I'm proud of it. All those people were against me, and I'm looking down on them now."

"Mr. Cub" and "Mr. Sunshine"

Ernest "Ernie" Banks (January 31, 1931 – January 23, 2015), nicknamed "Mr. Cub" and "Mr. Sunshine", was an American professional baseball player. He was a Major League Baseball (MLB) shortstop and first baseman for 19 seasons, 1953 through 1971. He spent his entire MLB career with the Chicago Cubs. He was a National League (NL) All-Star for 11 seasons, playing in 14 All-Star Games.^[1] Banks is regarded by some as one of the greatest players of all time.^[2][3][4]
Banks, born and raised in Dallas, entered Negro league baseball in 1950, playing for the Kansas City Monarchs. He served in the US military for two years and returned to the Monarchs before beginning his major league career in September 1953. Banks made his first MLB All-Star Game appearance in 1955. He received two consecutive National League Most Valuable Player awards in 1958 and 1959, and received his first and only Gold Glove award for shortstop in 1960.
He was transferred to the left field position during the 1961 season followed by a final change to first base that year. Cubs manager Leo Durocher became frustrated with Banks in the mid-1960s, saying that the slugger's performance was faltering, but he felt that he was unable to remove Banks from the lineup due to the star's popularity among Cubs fans. Banks was a player-coach from 1967 through 1971. In 1970, Banks hit his 500th career home run. In 1972, he joined the Cubs coaching staff after his retirement as a player.
Banks was active in the Chicago community during and after his tenure with the Cubs. He founded a charitable organization, became the first black Ford Motor Company dealer in the United States, and made an unsuccessful bid for a local political office. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977. In 1999, he was named to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. In 2013, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to sports. Banks lived in the Los Angeles area.

The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.

The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.
In the decade that began with the school desegregation decision of the Supreme Court, and ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the demand of Negro Americans for full recognition of their civil rights was finally met.
The effort, no matter how savage and brutal, of some State and local governments to thwart the exercise of those rights is doomed. The nation will not put up with it — least of all the Negroes. The present moment will pass. In the meantime, a new period is beginning.
In this new period the expectations of the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights. Being Americans, they will now expect that in the near future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups. This is not going to happen. Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made.
There are two reasons. First, the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for at least another generation. Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment have taken their toll on the Negro people. The harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing. Individually, Negro Americans reach the highest peaks of achievement. But collectively, in the spectrum of American ethnic and religious and regional groups, where some get plenty and some get none, where some send eighty percent of their children to college and others pull them out of school at the 8th grade, Negroes are among the weakest.
The most difficult fact for white Americans to understand is that in these terms the circumstances of the Negro American community in recent years has probably been getting worse, not better.
Indices of dollars of income, standards of living, and years of education deceive. The gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening.
The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.
The thesis of this blog is that these events, in combination, confront the nation with a new kind of problem. Measures that have worked in the past, or would work for most groups in the present, will not work here. A national effort is required that will give a unity of purpose to the many activities of the Federal government in this area, directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure.
This would be a new departure for Federal policy. And a difficult one. But it almost certainly offers the only possibility of resolving in our time what is, after all, the nation's oldest, and most intransigent, and now its most dangerous social problem. What Gunnar Myrdal said in An American Dilemma remains true today: "America is free to chose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity."

An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy ?

