Thursday, May 31, 2007

Deeper than skin deep

This award winning movie was made by 16 years old Kiri Davis, to explore the standards of beauty of young black girls. She recreated the Clarks' Doll experiment by presented a bunch of 4 or 5 years old children with two dolls - a white one & a black one. After asking them which one they liked to play with, she then asked them which they thought was "nice" and which was "bad."

As in the original study back in 1940's, most of the black children preferred the white dolls and identified the black dolls as "bad." According to the Clarks, the experiment was proof of internalized racism, the tendency of a person to identify with the racist stereotype of one's race. The children are "subjected to an obviously inferior status in the society in which they live" and "it is the kind of injury which would be as enduring or lasting as the situation endured, changing only in its form and in the way it manifests itself."

I suppose if one conducted the same study with Indonesian children the result would've been the same. Children in Indonesia is affected by media and marketing that promote light skinned. Look at pages of promotion for beauty product that will lighten your skin color. Look at the movies and tv that mostly depicted light skinned as the attractive, rich, intelligence, good guys, while the dark skinned as the ugly, poor, bad guys. All of it does not help boosting the children's self-esteem.

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