Youth Video

I'm working on a post about my trip. It'll probably take me a while to put it together, though, and in the meantime, I want you all to know about this collection of short documentaries made by teens about issues that matter to them as part of a series called "Media that Matters." There are a whole bunch of organizations that are involved in various ways, including What Kids Can Do and Reel Works Teen Filmmaking. You have to check some of these videos out.

The one that really blew my mind won some kind of award this year. It's only about 7 minutes long, and it's #2 on the right if you click "video" above. There's a small segment of it where the filmmaker, teen Kiri Davis, repeats the experiment conducted some fifty years ago by Dr. Kenneth Clark, a prominent African American psychologist whose work played an important role in Brown v. Board of Ed. In Davis' test, black children are presented with two dolls, a black doll and a white doll, and asked a series of questions. Asked to "show me the doll that you like best, or that you'd like to play with," 15 out of 21 choose the white doll. Even those who choose the black doll respond to the next question, "Can you show me the doll that's the nice doll?" by quickly selecting the white doll. You have to watch it. There's more. It is a more obvious measure than any I've seen in a long time of the violence that our society is still doing to our black youth. At the same time, the video presents quite a few smart young women who know exactly what's going on and, god willing, will do something about it. I'm thinking about what it all means for my students and how I can/if I should present the video to them.

That's all for now. Oh also, Happy Birthday, Dad!