Event

Deprivatized Emotions, Public Feelings: Kenneth B. Clark and the Psychologization of Antiblack Environments, 1940s – 1950s

Developmental psychologists and child psychiatrists in the mid-twentieth century primarily espoused a family-centered model of emotional development, in which family dynamics were the chief determinants of a child's emotional health and their budding personalities. This talk explores how Black developmental psychologist Kenneth B. Clark's experimental research on racial prejudice and personality damage, as well as his clinical work at the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, NY, undermined the integrity of this family-centered model by identifying social pathologies, like antiblack racism, that permeated and transcended "the home.” By developing a psychosocial model of Black emotional conflict that indexed environmental harm rather than biological inferiority or familial pathology, Clark exposed the inadequacies of the family-centered model as an explanatory paradigm for conceptualizing Black emotional development and diagnosing Black emotional disorders. More broadly, though, Clark believed that ambient antiblackness informed every child’s budding personality regardless of race. This talk demonstrates how Clark challenged long held conceptual orthodoxies in developmental psychology and child psychiatry by fundamentally upending how mid-century developmental scientists thought about race and racism as developmental variables.