A teenage filmmaker from Manhattan, Kiri Davis, decided to make a film called A Girl Like Me, that reflected the concerns of today’s black girls, so she pointed her camera at some friends at her own high school in Manhattan to explore their perceptions of beauty and self-image.
Davis thought a replication of Dr. Kenneth Clark’s infamous “doll test” would shed some light on how black girls perceive themselves and how the dominant culture’s standard of beauty affects them.
As early as 1939, Dr. Clark and his wife, Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, began conducting “doll tests” to try to understand how black children saw themselves. This test was used in the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case. Black and white children across the U.S. were shown black dolls and white dolls, as part of the experiment. The children were asked which dolls were nice, which were bad, and which they’d like to play with. Overwhelmingly, both groups chose the white dolls to play with and gave them positive attributes. Also overwhelmingly, both groups called the black dolls “bad.”
In Davis’ short film, she places two dolls—one black and one white—on a table and asks several black children (mostly girls), a series of questions:
Show me the doll that looks bad.
Show me the nice doll.
Can you show me the doll that you like the best?
Yes, the pattern remains the same after 50 years. Most of the children said that the black doll was bad, the white doll was good, and they overwhelmingly chose the white doll as the one they liked the best. Sad isn’t it?
When Davis conducted interviews with girls from her high school she got some honest, raw, and sometimes disturbing comments from these ladies. One brown-skinned girl says that the message that she gets from society is that darker girls aren’t smart and that light skin is better than dark skin. Another girl says when she started wearing her hair in a natural style, her mom told her to stop because she was “starting to look African.”
All women raising little black children, please watch this film. It might make you cry, but just dry your tears and remember to tell your little lady or man how beautiful she or he is—-everyday.
“Human beings who are forced to live under ghetto conditions and whose daily experience tells them that almost nowhere in society are they respected and granted the ordinary dignity and courtesy accorded to others will, as a matter of course, begin to doubt their own worth.”
-- Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power by Dr. Kenneth Clark, the
the first African-American to earn his doctorate in psychology from Columbia University in 1940.