Kenneth B. Clark

Some suggested the other day that "James Baldwin says it, and Ken Clark proves it." It turned out that his copy of Dark Ghetto had never gotten past the coffee table plateau. Because Clark does "say it" when he talks about racial problems.

He writes with the same involvement, if not the same eloquence, that has characterized Baldwin. And like Baldwin, he takes sides.

Rather than euphemize about "the problems of schools in predominantly non-white neighborhoods" he titles a "Ghetto Schools: Separate and Unequal." Indeed, when it comes time to postulate a reason why desegregation in New York schools is not immediately possible, he cites "the timidity and moral irresolution of whites."

All of which is fairly eyebrow-lifting language for an "objective" social scientist. And if his language lifts brows among some of those concerned with scientific objectivity, his background makes their jaws sag. For Clark is, of course, a Negro and his specialty, yea life work, has been an examination of the effects of prejudice and segregation in America--or as Ebony calls it, the white problem. The great question looms, then: How can a Negro approach with any degree of objectivity a problem that has personally affected him so elementally and profoundly from the earliest memories of his existence?

The question is a legitimate one and Clark answers it legitimately. "I have to be extraordinarily careful, sure," he admits, "and my peers have every right not to accept shoddy work." But critics fail to realize, Clark feels, the distinction between detachment and objectivity, of which they make a reality-obscuring fetish. As a matter of fact, he insists, objectivity that implies detachment or escape from reality actually decreases understanding and can be used to avoid the problem. "Where human feelings are part of the evidence, they cannot be ignored," he explains in Dark Ghetto, continuing, "Where anger is the appropriate response, to avoid the feeling itself . . . is to set boundaries on the truth itself." Clark has, since 1954, a powerful, if implicit, supporter for his argument--the Supreme Court, which accepted his psychological appendix to the brief, in Brown v. Board of Education.

How did Clark come to be involved in the famous school desegregation case? Clark explains that NAACP lawyers, in planning strategy for a new attack on segregation in the schools in 1951 decided that the only chance they had to overthrow Plessy v. Ferguson was to introduce psychological data about the harmful effects of segregation. They approached Otto Kleinberg as the man to coordinate the evidence-researching project, and he steered them to a former pupil, Clark, who had just completed a study on the subject for the Mid-Century White House Conference on Youth and Education. "When they came to me I walked over to the file cabinet and pulled out the study and handed it to Robert Carter, then general counsel of the NAACP," Clark recalls. "He looked it over and said it couldn't have been better had it been prepared to order."

During the ensuing months Clark worked to assemble the army of social scientists who were to testify, and during the trial he analyzed the opposing arguments and organized the rebuttal. "I thought our job was done when the case got to the Supreme Court," Clark says. But the NAACP lawyers decided that the psychological evidence, much of it precedent-shattering, would be more effective as a separately bound brief, so Clark, along with Isador Shein and Stuart Cook, prepared the now famous brief, which, smiles Clark, "to our pleasant surprise the Court accepted."

Born at the outbreak of World War I, Clark could pass for a somewhat haggard 35. A hand-on-hip, elbow-on-podium, lecturer, he speaks in a slightly lisped, pseudo-cynical side-of-the-mouth manner that a randomly selected sample of his female students agree is "cute." He smokes a pipe but looks far more natural with the Mariborough that is usually dangling from his lips. As a seminar leader, Clark is an instructive and incisive, interrupting a muddled speaker with an impatient "What is your point," or venturing a bemused "I feel terribly rejected" when someone ignores one of his observations.

Clark is one of the few Negroes who ever went to a segregated school largely to see what it felt like. "I'm quite clear on this. I was fascinated by the concept of a predominantly Negro institution," he recalls. He remembers Howard in the 30's as a mecca of Negro intellectuals whose academic and social concerns coincided, and fondly recounts bull sessions with the likes of Franklin Frazier, Abraham Harris, Francis Sumner, and Ralph Bunche.

After earning a Ph.D. at Columbia and working in the Office of War Information during the war, Clark joined the faculty of City College, where he still teaches and directs the Institute of Social Research. Clark may hate the conditions necessitating his research, but he loves his work and has few outside activities or relaxations.

Clark scorns detached observers who confidently predict gradual acculturation of Negroes into white society. Reacting to this view in a recent panel discussion he waxed quite apocolyptic about American society, but one gets the feeling that Clark is not really as pessimistic as all that.

As a matter of fact, though he feels that it is "too much to ask that whites be freed of prejudice and Negroes be free of resentment," he feels that prejudice will decrease "because racism is no longer being reinforced by government power." The best way for the white man to cope with the problem of his visceral racism is to face up to it and control it, to give dominance to his internal sense of morality. "The problem of ambivalence is not peculiar to race. You have to give dominance to the positive in these matters and control the negative. There is a feedback value to all of this. If you do it a sufficient number of times the negative is less likely to assert itself."

