Article “Study: White and black children biased toward lighter skin” reports: “A white child looks at a picture of a black child and says she’s bad because she’s black. A black child says a white child is ugly because he’s white. A white child says a black child is dumb because she has dark skin.” Click here to read the full article.
WATCHDOG: This is actually very good news. As the article goes on to report:
“Spencer’s test aimed to re-create the landmark Doll Test from the 1940s. Those tests, conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, were designed to measure how segregation affected African-American children.
“The Clarks asked black children to choose between a white doll and — because at the time, no brown dolls were available — a white doll painted brown. They asked black children a series of questions and found they overwhelmingly preferred white over brown.”
The natural order of social development is to first appreciate one’s own group and then later to develop respect for others. Hence, the CNN headline didn’t really capture the implication of the current research. Perhaps editors should leave headline writing to reporters!
I thought there were two very compelling and new points made in the study…
The first, as you note, is that, unlike the Clark’s doll study, black children do not view white dolls as pretty. That’s a change.
The other breakthrough observation was an explanation of why white children seem to maintain racial attitudes. It seems black children and their parents externalize and talk about race. In white families, the issue of race is not discussed, and therefore racial attitudes remain unchanged.