Response to Racism/Segregation Videos

My biggest reactions were to the first video, the Clark Doll Experiment from 1939. I had never seen that video before and I was amazed to see how these little kids already had such concrete opinions. I was astounded by what the defintion of "pretty, good, and nice" meant to these kids, and how can those words be associate with a color? I thought it was so sad when they chose the white doll  to be the one that that they thought looked like them because it was such a statement that they made about what they valued or wanted to appear to be.

Unfortunately, it is clear that institutional racism still exists in our society. In his excerpt from "Between Barack and a Hard Place", Wise discusses how simply the stigma of your minority can prevent you from acheiving the same standards as someone who is not a minority. This is also clear in many schools across the country. The elementary school that I am in there are only 4 white students in a class of 26. When the teacher tells "the girls" to hand out the folders it is two of the three white girls who do so. The "trouble" students are all of African American or Hispanic race. Even the conversations between student and teacher are a little on the racist side, today the teacher asked the child I was working with who happened to be African American why he wanted to be a "street kid" because he was acting tough in the hallway.