I saw this video on Facebook, of all
places, earlier in the week. This video was the first time I had ever seen
anything like this experiment, and quite frankly, it did really shock me. Upon
further research, I discovered that this was experiment created and conducted
by Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1940s, the center of the segregation time
period. Like the video shows, children that were a part of the segregated
school system were presented with two dolls, one white and one black, and then
asked a series of questions about the character of the doll. Overwhelmingly,
black children were in favor of the white doll. This experiment was later on
used in a variety of desegregation cases including Briggs v. Elliott and then
Brown v. Board of Education. This video depicts a variety of different
recreations of this original experiment, including modern children and asking
children of different ethnicities. I saw this video fitting towards our
discussions and readings this weak because we have discussed a lot about how
race is inherently programmed into our thinking as human beings.
This video epitomizes this natural “gut
feeling” we have about race that is learned, at such a young age. Children are
the best way to exhibit these stereotypes that the idea of race has created
because children do not have a filter. They do not understand what is right and
wrong to say, so they just say whatever comes to their own thoughts. This is important
to recognize because this video shows what these instinctive thoughts are to
children of all backgrounds. What is really interesting, is that it did not
matter what race the child was, they all answered in a very similar manner.
This further highlights the severity of the stereotypes of race in society. We
as a “progressive” society sometimes feel that racism is nowhere near the
prevalence that is was in the past when slavery and segregation and all these
different types of oppressions of race was both legal and dominating everyday
society. However, as the video demonstrates, racism and racial stereotypes are
still very real and very problematic. There are other videos of parents’
different reactions to their children in this experiment in which the parents
seem shocked that their children respond in these ways, but where are these
kids’ thoughts on race coming from? Does a child learn this behavior from
family? From society? Or are these stereotypes just a part of the human brains
makeup at this point?
I think that these questions are
relevant to the argument that Mark Smith made in How Race is Made, because we
looked into the history of race and how it came about. But then we move on to
why it still exists. What is it about race that makes humans feel the need to
categorize people into good and bad, or ugly and pretty, or smart and dumb, as
these children differentiated, based on skin color? These kids know nothing about
this doll and its qualities, because well it is a doll, except that it looks a
certain way. Yet based on these assumptions, the child creates every
characteristic about the doll based on what they know about race. The white
children associated themselves with the white dolls and therefore using that
they looked like me as their reasoning to being superior. The African American
children admitted to looking more like the black doll, even after they had just
said everything about it is lesser than the white doll, which speaks to
self-hate that comes along with the ideals and stereotypes of race. What the
most powerful part of this video was to me, was when the little girl states the
white girl was the mean one because she teases based on skin color. This was
the realist and most hard hitting
response of all the children because this little girl highlighted what a
huge problem racism and racial stereotypes still play in today’s society.
