Written by  Toni Sturdivant , Texas A&M University-Commerce ____ Back in the 1940s, Kenneth and Mamie Clark – a husband-and-wife team of psychology researchers – used dolls to investigate how young Black children viewed their racial identities . They found that given a choice between Black dolls and white dolls, most Black children preferred to play with white dolls . They ascribed positive characteristics to the white dolls but negative characteristics to the Black ones. Then, upon being asked to describe the doll that looked most like them, some of the children became “ emotionally upset at having to identify with the doll that they had rejected.” The Clarks concluded that Black children – as a result of living in a racist society – had come to see themselves in a negative light. I first heard about the Clarks’ doll experiment with preschool children during a Black studies class in college in the early 2000s. But it wasn’t until one of my daughters came home from preschool one day...