The Stagnant Winds of Change
While we try to maintain an optimistic tone on this blog with regards to enacting change, we occasionally come across areas within our culture and society that are simply lagging- and must be discussed. This week, I was sent a news article and watched a short movie that was just stunning. The film, A Girl Like Me, is a 2006 recreation of the famous experiments run by Dr. Kenneth Clarke in 1939. The filmmaker is a talented 17 year-old named Kiri Davis. In the movie, black children are asked their preference between black and white dolls. The findings of this movie, echo the findings of Clarke’s experiment and expose that little has changed over time. The filmmaker becomes a change agent as she is looking at the problem horizontally and hoping to find a new conclusion. Sadly she did not.
Rather than recap what the movie states, watch the two short clips below. They speak for themselves. They speak volumes.
- The KOMO-TV news report.
- The full 8-Minute Kiri Davis short film.
I will leave you with this quote from my friend Darryl Poole who alerted me to this story and offered a summary of his feelings and analysis of the movie:
“This particularly upsetting video-clip both reflects nascent attitudes being transmitted in the society and a powerful indicator of inevitable hostilities between races that tend to result from the cumulative effect of such knowledge. Repeating the Kenneth Clarke studies with such profoundly similarly conclusions indicates that all policies from all points of view and all levels of participation have failed. From the Far Right to the Far Left, no approach has worked that can produce this type of result (over 75 years after Dr. Kenneth B. Clark’s landmark “doll test” that led directly to the 1954 Supreme Court’s permanently overturning of institutional segregation). Time to rethink everything. Not least, at 60+ years of age, this breaks my heart.”
Darryl Vernon Poole Institute Chief Executive Cambridge Institute For Applied Research
Visiting Associate Professor of Managing School of Business & Public Administration, University of the District of Columbia
