In front of a white backdrop a young Black girl boldly strikes a pose. Her Brahmatic facial structure is composed of four distinctly different visages. Her left jaw line and ear come from a different person than her left eye and forehead, which have different origins than her right eye and smile, and are altogether separate from a face that juts out of the right side of her head, looking off into the distance. Above this conglomerate sit five tightly coiled bantu knots wrapped in a red and green scarf (two of the three colors of the pan-African flag). She sports a peach swimsuit with a large red, white and blue insignia across the front that reads “American” upside down, as if to say that such apparel is a knock-off or counterfeit – as if to suggest that the wearer is similarly a fraud.

This little girl represents the intricate and nuanced reality of Black childhood. Her story did not begin with herself, but rather her ancestors – those that came before her; the face that looks off into the distance reminding her of her past and informing her present. She is rooted in their traditions. From the crown of her intricately braided hair, to the soles of her richly pigmented feet, she is a sum of many generational parts. Her complex history – her very being – is one that is endemic to her contingent of the African diaspora.

The question then becomes, what happens if her story, like the stories of many other Black children – the stories that undergird the history of American democracy – are never told? What is lost in spheres of primary education and learning if her voice(s), her perspective(s) is not shared?

These were the questions that sparked the hearing of five Supreme Court cases that are collectively known as Brown vs. Board of Education. The central argument of this case was that separate school systems for Black students and white students were inherently unequal, and a violation of the "Equal Protection Clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In other words, Black students were not “separate but equal”. They were disenfranchised by a segregated schooling system and were not afforded the same, necessary privileges to succeed scholastically.

Scholar and (then) attorney Thurgood Marshall presented the results of sociological tests, such as the one performed by social scientists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, arguing that segregated school systems resulted in Black children internalizing an unnamed inferiority. This “double consciousness” as DuBois terms it, is the same phenomenon captured by photographer Gordon Parks in his image Doll Test.

Subject America #3 is such a potent comment on the Brown v. Board case – though painted almost seven decades later –because it begs a question that has been historically disregarded and shied away from: what is afforded to white American children through the integration of primary education settings? How can the experiences of a young Black student enrich the lives – and futures – of young white students? How does such integration work to proactively elicit ideals of representational justice and impact the psychological phenomenon Douglass terms the “internal picture gallery”? The answers to these questions aren’t as elusive as they may seem. It is through the acceptance and understanding of our neighbors’ uniqueness that we become closer to realizing the true potential of the American experience.