Race, Class and Gender
| | She’s Pretty for a Dark Skin Girl | |
In 1939 there was an original experiment performed by Dr. Kenneth Clark and wife Mamie Clark, they asked black children to choose between two dolls—a black doll and a white doll. The dolls were the same with exception for their skin color, most of the children thought that the white doll was the better doll. Within the research completed by Dr. Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark also revealed that black children between the ages of six and nine selected the black doll as the bad doll. Another similar study administered by Clark’s there were three hundred children were researched, this research was surveyed from three different areas of the country in which these children lived. They discovered that black children who went to segregated schools were more likely to pick the white doll as the nicer choice of dolls. In addition the Clark’s asked the children to color a picture of themselves and mostly all of the students indicated a shade of brown strikingly lighter than their own selves (Butler). In 2005 Kiri Davis, a filmmaker repeated the same experiment as the Clark’s but in Harlem as part of her short film, “A Girl Like Me”. Davis asked twenty one children which doll was the nicer doll out of the two dolls supplied and seventy one percent told her that the white doll was the nicer one. In 2009 after Obama became president, “Good Morning America” on ABC did their own experiment on a small pool of nineteen black children from Norfolk, Virginia, and asked the parallel question of what doll looked most liked them—eighty eight percent said the black doll looked most like them. ABC added a question of which doll was the prettiest however to the opposite sex and the boys showed an even liking to both the lighter and darker colored dolls. Out of the black girls asked the same question forty seven percent said that the white doll was the prettier choice.
I decided to write about this racial inequality within the
In 1939 there was an original experiment performed by Dr. Kenneth Clark and wife Mamie Clark, they asked black children to choose between two dolls—a black doll and a white doll. The dolls were the same with exception for their skin color, most of the children thought that the white doll was the better doll. Within the research completed by Dr. Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark also revealed that black children between the ages of six and nine selected the black doll as the bad doll. Another similar study administered by Clark’s there were three hundred children were researched, this research was surveyed from three different areas of the country in which these children lived. They discovered that black children who went to segregated schools were more likely to pick the white doll as the nicer choice of dolls. In addition the Clark’s asked the children to color a picture of themselves and mostly all of the students indicated a shade of brown strikingly lighter than their own selves (Butler). In 2005 Kiri Davis, a filmmaker repeated the same experiment as the Clark’s but in Harlem as part of her short film, “A Girl Like Me”. Davis asked twenty one children which doll was the nicer doll out of the two dolls supplied and seventy one percent told her that the white doll was the nicer one. In 2009 after Obama became president, “Good Morning America” on ABC did their own experiment on a small pool of nineteen black children from Norfolk, Virginia, and asked the parallel question of what doll looked most liked them—eighty eight percent said the black doll looked most like them. ABC added a question of which doll was the prettiest however to the opposite sex and the boys showed an even liking to both the lighter and darker colored dolls. Out of the black girls asked the same question forty seven percent said that the white doll was the prettier choice.
I decided to write about this racial inequality within the