Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner's Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center

...Equally importantly, Clark maintained that segregation was both the cause and the consequence of a similar psychic struggle, a similar sense of "twoness," on the opposite side of the racial divide...

...Later in the decade, under Mamie Clark's forceful direction, Northside further expanded its mission to include "community education, community action and advocacy," joining in the heightened militance of the Northern civil rights movement...

...Their research also inspired the Clarks to establish in Harlem in 1946 what became the Northside Center for Child Development, dedicated to preventing or ameliorating the psychological wounds inflicted upon children by segregation and discrimination...

...A fitting successor to Du Bois's Philadelphia Negro, Clark's work was the product of a team of government-sponsored researchers rather than a lone university instructor on a threadbare budget, and it brought modern psychology to bear on its subject in bold new ways to reveal the "distortion of personality" and the "impairment of psychological effectiveness" wrought by ghetto life...

...Deeply influenced by the psychodynamic theory of Alfred Adler, Clark conceived of social power as an outgrowth of a psychological struggle, namely the universal human "striving for power . . . rooted in basic feelings of inferiority...

...In an appalling irony, the "tangle of pathology" has become a standard means of mystifying political subjugation and economic exploitation...

...And it is worth considering whether the structure of political and economic power in modern America demands a different sort of oppositional politics, focused less upon the socialization of the psyche and more upon the socialization of property...

...Their evidence of the psychological toll taken by segregation bolstered the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools were "inherently unequal," regardless of the relative resources available to white and black schools...

...Part of the answer may be found by carefully considering the story Markowitz and Rosner tell of Northside in the years since 1968, the turning point for much of the liberal political economy of the postwar era...

...What Markowitz and Rosner aptly call "the union challenge to the Northside family" threatened not only the founders' vision of Northside itself as a family, but also their professional authority as social scientists...

...Their insightful new book is an invaluable addition to the burgeoning literature on the significance of social science in American political culture since World War II, and particularly in the civil rights movement and the Great Society...

...The Clarks' conclusion, that black children developed a "negative self-image" at the same early age that they acquired a sense of racial identity, provided the critical scientific support for the NAACP's case against segregation in public education in the early 1950s...

...The main targets of that assault were aggressive metropolitan unions like the UFT and Local 1199, which had been the strongest forces behind full employment, high wages, and a growing public sector, the economic underpinnings of civil rights and the Great Society...

...The pathetic vulnerability of the human ego may be illustrated by the in...

...Du Bois later came to describe the problem differently, as he moved from his early faith in sociology and psychology toward the commitment to class struggle that ultimately led him into the Communist party...

...The history of the American negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self...

...But the psychic split that he described as "twoness" became, for many social scientists, the essential dilemma of American race relations...

...Rising anew from the rubble, the social psychology of racial inequality has taken twisted new forms...

...and second, a commitment to professional, social-scientific expertise as the source of such familial strength and social health...

...That year, Northside threw itself into the searing battle against the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the New York City teachers' union, over community control of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district...

...121 Books eradicate crime, brutality, and abuse of authority— a cure, in other words, for the pathology as well as the pathos of power...

...For one thing, the Clarks often insisted that political and economic inequality was responsible for the psychological problems they treated at Northside...

...The typically adversarial relationship of union to management was antithetical to [Northside'sj style and its sense of its mission," the authors write...

...One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro...

...If I could have carried it out as completely as I conceived it, the American negro would have contributed to the development of social science in this century an unforgettable body of work...

...The Clarks' never-ending fight for funding, and their persistent unwillingness to yield control of Northside to their financial benefactors, runs throughout Markowitz and Rosner's work...

...The first black students to enter Columbia University's graduate program in psychology, the Clarks went on to study the formation of racial identity, most famously by asking black children to choose between white dolls and black dolls...

...Having just completed The Philadelphia Negro, a pioneering sociological survey of Philadelphia's largely black seventh ward, Du Bois mapped out an ongoing program of scientific studies of various aspects of black life throughout the nation...

...The Negro problem called for systematic investigation and intelligence," Du Bois said at an Atlanta University convocation in 118...

...In the segregated city that Kenneth Clark depicted in Dark Ghetto, the unsuccessful striving for power gave rise to the "social pathology"—illegitimacy, delinquency, drug addiction, and related concerns—that would become a staple of psychosocial studies of poor, black, urban America...

...Does the ease with which the social science of race relations has been turned to reactionary ends call into question the soundness of modern social science as a basis for progressive politics...

...Kenneth Clark's Dark Ghetto (1965), which grew out of the initial HARYOU study conducted under his guidance, helped to shape public policy and discussion regarding antipoverty and community action programs...