It will take a lot of positive feedback to counteract the massive negatives of American race attitudes, but as long as there are Kenneth Clarks around to prod consciences and prick rationalizations, there will be progress.

All of which is fairly eyebrow-lifting language for an "objective" social scientist. And if his language lifts brows among some of those concerned with scientific objectivity, his background makes their jaws sag. For Clark is, of course, a Negro and his specialty, yea life work, has been an examination of the effects of prejudice and segregation in America--or as Ebony calls it, the white problem. The great question looms, then: How can a Negro approach with any degree of objectivity a problem that has personally affected him so elementally and profoundly from the earliest memories of his existence?

The question is a legitimate one and Clark answers it legitimately. "I have to be extraordinarily careful, sure," he admits, "and my peers have every right not to accept shoddy work." But critics fail to realize, Clark feels, the distinction between detachment and objectivity, of which they make a reality-obscuring fetish. As a matter of fact, he insists, objectivity that implies detachment or escape from reality actually decreases understanding and can be used to avoid the problem. "Where human feelings are part of the evidence, they cannot be ignored," he explains in Dark Ghetto, continuing, "Where anger is the appropriate response, to avoid the feeling itself . . . is to set boundaries on the truth itself." Clark has, since 1954, a powerful, if implicit, supporter for his argument--the Supreme Court, which accepted his psychological appendix to the brief, in Brown v. Board of Education.

How did Clark come to be involved in the famous school desegregation case? Clark explains that NAACP lawyers, in planning strategy for a new attack on segregation in the schools in 1951 decided that the only chance they had to overthrow Plessy v. Ferguson was to introduce psychological data about the harmful effects of segregation. They approached Otto Kleinberg as the man to coordinate the evidence-researching project, and he steered them to a former pupil, Clark, who had just completed a study on the subject for the Mid-Century White House Conference on Youth and Education. "When they came to me I walked over to the file cabinet and pulled out the study and handed it to Robert Carter, then general counsel of the NAACP," Clark recalls. "He looked it over and said it couldn't have been better had it been prepared to order."

During the ensuing months Clark worked to assemble the army of social scientists who were to testify, and during the trial he analyzed the opposing arguments and organized the rebuttal. "I thought our job was done when the case got to the Supreme Court," Clark says. But the NAACP lawyers decided that the psychological evidence, much of it precedent-shattering, would be more effective as a separately bound brief, so Clark, along with Isador Shein and Stuart Cook, prepared the now famous brief, which, smiles Clark, "to our pleasant surprise the Court accepted."

Born at the outbreak of World War I, Clark could pass for a somewhat haggard 35. A hand-on-hip, elbow-on-podium, lecturer, he speaks in a slightly lisped, pseudo-cynical side-of-the-mouth manner that a randomly selected sample of his female students agree is "cute." He smokes a pipe but looks far more natural with the Mariborough that is usually dangling from his lips. As a seminar leader, Clark is an instructive and incisive, interrupting a muddled speaker with an impatient "What is your point," or venturing a bemused "I feel terribly rejected" when someone ignores one of his observations.

Clark is one of the few Negroes who ever went to a segregated school largely to see what it felt like. "I'm quite clear on this. I was fascinated by the concept of a predominantly Negro institution," he recalls. He remembers Howard in the 30's as a mecca of Negro intellectuals whose academic and social concerns coincided, and fondly recounts bull sessions with the likes of Franklin Frazier, Abraham Harris, Francis Sumner, and Ralph Bunche.

After earning a Ph.D. at Columbia and working in the Office of War Information during the war, Clark joined the faculty of City College, where he still teaches and directs the Institute of Social Research. Clark may hate the conditions necessitating his research, but he loves his work and has few outside activities or relaxations.

Clark scorns detached observers who confidently predict gradual acculturation of Negroes into white society. Reacting to this view in a recent panel discussion he waxed quite apocolyptic about American society, but one gets the feeling that Clark is not really as pessimistic as all that.

As a matter of fact, though he feels that it is "too much to ask that whites be freed of prejudice and Negroes be free of resentment," he feels that prejudice will decrease "because racism is no longer being reinforced by government power." The best way for the white man to cope with the problem of his visceral racism is to face up to it and control it, to give dominance to his internal sense of morality. "The problem of ambivalence is not peculiar to race. You have to give dominance to the positive in these matters and control the negative. There is a feedback value to all of this. If you do it a sufficient number of times the negative is less likely to assert itself."

It will take a lot of positive feedback to counteract the massive negatives of American race attitudes, but as long as there are Kenneth Clarks around to prod consciences and prick rationalizations, there will be progress.