Teen Filmmaker’s Updated ‘Doll Test’ Reaps Same Sad Results Decades Later
(please watch)
The link to the video is here
http://www.uthtv.com/umedia/show/2052/ Date: Tuesday, August 08, 2006
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com
A 17-year-old high school student from New York City is making waves with a short documentary that looks at the self-images of black teenaged girls and includes an exercise similar to the famous doll test from the late 1940's that played a key role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that outlawed segregation in public schools.
It started out as a school project for “black girls to see the world through our eyes,” said Kiri Davis, who produced “A Girl Like Me,” a seven-minute documentary that has won acclaim at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, the Silverdocs festival in Silver Spring, Md., and has won the Diversity Award from Media that Matters, a nonprofit Internet group that screens films about social issues.
In the course of the project, Davis told BlackAmericaWeb.com, “Standards of beauty kept coming up. So we started from there.”
In the film, four teenaged girls talk about what they believe society thinks of black women and how they and their peers wrestle with these notions and images imposed upon them.
One girl said black women were perceived as “loud, obnoxious -- ghetto.”
Supposedly, “we’re not smart,” another girl says.
The light-skinned/dark-skinned conflict, straight vs. kinky hair conflicts that many Baby Boomer black Americans thought were left behind after the ‘60s and ‘70s clearly are still at play.
“I just wanted to bring more awareness and more discussion to the issue,” Davis said.
One part of the film that has lots of people talking is the re-creation of the doll test that psychologist Kenneth B. Clark used in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case.
Individually, 21 four- and five-year-olds from a Harlem day-care center sat at a table with two dolls, one black, one white. Fifteen of the 21 children selected the white doll as the “nice” doll and the black doll as the “bad” doll. In one scene, Davis asks a girl to choose which doll was most like her. She hesitates a bit, touches both dolls, then pushes the black doll forward.
In another scene, however, a black boy is asked which doll he would most like to play with, and he gleefully holds up the black doll.
“The few kids that didn’t pick the white doll (as good) appeared not to be American, but children of immigrants or first-generation children from the Caribbean or Africa,” said Shola Lynch, a documentary filmmaker who was Davis’ mentor for the project.
“They have a different sense of themselves because of the country they come from,” Lynch told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “You see (black) people at the top and the bottom and everywhere in between.”
Lynch, who has completed a documentary about the late Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, as well as the first black and first woman to make a serious run for president, said she hopes Davis’ film will make black people think about the images and history they are giving their children.
The film was produced through Reel Works Teen Filmmaking (www.reelworks.org), a nonprofit arts group that sponsors four programs to help students interested in filmmaking. The program paired Davis and Lynch, and Lynch helped Davis focus the film topic and taught her how to market the piece.
“You get to the root of why filmmakers make films,” Lynch said. “I give to (Davis) only in terms of helping Kiri ask the right questions.”
“A lot has changed, but there some things that haven’t changed,” Lynch said. “Kids are getting an idea of who they are based on how they’re treated on this planet. It’s so important to educate ourselves, to know ourselves, to have a sense of who we are.”
“That subject opens up this Pandora’s Box,” said Esther Iverem, a writer, poet and media critic who runs the Web site,
www.seeingblack.com. “We all know the kind of historical depth of this problem. You don’t want to have to slog through centuries here, but you kind of have to.”
In 1997, Iverem’s son, then in pre-kindergarten, told her that a light-skinned classmate had told him “people who look like me are better than you.”
Years later, the remark still rankles, even after seeing her son grow into deep-chocolate handsomeness as he prepares to go to high school in the fall.
“Just a few generations removed from the civil rights struggle, our young people are still struggling with the issue of color,” Iverem told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
The inability to control the government and the institutions that purvey images of beauty, intelligence and other positive attributes to the masses affects how black people are viewed and how they view themselves, she maintained.
“When you really don’t control the government and the means of production about culture around you, you can’t control the messages about what goes on in your head,” Iverem said, adding that, after deliberately fighting to push positive images of black people in the media, at some point it becomes easy “to creep back to the other way.”
Iverem said the problem is heightened by the influx of immigrants, especially non-black immigrants, who have already gotten the message that they are better simply because they are not black.
Black Americans, she said, “still have to struggle mightily against the oppression of the black culture and against the ideas of what is beautiful.”
