As a mother in the era of Black Lives Matter, Black Girl Magic, and the Me Too Movement, I am keenly aware of every decision I make concerning my young black children. Parenting, in general, sometimes feels like a scary game of high stakes, high speed, decision making that often leaves us grown-ups wondering, “how many years of future therapy will this cause?”.
Daily, we think about the type of clothes they should wear, which extracurricular activities to enroll them in, which schools they should attend, and even which toys they should play with. Even before I became a mother I was considering which toys I would buy my future daughters. Part of this was just lofty daydreaming, the rest was a concern for their self-esteem.
Years before I was even seriously considering pregnancy I remember seeing a news special on The Doll Test.
The CNN special I saw was a recreation of the Kenneth & Mamie Clark experiment done in the 1940s. The history surrounding this study is quite interesting.
During the study, black researchers showed a group of children two dolls and asked a series of questions including, “which is the good doll?” and “Which is the bad doll?”. The dolls were identical in every way, their only difference being their race: one was black and the other was white.
The study’s findings led the researchers to the conclusion that both black and white children have an internalized racial bias, as they tended to attribute the bad traits to the black doll more so than the white.
When I watched this special I, like many who have seen this, was shocked and horrified that children could have these feelings about those who look like them at such an early age. Surely if they felt this way about dolls they must feel the same way about themselves and that is unacceptable.
From that moment on I vowed that I would only buy my children black baby dolls & barbies, books with black characters, and we would watch all of the movies with black characters.
I’m not the only mother of a black child that felt or feels this way. After a quick Facebook poll of my friends and family, I found that many of them exclusively buy their children, nieces, and goddaughters black baby dolls. But is this really changing anything?
In my opinion, the answer is no.
The point of the experiment was to show that segregation and the racist society around those children was having a negative effect on them mentally. Even though up until recently there has been a lack of diversity in the skin color of toys & children’s characters, the toys were never the main culprit of the problem.
I have only purchased my 3-year-old black dolls with curly hair, many of them have the same skin tone and hair color/texture as her, which hasn’t gone unnoticed. She has said to me, “she looks like me!”. Confidant that because of my choices, she would only want to play with brown, curly-haired dolls, I decided to perform a doll test of my own.
I took her to Walmart and gave her options to choose from. I showed her a white & black doll and asked her “which one do you want?”, “Which one is bad?”, and “Which one is good?”.
The results of my little test were inconclusive as far as I can tell. Many of the times she chose the white doll but not all. As far as good vs. bad, she mainly chose whichever doll was in my right hand as good and the left as bad. So after revisiting the Clark study and doing my own experiment I’ve moved away from my feelings on buying exclusively black dolls.
This is not to say that the experiment was pointless. I do think it revealed the very real emotions those children were having at the time as a result of the world around them. But, albeit imperfect and in need of work, the world our children are growing up in is vastly different from that of the 1950s.
Children are sponges and the best way to avoid them internalizing negative feelings about themselves or people that look like them is to
1. Be an example of positive self-esteem, while feeding them empowerment and
2. Creating a world where they can see themselves in the positive role models and leaders of the world.
Buying your child a white doll won’t make them feel any better or worse about themselves, but a lack of representation in their heroes will negatively affect them.
As Marian Wright once said, “You can’t be what you can’t see”.
As parents, creators, and influencers of today’s society, we need to make sure our black and brown children see themselves in the books they read, the movies and TV shows they watch, and in their everyday environments, be that their school, extracurricular activities and their community.
These are the things that actually matter.
Brittany Wright, B.A in Creative writing and English – University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, is an aspiring writer and creator of the She’s Wright blog. This black, millennial mom loves everything beauty, motherhood, and marriage related!
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