ey begin to figure out * othey are. As a four-year-old boy told s father after another day in the over-elmingly white environment of his
Connecticut day-care facility,  Dad, I m tired of being black. 
In theory it should now be easier for children to develop a healthy sense of black pride than it was during segregation. In 1947 psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted a famous experiment that demonstrated just how much black children had internalized the hatred that society directed at their race. They asked 253 black children to choose between four dolls, two black and two white. The result: two-thirds of the chil-
dren preferred white dolls.
The conventional wisdom had been that black self-hatred was a by-product of discrimination that would wither away as society became more tolerant. Despite the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the black-is-beautifiil movement of the  70s, the proliferation of black characters on television shows during the  80s and the renascent black nationalist movement of the  90s, the prowhite message has not lost its power. In 1985 psychologist Darlene Powell-Hopson updated the Clarks  experiment using black and white Cabbage Patch dolls and got a virtually identical result: 65% of the black children preferred white dolls.  Black is dirty,  one youngster explained. Powell-Hopson thinks the result would be the same if the test were repeated today.
.ZBlack mental-health workers say the trouble is that virtually all the progress the U.S. has made toward racial fairness has been in one direction. To be accepted by whites, blacks have to become more like them, while many whites have not changed their attitudes at all. Study after study has shown that the majority of whites, for all the commitment to equality they espouse, still consider blacks to be inferior, undesirable and dangerous.  Even though race relations have changed

for the better, people maintain those old stereotypes,  says Powell-Hopson.  The same racial dynamics occur in an integrated environment as occurred in segregation; it s just more covert. 
Psychiatrists say children as young as two can pick up these damaging messages, often from subtle signals of black inferiority unwittingly embedded in children s books, toys and TV programs designed for the white mainstream.  There are many more positive images about black people in the media than there used to be, but there s still a lot that says that white is more beautiful and powerful than black, that white is good and black is bad,  says James P. Comer, a Yale University psychiatrist who collaborated with fellow black psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint on Raising Black Chil-
dren (Plume).
The bigotry is not as usually as blatant as it was in Roald Dahl s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When the book was published in 1964, the New York Times called it  a richly inventive and humorous tale.  Blacks didn t see anything funny about having the factory staffed by  Oompa-Loompas,  pygmy workers imported in shipping cartons from the jungle where they had been living in the trees.
Today white-controlled companies are doing a better job of erasing racially loaded subtexts from children s books and movies. Yet those messages still get through, in part because they are at times so subtle even a specialist like Powell-Hopson misses them. She recently bought a book about a cat for her six-year-old daughter, who has a love of felines. Only when Powell-Hopson got home did she discover that the beautiful white cat in the story turns black when it starts behaving badly. Moreover, when the prod-
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6. AFRICAN AMERICANS
ucts are not objectionable, they are sometimes promoted in ways that unintentionally drive home the theme of black inferiority. Powell-Hopson cites a TV ad for dolls that displayed a black version in the background behind the white model  as though it were a second-class citizen. 
Sadly, black self-hatred can also begin at home. Even today, says Powell-Hopson,  many of us perpetuate negative messages, showing preference for lighter complexions, saying nappy hair is bad and straight hair is good, calling other black people  niggers,  that sort of thing.  This danger can be greater than the one posed by TV and the other media because children learn so much by simple imitation of the adults they are closest to. Once implanted in a toddler s mind, teachers and psychologists say, such misconceptions can blossom into a full-blown racial identity crisis during adolescence, affecting everything from performance in the classroom to a youngster s susceptibility to crime and drug abuse. But they can be neutralized if parents react properly.
In their book, Comer and Poussaint emphasize a calm and straightforward approach. They point out that even black children from affluent homes in integrated neighborhoods need reassurance about racial issues because from their
earliest days they sense that their lives are  viewed cheaply by white society. If, for example, a black little girl says she wishes she had straight blond hair, they advise parents to point out  in a relaxed and unemotional manner . . . that she is black and that most black people have nice curly black hair, and that most white people have straight hair, brown, blond, black. At this age what you convey in your voice and manner will either make it O.K. or make it a problem. 