Davis said, however, that her film seemed to have a more universal appeal among women, regardless of age or color.
“A lot of the response has been kind of similar in terms of age, and even people who may not have been black and other girls of color” are struggling with the image of beauty in a society in which they no longer belong to the dominant culture.
Besides, she said, “I’ve seen girls in the most Afrocentric homes who struggle with these issues.”
A’Lelia Bundles, the great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker, who built a financial empire on beauty and hair care products, told BlackAmericaWeb.com that she sees that struggle among college students as well.
Bundles, author of “On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker,” was asked to speak to a group of female students at Brown University. She said she was invited back for a second discussion because the “anxiety and dilemma about hair” kept coming up.
Davis’ film, Bundles said, “was great in the sense of showing the pain that we thought we had conquered in the upheaval of the ‘60s and ‘70s is just as intense as it was then.”
Asked what her famous ancestor would have thought about the emphasis on hair, Bundles said Walker was more concerned about healthy hair than straightened hair. She quoted Walker as having said, “Let me correct the erroneous impression that I claim to straighten hair. I grow hair!”
“Grooming was more the issue than straight hair,” Bundles said.
Bundles also said many women fail to distinguish between “a subset of people who are about healthy hair and another group of people who say, ‘If I can sell you a product, if I can sell you doll’s hair and make you think you’ll look better, you’ll buy it.’”
Author, artist and educator Carolivia Herron knows firsthand what a furor hair can cause.
In 1998, Ruth Sherman, a white New York City schoolteacher, caught heat when she had her class of mostly black and Latino third-graders read Herron’s book “Nappy Hair.”
The book tells the tale of Brenda, a little girl with “the nappiest, the curliest, the twistiest hair in the whole family” and it was made that way because “God wanted hisself some nappy hair upon the face of this earth,” according to the story.
Black parents accused Sherman of trying to demean black children.
Herron said when she wrote the book, the focus really wasn’t about hair at all.
“I was writing it to show the beauty of the culture, of call-and-response,” Herron told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “It was one of many wonderful things about the culture. But in the process of publishing it and sharing it with so many audiences, (its meaning) began to change.”
The images of beauty purveyed in magazines, films and videos is “powerful stuff,” Herron said.
“I think we really had no idea the depth of the damage,” maintained Camille Clay, a mental health therapist based in Washington, D.C. “The damage is there for the parent who is trying to instill a better image in a child, but who clearly doesn’t have a good image of self to begin with, or who says one thing but is demonstrating something else.”
Clay told BlackAmericaWeb.com that she comes across women in her practice “all too often who don’t consider themselves attractive because they are too dark or their noses are shaped a certain way.”
With adolescents, Clay said, “although they accept themselves differently than adolescents did (in earlier generations), they still see things that are glamorously white as superior.
“Sometimes it’s not about white, it’s about the glamour. It’s being Beyonce, the lighter skin and all the hair” and all the things it appears those looks have gotten her.
“It’s far more intricate than we recognize, and it wreaks havoc on relationships,” said Clay, who also counsels couples. “Some women seem to assume that they’re husband wants them to be like X or be gorgeous or have hair” without talking to their men to see if those things are really priorities.
While people may see and value themselves one way, they fall prey to “fantasies about how we should look, how relationships should work and what a perfect relationship should be,” Clay said.
“In a way, I don’t think we’re back where we started. It’s broader than that. But it’s going to take more time -- and more than we ever thought.”
Asked how young black men have responded to the screenings, Davis said, “they say they like the film, but they don’t really talk about their experiences.”
“One of the things that is great about the film,” Lynch said, “is it gives you something to talk about.”
So, whether the men discuss the film in front of others, “it’s going to stay with you. That’s what makes it a good film,” she said.
Davis said officials at the day-care center where the doll test was administered are making changes in the curriculum to address the issues seen in the film. "I'm already starting to see some changes," she said. "which is gratifying."
Her next project is a documentary on New York City public schools.
“I like working on issues that are important to me and address the lives of black people,” Davis said. “I’d like to get into programming on TV and producing more” to provide more teen shows “that have people who are more like me and the people I know.”
Posted By: Candice Johnson
Friday, August 11th 2006 at 12:19AM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
