Deep, deep racism in American culture: The Doll Test

There is a diary over at My Left Wing that is well worth reading. It describes an attempt by a thoughtful teenager to redo the "Doll Test" from the 1940s and 50s. In the original test researchers showed that when black children were shown two dolls that were identical except for "skin" color, the children would overwhelmingly choose the white doll as the "nice" one and the black doll as the "bad" one. This was used to show the effects that institutional racism had on children's self image and was used as evidence in Brown vs. Board.

The new "study" can't be called scientific, but it is still very interesting. Kiri Davis, a 17-year old filmmaker, wanted to see The Doll Test repeated today. With help from my neighborhood YMCA in Brooklyn, she did her best to do just that. The results were essentially the same as the original, pre-Civil Rights era study. Read the diary for more details.

I think this is something of a condmenation of our society. Our society teaches children as young as 5 years old to consider black skin "bad" and white skin "nice." The MLW diary's author links this to the complete abandonment of black Americans after Katrina hit, which at the time I felt showed quite starkly that the Bush Administration cared not one whit for blacks. Together, these two snapshots of blacks in America really show that our society has not escaped racism. I have always felt that until our society can face up to our slave past we will have a hard time overcoming racism in America. You can take the racism out of the laws, but you can't get rid of the racism unless you face the fact that America was founded with a legal definition of blacks as property and as 5/8 of a person. Even today, history books that cater to Southern markets refer to slavery as not that bad, say that blacks were better off as slaves, and paint the post-Civil War reconstruction government as corrupt carpetbaggers, a myth that was never as true as our history books portray. Isn't it time we admit that as a nation we committed a sin in slavery, admit that our society is still far from fair racially and try to find solutions. The denial of American racism is widespread. Claims that all is equal ignores the reality on the ground. Blacks were left behind after Katrina. It is black skin that is reviled. In NYC our mayor declared victory over unemployment at a time when 50% of black males were without work. It is mostly black district polling places that seem to have problems on election day. Even life expectancy is lower for blacks than whites...a fair amount lower.

Without even assigning blame here, can't we at least admit that there is something deeply wrong in a society with discrepancies like that?

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