The posted article is from a research study late last year. Because of its content, I not only find this study to be noteworthy, but also newsnet14-worthy!
NYC - A short film by a New York City high school student asks how far our society has come in its attitude toward race since the 1940s.
In her film, “A Girl Like Me,” Kiri Davis recreates a famous 1940s experiment conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark that studied the psychological effects of segregation on black children. Including Video:
In Clark’s test, children were given a black doll and a white doll, and then asked which one they thought was better.
Overwhelmingly, they chose the white doll.
Davis asked 4 and 5-year-old kids at a Harlem school the same question in 2005. She found the children’s answers were not that different.
In Davis’ test, 15 of the 21 children said that the white doll was good and pretty, and that the black doll bad.
Clark concluded that “prejudice, discrimination and segregation” caused black children to develop a sense of inferiority and self-hatred.
The experiment also influenced the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which outlawed school segregation.
Davis, who was 16 years old when she made the film, said the results of her experiment surprised and frustrated her.
In the powerful film, Davis asks a little girl, “Can you show me the doll that looks bad?”
The girl immediately chooses the black doll.
“Why does that look bad?” Davis asks. “Because it’s black,” the girl responds.
“Young student’s documentary leaving audiences stunned”
SEE VIDEO>>>
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The Doll Experiments by Clark:
The Clarks’ doll experiments grew out of Mamie’s master’s degree thesis and yielded 3 papers between 1939 and 1940. They found that Black children often preferred to play with white dolls over black; that, asked to fill in a human figure with the color of their own skin they frequently chose a lighter shade than was accurate, and that they viewed white as good and pretty, but black as bad and ugly.[1] They viewed this as evidence of internalized racism caused by stigmatization.
The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in several school desegregation cases including Briggs v. Elliott, one of the cases that were later combined into the famous Brown v. Board of Education, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court officially overturned racial segregation in public education. According to Woody Klein’s Toward Justice and Humanity: The Writings of Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, Scholar of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision, this was the first time the Court ever admitted social science studies as hard evidence.
Kenneth Clark advocated several different methods of improving schools in black ghettos, and in 1964 persuaded the Johnson administration to back his ideas with $110 million in federal funding.[2]
Doll Experiments by Kenneth Clark Wikipedia>>>
I was inspecting a Section 8 (welfare paid) apartment project in Houston in 1982 and inside one of the wrecked apartments was a photograph of a White child angel located in the center of one of the walls. The photo was place and maitained as if it was a picture of God. All around was incredible filth but this image was in a place of honor.