AC360: Kids’ test answers on race brings mother to tears

[phantom power]

A 5-year-old girl in Georgia is being asked a series of questions in her school library. The girl, who is white, is looking at pictures of five cartoons of girls, all identical except for skin color ranging from light to dark.

When asked who the smart child is, she points to a light-skinned doll. When asked who the mean child is she points to a dark-skinned doll. She says a white child is good because ”I think she looks like me”, and says the black child is ugly because “she’s a lot darker.”

As she answers her mother watches, and gently weeps.

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/ac360_kids_test_answers_on_race_brings_mother_to_tears_weve_got_a_long_way_/

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/18/kids-test-answers-on-race-brings-mother-to-tears/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+rss/cnn_ac360blog+(Blog:+AC360)

[dalaigh lllama]

1. I have a problem with the way this test is constructed

Seems to me it's set up to introduce prejudicial behavior even if it doesn't exist before the test.

Before taking this test, I would hypothesize that most kids are going to know a "nice" kid would be smiling and a "mean" kid would be frowning. But with no facial difference between these kids other than skin color, the testee is going to deduce that skin color must be a criteria they may never have even considered before for determining who is nice and who is mean. I think this is just an awful test.

[phantom power]

2. Signal comes from aggregate statstics.

One would hope the responses are randomly distributed across skin color. But they aren't.

[Raineyb]

5. Even if it doesn't exist?

Are you implying that the child is too young to express prejudiced thoughts. I can assure you she is not. In fact seems to me this child is fairly typical for this country.

[dalaigh lllama]

17. No, I'm saying that some children may BECOME prejudiced from this test.

I know there are many kids who are prejudiced at that age, but let's say little Suzie's parents have done what they could to make sure Suzie has an array of friends that are every color of the rainbow. So now little Suzie bounces in to take this test. She is shown identical pix of kids except for their skin tone and asked to pick out who is mean or nice or smart. Since the only difference IS skin color, Suzie is surprised to learn one can determine these things from skin color, but obligingly answers the authority figure with her best guesses. Then probably goes home that night and says to the folks, "Did you know you can tell how smart someone is by the color of their skin? That's what I learned in school today!"
I'm also not surprised the white kids would pick the pix most like themselves with positive attributes; and I'd be interested in knowing if the AA kids would gave the positive attributes to the white figure pix had the test administered by a white authority figure or an AA authority figure.
Now if the test were constructed with different skins tones and different facial expressions and/or a third choice "There's no way to tell" I'd like it a lot better.

[The Doctor.]

18. Agreed.

[abelenkpe]

3. My five year old asked me a while ago

Why some people were brown and some people were not. I told him that a long long long time ago there was an original mother and father and that they had children who had children who had children. The family got so big they spread across the globe to other countries and over the years their skin color adapted to the environment. But we're all part of the same family.


I think what confuses the very young is that in our society through the stories we tell black is used to represent bad and white to represent good.

[AnArmyVeteran]

6. Black is the absence of color, but African-Americans were called 'coloreds', go figure...

White has all colors, but not caucasians are not called colored. Go figure...

Black is used negatively throughout our language:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black)

Black-hearted person is mean and unloving.
Blacklist is a list of undesirable persons or entities (to be placed on the list is to be "blacklisted").
Black comedy is a form of comedy dealing with morbid and serious topics.
Black marks against a person relates to something bad they have done.
Black mood is a bad one (cf Winston Churchill's clinical depression, which he called "my black dog").<5>
Black market is used to denote the trade of illegal goods, or alternatively the illegal trade of otherwise legal items at considerably higher prices, e.g. to evade rationing.
Black propaganda is the use of known falsehoods, partial truths, or masquerades in propaganda to confuse an opponent.
Blackmail is the act of threatening to reveal information about a person unless the threatened party fulfills certain demands. This information is usually of an embarrassing or socially damaging nature. Ordinarily, such a threat is illegal.

If the black eight-ball, in billiards, is sunk before all others are out of play, the player loses.
The black sheep of the family is the ne'er-do-well.
To blackball someone is to block their entry into a club or some such institution. In the traditional English gentlemen's club, members vote on the admission of a candidate by secretly placing a white or black ball in a hat. If upon the completion of voting, there was even one black ball amongst the white, the candidate would be denied membership, and he would never know who had "blackballed" him.
Black tea in the Western culture is known as "crimson tea" in Chinese and culturally influenced languages, (紅 茶, Mandarin Chinese hóngchá; Japanese kōcha; Korean hongcha), perhaps a more accurate description of the color of the liquid.
"The black" is a wildfire suppression term referring to a burned area on a wildfire capable of acting as a safety zone.
Black coffee refers to coffee without sugar or cream.

[FirstLight]

7. It extends to animals as well

When we were looking for a shelter kitty last fall, the clerk mentioned that black animals seem to be the ones picked last, that they often get too old to be adoptable because nobody wants the black cat or dog...


we promtly took our little black kitten home and love her to death! She is our 'Halloween kitty' :D

[pipi_k]

8. Out of the previous five dogs we had,

two of them were black.

