Standard of beauty Part 2 May 7, 2007
Recently, I watched the documentary A Girl like Me by Kiri Davis. This is an amazing video about the standards of beauty which discusses light skin vs. dark skin. One of the interesting bits of the video was the doll demonstration with the kids in which the black kids were to choose what doll they preferred between the black and white dolls. Most of the kids choose the white doll as the prettier doll and the black doll as the bad one. They were asked why the black doll was the bad doll and the little girl replied because it’s black.
That moment was a breaking point for me which made me cry. I cried because it was so sad that a little black girl will pick a doll which looks like her and believe that it is bad just because it is black. I also cried because I remember when I was a child, my mother bought a black doll for me. I disliked it so much. I broke its legs and pulled the hair out. I cried because I wonder how come as a child I felt that way. What made me hate something so much that looked liked me? Why do some black kids at a young age feel inferior and hate things that look just like them? Why do they feel that the black doll is bad just because it is black? This breaks my heart so much.
I spoke to a friend about this, she told me she believes one of the reasons to this problem is what kids are exposed to. At a young age, they are falsely exposed to society’s standard of beauty. Little girls watch fairy tales where the princesses considered beautiful are white girls. They watch cartoons and TV shows in which the characters are mainly white. These girls do not see anyone who looks like them. The view of beauty portrayed to them is not anyone who looks like them but white girls. As a result, they start to perceive white as being more beautiful and black as being bad and ugly.
I plead the standards of beauty need to change and kids need to be learn that black is beautiful.
This is very sad and strange. When I read the book by black Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, I see that he reacts to the story of Jezebel in the Bible with a sense of horror, because it is assumed she was black. The dogs ate all of her body, except for the palms of her hands (which would have been white, on a black person). The symbolism of this really freaked Dambudzo out.
Thank you so much for writing this. I am a black girl of mixed backround, and I’ve also viewed this documentary in which most of the black kids picked the white doll over the black one because in their eyes, she was considered to be beautiful and good. It hurt me so much to watch this. I remember as a child on t.v. I would mainly see advertisements of which the girls were mainly white and playing with white dolls, and it would make me mad because I would wonder where’s the black doll? or hispanic doll? or asian doll? Whenever the media is displaying us black people, it is always in a negative way, and I think that we really need to start a change. Yes it is true that black on black crime rate is very high, but why not also show black GPA rates which are also very high. I dont understand this world. I remember sometimes I would be ashamed to be black because most people would tell me that I could pass for latina or half white, and I would always take it as a compliment that I could pass for things that weren’t me. One of my sister’s is dark skinned and when she gave birth to my neice who is light skinned, people would constantly question her on why her baby was so light and why she was so dark. Threy would ask questions like,”is the father white?,” or,”is the dad puerto rican?” My neice is black just like me. I remeber my friend who is west indian would constantly say that she wish she had hair like me because it is wavy, and I would constantly wish I had hair like a my south american friend because it was straight. I beleive that hair skin eyes are beautiful despite the color, and inner beauty is the most beautiful of them all.I just hope that someday God or somebody will speak to the negative people in this crazy world and there will be a change.
I found this image of the doll on your website and I smiled. It immediately brought back many happy memories. I am an African American woman and had the exact doll photographed as a child. I named her Lizzy B and loved her until all her hair fell out. My parents bought me a doll to replace her, but I insisted Lizzy B was not to be thrown out. Instead, I kept them both and named the second doll Lizzy Q. The Lizzies and I were inseparable. The three of us had many adventures; we sat on Santa’s lap together, I read aloud to them, we had tea parties, and they were my loyal subjects as I held court in my stately role of “African princess” (my mother’s pantyhose worn on top of my head with the legs wound over my very short natural hair were my braids.) I wanted to add my voice and assure you and other readers self-loathing is not the norm for all black girls and the women they become.
Hello I recently saw this video on youtube and it broke my heart. At the age of 4-5 they have a mind set that black is bad and white is good. It shows that they dont like themselves and that is truly upsetting.
This video reminds me of a discussion we had in one of my classes in high school, which was on the Brown vs Board of Education case. One of the boys in my class, who was white (Greek, descent I think), asked “What’s so bad about having everything separated if it’s honestly equal?” (we were talking about the “eqaul, but separate” issue)
The teacher had just finished discussing the doll test. And so when this guy asked this question, I exploded. I said, “It’s obviously not equal if the majority of black children can’t say that someone who looks like them is beautiful or good. Granted some people have low self-esteems. But if the majority of an entire race can’t see beauty in themselves, where is the ‘equality’ in that?”
My mom is really light skinned. She looks Native American with her long silky black hair with silver threading through. I was living with my dad in Washington when she sent me a picture in which she looked absolutely beautiful. I took the picture to school and showed it to my classmates (I was in seventh grade at the time) and one asked me in a joking way, “Are you adopted?” It hurt when he asked me that. I was by no means dark, but I wasn’t light either.
Over time, I didn’t even realize that I was finding my physical features (big butt, boobs, and lips) less desirable than those of the white girls I went to school with. I thought I was so much fatter than they were.
I moved to VA with my mom and started my junior year of high school there. Going from a predominately white school to a predominately black school was like culture shock. All of a sudden, girls wanted to fight me because they thought I was “stuck up”. This I really didn’t understand. I had no friends and didn’t talk to many people in the beginning, I just stayed to myself. My cousin had actually warned me before that because I had “good hair” girls would want to fight me. Boys were constantly trying to get at me, which I wasn’t used to at all. My skin had lightened due to the sheer lack of sunshine in western WA and I was classified as “that new light-skinned b*tch with the fat *ss” behind my back (I later found this out from the male friends I had made). A mixed senior named Bonnie decided she would be my friend because I was “prettier than her, and all the pretty light-skinned girls were her friends.”
I know for a fact that if I was dark skinned, I wouldn’t be married to my current husband because he feels that anyone darker than him, isn’t attractive.
Black on black racism astounds me more than the white on black racism. We have to change it.