Scars of racism

In 1939, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark began publishing papers based on experiments that had found young African American children to often perceive being white as preferable to being black. Their evidence was later used in the case of Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the US Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation in American public schools.

Kiri Davis' first documentary A Girl Like Me has won an award at the Media That Matters Film Festival, and in part of it she has attempted to replicate Clark and Clark's famous 'doll experiment' to try to gauge how much things may have changed regarding African American children's views of themselves.

I have no idea how faithful she was to the psychologists' original methodology, or how comparable the two sets of experiments really are. Despite this, the sight of young African Americans repeatedly identifying the white doll in front of them as 'good' and the black as 'bad' cannot be anything but disheartening.

Found via a Gay Persons of Colour post.