After they all passed away, we got two more German Shepherds.

Mr P wanted a black and tan or sable. I wanted all-black


We got them...they're sisters and littermates.

People often comment on how beautiful they BOTH are.



We tell our furbabies every day how beautiful they are...

:loveya:

[AnArmyVeteran]

11. Good for you, but please protect her well...

There are a lot of evil people who love to capture cats, and specifically black cats, to torture and kill, especially around Halloween. Don't ever let your cat go outside. I have five stray cats and one is solid black. Her name is Michelle. You're right about what the clerk said. Black cats are not only shunned, they are tortured. I'm so glad you gave that kitten a loving home. Awesome!!!!

[Quantess]

14. I have heard it's because the black animals aren't as photogenic on the adoption web pages.

Who knows...

[Hekate]

22. That, as it happens, is the truth. At shelters they blend into the shadows of their crates...

... and they don't show up well in most photos. Shelter workers in some places will put a brightly colored bandanna on their black dogs so that visitors will notice them more. Once they are noticed and taken out of their cages they are seen to be beautiful.

Hekate

[NotThisTime]

4. I watched that Mother with a heavy heart.... she said the message she was trying to instill

didn't seem to get across to the child.... she was very genuinely upset.

[uponit7771]

9. Sigh, I can understand that the mother being disappointed...I would.

[TwilightGardener]

10. It's not surprising that a light-skinned child would choose a light-skinned

picture or doll as the smart/pretty choice. That's just self-affirming behavior. I would hope a dark-skinned child would gravitate towards a dark-skinned picture or doll as being smart/pretty--that's where the real test lies. If color is the only difference between the pictures or dolls, then the kid is basically being asked, "which color is best?"--you aren't going to get a politically-correct answer out of a 5 year old.

[csziggy]

12. Even the dark skinned children tended to class dark cartoon dolls as "bad"

The cartoons they use are rear views and each "doll" is identical other than skin and hair color. I've only watched a few of the clips, but the ones I have seen showed white female and male children and dark skinned female and male children. The choices are pretty universal, classifying dark dolls are "ugly", "stupid" or "bad" while lighter dolls are picked for more positive traits. The one dark skinned female child I saw seemed to think that she could not select the same doll for all questions and was more disturbed when she had assigned a "role" to each doll when there were questions left than by the idea that all the negatives were assigned to the doll she had identified herself with.

Whatever the eventual fallout from this is, watching it is disturbing, in that the dark dolls always seem to be given negative connotations.

[seabeyond]

15. lite/dark, white/black, good/evil..... white privilege. so many white people refuse to accept

it as a reality. as if they do, they lose something. and they lose nothing. never do, never will because the reality is white is looked at differently than black. lite is different than dark. even within their own community shade of skin color makes and made a difference and has been known and relevant forever.

so what we do is become aware. understand. in the know. and only then do we heal.

i remember the doll study and black girls saying the white dolls more attractive. truly sad.

i dont know about this study. with a child so young and never discussed (yet) in home. this particular study i see it as much as the child self identifying.

the doll study was less about self study and more about culture influence.

[TwilightGardener]

20. It's sad that dark-skinned children feel that the lighter-skinned dolls are better--

that's more worrisome than a white child attributing good qualities to the white doll or picture, IMO.

[csziggy]

23. I know - I wanted to cry.

The kids should be taught that anyone can be good or bad, smart or slow, and so forth. And that looks are not the most important thing in life.

The other sad part is there was very little hesitation in the kids' choices. By six years old, the idea is already so ingrained that the selection is almost automatic.

[Raineyb]

21. And what does it say when the dark skinned child gives similar answers?

Because it damn sure isn't self-affirming behavior and has more to do with how this society sees blackness. Unfortunately the children of this country absorb the negative attitudes our society has toward those who are not white. Even non-white children. So no it's not about political correctness and to assert such a thing is to be willfully blind about the society we live in.

[The Doctor.]

13. This 'test' is not entirely valid.

When a child is asked an 'either or' question, they give the answer that they think, for whatever reason, the adult questioner wants to hear.

Most five year-olds have not had the experience necessary to develop any given opinion. They can rarely ever make judgments based on their own 'beliefs', because they rarely have any beliefs pertinent to a test such as this. So they go with whatever cues they can pick up from the test itself.

In essence; they're just guessing at the "right" answer.

[Bucky]

16. Here, let's test out the validity of this experiment at DU. Which one of these dolls is evil?

[The Doctor.]

19. The lifeless one with dead eyes.

That was easy.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

24. you've got to be taught before it's too late

before you are six
or seven or eight
to hate all the people your relatives hate
you've got to be carefully taught

you've got to be carefully taught

----Rodgers and Hammerstein, South Pacific