The “zoot effect” in American culture appears to manifest itself when the human personality has been socially isolated, rejected, discriminated against, and chronically humiliated. It is the consequence of the attempts of the individual to stabilize himself and maintain some ego-security…. It is not primarily a racial phenomenon since a given person of any race who is subjected to the determining conditions may manifest this effect in personality structure.
—Kenneth B. Clark and J. Barker, The Zoot Effect in Personality: A Race Riot Participant (Reference Clark1945, p. 147)INTRODUCTION
During the early twentieth century, psychologists increasingly looked to environmental factors to explain individual mental health problems. As a manifestation of this interest, the new field of social psychology sought to analyze the social context of an individual's psychological development and introduced the idea that society should be viewed as the patient (Capshew Reference Capshew1999; Pandora Reference Pandora1997; Rose Reference Rose2009). A growing interest in investigating the negative psychological effects of racial segregation occurred simultaneously, with many social scientists in the interwar years discovering damage in the African American psyche caused by environmental conditions. The extent of the damage varied according to class, color, and even region; middle-class light-skinned Blacks were thought to suffer the worst due to their “desire” to integrate with Whites. Only a small number of social scientists, however, used damage to critique racial segregation. Indeed, many researchers argued that close proximity to Whites actually increased the danger of mental health problems in Blacks (Cross Reference Cross1991; Rose Reference Rose2009; Scott Reference Scott1997). Contemporary scholars now contend it was not until after World War II that social scientists including Kenneth Clark used evidence of Black psychological damage to explicitly appeal to Whites for school desegregation and increased social welfare spending (Cross Reference Cross1991; Patterson Reference Patterson2001; Scott Reference Scott1997; Wolters Reference Wolters1984).
Possibly the twentieth century's most significant Black psychologist, Clark is well known for positing that racial segregation created feelings of inferiority in Black children. Born in 1914 in the Panama Canal Zone, he emigrated with his Jamaican-born mother to New York City in 1919. He attended public schools in Harlem during the 1920s and enrolled as a freshman in Washington, D. C.'s Howard University in 1931 where he earned a bachelor's and a master's degree before becoming the first Black recipient of a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University in 1940. By the early 1950s, Clark's work led to his involvement in the Brown v. Board of Education case, where the U.S. Supreme Court relied heavily on his research in ruling school segregation unconstitutional. Specifically, Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark—the second Black recipient of a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia—conducted experiments, which loosely came to be known as the “doll studies,” to measure the psychological impact of racial segregation. Clark (Reference Clark, Witmar and Kosinsky1952) summarized his work and the research of other social scientists in a report, “The Effects of Prejudice and Discrimination,” for the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1950; this formed the basis of the social science argument that convinced the court in Brown (Jackson Reference Jackson2001; Keppel Reference Keppel1995; Kluger Reference Kluger1976).
But scholars challenged Clark's methods and conclusions almost immediately after the decision and questioned the impact of the “damage thesis” on school desegregation and social policy. Much of this criticism maintained that Clark incorporated psychologist Kurt Lewin's “Jewish self-hatred” thesis in his research on Black children (Cross Reference Cross1991; Jackson Reference Jackson2001; Scott Reference Scott1997). In an essay first published in 1941, Lewin argued that Jewish individuals experienced psychological tensions as they attempted to move from a subordinate status into a dominant one, which resulted in those persons distancing themselves from their socially mandated inferior group (Lewin Reference Lewin and Lewin1948). As one scholar has held, the impact of the social science argument in Brown led to the “harm and benefit thesis” pursued by the courts. This thesis concluded that segregated schools harmed the academic achievement of Black children through reinforcing negative racial stereotypes, and asserted that racial integration would improve both educational outcomes for Blacks and race relations as a whole (Armor Reference Armor1995). Clark's ideas are now viewed by many scholars as incomplete at best and biased at worst.Footnote 2
A broader and deeper analysis of Clark's work suggests the need to reevaluate his intellectual significance, for much of the criticism of Clark narrowly focuses on the Black psychological damage claim and decontextualizes his argument from his larger social thought. In the early Reference Clark1940s, he developed a concept which he called the “zoot effect” or “zoot personality.” He defined it as the attempt by a person, regardless of race, to stabilize his or her ego in opposition to the larger society's insistence on that individual's inferiority. It reflected not only what went on inside a person, but also the larger society's pathology (Clark and Barker, Reference Clark and Barker1945). Although Clark believed human beings who demonstrated the zoot effect could engage in pathological actions that were destructive to themselves and the larger society, he never believed that such behavior was one-dimensional or intrinsic to African American culture. In his mind, the zoot personality was the complex result of structural inequalities rooted not only in White supremacy, but in the total pattern of American culture that encouraged striving for materialistic rewards and status. These larger social, economic, and cultural patterns damaged all human beings whether they were victims or victimizers and inhibited their potential (Clark Reference Clark1945, Reference Clark1946, Reference Clark1948, Reference Clark1950, Reference Clark1955, Reference Clark1965; Clark and Barker, Reference Clark and Barker1945). In articulating this concept, Clark followed the thinking of other social psychologists in situating the individual within the broader social context. For him, the problem of damage was inextricably linked to the wider culture; American society as a whole had developed historically deep-seated racial prejudices that served both psychological and economic needs of insecure European immigrants. Putting it another way, Clark disagreed with Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal's assertion that American racism contradicted the American creed, the belief in individual freedom, justice, and equality; instead, Clark posited that the two reinforced each other (Clark Reference Clark1950; Myrdal Reference Myrdal1944).
