I have been meaning to post this for sometime mostly in response to Darcy Bullock's essay regarding the cover page of Vanity Fair. The fact that white is a common attribute of beauty and sexual appeal for women in our culture is a persisting problem. Based on the doll tests performed in Harlem by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1940s, a high school student recently conducted doll tests intended to detect whether or not attitudes toward race and beauty were still persistent. She filmed her study as a documentary. Although I was unable to retrieve a copy of the documentary unedited, here is a link to the news story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSFqnUFOns
President Obama walks fine line on race, justice
11 years ago
I really enjoyed this video-- I think it fits in really well with Alcoff's "The problem of Speaking for Others," because I feel that I have mostly been exposed to third person accounts of discrimination, poverty, race, gender issues, body issues, beauty issues, etc. This phenomenon might be due to the fact that I read about these issues in textbooks more that anywhere else.
ReplyDeleteNonetheless, I have never heard an African American girl talk about beauty relative to skin lightness/darkness. This video brought things that I had read in a textbook setting into real life. Thanks for the link, Matt, and thanks for showing this in class, Dr. Moore.
watching that video was sad for me, mostly because of the way it is protrayed
ReplyDeletesee as a child growing up, i played with white dolls that is all there was there and i never thought oh it is a white doll, and that is a problem, because there were simply no black dolls around for me to make the comparisons
so what is sad for me is that there is a labeling as to which doll is bad and which is good and which one looks more like which child, i think that is just sad, but then not to let my emotions run away with me
i think this is showing us that there is still this big racial problem out there, we might be somewhere better but we are nonetheless very far removed from the effects of these issues