Tyra Show explores kids and race
by Carmen Van Kerckhove
This Wednesday’s episode of the Tyra Banks Show is going to explore children’s concepts of race. I hope they’ll include Kiri Davis’s film “A Girl Like Me,” since it would tie in beautifully to this topic. Here’s the description:
Does skin color make a difference to a child? Tyra continues her series on race with a powerful and eye-opening look at how innocent children start forming stereotypical opinions of different races at a young age. A group of children were invited to participate in a social experiment where they were asked to look at pictures of people of all races and say what they thought about them. Their honest results will shock you! Body image expert Jessica Weiner, along with the kids and their parents, join Tyra in her studio to discuss how they believe children are exposed to stereotypes and what can be done about it. Then, Tyra speaks with white supremacist parents and their young children who are being trained to follow in their footsteps. Plus, an African American woman who hates Caucasians finds that her young daughter is determined to break her mother’s racist views.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Eun-jung wrote:
This is really very interesting to me. I have to give Tyra some props for handling such a delicate issue — I am anxious to see how it goes (unfortunately, I work during the day so I hope I can find some clips of it online somewhere).
It’s a subject that I think if done correctly, could really have a strong influence on how people really view racism in this country, and how those views are overflowing into our youth. But it also has the potential to be quite disasterous.
Posted 30 Apr 2007 at 7:32 am ¶
phil wrote:
On a related note, you can also download this study:
A Different World: Children’s Perceptions of Race and Class in Media (May 1999) at
http://publications.childrennow.org/publications/media/differentworld_1999b.cfm
It reinforces what Kiri Davis’ film found. There’s also other interesting publications on the site.
Posted 30 Apr 2007 at 8:39 am ¶
S wrote:
I don’t think the results will “shock” anyone. They will probably be typical at best: Every race of child will most likely identify black people and possibly latinos with negativity, and white people with holiness, superiority, and beauty. What will be interesting is their opinion of biracial children. Does the “good” race cancel out the “bad” one? It will be interesting to hear what the smaller kids think.
Posted 30 Apr 2007 at 1:17 pm ¶
berrybrowne wrote:
this kind of thing frustrates me because it’s not the whole story. in the harvard “bias test” project, they found that people overcame prejudices they were unaware of after even brief periods of exposure to “positive” people of various races (e.g. bill cosby). it may sound cheesy, but the south asian scientist who designed the test finds that by surrounding herself with “positive” images of groups she holds biases against, she can prevent feelings of prejudice. i am confident that this holds true for children and that, brainwashing aside, even children without racially conscious parents can have positive responses to – gasp! – black people (or other people of color). i babysat for a number of white children in my teenage days and all of them – girls and boys alike – thought i was beautiful, BLACK and beautiful. sometimes their parents were embarassed that they’d actually say it, “that beautiful black lady! that’s my babysitter!” more recently, a 4-year old girl was staring so intently at me on a metro train that it was drawing the attention of other passengers, as well as her parents. she eventually whispered to her mother, who told me that she thought i was beautiful. the ice broken, we spent most of the trip complementing each other’s hair, clothing and accessories. one white little girl i babysat gave me the white barbies to play with and would only play with her single black barbie. at fao schwartz i watched a young white child select black twin girls from the baby doll “nursery.” when i taught in an all-black elementary school, a little girl brought in a black barbie, because she thought she was beautiful, and looked like me.
i say none of this to extol my attractiveness, only because i highly doubt that this other side of the story will be represented on the show, and i think it’s an important part of the story. people of color already hear how undesirable we are by grown folks, i think it’s a study of dubious usefulness for tyra to expose us to further confirmation of our worst fears, told to us by the best, most “innocent” part of ourselves, our children.
Posted 30 Apr 2007 at 2:18 pm ¶
Guerita wrote:
As a child of a American(white) and a mexican mother, I was pretty much protected by the race issue and never felt it was an issue. SUre people can up and told me I was cute and I had complaments on my skin,hair ect. and pretty inncoent about other stuff like race, ect.. Alsa I went to a public school exposed and asked everyday what was I. Lets say I wasn’t ready,(Beyond not ready!) I rember crying home and asking my parents questions and this and that. I feel horrible for the kids who have to go through what I went throught and it breaks my heart, when I read about a child going through thing like idenity and beauty abot who they are and how the worlds treats them like dirt.
Posted 30 Apr 2007 at 6:46 pm ¶
Ashley wrote:
I watched the Tyra show and I wasn’t all that shocked about what the kids had to say about the pictures from the different races. However, I was upset the most by the Nazi family. And I just have to say this about his last coment(he said he souldn’t be made to feel gulity for the things that his ancestors did):THEN WHY THE HELL SHOULD THE JEWS, BLACKS, AND ANYONE ELSE IN THIS COUNTY BE STEREO TYPED FOR THE ACTIONS OF A SOME PEOPLE…just because some black people are theives DOES NOT mean that all blacks are theives…I meant come on, thats rediculas! I cannot beleive they are teaching their children to expend so much effort to dislike people of different races. I just don’t get why anyone thinks their race/sex/religion is better than everyone else’s!!!