Clark's thinking was heavily influenced by psychologist Alfred Adler's idea that all human beings develop their personalities in response to internal and external stimuli. As individuals become aware of their social status, Adler believed, they experience a desire to compensate or a “will to power” to overcome feelings of inferiority which could result in the creation of an inferiority or superiority complex (Adler Reference Adler1929). In this article, I contend it was Adler's views and Clark's exposure to them as a Howard University student that grounded Clark's theoretical perspective on race, racism, and its psychological effects. Shaped by Adlerian theory, Clark interpreted many psychological responses by Blacks as compensatory attempts to gain individual and social power in a racist and capitalistic society that denied them human agency.
This article is not the first to argue the central importance of Adler in shaping Clark's foundational ideas on race and mental health; historian Ben Keppel noted the same in his study of Clark, Ralph Bunche, and Lorraine Hansberry (Keppel Reference Keppel1995). However, past researchers of Clark's work have neglected to explore the depth and range of Adler's influence on his thinking as well as how that influence arose within the setting of the intellectually dynamic atmosphere of Howard University.Footnote 3 This article intentionally avoids discussion of the doll studies and the methods used by the Clarks in those studies that have caused so much controversy for social scientists. With space limitations in mind, I analyze how Adler shaped Clark's ideas, especially in those of his writings past researchers have neglected. In this essay, I explore Clark's idea of Black psychological damage within the broader context of his education and social thought, examine its applicability to contemporary issues of Black mental health and propose future directions for the critical assessment of Clark's legacy.
CONCEPTUALIZING THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX
Clark's zoot-effect idea first appeared in an unpublished conceptual paper he wrote in Reference Clark1938 as a graduate student, entitled “Indices of a Racial Inferiority Feeling Among American Negroes.” The essay examined what Clark called cultural indicators of a “racial inferiority feeling” among “lower-class” and “middle-class Negroes,” although interestingly he began by dismissing the long-term impact of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association on Black psychological health. First, he argued that lower class Blacks sometimes exhibited stereotypical racial behavior in the presence of Whites. He felt such behavior operated as a defense or compensatory mechanism in reaction to their inferior status. Clark also claimed much Black-on-Black violence compensated for feelings of personal and racial inferiority, particularly among Black men who felt compelled to prove their manhood, and he highlighted the aesthetic tastes of lower-class Blacks, speculating that the wearing of “bizarre and exotic clothing” functioned as a psychological reassurance to boost their self-worth (Clark Reference Clark1938, pp. 2–4). Finally, Clark examined sexual behavior, but only interracial sex because of the larger society's obsession with the subject. He challenged sociologist John Dollard's (Reference Dollard1937) claim that interracial affairs in the South were dominated by the ability of White males to gain easy sexual access to Black women. Clark countered that Black women in both the South and the North were not necessarily victims, and emphasized that some Black women desired White men as sexual partners for personal and/or financial gain. For such a woman, having sex with a White man made her the “equal if not the superior of not only her partner but the whole white race” (Clark Reference Clark1938, p. 5).
