Self-Esteem and Delinquency

L. Susan Williams

Kiri Davis was 16 in 2005 when she reproduced a famous “doll test” in her amateur documentary, A Girl Like Me. Her documentary showed that 15 out of 21 Black children (71%) preferred to play with a White doll, commonly identifying the Black doll as the “bad” doll and the White one as the “nice” or “good” doll. Davis's results virtually mirror those of Kenneth Clark's doll test, conducted in the 1940s and cited in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Clark's telling results were used by the Supreme Court to reject the concept of “separate but equal” and to officially overturn racial segregation in public schools. Although Clark died unaware of Davis's recent findings, he predicted that present-day results probably would not vary. Unfortunately, he was correct. In a striking moment in Davis's experiment, one girl, after identifying the “bad” doll, sadly and slowly pushed the Black doll toward ...

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