A few days ago I passed this video titled “Racism test in Mexico” where an experiment is carried out with children to see what their level of racism is even lower.
The experiment is carried out with a white doll on one side and a black doll on the other and then the children are asked “which doll is beautiful and which is ugly”, answering most children that the beautiful or good is the white and that ugly or bad is black. They are also asked why black seems bad to them, and they simply rely on color: "it is bad because it is black (or brown)" and "it is good because it is whiter."
The people who have seen the video have torn their clothes when they see the answers of the children, however I, as I usually do other times, have tried to imagine myself as a child before the experiment, and I have tried to imagine my children in the experiment, and I've noticed that There are several reasons, which have nothing to do with racism, to answer the same thing as these children.
The good is on the right, the bad on the left
If I wanted to do an experiment and I wanted to see what the level of racism is and what the tolerance of children to skin color and I decided to do it with dolls (I would do it with photos of white people in suits and white people with very bad looks , as well as black people with suits and black people with very bad looks, for example ...) would put the black doll on the right of the children and the white one on the left.
Most children are right handed. If you offer something to a child to take it, the logical thing is to extend the right hand to take it, so if I put a child two identical white dolls in front and told him to choose one, most likely the majority choose the one on your right, for a matter of practicality: I choose the one I can take with my dominant hand.
However for the experiment they have done it the other way around. They have put the white doll on the right and the black doll on the left, perhaps because they want children to show their racism by actually choosing white.
The color white means one thing and black another
In the films in which God appears represented by a person, he is dressed in a white suit, completely white. This also happens with women when they are going to get married, who are pure and innocent (it is assumed) and that is why they go white. The bad guys in the movies, however, are in black (has anyone seen any bad dressed in white?) Or with dark colors. They are night, darkness, evil, death. In fact, when someone dies we wear black, and death is considered a bad thing.
Babies are dressed in blue or pink combined with white, even white too, always light colors. I've never seen a baby in a black lace dress because nobody would think of buying something like that (and nobody would think of putting it up for sale).
The adults themselves analyze the children's drawings and we are pleased to see that they use many colors, just as it makes us suspect that a child uses black a lot in his drawings.
That said, if a child is asked: which of the two is the beautiful, the good, the children will say the target and If you ask what is bad, ugly, they will say black. Not because black people are bad, not as rejection, but because they are responding to what they have learned based on colors: the white represents the good and the black the bad. For sample, a button, I have done an image search in Google with "good and evil" and the images speak for themselves (click here and you will see my search).
"Which doll is pretty?" Is a dangerous question
If you look, the girl who asks starts with a “Which doll is pretty?”. Children by elimination and deduction understand that one of the two is beautiful and the other ugly, being forced to choose one of the two. At that moment they choose the target. Then comes the question “Which doll is ugly?”, To which they must answer yes or yes that it is black.
What if they had been asked "what is the other pretty doll"? If instead of saying “what is the ugly one” they would have been asked what the other pretty doll was, they might have pointed to black for elimination then the children would suddenly stop being considered racist.
But no, in the experiment children are not allowed to be good, because the questions are aimed at one being good and beautiful and the other being bad and ugly. Only one girl, who appears very little in the video, says that neither is bad, skipping the interviewer's rule (choose the good and the bad).
Blacks tend to be a minority
I don't know if in Mexico there are many black people or few, but in Spain, in proportion, there are very few. The first time I saw a black person I was a few years old and I remember that I couldn't stop looking at her in amazement. If someone had put me next to a white person and asked me “which one are you going with?” I would have responded immediately with the white person.
The first time my son Jon saw a black boy he was amazed watching. I couldn't stop looking at him and when he approached us (he came towards us walking down the street) my son made a move to hide from him, scared. I felt violent about the situation, but I understood my son because I had felt something similar as a child. It is not racism, it is not rejection, It's ignorance, lack of habit.
If the children of Mexico are mostly white or mestizo and see few blacks, the most normal thing is that between those two dolls they choose white, and that doesn't mean anything to me. I have a black car, because it is the color that I liked the most, but that does not mean that I did not like other colors (in fact, the last mobile I bought is also black and white I did not like anything ... I am racist with my skin color?).
But it could be that it was racism
As I do not have the data and as I cannot put my hand in the fire for anyone, it is possible that these children really feel rejection towards the black baby because they have learned that blacks are worse and whites are better (although I already say that I don't think so.) This is not innate, this is learned, it is absorbed from the environment, from dialogues, from television images, from our parents' words, from xenophobic jokes, from commercials and ultimately from the whole society. We are all guilty in a way that children say nonsense and that they assume racist concepts.
I have a friend who has an adopted Ethiopian son and one day she explained to me that a 6 or 7 year old girl told the boy that “you don't play, that you are black”, I have witnessed racist comments by adults in front of their children and I have always thought the same thing: "what a shame to leave this inheritance to our children".
By this I mean that although the children in the video don't seem so bad to me and partly because I think the experiment could have been done better, Many children today continue to reject other people because of their skin color and this is unfortunate, so I hope that both the video and the input itself give you some thought (I have already done so).
Video | Youtube
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