The (New) Doll Test and Some Thoughts on the Coming Race Riots, 21st Century Edition

"The reassuring female voice asks the child a question: "Can you show me the doll that looks bad?"

The child, a preschool-aged Black girl, quickly picks up and shows the Black doll over a White one that is identical in every respect except complexion.

"And why does that look bad?"

"Because she's Black," the little girl answers emphatically.

"And why is this the nice doll?" the voice continues.

"Because she's White."

"And can you give me the doll that looks like you?"

The little girl hesitates for a split second before handing over the Black doll that she has just designated as the uglier one."

-Hazel Trice Edney, NNPA Washington Correspondent

I would love to tell you that the excerpt you just read was from the original "doll test," conducted in the 1950's by pioneering psychologist Kenneth B. Clark to help make the case for desegregation in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated public schools. I would love to tell you that before I added my own insignificant commentary on the matter. However, sadly, this is not the case.

Before any hawkish, thunderbolting comment-vultures descend on this article with their own wisdom deficient, shortsighted, borderline bigotry musings, I'd like to preface my own thoughts with a warning. Despite what you think or what you think you think or what you think "most" people think, know this: Racism, paternalism, and prejudice are still extremely real and prevalent issues, loaded quandaries that inhabit the guns of the powerful and strike dead, with boundless pools of fresh blood metaphorically, the weak, tired, downtrodden and powerless who keep this country moving, keep this country fresh with the hopeful renditions of a freedom song that has nothing to do with the so-called "freedom" that our leaders spew out, out of key, through war, control, fear and the barrel of their greedy, psychotically mindless, tuneless shotgun, aimed squarely at the jugulars of the said disenfranchised.

Leave it to the young and ambitious… because I for one am hopeful that my under generation has a little more spit and gumption than my own hopelessly apathetic one, poor excuses for the Great Society's kin that we are, even if we're mostly forgotten about anyway. Kiri Davis is a 17-year-old film student at Manhattan's Urban Academy and it was her 8-minute documentary that produced all the fervor around this long dismissed debate (though it probably squeaked under your radars, whoever you are, big surprise). I can't put into words how good this documentary is, so please just check it out for yourself, the URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjy9q8VekmE. I can only say, and hope, that Kiri Davis will be around for a long time; she is truly talented.

"No more self-defeating device could be discovered than the one society has developed in dealing with the criminal. It proclaims his career in such loud and dramatic forms that both he and the community accept the judgment as a fixed description. He becomes conscious of himself as a criminal, and the community expects him to live up to his reputation, and will not credit him if he does not live up to it."

-Frank Tannenbaum, "Crime and the Community" 1951

Just like the doll test, there should be a scientific study done where hick, country white children are asked which color baby is more likely to grow up to be a criminal. I think the results of that study would stir up Middle America more than Clark or Davis' experiments ever could (patent pending on that one, so don't get any ideas).

Our government, Ann Coulter, Fox News, my father and a vast amount of Americans (too many) would like you (me, anyone) to think that a pile of nukes in some foreign, Middle Eastern nation (Iran!) is the threat that we all should be worried about. But let me tell you this: there is a volatile, strong, undying and mean pile of nukes in this very land, in the form of millions of disenfranchised minorities- not to mention a whole lot of purebred white folks who are damn fed up by the inequality that is touching more and more, day in day out (myself included).

Is there a coming race riot? Probably not. Bush and co. would sick the locals, the Guard and any other muscle they could muster up faster than the scenes of the 60's, 70's and present day Iraq combined. I simultaneously loathe that day and pray for its arrival, because I will be so drunk off the irony that I can finally die in peace.