In the second half of the paper, Clark argued that many middle-class Blacks believed the mixture of White and Indian heritage in their background made them better than “the common run of Negroes” and therefore exaggerated their mixed ancestry. But he concluded that dark-skinned Blacks who took pride in their so-called African “blood” were compensating for feelings of racial inferiority. Clark also contended that many middle-class Blacks who emphasized their White friendships over Black ones were using Whites as “props” for ego support; he stated that some middle-class Blacks exaggerated their uniqueness in being the only non-White person in an office or school in order to show off how exceptional they were compared to other Blacks. Clark had researched two Black newspapers over a two-month period in 1937 and found that forty to sixty percent of the advertisements in each issue were for skin bleaching creams and hair straighteners, a finding he considered to be further evidence of damage. Finally, Clark maintained some Black intellectuals distanced themselves from studying race and did not wish to be identified with the “Negro Problem,” while other Black intellectuals defended American society and suggested Blacks had not done enough to solve their own problems, and a third group “manufactured Negro heroes” for popular consumption. He agreed with historian Carter G. Woodson (Reference Woodson1933), whose The Mis-Education of the Negro concluded that the U.S. educational system taught Blacks not to value their intellectual heritage. But Clark (Reference Clark1938) also questioned whether the efforts by the Black press to boost the profile of Black athletes such as heavyweight boxer Joe Louis or track star Jesse Owens truly represented racial progress, and he particularly took issue with White scholars who supported “overpraising” heroes for encouraging narrow thinking among Blacks.
In explaining the cause of these behaviors which Clark called compensatory mechanisms, he emphasized that such actions were not inherently racial. He blamed the cultural media for barraging American society with comical and primitive images of Blacks on a daily basis. He was not alone in reaching that conclusion; one of his Howard University mentors, Professor of English Sterling A. Brown, had written a penetrating analysis of Black stereotypes in American literature only a few years earlier.Footnote 4 Clark added that science provided crucial intellectual support to cultural messages perpetrated by White authors in “proving” Black inferiority. Nonetheless, the most devastating of all factors was the existence of racial segregation itself. Clark defined segregation as “the condition whereby the Negro's environment is restricted and proscribed by whites—unidirectionally so that whites are accorded the complete freedom of the Negro's institutions while the Negro is systematically excluded from all contact with whites except those which are condescendingly permitted him” (Clark Reference Clark1938, p. 22). Segregation both caused feelings of inferiority and maintained them, and he worried its effects would “preserve our American ‘caste and class system’ [and] maintain the basis for [perpetuating] the American economic system” (Clark Reference Clark1938, pp. 22–23).
HOWARD UNIVERSITY AND AN ADLERIAN APPROACH TO RACE
In conceptualizing the racial inferiority complex, Clark essentially adapted Alfred Adler's ideas to the study of race. A psychologist and a committed socialist, Adler insisted that psychologists had to consider social problems in their work and underscored the central importance of the superiority/inferiority complex as a byproduct of social inequality. He believed that as an individual strove to overcome his or her problems in life, the individual engaged in a process of conscious or unconscious compensation. More precisely, Adler maintained individuals who felt they were inferior sometimes compensated by striving to become superior and sometimes adopted other defense mechanisms. In certain cases, an individual erected a superiority fantasy, sheltering himself or herself from psychological threats. Adler believed many individual mental health problems could be prevented through a community approach emphasizing social equality (Adler Reference Adler1929).
Adler also incorporated into his thinking the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's idea that power, achievement, and ambition were the main driving forces in humanity. Adler borrowed heavily from this concept Nietzche called “the will to power” (Adler Reference Adler1929). Clark also used the will-to-power concept in his racial-inferiority-complex paper. In the section on sexual behavior, for instance, he used the phrase “will-to-power” in discussing Black women's involvement in sexual relationships with White males (Clark Reference Clark1938, pp. 5–6). The “will-to-power” concept fundamentally shaped Clark's research and his future theoretical perspectives on race, American society, and the possibilities of social change (Clark Reference Clark1950, Reference Clark1965, Reference Clark1967, Reference Clark1974). Nearly thirty years later, he unequivocally stated “the most significant and persistent influence on my own thoughts and activities as a social psychologist has been the … theories of Alfred Adler” (Clark Reference Clark1967, p. 182).
