Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Monday, January 02, 2012

Mexicans confront racism with white, black doll video

The results are predictable:

The kids are seated at a table before a white doll and a black doll, and are asked to pick the "good doll" or the doll that most resembled them. The children, mostly brown-skinned, almost uniformly say the white doll was better or most resembled them.

One child in the video with mixed-race features says the white doll resembled him "in the ears."

"Which doll is the good doll?" a woman's voice asks the child.

"I am not afraid of whites," he responds, pointing to the white doll. "I have more trust."

...

The children who appear in it are mostly mestizos, or half-Spanish, half-Indian, and a message said they were taped with the consent of their parents and told to respond as freely as they could.


What is also predictable was the following response:

Commenters have noted that the options were "very limiting" by offering only black and white, or good and bad, when in Mexico the majority of the population is mixed-race, mostly European and indigenous, and to a lesser extent African and Asian backgrounds.

"It is a poorly formulated question, it is pretentious," one user said on the website VivirMexico (link in Spanish).


But this is really not "limiting" at all. Indeed we can propose that the minimal common contact with African people makes the implications even more damning because none of the subjects can even use actual events in their own lives to form these opinions. Thus their ideas about blackness are pure fictions they either came up with or that were passed onto them by their peers. It is also possible and probable that the local media has a lot to do with this.

It is also important given the immigration of Mexican nationals into the United States. If these attitudes are being brought into the US, how does that affect those persons of African descent in those locations?