She has sat through several flea markets, this dark-complexioned wooden doll I got at auction a few years ago. She has watched as her companions – two light-colored fabric dolls in dresses with Asian script – were sold. So what that they were sold cheaply, but at least someone wanted them.
But not this doll. She was on the flea market table again over the weekend – front and center, waiting for some little girl or some nostalgic woman to take her home. Most people ignored her; only one woman picked her up to look her over. And then plopped her back down.
An articulated doll, she has a very dark brown color and woolly hair. She carries a cute little basket of wool, a piece of yarn and a small wooden knitting needle (there were two of them but I’ve had her so long that one has been lost).
Why doesn’t anyone want my little dark-complexioned doll? It slowly dawned on me as I watched her sitting there on the flea market table that maybe she was too dark for most people’s tastes. Which was interesting because some of the most beautiful dolls I saw at the International Black Doll Show and Sale in Philadelphia two months ago were as dark as her – and me.
Maybe she was ignored because she was a craft doll, or that she had a country look, or that she was made of wood or that she looks too homely. I don’t think so. I think it was because of her color.
Her rejection reminded me of the experiment conducted in the 1940s by psychologists Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, and repeated several times over the last decade. The Clarks used black and white dolls to determine how a group of black 3- to 7-year-olds in Harlem perceived themselves. The psychologists found over and over that the children preferred white dolls, would rather play with white dolls and said white dolls looked more like them.
White was perceived as good and pretty, and black as bad and ugly. The psychologists concluded that the children had feelings of inferiority and self-hatred engendered by the prejudice, discrimination and segregation they were experiencing in their young lives.
Remember that these were children who saw no one like them in the media, watched as their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles were victimized, and read little of their people’s historical contributions in textbooks. Even in their own families and neighborhoods, they were confronted with the brown paper-bag test (to determine if a person was too dark to join a club), bleaching creams to make them lighter, straightening combs to make their hair silky, and the admonishment: “If you’re white, all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, step back.”
But the Clark’s study was 70 years ago. That can’t be true now – after the positive messages of the black power movement and James Brown’s “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and black people starring in and making movies, and working not as maids and janitors but in nontraditional professions. Certainly, our self-images have been elevated.
Maybe, maybe not:
In 2005, Harlem teenager Kiri Davis recreated the study in a New York day care center and found similar results. In her 2007 documentary “A Girl Like Me,” she also interviewed teens who talked about the images they were raised with. As I watched the video, I wanted Davis to ask the children why they chose one doll over the other. (I’ve read stories where journalists failed to ask those very important follow-up questions, to get at the why. It drives me crazy.)
In 2009, Good Morning America conducted the study again. It found that most of its black children wanted to play with the black dolls and chose them as the nicest. They said both dolls were beautiful.
Earlier this year, CNN tried it again (including with children from my state of Georgia). Most of the black and white children they tested preferred white dolls over black dolls, although the black children’s choices were not as strong. The black children in the CNN video I watched chose the darkest skin tone – the color of my wooden doll – as bad.
In the study, Anderson Cooper asked the “why” question. Said one little girl, as she rubbed the dark brown skin on her forearm: “I don’t like the way brown looks” because it looks nasty (she said subsequently that it “sometimes” looks nasty). She admitted that she didn’t know why she felt that way, though.
The studies showed that this notion of white being all right is still very prevalent, embedding itself consciously and unconsciously in us and our children. Unfortunately, too many of us black adults still feel some self-hatred, believing that if not us then the black person sitting next to us is – as the children said in the study – “bad.”
When my wooden doll is not on a flea market table, she has her own place in the nook of a piano that I no longer play. She seems at home there, and I believe that’s where I’ll keep her instead of putting her through the rejection. I think she’s lovely – coarse hair, dark complexion and all.
