Why Black Girls Still Prefer White Dolls

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Fifty years after psychologist Kenneth Clark conducted the doll test that was used to help make the case for desegregation in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, a 17-year-old filmmaker redid the social experiment and learned that not much has changed.

In the 1954 test, Clark showed children a black doll and a white doll and asked black children which doll they preferred. The majority chose the white. The findings were not surprising for the time. In the summer of 2005, Kiri Davis, a high-school teen, sat with 21 black kids in New York and found that 16 of them liked the white doll better.

"Can you show me the doll that you like best?" Davis asked a black girl in the film. The girl picked the white doll immediately. When asked to show the doll that "looks bad," the girl chose the black doll. But when Davis asked the girl, "Can you give me the doll that looks like you?" the black girl first touched the white doll and then reluctantly pushed the black doll ahead. Watch the video.

The film has left audiences across the country stunned and has reignited a powerful debate over race.

"You hear the audience really gasp because they feel the pain," said Thelma Dye, who worked in Northside Center for Child Development, founded by the late doctor Clark.

"The result of the test is just as painful as [it was in the] 1950s," Thelma Dye said on ABC. "I would not take the film to say all the black children's self-esteem is suffering. We have to continue to ask questions about this film, to ask questions about its meaning."

For Davis, the film was personal. "I remember when I was little," Davis said. "People told me I can't be a princess because I was black. All princesses aren't black. These little things get you after awhile."

"A Girl like Me" also features black teenage girls talking about perceptions of race. Two of the girls discuss the "good hair/bad hair" standard, explaining that the more naturally straight the hair, the better quality it is thought to be.

"It's amazing that two generations after the 'Black Is Beautiful' mantra of the 1960s, some African Americans still believe that it's not," Monroe Anderson wrote in the blog MultiCultClassics. "It's amazing that four decades after James Brown's chart-topper, 'I'm Black and I'm Proud,' so many African Americans aren't. It's amazing that in the same year hip-hop artist Kanye West told the world that 'President Bush doesn't care about black people,' Davis was discovering that neither do shorties in Harlem."

One blogger thinks that when black girls try to bleach their skin or black kids pick white dolls as a better-looking toy, it is merely a reflection of the societal stereotype. This stereotype is continually reinforced.

Davis hopes in the future it won't be such a problem. "Maybe there won't be a need to tell a good doll or bad doll," she said on ABC.

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