A Girl Like Me and At Risk

The two videos that I watched were, “A Girl Like Me,” and “At Risk.” The first film reminded me of the story in our course packet that we read dealing with beauty and women. In this film young black girls were interviewed and gave their views on what was considered beautiful. Most said that lighter skinned black women were more attractive than darker skin, and that girls wanted long straight hair instead of course black hair. What was the most surprising thing to me was that these girls explained how people would use skin lightening cream to try and lighten their skin. I have never heard of people trying to use cream to lighten their skins, but I guess this is no different than white women getting plastic surgery or other extremes to change their appearance. The maker of this film conducted a remake of an old study which involved young black children choosing between either a black or white doll. Surprisingly 21 of the 15 kids chose the white doll over the black doll. Even though they said that the black doll looked more like them, the majority of the children said the white doll looked nicer than the black doll. I thought this video was made very well and did a good job projecting how young black teens feel about beauty.
The second video was about young teenage boys from Brooklyn, New York who struggled with going to school due to their rough neighborhood. One of the boys claimed that school just was not for him and that he could not concentrate whenever he would go. He explained how he would hide his habit of skipping school from his mom by deleting messages and throwing away letters from his school. Many of the other boys blamed their drug addictions on why the acted they way they did. I feel like many times people just give up on kids like this, and do not take the time to try and fix the situation. It is quite obvious that these boys do not have positive role models to look up to in their lives.