...It was effectively a successful strike by finance capital, which thereby consolidated its control over city government and inaugurated the current era of fiscal austerity...

...Each needs the other, the white to be free of his guilt, the Negro to be free of his fear...

...Du Bois's successors generally have defined that problem much as he did in The Souls of Black Folk, in terms that evoked the romantic psychology of his friend William James...

...The key contribution of the Clarks' early research was to show how such feelings were given special force by racism and segregation...

...Recently, Northside commissioned Markowitz and Rosner, who have published several previous works on twentieth-century American social history together, to write its own history...

...But therein lies a problem that neither the Clarks nor Markowitz and Rosner directly address...

...In 1910, Du Bois resigned his academic post to help lead the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP...

...Each Negro is a little bit white, and every white is a little bit Negro, in the sense that neither is totally alien from the other...

...The "Negro problem"—that is, the problem of racial inequality—has been the central concern of much of American social science throughout the twentieth century...

...But his early research formed the starting point of what has become indeed "an unforgettable body of work" by American social scientists, black and white, on AfricanAmerican life...

...They have done so with compassion and care...

...It is vital to recall the power and humanity of that project...

...Labor's loss was thus Northside's as well...

...From the perspective of political economy, the urban fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s was the final stretch of the marathon of state-sponsored capital accumulation that had created the dark ghetto as well as the bright suburb...

...If the struggle against racism and poverty had fallen short, the reason was to be found in a sobering psychological truth: "Those human beings with power," in his words, "are deeply unwilling to share even a modicum of real power with those who have been powerless...

...The Clarks' studies formed a crucial link between the sense of racial alienation that Du Bois described and the theory of psychosocial "damage" due to past or present racism, an idea that gained considerable currency in postwar American social science...

...As organized labor shows signs of becoming again a wide-reaching social movement, while so much of the liberal politics of the postwar period appears to have run its course, it may be time to critically reconsider those strains in the American left-liberal tradition that have run counter to a labor-based politics...

...Clark's long-standing "diagnosis," as he put it, deserves more critical attention than this last-ditch "remedy...

...sight that the most ruthless, power-competitive individual may be driven by an insatiable need to be loved and accepted by others," Clark said...

...Nowhere can such an individual obtain enough actual power to disguise from himself the essential fact—the intolerable fact—of his own essential inner powerlessness...

...By the end of the first decade of Atlanta Conferences, his hopes for the scientific settlement of "the Negro problem" had dimmed, as Jim Crow and Judge Lynch appeared unmoved by the evidence of inequality...

...For another thing, they understood all too well that mental health requires money, and that money rarely comes without strings...

...From the perspective of social psychology, the demise of much of the integrationist project is difficult to explain, and even harder to resist...

...At the risk of slighting Northside's distinguished history of enlightened activism and community service, I am focusing on these two episodes because they highlight what seems to me a serious problem for the American left, then and now: the tension between a humanitarian idealism informed by social psychology and an understanding of advanced capitalism indebted to an older tradition of political economy...

...Their identification of the union shop as a threat to Northside's very existence stemmed from two of the basic commitments upon which the child development center was founded: first, a commitment to the strong family as a microcosm 120 • DISSENT Books and model of healthy social relations...

...two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings...

...In the early 1960s, Northside took a central role in the planning stage of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), one of the showpiece federally funded, community-organized programs of the War on Poverty...

...Over the next thirty years, SUMMER • 1997 • 119 Books the Clarks' center became a leading outpost of racial liberalism in one of the nation's largest predominantly black communities...

...Both are caught in a common human predicament...

...His earlier description in Dark Ghetto of what he called "the ghetto inside" offered a revealing gloss on Du Bois's "Negro problem": The great tragedy—but possibly the great salvation too—of the Negro and white in America is that neither one can be free of the other...

...two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder...

...The partisans of community control, strengthened by the Clarks' efforts to help organize a "Union of Concerned Parents," nominally won that fight...

...It is no less essential to appreciate that the psychological and educational assistance that Northside has provided for half a century is in itself a monumental achievement...

...Northside was forced to retreat in large part from the expansive social work it had initiated in the 1960s and to return to its original mission, providing mental health services to a deplorably underserved community...

...DISSENT Books 1938...

...But the center never reneged on its promise to provide the children of Harlem with first-rate psychological services...

...They found that most of their three- to seven-year-old subjects preferred the white dolls to those of their own race...

...On the deepest level, Du Bois wrote, the problem was a struggle for "selfconsciousness" amid pervasive prejudice: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity...