Clark first encountered Adler's ideas as a Howard University student during the 1930s. When he arrived as a freshman in the fall of 1931, he found a campus environment bubbling over in social and intellectual activism. Much of this activism originated in the New Negro movement of the 1920s and the devastating economic impact of the Great Depression at the onset of the 1930s. Professors including philosopher Alain Locke, editor of the critically acclaimed The New Negro, An Interpretation, published in Reference Locke1925, and the previously mentioned Sterling Brown, author of a Reference Brown1932 book of poetry, Southern Road, attempted to chart new intellectual and cultural paths for African Americans that refuted deep-seated ideas of innate Black cultural inferiority (Brown Reference Brown1932; Locke Reference Locke1925). Abram Harris, an economics professor, contributed to this effort in 1931 when he co-wrote The Black Worker, The Negro and the Labor Movement, a seminal work considered to be one of the most important studies of Black labor produced in the mid-twentieth century (Harris and Spero, Reference Harris and Spero1931). Sociology professor E. Franklin Frazier added to this burgeoning literature when he published The Negro Family in Chicago in Reference Frazier1932, while Ralph Bunche, the first Black recipient of a political science Ph.D., caused a stir with his 1936 publication of A World View of Race, which boldly predicted that class would supplant race as the central global conflict (Bunche Reference Bunche1936; Frazier Reference Frazier1932). In addition to taking courses and engaging in discourse with these professors, Clark read the work of other Black authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois's Reference Du Bois1935 Marxist interpretation of the Civil War era, Black Reconstruction in America.Footnote 5 As a student at the most prestigious Black college in the world, Clark was lucky enough to develop close friendships with Bunche and Locke in particular, whom he counted among his most important professors and mentors.Footnote 6
Clark became a campus leader. By his junior year in 1933, he had become editor of the Hilltop, Howard's student newspaper. He wrote editorials criticizing the university administration for its close ties to the U.S. Congress, which was dominated by southern segregationists. By March 1934, he had grown bold enough to lead a student sit-in at the segregated U.S. Capitol Restaurant, an act which nearly led to his expulsion.Footnote 7 Clark's writing and activism were not unique; many other Howard students during the 1930s staged anti-lynching and anti-war protests and called for an end to racial segregation in newspaper editorials (Holloway Reference Holloway2002). In addition, Bunche and Harris were especially critical of both mainstream civil-rights organizations such as the NAACP and more militant organizations including Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (a critique echoed by Clark in his paper) and the New Negro Alliance; they maintained that many Black civil rights leaders in the 1930s failed to understand the centrality of class to racial segregation (Holloway Reference Holloway2002). The rich intellectual environment at Howard during the Great Depression and following on the heels of the 1920s New Negro movement provided Clark with his first lesson “that disciplined intelligence could be an instrument for racial justice, social and economic justice, because (of the) talks … [he] would have with [Bunche, Frazier, Harris, Locke, Sumner]” (Clark Reference ClarkInterviews, pp. 71–72).
Although Clark learned much from many mentors and peers, psychology professor Frances Sumner had the biggest impact on him. The first African American in the United States to gain a Ph.D. in psychology, Sumner arrived to chair Howard's Psychology department in 1928, a position he held until his death in 1954 (Guthrie Reference Guthrie1998; Sawyer Reference Sawyer2000). At Howard, his teaching and research focused on refuting psychological theories that aimed to prove Black mental inferiority (Sawyer Reference Sawyer2000; Sumner Reference Sumner1931a,b). Sumner had written his doctoral dissertation on a comparative analysis of the theories of Freud and Adler; he first exposed Clark to Adler's ideas while Clark was his student. Sumner's emphasis on the social environment's importance in human development led Clark to abandon his goal of becoming a doctor to pursue a career as an academic psychologist instead (Clark Reference Clark1967; Clark Reference ClarkInterviews). He encouraged Clark to adopt a humanistic approach to psychology by integrating psychological theory with all that he was learning in his courses in philosophy, literature, and premedicine.Footnote 8 Clark later credited Sumner not only with inspiring him to pursue psychology but for being his role model as a “scholar and humanist”; Sumner became his “intellectual father.”Footnote 9
Clark initially wanted to specialize in neurophysiology; he was excited by research on the links between the brain and the nervous system and its impact on behavior. However, as a Black psychologist in training at Howard during the 1930s concerned with issues of racial and social justice, he felt he could not afford that luxury in career choices (Clark Reference ClarkInterviews, pp. 55–56). His Reference Clark1936 master's thesis, “The Attitude of Negro College Students Toward Their Parents,” written under the direction of Sumner and Howard Professor Max Meenes, reflected these concerns. In his study, Clark tested 146 Howard undergraduates for their attitudes toward their parents and for the socioenvironmental factors which shaped those attitudes, such as the parents' occupations or the number of siblings in the family. Although Black students were examined, the study never analyzed race or racism; the word “Negro,” for instance, was mentioned just three times in fifty-seven pages. From the viewpoint of Howard University, Clark's study could have been of any White or Black undergraduate institution. Instead of analyzing race, the thesis focused on fine-tuning the study's methodology and developing an attitude scale—undoubtedly stressed as a part of his predoctoral training in research skills to prepare him for the Ph.D. in an all-White psychology department. Sumner expected competence above all from his students and was focused on producing rigorous and objective scholarship rebutting so-called psychological evidence that Blacks were innately inferior in intelligence to Whites.Footnote 10 The thesis also showed Sumner's and Clark's focus on socioenvironmental factors to explain what they believed to be universal psychological attitudes and behavior expressed in Black college students.
