An elementary school science project that spurred contentious school board meetings in Boulder six years ago and led to a national controversy dubbed "Barbiegate" has inspired a collection of academic essays about public discourse and democracy in action at the local level.
The essays appear in the recently published book "The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse and Ordinary Democracy." Karen Tracy, a professor and associate chair of the University of Colorado at Boulder communication department edited the tome. In the book, communication experts from around the country analyze public discourse that touched on science, political correctness and claims of racism and free-speech violations during highly charged 2001 Boulder Valley School Board meetings.
"People are surprised that anyone would be interested in studying school board meetings and my reaction is: School board meetings are the essence, the stuff of our ordinary community lives. They're what democracy is all about," Tracy said.
The "Barbiegate" controversy arose after school officials pulled a science fair project that attempted to measure social attitudes about beauty, race and physical appearance. A third-grader from the predominately white and affluent college town of Boulder showed two Barbie dolls, one black and the other white, to adults and children and asked them to say which one was "prettier."
One doll wore purple, the other another color. The student then switched the dresses and asked her focus groups the same question. The student's research indicated that most of her peers preferred the white doll, while most of the adults preferred the Barbie dressed in purple, no matter what her skin color was.
Worried that ethnic-minority students would find the exhibit offensive, the district opted to remove the girl's project from the science fair. The girl's father later challenged the decision at school board meetings and the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the district had violated the student's free-speech rights.
The student's science project seemed to mimic the famous "doll test" conducted in the 1940s and 1950s by pioneering psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark. The Clarks later testified as expert witnesses in a court case that was combined with Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that officially ended racial segregation in U.S. public schools.
Tracy says the "Prettier Doll" essays highlight how vigorous public discourse during school board and city council meetings can shape the democratic process at the local level and have far-reaching implications for the entire country. For example, the Boulder school board's decision to pull the science exhibit drew criticism from free-speech advocates and forced the district to review its nondiscrimination policy, which bans all displays aimed at denigrating racial groups.
"What we point to is the complexity and difficulty of many of the issues that school boards and local governance groups face, and that these difficulties are handled through very small communicative moves," Tracy said. "I think it can make us a little more tolerant of what people are accomplishing in realizing the competing concerns that are always at stake and the complexities of putting them together."
For more information about the CU-Boulder communication department go to comm.colorado.edu/. To listen to a podcast about the "Prettier Doll" go to colorado.edu/news/podcasts.