Clark's Doll Test & The Bluest Eye

I would also like to post another piece of writing that I believe relates to Face Forward’s message and cause quite appropriately. The message of Face Forward is to raise awareness, educate and promote a healthy self-image. By doing so we can affect people globally in a positive manner and specifically do so via the cosmetic industry and its relation to women of color. Due to our organization’s goals, the story and message of both Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and a particular psychology study doll test raise important issues that revolve around similar issues that Face Forward wishes to address. Read the following response I wrote to understand how reading The Bluest Eye relates to certain issues concerning race that permeate our culture still today:
For this week’s response, I found a documentary called “A Girl Like Me”. It was a film made by a senior in high school interested in recreating Kenneth Clark’s well-known doll experiment from the 1950’s. Although Davis was only a high school student when she made the film and I do not know the validity of her study, it does focus on a lot of issues that are not only problems young African American children are obviously dealing with today, but also issues which draw significant parallels to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. In the Morrison’s novel, the protagonist Pecola deals with not only a very difficult family life, but struggles with that fact that she doesn’t embody the qualities and make-ups of what white society of the time was projecting. In one haunting scene where Pecola and her brother are dealing with the fighting going on between their parents, Pecola envisions her body “disappearing” as a means to escape the pain of her family’s broken home. Morrison writes, “’Please, God,’ she whispered into the palm of her hand. ‘Please make me disappear.’ She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away…Try as she might, she could never get her eyes to disappear. So what was the point? They were everything. Everything was there, in them. All of those pictures, all of those faces,” (45). Although Pecola’s exercise of imagining her own body disappear is a reaction to her troubled family life, it more broadly documents the feelings and self-esteem issues she has due to how society and those in her town treat her. She seems to maintain the idea that if only she were prettier her life would not be this difficult, and more specifically it reveals this never-ending obsession and belief that if only she had blue eyes everyone would like her.
However, Pecola’s mindset is not one that comes from merely her own imagination. Unfortunately Pecola deals with people saying and thinking terrible things about her throughout the whole story. These messages of negativity are reinforced by many people in the both her family and the neighborhood. In one passage where her mother Pauline (whose obsession with glamorous movie stars of the time doesn’t help normalize Pecola’s positive body image) has a short narrative, her mother says, “A right smart baby [Pecola] was. I used to like to watch her. You know they makes them greedy sounds. Eyes all soft and wet. A cross between a puppy and a dying man. But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly,” (Morrison, 126). Although Pauline’s comments aren’t literally telling Pecola that “if you were beautiful, life would be better for you”, it just proves the mindset of the individuals that surround Pecola’s life. That even from those in her own home where a child is supposed to receive the most positive reinforcement and support, she sees nothing but degrading and deplorable behavior.
The documentary aptly highlights the standards of beauty that young women today still face. In the beginning of the short documentary, much of the discussion revolves around young girls and their idea of what ideal beauty is and the stories they have of friends or people they know trying to achieve this. The idea that fair or lighter skin color is still what is considered beautiful only further justifies Pecola’s very low self-esteem and body issues. When recreating Kenneth Clark’s doll test, the results are overwhelming in favor of African American children still choosing the white doll. Unfortunately it seems, (although this is only an isolated case whose study and method are not completely known to the audience) that the standard ideals of white beauty are still impacting children, over 50 years after Brown vs. the Board of Education case (for which the original test was conducted around). In one child’s response he literally says that the white doll is the “nice doll” because she is “white ”.
Unfortunately this is the reality that many are still facing, the reality that young children are somehow socially or indirectly being taught to prefer white over black, even in the simplest of examples, such as choice of dolls. Between this study and Morrison’s novel, these ideals of white beauty are strongly being reinforced by even the youngest and most innocent of our society, which makes it the most disheartening. Change needs to come from within the family and from within societal institutions for the hope to overcome this sad reality.

Pop Culture Link to Check Out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjy9q8VekmE&feature=related