Dark Girls discusses colorism and structural racism. Many personal experiences are recounted by African-American women, discussing the pressures from strangers, peers, and even family to be light-skinned. An experiment also showed a little girl selecting the drawing of a white girl for the positive traits (beauty, intelligence) and the darkest girl for the negative traits. A psychologist highlights the fact that colorism is not predispositioned; rather, societal pressures like the media subconsciously plants colorism in the mind. A Girl Like Me highlights the beauty standards rampant in African/African-American cultures. Inherent “black” features - natural hair, darker skin - are perceived as undesirable in communities. Colorism is common and
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The clip also expanded on an experiment conducted using African-American children and baby dolls, in which children perceived the white doll as more attractive and linked to positive characteristics. The experiment showed how racism and colorism is embedded in humans from a young age. Killing Us Softly 4 points out the major sexist and sexual issues in modern advertising. Jean Kilbourne first focused on the general problem of the portrayal of women in ads: they are an unattainable standard of beauty fed to the masses, which leads to long term problems like trends in eating disorders and depression. Women are made impossibly thin in ads and also become objects (a sex object and/or a product). Since ads are so widespread, they are a reflection of society and what is perceived as normalcy; thus, constant exposure to ads promoting unreasonably thin, overly sexualized, or vulnerable women serves to promote such images in our subconsciousness as what is normal. Besides mental health issues in women, such ads serve to promote violence against women as they are reduced to
The clip also expanded on an experiment conducted using African-American children and baby dolls, in which children perceived the white doll as more attractive and linked to positive characteristics. The experiment showed how racism and colorism is embedded in humans from a young age. Killing Us Softly 4 points out the major sexist and sexual issues in modern advertising. Jean Kilbourne first focused on the general problem of the portrayal of women in ads: they are an unattainable standard of beauty fed to the masses, which leads to long term problems like trends in eating disorders and depression. Women are made impossibly thin in ads and also become objects (a sex object and/or a product). Since ads are so widespread, they are a reflection of society and what is perceived as normalcy; thus, constant exposure to ads promoting unreasonably thin, overly sexualized, or vulnerable women serves to promote such images in our subconsciousness as what is normal. Besides mental health issues in women, such ads serve to promote violence against women as they are reduced to