By the late 1930s, Clark had graduated from Howard and enrolled as the first Black Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Columbia University. His academic training continued to exhibit his primary concern of proving his capability as a psychologist. Clark's dissertation, “Some Factors Influencing the Remembering of Prose Material,” focused on revealing how social factors influenced memory and, as with his master's thesis, did not touch upon race at all (Clark Reference Clark1940). Both studies reflected his general interest and training in analyzing how social and environmental dynamics influenced human behavior. The essay “Indices of a Racial Inferiority Feeling Among American Negroes” was Clark's first attempt on paper to apply his training and observations in conceptualizing the Black psychological experience. For that reason alone, it is a significant window into Clark's thought on race. At the time of its writing, the essay represented the culminating work of Clark's accumulated experiences, interactions, and education as a Howard-trained psychologist and an activist-intellectual.
The essay and his personal correspondence show that by the late 1930s, Clark had concluded that the lack of political and economic power led to the development of a racial inferiority complex. He located the source of racism within larger American political and economic structures and argued that segregation could lead to social problems in Black communities. Emphasizing the intersections between race, class, and mental health, in a letter to Mamie Phipps Clark, he reasoned that the structural consequences of racism manifested themselves psychologically “in the form of peculiar personality distortions, such as compensatory behaviors against the feelings of inferiority” which the social environment forced upon Blacks.Footnote 11 He did not mean that all Blacks experienced this, but that they struggled on a daily basis with constant reminders of their socially mandated inferiority. Furthermore, he believed most of the efforts to overcome racism in the 1930s were far too limited. In the same letter, Clark wrote, “[People attack] the problem from a superficial level [and attempt] to treat the symptoms.” He called for Black intellectuals and activists to reframe the problem as “one of … exploitation and subjugation of a group of people and [demonstrate] the effects of this on the entire society” (Clark Papers). His experience of working as a New York City caseworker in the summer of 1935 strengthened his belief; most of his clients were homeless and mentally ill men whom he felt unable to provide more than temporary assistance.Footnote 12 Clark's conceptual framework—the interlocking manner in which his view of Black psychology reflected larger race and class dynamics—provided the broad foundation for his future research on race and psychology, in particular the psychological damage argument he would make in Brown v. Board of Education.
“NANCY,” THE 1943 HARLEM RIOT, AND THE ZOOT PERSONALITY
Clark's doubts about a traditional clinical and social-service approach to deal with the structural problems caused by racial segregation were highlighted in three articles he published in Reference Clark1944 and 1945. In “A Brown Girl in a Speckled World,” he discussed the case of “Nancy,” a twelve-year-old girl, and her seven-year-old brother, “John.” According to Clark, Nancy and her mother had light-brown complexions, but John could pass as a White child because of his skin color. In addition, the mother's sister had married a White man and was raising her children as White. Nancy's mother brought John to Clark's attention because she wanted her son to be tested; she believed he possessed superior intelligence. She saw Nancy as a dull, problem child and continually harassed her over real and perceived slights while very rarely punishing John. As Nancy became aware of her mother's favoritism, she grew resentful of her brother and physically attacked him. Realizing that aggression against John would lead to physical abuse from her mother, Nancy responded by withdrawing from both. She retreated into a world of books and made few friends except with much younger children. Furthermore, her mother pushed John to interact with his White cousins while Nancy's visits were discouraged. As Nancy grew older, she attended a mostly Irish American Catholic school where she endured almost daily racial taunts such as “little black nigger” and “tar baby.” Yet she persevered despite the unwillingness of teachers and administrators to punish the other children. Although Nancy felt hurt and angry, Clark noted that she directed her anger at her teachers for having an indifferent reaction to the incidents (Clark Reference Clark1945).