There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of white Americans desire that there be as few Negroes as possible in America. If the Negroes could be eliminated from America or greatly decreased in numbers, this would meet the whites' approval-provided that it could be accomplished by means which are also approved. Correspondingly, an increase of the proportion of Negroes in the American population is commonly looked upon as undesirable.
White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually 'cause' each other.
On page 167 of the book, under the sub-heading 'Ends and Means of Population Policy,' appears the following analysis (emphasis in original):
[T]here is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of white Americans desire that there be as few Negroes as possible in America. If the Negroes could be eliminated from America or greatly decreased in numbers, this would meet the whites' approval -- provided that it could be accomplished by means which are also approved. Correspondingly, an increase of the proportion of Negroes in the American population is commonly looked upon as undesirable. On page 168, Myrdal further remarks that these ideas are 'not necessarily hostile' in all situations. He comments that the very same opinion...
... is shared even by enlightened white Americans who do not hold the common belief that Negroes are inferior as a race. Usually it is pointed out that Negroes fare better and meet less prejudice when they are few in number. Toward the bottom of the same page (168), the following appears:
...as we shall presently see, all white Americans agree that, if the Negro is to be eliminated, he must be eliminated slowly so as not to hurt any living individual Negroes. Therefore, the dominant American valuation is that 'the Negro should be eliminated from the American scene, but slowly.' Regarding the difficulties posed by the 'problem' of Negro population, Myrdal states on page 170 that....
In our further discussion of the means in Negro population policy we ought start out from the desire of the politically dominant white population to get rid of the Negroes. This is a goal difficult to reach by approved means, and the desire has never been translated into action directly, and probably never will be. All the most obvious means go strongly against the American Creed. The Negroes cannot be killed off. Compulsory deportation would infringe upon personal liberty in such a radical fashion that it is excluded. Voluntary exportation of Negroes could not be carried on extensively because of unwillingness on the part of recipient nations as well as on the part of the American Negroes themselves, who usually do not want to leave the country but prefer to stay and fight it out here. Neither is it possible to effectuate the goal by keeping up the Negro death rate. A high death rate is an unhumanitarian and undemocratic way to restrict the Negro population and, in addition, expensive to society and dangerous to the white population. The only possible way of decreasing Negro population is by means of controlling 'fertility.' But as we shall find, even birth control -- for Negroes as well as for whites -- will, in practice, have to be considered primarily as a means to other ends than that of decreasing the Negro population. After a lengthy discussion of the reasons for promoting birth control among people of African descent (and to a lesser extent among poor people generally), Myrdal then endorses, on page 178 of the book, 'extreme' measures in this direction:
If caste with all its consequences were to disappear, there would, from these viewpoints, be no more need for birth control among Negroes than among whites. But the general reasons for family limitation would remain, and they would have a strength depending upon the extent to which society was reformed to become a more favorable environment for families with children. Until these reforms are carried out, and as long as the burden of caste is laid upon American Negroes, even an extreme birth control program is warranted by reasons of individual and social welfare.
Finally, Myrdal acknowledges the opposition to such a program that is virtually certain to arise from the black community, and he infers that a certain amount of deception will be needed -- primarily the use of 'negro doctors and nurses' to conceal the real goals of white society. Note especially the change in language by which a serious attempt to 'get rid of the Negroes' suddenly is transformed into a campaign of birth planning meant to 'benefit' them (page 180):
The activity of the birth control movement's workers, the Southern whites, and the Negro leaders -- all with the same aim of spreading birth control among Negroes -- promises a great development of the movement in the future.....
A ... serious difficulty is that of educating Southern Negroes to the advantages of birth control. Negroes, on the whole, have all the prejudices against it that other poor, ignorant, superstitious people have. More serious is the fact that even when they do accept it, they are not very efficient in obeying instructions and sometimes they come to feel that it is a fake. An intensive educational campaign is needed, giving special recognition to the prejudices and ignorance of the people whom the campaign is to benefit. The use of Negro doctors and nurses is essential.


The chapter on 'population' begins by advising that, until about the 1930s, the growth of the black population lagged far behind the increase in white population. Not only fertility, but immigration as well, tended to support a phenomenal rise in the numbers of white U.S. residents between the end of the 18th century and the early 20th. However, birth rates among both black and white people had fallen in the years prior to Myrdal's research, to the point that black fertility had for the first time become measurably higher than white. This information on demographic trends begins on the first page of the population chapter, page 157 (citations omitted):
There were about 17 times as many Negroes in the United States in 1940 as there were in 1790, when the first census was taken, but in the same period the white population increased 37 times... Negroes were 19.3 per cent of the American population in 1790, but only 9.8 per cent in 1940.... [The relative change in proportion] has been governed by the national increase of the two population stocks, by expansion of the territorial limits of the United States and by immigration. At page 160 (re census figures):
Despite the errors in the data, it is possible to derive the following tentative conclusions: (1) that Negroes, like whites, are not reproducing themselves so rapidly as they used to, (2) that probably their rate is now higher than that of the whites, and (3) that this differential is a new phenomenon, at least in so far as it is significant. If such a differential continues into the future and if it is not fully compensated for by immigration of whites, the proportion of Negroes in the American population may be expected to rise, though slowly. Half way down the next page (page 161), Myrdal observes:
...Negroes are no longer reproducing themselves at a lower rate than whites. In fact, the figures suggest that they are reproducing themselves more -- thus reversing the position they held in 1930 and before. As to future trends, the author includes a veiled hint about the potential for intervention on page 163:
It must be remembered, however, that future change in fertility and mortality will change the entire pattern. At page 165, Myrdal points out the inconsistencies in various popular beliefs about the black population:
Popular theories on the growth of the Negro population in America have been diverse. At times it has been claimed that Negroes 'breed like rabbits,' and that they will ultimately crowd out the whites if they are not deported or their procreation restricted. At other times it has been pronounced that they are a 'dying race,' bound to lose out in the 'struggle for survival.' Myrdal writes that it is common among 'liberal' white Americans to rationalize the depopulation of persons of African descent on the grounds that there will be less prejudice as the size of the black population diminishes But this is clearly not the perception of the black community. Writes Myrdal (at the bottom of page 168), 'I have never met a Negro who drew the conclusion from this that a decrease of the American Negro population would be advantageous. Indeed, says the very same paragraph (on page 169): 'almost every Negro, who is brought to think about the problem, wants the Negro population to be as large as possible.'