Studies about the Discrimination Against African Americans in the U.S.

In 1947, Kenneth and Mamie Clark did a classic experiment to test prejudice and self-esteem. They offered young girls a choice between taking a white doll or a black doll to play with it. The majority, including African American girls, chose the white doll and rejected the black doll because they though that the white doll was prettier and superior. These researchers demonstrated that young African American girls were thinking at this very young age that it is not desirable to be black, which highly affects their self-esteem.





In 1954, Thurgood Marshall succeeded before the U.S. Supreme Court in ending legalized segregation in public schools, and he used the previous experiment by Clark to back up his argument. However, even after the ending of legal segregation, many people argue that prejudice and stereotypes against African Americans still exists in the United States.

In 2002, Correll and others did a study to test stereotypes about race and weapons. They used a video game that showed different people, half black and half white, in different places like parks, train stations, and city sidewalks. Half of the men in each group, white or black, carried a gun and the other half carried the non-threatening objects like a cell phone, a camera, or a wallet. The participants were asked to play the role of the police officer and press a button “shoot” if the character in the video game was holding a gun, and press the button saying, “don’t shoot” if the character in the game was not holding a gun. In addition, to make their role very similar to the role of the police officer, they were given very little time to decide to press “shoot” or “don’t shoot”, which was a bit over half a second.






The results from this experiment showed how participants were most likely to press “shoot” when the man in the picture was black, whether he was holding a gun or not. When the characters were white, the participants made about the same number of errors when they were armed or not. They did the least errors when the characters were black and armed, and did the most errors when the characters were black and unarmed.





This study shows that discrimination against African American still exists in the United States, even if its not legalized. And it also shows that status value is assigned to each race, black being dangerous, and white being not dangerous.


Reference: Aronson, Wilson, Akert. (2010). Social Psychology.