When Thurgood Marshall failed to persuade the Supreme Court justices against segregated public schools, he resorted to the doll test evidence for its emotional appeal.
During the doll test, Black children received both a Black and a White doll. The children accepted the White doll, but when asked which doll was ugly and resembled them, they pointed to the Black doll, and several ran out of the room crying.
Marshall’s colleague, Spottswood William Robinson III, said it was “crazy and insulting to persuade a court of law with examples of crying children and dolls.”
Robinson was wrong.
The justices couldn’t ignore the doll test results, which revealed that the “separate but equal” doctrine left Black children with an abiding sense of inferiority, and the Supreme Court unanimously declared segregated public schools unconstitutional in 1954.
In 1963, Rev. James Bevel organized a children’s march in Birmingham, Alabama. More than a thousand students walked out of school and marched to the mayor’s office to demand the end of segregation in public accommodations. Martin Luther King Jr. was opposed to the children’s march because it would expose students to violence, and, more importantly, the emotional appeal was not worth the risk.
Birmingham police used fire hoses and police dogs to break up the children’s march.
The televised images of Black children being sprayed with high-pressure water and attacked by dogs compelled President John F. Kennedy to publicly support federal civil rights legislation.
Rev. Bevel’s tactic was successful, but unlike Robinson, King wasn’t wrong.
Marshall used “crying children” as evidence, but he did not endanger any children. The organizers of the Children’s March believed that the outcome justified the methods. King understood that outcomes were beyond an organizer’s control, but organizers were responsible and should be held accountable for the tactics they used to achieve their goals.
King thought the means were more important than the ends, but “by any means necessary” is now the norm.
For example, in a 6-3 ruling, the United States Supreme Court invalidated the use of affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson addressed why affirmative action was still necessary in twenty-first-century America. Jackson cited one study for its emotional appeal, which turned out to be incorrect.
Jackson had written, “Black (and Latino) children with heart conditions are more likely to die than their White counterparts.” Jackson backed up this claim with a brief submitted by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which referenced a 2020 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The PNAS study stated when Black babies are cared for by White doctors, 430 more of them die for every 100,000 births than White newborns. When Black doctors take care of newborns, the death rate for Black babies is only 173 per 100,000 births higher than for White babies. This number represents a difference of 257 deaths per 100,000 births and a 58% reduction in the racial mortality differential.
Based on this data, the researchers concluded that racial concordance, which is when infants are cared for by physicians of the same race, substantially decreased the likelihood of infant mortality for Black newborns. The researchers also suggested that spontaneous bias, an unconscious tendency to lean against something, harbored by White physicians is potentially driving higher Black infant mortality rates.
The AAMC brief stated, “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug: it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live. Yet due to the enduring and significant underrepresentation of minorities in the health professions, many minority patients will not receive care from a racially diverse team or from providers who were trained in a diverse environment.”
It’s reasonable that Jackson would use this study to demonstrate the need for more Black doctors and why affirmative action was still necessary in the twenty-first century.
However, in 2024, a different set of researchers attempted to replicate the 2020 study Jackson cited, but these researchers didn’t reach similar results. The researchers found that the previous study failed to account for the low birth weights of Black newborns.
These researchers published their findings in PNAS. They found that after adjusting for the effects of very low birth weights on mortality, the estimated racial concordance effect is significantly reduced and frequently becomes statistically insignificant. Their findings called into doubt the importance of physician-patient racial matching in predicting Black newborn death, and their findings implied that reducing the prevalence of such low birth weights among Black newborns may remain the key to closing the Black-White disparity.
These researchers pointed out a methodological error in the 2020 study, but it wasn’t an error; it was an intentional oversight.
Do No Harm, a medical and policy advocacy group that opposes identity politics in medical research, has uncovered that Brad N. Greenwood, the principal author of the 2020 study, knew from the beginning what the other set of researchers found out in 2024. However, Greenwood purposefully withheld that information since it contradicted the “racial concordance” argument, which promoted more Black physicians, and the “spontaneous bias” theory, which blamed White doctors.
Greenwood noted why he suppressed the information. He said if we’re telling the story from the perspective of saving Black infants, we don’t want to emphasize information that undermines the narrative.
The story circulating from Greenwood’s 2020 study was that “White doctors are biased against Black babies.” Scientific literature has mentioned the study 507 times, and 340 news sites, including the Washington Post, USA Today, and CNN, have covered it.
A Supreme Court justice even endorsed the misleading narrative.
Greenwood accomplished his goal “by any means necessary,” but the method he used was not worth the cost because the loss of public trust affects not only him but the entire scientific community.