Anti Essays :: Free Essay on "A Girl Like Me"
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Submitted by mooremulah on April 30, 2009
The video begins with interviews with Kiri and her peers about how 'black' features did not conform to society's standards of beauty. She spoke about her hair and what was ideal for American beauty, which was long sleek, straight blonde hair. The interviews examine a number of African American girls and question them about their ideas of beauty as compared to their own hair and skin color. The consensus for the most part was that light skin and light hair were considered beautiful in the eyes of an African American. I found this odd because, all the while some African Americans are trying to bleach their skin and straighten their hair; you have white females doing the exact opposite in pursuit of being “beautiful.” They are dying their hairs darker and tanning constantly to achieve this. The next section was a repeat of an experiment conducted by Kenneth Clark in the 1940s where African-American children were asked to choose between black or white dolls. In the original experiment(s) the majority of the children choose the white dolls. When Davis repeated the experiment 15 out of 21 children also choose the white dolls over the black, giving similar reasons as the original subjects, associating white with being "pretty" or "good" and black with "ugly" or "bad". The dolls used in the documentary were identical except for skin color. I had a hard time watching this part of the film because they did portray the colored dolls as ugly and bad; they knew the answer they would get from the children, and then they open the answer to their eyes by asking “which doll looks like you?” Even in a child’s mind, they are able to put such a simple link together. I believe this was detrimental to the children, yet after class discussion, it was possibly only an accelerated exposure because obviously the children had preconceived ideas about skin color and the attributes and character traits that accompany it. In all the film was a short, yet accurate insight into how the minds...
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