As a mother in the era of Black Lives Matter, the Me Too Movement and Black Girl Magic, 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 or that 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.
But even before I became a mother I was considering which toys I would buy my future daughters. Part of this was just lofty day dreaming, the rest was concern for their self esteem. Years before I was even seriously considering pregnancy I remember seeing a news special about “The Doll Test”. The CNN special I saw was a recreation of the Kenneth & Mamie Clark experiment done in the 1940’s. The history surrounding this study is quite interesting. Basically, these black researchers showed a group of children two dolls, and asked them questions like “which is the good doll?” “Which is the bad doll?”. The dolls were identical in every way, their only difference being their race: one was black, the other was white. The study’s findings lead 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 god daughters black babies and nothing else. 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 & hair color/ texture as her, which hasn’t gone unnoticed. She has remarked 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 the good or bad question, she mainly chose whichever doll was in my right had for good and whatever was left for bad.
So after revisiting the Clark study and doing my little experiment I’ve moved away from my feelings on buying exclusively black dolls. This is not to say that the experiment was pointless because 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 needing work, the world our children are growing up in is vastly different than the 1950’s.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 are able to 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 them not seeing themselves be heros or whatever they aspire to be will negatively affect them. As Marian Wright once said “You can’t be what you can’t see”. So 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.