In his analysis, Clark believed some of Nancy's difficulties were general to most children, but she had to face the additional burden of race. She appeared to be psychologically healthy. Although he wanted to help her, Clark found himself at a loss. Nancy's apparent “internal stability” and intelligence despite her issues, he believed, presented “social psychologists with a mocking problem” (Clark Reference Clark1945, pp. 14–15). Nancy's withdrawal was a source of personal strength, but how she developed that strength he could not explain. He had trouble offering a solution since Nancy's problems were not about her own mental health but involved the social dynamics of White supremacy. By applying an Adlerian framework to understanding Nancy, Clark showed how social scientists could comprehend the dynamics of racism in the lives of individuals, but he hinted at the large-scale structural changes necessary to end Nancy's racial humiliation.
Only two years before his article on Nancy, Clark had had an opportunity to apply his Adlerian approach on a much wider scale. On August 1, 1943, a rumor that an unarmed Black man had been shot and killed by a White New York City police officer set off a two-day riot in Harlem. The riot caused six deaths, 189 injuries, 600 arrests, and more than 1,450 stores to be burned or looted (Greenberg Reference Greenberg1992). Many White writers blamed racism for the riot, but they portrayed Blacks as one-dimensional victims in need of their help (McWilliams Reference McWilliams1943; Sancton Reference Sancton1943). On the other hand, some Black leaders such as the NAACP's Walter White blamed radical activists and criminals as well as racism, and suggested Blacks were particularly angry about the segregation of Black soldiers during World War II. He nonetheless criticized the rioters for their behavior and claimed most Harlem residents opposed the violence (White Reference White1943).
As a young professor at the City College of New York only ten blocks from the riot's epicenter, Clark had a unique opportunity. He and eleven of his students conducted one of the first psychological studies of a race riot, interviewing sixty-seven Harlem residents. They found evidence supporting Walter White's claim that many Harlem citizens opposed the violence; sixty percent of the respondents condemned it, while thirty percent welcomed it. However, the majority expressed sympathy for the rioters, which indicated reluctant support for the riot but not violence. When asked why they thought the riot occurred, only five blamed the mistreatment of Black soldiers and four blamed the shooting. The other fifty-eight cited other reasons including generalized racial tensions, anger at price gouging by Harlem store owners, criminals, or new Southern migrants. Clark concluded many Harlem residents did not see violence as incompatible with the pursuit of racial justice. Unlike Walter White, Clark refused to condemn the rioters outright or dismiss their behavior as criminal (Clark Reference Clark1944).
Clark's nuanced interpretation of the riot was enhanced by an interview, published in Reference Clark1945, with an eighteen-year-old male referred to as “R.” From the beginning, R. complicated many people's assumptions about who had taken part in the riot. Clark wrote that while R. wore clothing exemplifying the zoot-suit style, he appeared to have superior intelligence and possessed leadership qualities. But R. also talked casually about committing violent acts during the riot. He showed neither regret for his actions nor sympathy for the injuries suffered by innocent bystanders. By his own testimony, R. epitomized the criminal behavior White and others warned about. Clark wrote that although R. understood very well the American ideals of social, racial, and material progress, he consciously chose to reject those norms (Clark and Barker, Reference Clark and Barker1945).
