Teenage filmmaker Kiri Davis created a short film about race and young women in America. She recreated the “doll test” that was used by Dr. Kenneth Clark to settle Brown vs. Board of Education. She documents the result in her 7 minute documentary.
This video reminded me of a time I was helping out with arts and crafts as part of a VBS style church ministry at the Boys and Girl’s club several years ago. My friends had dragged me there and I sat at a table with 10-20 children aged 5-10 years old not sure what to do. They were all coloring pages of a Bible-themed coloring book. The girl sitting beside me was maybe five or six years old, and black. She kept asking me what colors to use and if she had picked the right color. When she got to the skin color, she picked up a peach colored crayon and said, “this is the right color, right?” I was taken aback. I tried to explain that she could use whatever color she wished and that the disciples and characters in the Bible weren’t white anyway. Still, she chose the peach color because it was the “right” color.
How is that we are still teaching young women that the lighter skin is better than darker skin, that light-skinned means good, beautiful, pure, nice, etc? Lindsay Cortwright