“We played it with our friends,” Feiman remembered, “and we kept thinking, you know, someday we could remake this and update it.” Jump ahead 50 years to 2020 when the millennial writer-comedians, Markos, who is Black, and Feiman, who is white, were playing with an old edition of Sommer’s game. (Karin Higgins/UC Davis) 2020 events inspire 50th-anniversary edition Professor Robert Sommer, who died last year, created the 1960s “teaching game” Blacks & Whites with his friend, Judy Tart. Sommer said in a letter to a colleague, filed in the UC Davis Library archives, that Psychology Today sold thousands of copies. The magazine at that time also sold the board game by mail order, complete with play money, dice, play pieces and the cards for $5.95. Blacks & Whites was manufactured, published and sold to consumers by Psychology Today in 1970, with an article, rules and special tear-out version of the game available in the March 1970 edition of the magazine. Sommer, who died last year, in creating this “teaching game,” collaborated with Tart, the wife of UC Davis psychology faculty colleague Charles Tart. “The content of the game seemed unrealistic, and worse, the rules of the game immoral,” he wrote, lamenting: “The game explicitly encouraged illegal behavior.” “As an observant adult living in socially conscious times, when every act had political implications, I viewed differently,” Sommer, a white man, wrote in 2008 - four decades after creating the board game Blacks & Whites, his own version of a Monopoly-style game. So began Sommer’s quest to create a game that might help illustrate racism in society. He didn’t want them indoctrinated into becoming “monopolists,” as the game rules dictated. He developed the current Davis bicycle path system.Īnd when watching his three children play the seemingly innocent game of Monopoly, he became enraged, even though he’d loved playing the game himself growing up. During his 40-plus-year tenure, he researched and made recommendations for the layout of farmers markets, where human interaction was tantamount to their success - a type of market layout still prevalent today. Sommer, an environmental psychologist, had always said that he wanted to leave the world a better place. Obituary in Davis Enterprise from February 2021.Professor Robert Sommer appeared on a UC Davis-produced talk show in 2005 where he discussed his career.
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