The last child in the third video unwittingly offers the best first hand account, step-by-step construction of white privilege and discrimination I've yet seen. He labels the darkest child the ugly one, then when asked why he clarifies that he doesn't think black is ugly, other people do. And actually, most people don't think black is ugly anymore because that's a thing of the past that changed with MLK. It's a straight jump from discrimination to a deflect the blame, post-racial society defense, and an insight into what many white adults believe.

I can't watch this. I watched the original experiment recreated and I started bawling. Even thinking about it makes me tear up. I can't handle it. It's so terrible. One of my life goals is to find a way to change this!

It is quite sad... we've had a similar experience in my house with my daughter (who could "pass" for white with her olive skin and light brown hair, but her father is black and native). We had two beige cats and she decided that she liked one better because it was lighter and she said that being dark isn't good. I sat down with her to figure out exactly what she was talking about and try to use this as a teachable moment... well, it turned out that a native girl she sits with on the bus told her that they shouldn't play with the black girls in the class because dark skin was bad (keep in mind, these kids are in what we call Junior Kindergarten, which means they are 3 and 4 years old).

We had a talk about discrimination and racism, which have progressed a lot further over the years from when she was 3, but I can still see the preference for lighter skin... such as when she favors blond characters in books and television programs.

If only all adults sought out what God planned, then more people would understand that we are all human and our characteristics make us individuals. Every individual is different so how is it we label in groups.

I loved how the last two girls commented the subkect. Also... on that age I have never heard about Marthin Luthar King Jr.
I have some criticism for the experiment but even besides that, the video was heartbreaking.

Oddly enough, when I was that age I might have said that the children with darker skin were better, since I thought that Asian people were smarter, better looking, etc. I thought this despite the fact that I am white, as were most of my school teachers, though most of the students at my school were of Asian descent.

This was so hard to watch. I love the boy with glasses who says he wants all the children as classmates though... makes me think we have some glimmer of hope.

I notice that in the pictures of the dolls, as the skin color gets darker, the facial features have not been adjusted so that they can still be seen. So the darker dolls have more scary faces, because you can barely see the eyes and the smile.

I think that "absence of smile" may be seriously throwing off their results -- if you had dolls all the same skin tone with vanishing facial features, that most-strongly featured doll image would likely be the preferred one.

I believe much of their response is based on what they think the adults want to hear. Children are much more savvy than we give them credit for and a large part of what they say is reflective of how they think the adults think about the questions being asked.

Viewing the experiment this way, it is possible that some of the children have not internalized negative views about themselves so much as they've already become very aware of how adults view dark skin and want to give the "right answer". They may also be talking about seeing everyone for what's inside and being friends with everyone because that's what many adults tell children.

How children are playing out and making sense of the roles assigned by skin color can really be understood by watching them interact with each other and the world. I recommend the book "The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism" by Faegin and Ausdale to learn more about how children practice privilege, discrimination, cross-cultural communication, and explaining their identities.

So sad how much kids internalize this nonsense.

I came of age when tan was in, but tan brought out certain features of my heritage that my elders were taught to hide or suppress (their grandparents had migrated west and "passed"). My mother, constantly nagged me to cover my skin to prevent wrinkles even though I tan extremely easily (even now, people rarely guess my real age despite four and a half decades of solar exposure). I was also made to sit down and let my great aunt show me how to use a straightening comb when my hair went temporarily frizzy as an adolescent (as it did when I was pregnant, too).

The MLK thing was telling. I brought a multicultural soccer team (like all of our city's soccer teams ...) to a Whitopia around the time that my kids were learning about desegregation in school. It was interesting to see this ethnically and racially mixed group of kids who had known each other most of their lives look around and realize that segregation was alive and well outside of their own community. My younger son, who is quite pale skinned and blond, later described the six fields full of white kids as "just creepy and wrong". I think this segregation also degrades the kids who find dark people to be disgusting - my older son, who works as a ref, has kicked kids from Whitopia off the field for racial slurs. These kids don't even know anybody who is Black, Hispanic, or even Asian and yet they know all the right evil insults to express their generic disgust.

I remember growing up as a black child...my mom would only buy brown dolls for me and I hated it. I thought that they were ugly and I wanted my dolls to look like everyone else's dolls...I also didn't really like dolls that much to begin with and would have much preferred the science toys my folks finally got around to getting me.

I worked in a day care in college and one of the little girls who was white told me that the black dolls and the white dolls couldn't be a doll family together. I asked her why and she said because blacks and whites aren't supposed to make families together. She said all this while sitting in my lap, which I found fascinating. I asked if we could be friends even though I was black and she was white. She seemed to think that was fine.

And I do wonder about these experiments. Kids definitely know that there is a right and wrong answer when being asked a question. And I wonder if all the proctors were of one race, or if there were people of many colors behind the camera.

I think there's a lot of truth to the sociological causes of this study, but I do agree that color theory could explain a lot of trends. Someone mentioned that the faces disappear as the skin color gets darker, which is true. Also, the first question asked is "which child is the bad/ugly child?" Naturally our eye is drawn to positive space, and the eye would automatically be drawn to the child on the far right first.

Please note that I am not brushing off this study, because I think many of these children bear witness to the heartbreaking values still lingering in our society. I would just like to see all the variables accounted for: I want to see multiple studies where the shades are flipped, where the facial features against the skin tones all have the same contrast, and where the tones are jumbled around.

I wonder how much of it just has to do with how children associate color. Not race, but color. Darkness is bad to children. They don't like the dark. They're scared of it. They don't even like shutting their eyes half the time. Bad guys in cartoons, are often portrayed wearing dark colors, and living in dark places. Star Wars called the bad guys the dark side. The Bible often relates evil with darkness, and light as goodness and truth. I know this is supposed to be about race, but I wonder if, in the mind of an innocent child, this has more to do with a control variable than actually relating dark skin color to negative traits. Just throwing another theory out there.

Blacks and other people of color rate their happiness with their own skin color and race much more highly than light skinned people do. Go figure!