Posted 02 May 2007 at 1:21 pm ¶
Koko wrote:
I missed the African American daughter that wanted her mother to stop being racist. Can anyone fill me in.
Otherwise, I have nothing negative to say, except there was something left to be desired after watching it. I don’t know why. It’s such a complex issue that an 1 hour just doesn’t cut it I guess.
Did anyone notice how the Black girl and her mother were never talked to?
I guess maybe she didn’t say much. I think that Tyra should have bought up here comment about not seeing any Black princesses.
Posted 02 May 2007 at 5:22 pm ¶
Mona B. wrote:
Koko, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one that noticed that Tyra did not ask the Black mom + daughter any questions. I kinda wish that Tyra would have done more to address the lack of positive black role models to counteract some of those rather negative views. She didn’t take the “I had no idea” excuse from the asian mom, so why didn’t she get on the parents of the white children more?
BTW, this is a really great site!!
Posted 03 May 2007 at 10:01 am ¶
eric daniels wrote:
WILL TYRA, OPRAH, JASON, STANLEY, RUSSELL, SNOOP and the rest of the ‘Black Thought Police’ please shut the “HELL UP!!! I don’t need another lecture or ‘conversation’ on race because these people are not qualfied to led a fourm of being honest much less race.
Posted 03 May 2007 at 6:40 pm ¶
Brittney409@netscape wrote:
To Eric Daniels’ comment~
Why shouldn’t the “Black Thought Police” be able to talk about race? Just because you feel like they don’t have anything intelligent to say doesn’t mean that their opinion on race has no value. I just think that everyone is entitled to discuss race because everyone has a race.
Posted 04 May 2007 at 9:14 am ¶
Koko wrote:
I agree Mona B.
That is definatley a big issue, but it seems that some changes are being made. I am starting to see a tad more diversity.
Posted 04 May 2007 at 9:58 pm ¶
S wrote:
i KNEEEEW Tyra was gonna punkout! She spent most of the show hounding the Asian woman, and TOTALLY DIMISSED the black girl’s comment of having NEVER seen a black princess, the asian girl’s comment that white people make good bosses because they think they can boss everybody, the white girl’s comment “…because white is better than black.” HELLO? What other comment was more blunt and conclusive than that? She ignored the black parents, badgered the Asian one, and babied the white ones. PUNK OUT.
For those of you who missed it:
The kids were shown 2 close up pics: 1 black woman, 1 white. The white woman had slightly crooked teeth, the black woman had almost too-perfectly straight teeth, and of course, all the white kids said the white woman was prettier because she had nice hair and prettier teeth.
The Black racist parent segment was weak. Instead of showing her as racist “as advertised”, they showed her as a black woman with several recent bad expreiences with white people. The daughter was very strong in her individual belief that some are bad, but not all. That was refreshing, but nothing new because most black children that I know have the same attitude. The question is, why don’t the white kids???
The Nazi family: What a joke! What Nazi racist white man would tell his kids to kiss Tyra, a black woman, TAKE PICS OF IT, and…o.k. this is big…ALLOW Trya, a black woman, to repeatedly tell him to SHUT UP on national television? Many, if not all of their comments were contradictory. The boy stated that he didn’t want black people in this country, but would love to have a black kid over his house for company. The daughter couldn’t even explain a racist quote that she was taught and had to whisper “what’s that mean” to her brother. Talk about Force-fed Racism?
Posted 06 May 2007 at 6:38 pm ¶
eric daniels wrote:
Brittany just proves my point right here, “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS RACE” . White Americans created the group paradigm of race in this country and it’s their damned responsilbity to rid it because they came up with these sterotypes of groups for fun, entertainment and privledge. I am tired of Blacks like Banks being a ‘black tour guide’, that keeps black folks in a constant state of depresssion and victimization to ‘overcome some sterotype’ of what this society ASS (YOU ) and (ME) thinks of black folk.
Black folk would be better off letting white people go and wallow in their anti- P.C. behavior, if they say the wrong word to a brotha or a sista then they deserve to suffer the consquences of the anti- P.C. actions.
Posted 07 May 2007 at 8:17 pm ¶
Brad wrote:
Does anyone have a clip of this? Some people are saying this looked way too scripted. Personally I think all these race special shows are scripted to follow a certain stereotype of every race. I just want to see for myself
Posted 08 May 2007 at 11:55 pm ¶