...It is also a sharp argument for the moral force of Northside's scientific spirit, which the authors rightly contrast to the resurgent racism of current social-scientific apologies for cutbacks in welfare and public education...

...But it is also worth wondering whether Northside's broader psychosocial vision of politics and power has proven inadequate, and even enfeebling in important ways...

...122 • DISSENT...

...But given the narrow constraints of collective bargaining, the UFT could hardly do other than guard the fragile authority embodied in its pathbreaking contract for public workers...

...The decisive demonstration that racial inequality gave rise to a profound psychological struggle within black Americans came in the child studies conducted in the late 1930s by Kenneth and Mamie Clark...

...As Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner show in their compelling institutional biography, Children, Race, and Power, Northside provided a much-needed alternative to New York City's draconian child welfare system, in an era when Harlem was straining to accommodate a massive influx of African-Americans for whom private charity and foster care were largely off-limits "Our biggest job is to build a child's self-esteem," Kenneth Clark told Ebony magazine, "so that he can bear life in spite of slums, lack of privacy, discrimination and ugliness all around him...

...But they did so at the cost of busting a fiftyfiveday citywide strike by the teachers' union and thereby providing an ominous demonstration of the precarious position of organized labor, a pillar of the postwar liberal order...

...But Kenneth and Mamie Clark adamantly, and successfully, opposed the local's most fundamental demand: the union shop...

...guilt and fear are both self-destructive...

...Local 1199, a union of predominantly black and Latino health care workers with a strong history of support for civil rights, sought to organize the Northside staff...

...Does the equal ease with which conservatives and neoliberals have dismantled the infrastructure of integration call for a rethinking of its psychosocial rationale...

...It would be simplistic to see the child development center and the labor union as rival bases of social action, the one guided by social psychology and the other by political economy...

...Engaged in a common struggle against self-destruction, they were bound by the "inner powerlessness" that compelled each to look to the other for selfhood and strength, much as the children in the Clarks' early studies learned to see themselves as others saw them...

...For the social psychology of integration was fundamentally a science of common needs rather than competing interests, of powerlessness rather than power...

...At the same time, Northside's founders sought to combat the destructive forces that eroded children's self-esteem— both clinically, by offering remedial education and family counseling, and politically, by mobilizing the community on behalf of integration and civil rights...

...Northside's conception of social power derived from a mixture of Weberian sociology and behavioristic psychology, as Kenneth Clark explained in his 1965 address to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, elaborating what he called "a social psychological theory of power...

...That observation was borne out several years later when the New York City fiscal crisis (along with the Nixon Administration's ceasefire in the War on Poverty) resulted in drastic reductions in the government funding upon which Northside had come to depend...

...This "inner powerlessness" lay at the core of both white racism and such pathological repercussions as Black Power (in its most "extreme" form), in Clark's view...

...Children were the appropriate subjects of the Clarks' science of social life...

...Such a science could scarcely describe the social structure that divided Americans, or that united them on unequal terms...

...Two years later, Northside once again ran up against an essential claim of organized labor in the era of collective bargaining, this time within Northside's own ranks...

...The antidote lay in the cultivation of healthy self-esteem as well as a proper esteem for others, which was Northside's ultimate aim from the start...

...The UFT's estrangement from those in the black community justifiably demanding control over their schools was itself a sign of the union's departure from the broad social agenda that had made it an early ally of the civil rights movement...

...The downsizing of Northside was a harbinger of the coming destruction of much of the institutional foundation of integration, from the green flight of urban businesses to the defunding of public schools to the closing of mass transit systems...

...Joining in the social psychology of prejudice developed by mid-century writers including Gordon Allport, Theodor Adorno, Bruno Bettelheim, and Gunnar Myrdal, Clark described what he called the "pathos of power" in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1971...

...Du Bois took charge of a new series of annual conferences at Atlanta University on the state of Black America...

...For Kenneth Clark, the "problem of personal and social power" was essentially a "problem of human motivation...

...But it seems fair to say that the conflict between Northside's commitment to familial relations and social-scientific expertise, on the one hand, and organized labor's commitment to collective bargaining and the union shop, on the other, reflected competing conceptions of social power...

...Social psychology, Northside's stock-in-trade, is one such strain...

...His long-range plan was for the studies to be repeated in ten-year cycles for the next hundred years, expanding in scope each decade...

...It was the object as well of Clark's regrettable proposal, in his 1971 address, for the development of a biochemical "psychotechnology" that would SUMMER • 1997...

...White and black America were united by mutual need on the common ground of the pathetic psyche that Clark envisioned...

...Nor could it help but see the community control plan underway in 1968 as an assault upon everything it had won in six years of struggle...