Miami Herald: What we teach our children about race Leonard Pitts
Last week, Soledad O'Brien made a young mother cry.
It came in the midst of a special series, "Black Or White: Kids on Race'' on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360. The series was based on a new version of the famous "doll tests'' pioneered by husband and wife psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1930s and '40s, and recreated in 2005 by Kiri Davis, a teenage filmmaker.
In the tests administered by the Clarks and Davis, black children were presented two dolls, identical in appearance except that one was dark and the other, light.
Asked which doll was bad, stupid, or ugly, most of the black kids picked the black doll. Asked which was good, smart, or pretty, they chose the white one.
CNN's study was similar, except that children were presented with pictures, not actual dolls, and the images ran a color gamut from very light to very dark. One other difference: CNN tested white children along with black ones.
Which is how this little five-year-old white girl in Georgia came to be sitting at a table facing an unseen researcher as her mother sat with O'Brien and watched on video. Asked to point out the "good child," she touched one of the lighter skinned figures. Why is that the good child, she was asked. "Because I think she looks like me," the little girl said.
Asked to point out the "bad child," she touched the darkest image on the paper. And why is that the bad child? ‘‘Because she's a lot darker," the little girl said.
And watching, her mother softly wept.
Your heart broke for her, because you just knew she never saw that coming. Your heart broke because you just knew she had bought into the myth that children are not soiled by the prejudices that stain their elders. Your heart broke, because how many times have you heard it said that, since they are growing up in the era of Oprah and Obama, our children will live beyond the belief that character is a function of color.
But children are not idiots. They hear us and see us. …
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