Here is a great short film titled “A Girl Like Me” which is a youth documentary directed by Kiri Davis, a young black girl in America. The film is one of twelve on the “Media that Matters” website. Davis created an anthology of stories which she felt reflected the experience of being a black girl in the United States, for her high school literature class. For the project she conducted numerous interviews with other black teenaged girls, and she noted several repeating issues regarding beauty and the self-esteem and self-image of black girls. These issues regarding beauty and society’s standards for beauty and how that affects black girls, is the topic of “A Girl Like Me”.

In the film, Davis interviews multiple girls, who are all black teenagers or young adults. They talk about typical stereotypes that people think of when they picture a black girl. Having “a bit butt”, being loud, being obnoxious, being uneducated and unintelligent and acting “ghetto”, were all qualities that these black girls felt described the way society sees them or expects them to be. Several girls said that they felt that they had to prove themselves to be otherwise.

When asked about beauty, over and over the girls said that lighter is better, and lighter skin is prettier and more beautiful and dark skin is ugly. “Good hair” is hair that is naturally straight and “bad hair” is hair that is kinky or needs to be relaxed. This was really awful for me to hear…that these girls see dark skin as ugly and natural African hair as bad, because that is their natural physical characteristics (and those of some of my girls too!)

As part of the film, Davis also conducts her own version of the “doll test” that was originally used by Dr. Kenneth Clark in the history-making “Brown vs. Board of Education” desegregation case. In the original test, the overwhelming majority of black children, with the choice between a white baby doll and a black baby doll, chose the white baby doll as their favorite, the white baby doll as the “good doll” and the black baby doll as the “bad doll”. These kids also chose the black baby doll as the one that “looked like them”, which concludes that these kids see themselves as “bad”, or at least not as good as white.

In Davis’s test, the results were the same, 15 out of 21 black children chose the white doll. Davis used this test to show that while a lot of progress has been made, that in some areas of society and especially how it impacts the self esteem of black children, the change has been very small.

As the mother to African American daughters, I found this film very interesting and very disheartening. It makes me wonder what doll my girls would choose. I know that they often comment on how much they would like to have their sisters’ long, straight, black Asian hair, and yet the little girls often say that they wish they had their older sisters’ hair, which we are always doing in fun hair styles that actually stay in. I think it is important for parents of black kids to realize that these stereotypes and views are out there, so that we can work hard to fight against them, and help our kids build the best self-esteems possible. Watch the short film and tell me what you think.