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Why Black Girls Still Prefer White Dolls
By Yuqing Feng
February 09, 2007
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.
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Based on the African American Women's Voices Project, Shifting reveals that a large number of African American women feel pressure to compromise their true selves as they navigate America's racial and gender bigotry.
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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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Brown
Eyes Blue Eyes Complete Pack
The "Brown Eyed/Blue Eyed" exercise is perhaps the most popular diversity experiment in practice today. Many trainers first heard of the exercise's author, Jane Elliott, from her appearances on the Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, The Tonight Show and on Donahue.
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