Pitts: a child's view of black and white

Last week, Soledad O'Brien made a young mother cry.

It came in the midst of a special series, “Black Or White: Kids on Race” on CNN's “Anderson Cooper 360.” The series was based on a new version of the famous “doll tests” pioneered by husband and wife psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1930s and '40s and re-created in 2005 by Kiri Davis, a teenage filmmaker.

In those first doll tests, black children were presented two dolls, identical except that one was dark and the other, light. Asked which doll was bad, stupid or ugly, most of the black kids picked the black doll. Asked which was good, smart or pretty, they chose the white one.

CNN's study was similar, except that children were presented with pictures, not dolls, and the images ran from very light to very dark. One other difference: CNN tested white children, too.

Which is how this little 5-year-old white girl in Georgia came to be sitting at a table facing an unseen researcher with her mother. Asked to point out the “good child,” O'Brien touched one of the lighter-skinned figures. Why, she was asked. “Because I think she looks like me,” the little girl said.

Asked to point out the “bad child,” she touched the darkest image. And why? “Because she's a lot darker,” the girl said.

And watching, her mother softly wept.

Your heart broke for her because you just knew she had bought into the myth that children are not soiled by the prejudices that stain their elders.

How many times have you heard that, because they are growing up in the era of Oprah and Obama, our children will live beyond the belief that character is a function of color?

But children hear us and see us. They watch television, they listen to radio, they read magazines, they live in our world. So early on, they know what we think. And often, it becomes what they think, too.

Thus, it is no surprise that CNN found both black and white kids maintain a decided bias toward whiteness. Because this is a pilot study, those results are not definitive. But they are instructive.

So is this: A few months ago, a white teacher brought a black girl up to me as I was preparing to give a speech. The teacher wanted me to talk to her. She doesn't think she is beautiful, said the teacher, because she is dark. I asked the girl if this was true and in a soft voice, with eyes averted, she said that it was.

And what do you say to that? How do you explain the psychology of self-loathing and the futility of judging oneself by someone else's beauty standards, and the cumulative psychological weight of 400 years of being told you are not good enough? I did the best I could in the 90 seconds I had before the speech. It was not good enough.

We are more than 40 years beyond the Civil Rights movement, 40 years beyond a burst of pride and racial consciousness, 40 years into a future where Michael Jordan is an icon, Bill Cosby is a national father figure and a Kenyan's son is president of these United States.

Forty years. And still ... .

n Comments: lpitts@miamiherald.com