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Saturday, October 14, 2006
Why would kids think they’re in the wrong skin?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The baby doll coos if she’s happy and cries when upset. It’s brown-skinned.
The other doll doesn’t have batteries. It’s pale.
Both were placed in front of Olivia.
“Which one do you like playing with the best?” I asked. She pointed to the pale one.
“Which doll looks like you?”
Last week, I conducted a “doll test” with my precocious, pretty, moody, maddening 4-year-old. It was a quiz to glean some sense of her self-esteem, how she feels about herself, her brown skin.
In the 1950s, Dr. Kenneth Clark, and his wife conducted doll tests to help persuade the Supreme Court to strike down segregation in its Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
The experiment involved 16 black children, ages 6 to 9. They asked the children their perception of a white doll and a black doll.
Eleven of the students said the black doll looked “bad” and nine said the white doll looked nice.
Decades later, we have a similar experiment. Kiri Davis, a 17-year-old student from New York, conducted a doll test for “A Girl Like Me,” her 2005 short film about black girls and standards of beauty (view it at www.uthtv.com /umedia/collection/2052).
In the seven-minute film, 15 of the 21 black children in a Harlem day care center favor the white doll over the black one. The white doll is good, they say; the black one bad. When asked to select the doll that looks like her, one little girl seems to hesitate before she reluctantly picks up the black one.
This hesitation, along with the kids’ overall perception of race has alarmed the masses. Folks are professing shock that some vulnerable young minds seem to think that the skin they’re in is the wrong skin to be in.
My take is — why are we surprised?
Browse through the magazine rack in grocery stores. Look at the waifish runway models. Whites, naturally, dominate most everything in America because they are the majority. That, to some degree, may explain why the kids in Davis’ film believe beauty and goodness comes in shades of white.
Now juxtapose the typical image of whites with the general, limited image of blacks in pop culture. It’s not multifaceted. It’s unappealing. Half-naked women, licking lollipops, gyrating to some trashy song. Young men with “grills” in their mouths, pants to their knees. Nonsensical songs about who owns the baddest car, the biggest house, the magic touch.
Yet we feign shock and sorrow and look aghast at the results of Davis’ experiment. We ponder the possibility that low-rent stereotypes can impact self-identity and that race can trample self-esteem. And we are surprised to see that racial images can penetrate the youngest of minds, even those of 4- and 5-year-olds.
Truth be told, we didn’t need a doll test to expose the ugly truth. When it comes to beauty, we already knew what America values, and what it doesn’t.
Olivia looked at the two dolls after I asked her which one resembled her the most.
She touched the tummy of the black one.
And she did it without hesitation.
