A Girl Like Me (documentary)

Infobox Film
name = A Girl Like Me


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director = Kiri Davis
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released = flagicon|United States 2005
runtime = 7 min.
country = US
language = English
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"A Girl Like Me" is a 2005 award-winning documentary by Kiri Davis. The seven-minute documentary examines such things as the importance of color, hair and facial features for young African American women. It won the Diversity Award at the 6th Annual Media That Matters film festival in New York City, and has received coverage on on various American media sources, such as CNN, ABC, NPR. The documentary has been shown on HBO and is available, in its entirety, on mediathatmattersfest.org. The documentary was made as part of Reel Works Teen Filmmaking.

The video begins with interviews with Kiri and her peers about how 'black' features did not conform to society's standards of beauty. The next section was a repeat of an experiment conducted by Kenneth Clark in the 1940s where African-American children were asked to choose between black or white dolls. In the original experiment(s) the majority of the children choose the white dolls. When Davis repeated the experiment 15 out of 21 children also choose the white dolls over the black, giving similar reasons as the original subjects, associating white with being "pretty" or "good" and black with "ugly" or "bad". The dolls used in the documentary were identical except for skin colour.

Awards

*The Diversity Award at the 6th Annual Media That Matters film festival

creenings

*Tribeca Film Festival
*The 6th Annual Media That Matters.
*Silverdocs: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival
*HBO

External links

*"Kiri Davis' Official Website" [http://www.kiridavis.com]
*Edney, Hazel Trice. "New 'Doll Test' Produces Ugly Results", "Baltimore Times", August 16, 2006. [http://www.btimes.com/News/article/article.asp?NewsID=10180&sID=3]
*Johnson, L. A. (2006). Documenary, Studies Renew Debate about Skin Color's Impact. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Pittsburgh: [http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06360/748295-51.stm] .
*"A Girl Like Me", Entire documentary on [http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/6/#/ mediathatmattersfest.org]
*"A Girl Like Me", Media That Matters, [http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/6/a_girl_like_me/index.php?fs=bios Biography] of Davis
*"A Girl Like Me", [http://www.uthtv.com/umedia/show/2052/ Discussion] of the background of making the documentary
* "BLACK KIDS’ SELF IMAGE-NO PROGRESS" by Marian Wright Edelman [http://www.minutemanmedia.org/EDELMAN%20021407.htm]
*"A Girl Like Me", "Good Morning, America", ABC, October 11, 2006.
*"African-American
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6181729]
* "A Girl Like Me" appears in [http://www.understandingRACE.org RACE: Are we so different?] a public education program developed by the American Anthropological Association.