Confronted by the questions R. had raised for him, Clark arrived at a new concept to describe this behavior which he called the “zoot effect.” He defined the zoot effect or “zoot personality” as an individual's attempt to stabilize his or her ego in the face of societal rejection—a form of psychological protection against a racially hostile society. Individuals who possessed the zoot personality rejected the majority's norms and embraced antisocial values to protect themselves against the larger society's refusal to actually see them. (The majority of Americans in the 1940s saw Blacks as a culturally-inferior and potentially dangerous population suited only for manual labor and entertainment.) Clark maintained the zoot effect was especially pronounced in young Black males. He proposed that R. and others like him used the zoot effect not for the purpose of gaining social acceptance from Whites, but to gain psychological security among other Blacks (Clark and Barker, Reference Clark and Barker1945). Clark's analysis grappled with the political implications of the rioters' actions. In postulating the riot as “an instrument for the establishing of a specific socially desirable and ethical end” (Clark Reference Clark1944, p. 377) and characterizing the zoot effect as “a pattern of conscious or unconscious protest against society-at-large” (Clark and Barker, Reference Clark and Barker1945, p. 148), he illuminated Black strategies and capacities for resistance against racial oppression. He nonetheless regarded the zoot effect as a protection utilized by Blacks “for the purpose of concealing a deep-seated hurt or scars” (Clark and Barker, Reference Clark and Barker1945, p. 148). While aiding Blacks in coping with a racially-hostile environment, he ultimately viewed the zoot effect as a cover for psychological damage.
CONNECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
Clark's zoot-effect concept clearly drew on Alfred Adler's theories and other ideas about race and class he learned at Howard University, and built on the insights expressed in his conceptual paper on racial inferiority. In his pioneering studies of Nancy and R., he illuminated the complex ways African Americans coped psychologically with the consequences of racial segregation. He also demonstrated that Nancy's and R.'s responses were shaped by a society in which White supremacy served as its overarching narrative. Although Clark never explicitly compared Nancy and R., I believe their responses epitomized his zoot-personality concept. It is useful to think of the concept through the lenses of gender, age, and class; Clark plainly did so when he maintained that the zoot effect was especially true in Black males. Nancy internalized her societal rejection through social withdrawal; R. externalized his rejection through overt violence. Bear in mind that Nancy was only twelve years old and appeared to come from a middle class background, while R. was eighteen and defied middle-class standards and behavior (Clark Reference Clark1945; Clark and Barker, Reference Clark and Barker1945). We might think of the zoot effect as a continuum extending throughout the life of an African American and shaping reactions depending on gender, class, age, geography and other social realities. This interpretation is consistent with Clark's intellectual framework in the Reference Clark1950 White House Conference paper which served as the basis for the social science statement in Brown v. Board of Education; he emphasized therein that the reactions of minority children to racial prejudice were influenced by a number of factors including family support and stability, individual intelligence, and economic background (Clark Reference Clark, Witmar and Kosinsky1952). Like many Blacks, Nancy and R. might be able to cope and even thrive in American society over their lifetimes in their “will to power,” but they would do so within the context of a society that privileged White racial identity and social and economic power. Moreover, Clark implied there were both short- and long-term psychological costs to both Nancy and R. despite the zoot effect, though what those costs might be he could only speculate.
It is also important to note that by highlighting the dynamic and multilayered ways in which Blacks coped with life in the 1940s, Clark conceptualized African American identity as not biologically or culturally fixed. Thus, he rejected both the biological racism arguments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the “culture of poverty” arguments of the mid-to-late twentieth century to explain racial achievement gaps. Critics of Clark's work have implied he portrayed African Americans as psychologically damaged in order to gain White sympathy, and that his theories led to deficit-oriented models of Black family life (Cross Reference Cross1991; Scott Reference Scott1997). Clark however was a vociferous critic of cultural deprivation theories beginning in the late Reference Clark1950s; he interpreted such arguments as rationalizations for the racial status quo.Footnote 13 His criticism was rooted in a socially-dynamic conception of damage that was, as he repeated again and again throughout the 1960s and 1970s, easily remediable. He believed in a therapeutic approach for individuals that “included the development of personal strength not to adjust to remediable pathology, but to attempt to change the pathology” (Clark Reference Clark, Zubin and Freedman1970, p. 208).
Drawn from Adlerian principles, Clark's analysis highlighted the critical role of social context in shaping an individual's mental health. Rather than seeing racial identity and/or damage as fixed, he interpreted them as shaped by structural inequalities which could be changed through radical social and political transformation. Presenting the stories of Nancy and R.—with their revelation of the psychological effects of racism and segregation—was seen by him as essential to large-scale social justice efforts (Clark Reference Clark1965). For contemporary specialists in Black mental health, these two insights—the importance of environmental context and the possibilities of personal and social transformation—are critical to understanding Clark's concept of racial psychological damage.
