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"The Kindergarten of New Consciousness": Gwendolyn Brooks and the Social Construction of Childhood - Critical Essay
African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Richard Flynn
There was a whole lot of grayness here. (Blacks 205-06)
Had Bell attended to "literary creations" like Maud Martha (1953), he would have seen Bronzeville heroes and heroines deprived of a widening of windows, who nevertheless have a clear-eyed perception of the world outside through "a half-inch crack" (Blacks 319). These "literary creations" struggled to make sense of the maimed bodies of men home from the war and the dissonant images in "the Negro press (on whose front pages beamed the usual representations of womanly Beauty, pale and pompadoured)" which "carried the stories of the latest Georgia and Mississippi lynchings" (Blacks 319-21). If the "kitchenette folks" of Maud Martha's (and Brooks's) Bronzeville "would be grand, would be glorious and brave, would have nimble hearts that would beat and beat" (321). they would do it in the face of a relentless racist ideology. Bell's stereotypes, in fact, find their antithesis in Brooks's poetry, which works to undermine the ways in which even liberal ideology interpellates its victims.
Such pervasive misconceptions of Black life in America were wide-ranging and historically sedimented in intellectual circles, and so the Black scholars in the '30s and '40s relied on the strategic erasure of race. Though among what Du Bois termed "the talented tenth," they knew firsthand the effects of racial discrimination. Allison Davis, the first Black professor hired by the University of Chicago and the first to receive tenure (in 1948), had spent most of his life earning intellectual distinction in segregated institutions. [8] His research during the forty years he was at Chicago focused on the personality and development of children and adolescents, particularly the influence of social class on learning, which led to pioneering work on cultural bias in intelligence testing. He was the co-author of two major studies of social anthropology--Children of Bondage: The Personality Development of Negro Youth in the Urban South (1940), with John Dollard, and Deep South (1941), with Burleigh and Mary Gardner.
Under the influence of White mentors like W. Lloyd Warner, author of Social Class in America (1949), scholars like Davis recognized the rigidity of "color-caste" distinctions and chose to focus on economic and social class as a strategy for a more effective remediation of inequities. In addition, recognizing the growing influence of psychoanalysis and social psychology, they enlisted the new prestige of those disciplines in order to make their case. In his preface to Children of Bondage (1940), Davis thanks his collaborator John Dollard for helping him achieve "a genuine integration of psychoanalytical and sociological understanding" (xvii). Employing a Freudian-inflected behaviorism as an interpretive schema, Davis and Dollard present case histories of "eight Negro adolescents in the Deep South [New Orleans, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi] selected to represent all class positions in Negro society [whose] experiences illustrate the fundamental controls which each class exercises over the socialization of its members" (xxiii-xxvii). Firm in their insistence that social-Darwinist theories of race are unscientific, they argue that differences between groups are cultural and social, and that the effects of invidious discrimination are psychologically damaging to children.
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