The Doll Experiment: Barangay 105, Choosing Blonde Over Black

During the final clinic of our last day of the Vietnamese Houston Medical Mission in Tacloban, I happened upon a young Filipina who chose a blonde-haired figurine over a black-haired one. This reminded me of the Dr. Clark Doll Experiment conducted back in the late 1930's.

What does this young girl's choice in hair color say about how she perceives herself?

Young Filipina Chooses Blonde Over Black

Not the actual brush

One of our volunteers, Abby, was handing out toothbrushes to the line of young kids who had just been seen by the pediatrics doctors and who were now waiting for their prescriptions to be filled. These toothbrushes were for kids; they all had some sort of masculine or feminine figurine that served as the toothbrush's handle.

For the girls' toothbrushes, their figurines came in two options: a maiden in blonde hair and a maiden in black hair.

Since we had to keep the line moving, Abby handed the toothbrushes out based on gender alone. Masculine figurine toothbrush for the boys, feminine figurine for the girls (regardless of color of hair). When I came over to check on Abby, I saw her give a black-haired maiden figurine toothbrush to a young girl who was somewhere between the age of four- and six-years-old.

I couldn't exactly tell from my angle, but the girl looked either curious or disappointed. What I did see was Abby lowering the box of toothbrushes to give the little girl a chance to look at the other options available, and the little girl putting the black-haired maiden figurine toothbrush back in the box, only to take out a blonde-haired maiden figurine toothbrush.

The moment that happened, Abby and I looked at each other, and we both knew exactly what the other person was thinking.

"Did she just replace the black-haired one with the blonde-haired one," I asked, with a hint of dismay in my tone.

"Yep," Abby replied.

Abby went on to explain (and I'm paraphrasing heavily) that much of what defines beauty for some Filipino girls primarily revolves around images of girls and women who have blonde hair and fair skin. Whatever media exposure these girls had--prior to Yolanda stripping away their electricity and thus their ability to watch television--contained enough imagery to support and reinforce the idea that superior beauty involves blonde hair and fair skin.

Watching this young girl swap the black-haired figurine for the blonde-haired one immediately reminded me of the Doll Experiment.

Dr. Clark's Doll Experiment

In the late 1930's to early 1940's, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, African-American psychologists and a married couple, published reports on what they called their "Doll Experiment." They created this experiment to demonstrate the detrimental psychological effects that racial segregation in public schools had on an African-American child's perception of self. Their research played a pivotal role in the larger Brown vs. Board of Education legal case, which ultimately led to the desegregation of public schools.

The first and only time I ever came across this experiment was during my high school days. I remember watching the movie "The American Experience: Simple Justice," and, in particular, a scene that reenacted Dr. Clark's doll experiment. This scene was seared into my memory, as I'm clearly able to recall it nearly 15 years later.  It served as another challenging reminder of what it meant to be a person of color back during the days of segregation.



In this scene, Dr. Clark invites, one-by-one, young African-American children into a small classroom. Each child is seated at a school desk, and before them are four dolls laid on top of the desk. Three dolls are black, one is white. One or two of the dolls are male, and the remainder are female.

After a brief conversation to create a sense of safety and comfort, Dr. Clark asks each child a few basic questions that are easily answered. "Which doll is the white doll?" "Which doll is the boy doll?" Shortly thereafter, Dr. Clark asks each child to pick a doll that they consider to be "the good doll," and then to pick a doll that "most closely resembles them."

The reluctant choices that each of these children made during this experiment demonstrated an implicit association between "bad" and "black," and "good" and "white." It was even more jarring to watch some of the children association the white doll with themselves.

This young Filipina reminded me that racism or racial preference, be it overt or subdued, can change a person's perception of self at a very early age.

A Young Child's Inferiority Complex, Predisposition to Western Beauty

I understand that this could easily be dismissed as one instance, a fluke or an outlier that says nothing significant about the true psychology of young Filipino girls in the Philippines, or even in this tiny Barangay in Tacloban.

Conversely, one could also easily dismiss this incident by saying that this kind of preference for blonde hair, fair skin--not to mention long legs (hence platform shoes), blue or green eyes (hence contact lenses), a taller nose (hence plastic surgery), or double-fold eyelids (hence...plastic surgery)--happens all across East and SE Asia. This instance is nothing new. "Stop making a mountain out of a mole hill," right?

I've travelled to multiple countries in East and SE Asia, so I'm somewhat familiar with and accustomed to what the preference for western beauty looks like among a segment (key point, let's not generalize here) of the female (and male, to a certain extent) population, at least regulated to the cities I've visited.

However, what this young Filipina did concerns me more than any other example of preference for western beauty that I've encountered. It concerns me because this girl is still very young, and yet she has already demonstrated a preference for western beauty. She has already been influenced by the media to believe that her natural beauty, her own Filipino black hair and Filipino brown skin, is somehow inferior to someone else with blonde hair and fair skin.

I've seen small segments of women in East and SE Asia mimic western beauty because it's fashionable, cool, hip, and ultimately psychologically desirable. They made the choice to look they way that they want. However, it worries me to see this young girl make this kind of a choice because it signals, at least to me, that she's already predisposed to have an inferiority complex towards westerners.

This is ever so slightly similar to what Dr. Clark was trying to demonstrate in his Doll Experiment.

Furthermore, I worry that she may grow up to be the same adults who make the same conscious, immediate, and limiting decision to reject or see as inferior anything that is not the prototypical western image of beauty. I've encountered those kinds of people, and they're not fun people. Quite the opposite, they're people who opt to stunt the progression of inclusion and diversity because they explicitly prefer one hue over another.

And, when I use the word "she," I'm not just talking about this one girl. I'm talking about every single other girl who didn't have the box lowered for them so they could make the choice on whether to keep the black-haired figurine toothbrush, or replace it with the blonde-haired one.

Who knows? Perhaps she truly might've been the only one who would've made the choice to switch given the opportunity. However, after reflecting upon my travels across Asia, the number of advertisements that have nobody else but westerners, the entertainment programs that covet western models and guests, the skin whiteners and other such products that try to get your skin looking porcelain white, and the abundance of cosmetic surgery readily available to get your nose taller and your eyes less "slanted," leads me to believe that she might not be the only one eager to achieve the goal of western beauty.