Powell-Hopson, who along with her psychologist husband Derek has written Different and Wonderfid: Raising Black Children in a Race-Conscious Society (Fireside), takes a more aggressive approach, urging black parents in effect to inoculate their children against negative messages at an early age. For example, the authors suggest that African-American parents whose children display a preference for white dolls or action figures should encourage them to play with a black one by  dressing it in the best clothes, or having it sit next to you, or doing anything you can think of to make your child sense that you prefer that doll.  After that, the Hopsons .say, the child can be offered a chance to play with the toy, on the condition that  you promise to take the very best care of it. You know it is my favorite.  By doing so, the
Hopsons claim,  most ch jump at a chance to hold the t a second. 
White children are no less to racial messages. Their re range from a false sense of over blacks to an identify sports superstars like Michas complete that they want to be But if white parents look f< from popular child-care ma won t find any.  I haven t because I don t feel like an e: area,  says T. Berry Brazelto Infants and Mothers and othe books.  I think it s a very, i issue that this country hast to.  Unless it does, the U.S. i of rearing another generate children crippled by the bell are better than blacks and bl who agree.
As for my daughter, we r but confident. As Comer says, run what children learn from is more powerful than anyth from any other source.  Wt girl expressed the wish to b wife put aside her anguish a replied that she is bright an beautiful, a very special chile telling her that until we re si herself as much as we love 1
Article 32
Beyond the Pale
Why My 'Too-Black' Friends Want Light-Skinned Babies
Portia Williams
Portia Williams is a Maryland writer.
What with Michael Jackson s controversial color-change and the mulatto heroine of Alex Haley's TV mini-series, "Queen," people are talking again about the consequences of being a  dark-skinned" or "light-skinned" African American. Five years after Spike Lee's  School Daze" raised Wes by airing the issue outside the black community, this is a debate that will not die for some of us. My 29-year-old friend Kate, on the other hand, doesn't bother herself with W discussions. She thinks that in $ fears being dark-skinned in America may be a non-issue. That's because an increasing number of Wskinned women simply refuse ^reproduce a dark-skinned child.
fet me explain.
Kate laid out this theory a few hours after I attended a party she Wta 1-year-old daughter. At the P^y, 1 had met several of her fends and their children; I hap-to mention to Kate that I recall meeting the mother of
Me white girl.
W' replied Kate. "You met her
The little girl is not white, her father is. . . . You know, ev-wants a good-looking baby.
ome on, I said laughing. This is I	> people don't focus on complex-
? anymore. "No, you come on," I e sfet 'This is how it is. Nobody
wants a dark-skinned, nappy-haired baby. . . ."
This statement, of course, is not
daily for me: "Portia was a black baby; Portia was a thief; Portia came to my house and stole a leg of beef.' " It was hardly the worst thing I heard as a child.
I am dark, like my mother and two
true. Kate and millions of other black mothers not only want but adore their kids regardless of color. Yet after a moment I realized that indeed every dark-skinned mother at this party had a very light child. And now Kate was telling me that this was no accident. She said many of the women I met that day spoke openly about the necessity of having light-skinned children; that they had their children out of wedlock, and that the fathers of their children had not mattered as much as the lightness of their skin. "It's sad, and nobody wants to admit it," she said, "but even many educated, professional women of today don't want their babies to have to go through the same things they went through when they were growing up."
Suddenly I knew why this conversation so disturbed me. Not because it was outrageous; because it was plausible. For Kate and I weren't merely talking about light-skinned children or near-white partners, we were talking about the painful and contradictory effects of forced assimilation the everyday struggle for social acceptance and against self-hate. If you're black, the struggle is hard enough. But if you're "too black, it can become your life. Color can mean everything; if you let it, it can consume you. It can dictate a womans most fundamental choices.
In the neighborhood where I grew kids had a chant reserved espe-
of my brothers; dark unlike my father, my sisters and one brother. In short, I was the only dark-skinned girl in my family. Growing up, I was called tar-baby, nappy-head and black baby so many times that, for a period, I automatically looked up when a derogatory name was called.
I can remember with glowing clarity one of my brothers coming home from high school and noting how difficult it was to date dark-skinned girls. The guys at school joked about wanting only the light-bright-and-damn-near-white girls. If you're caught with somebody dark, he said, they'll trash you.
J already understood what he meant. I had been told by a lightskinned playboy that dark-skinned girls were only good for sex.
It wasn't just school-age kids who trashed dark skin, however; many children learned of their ugliness from figures of authority. I was in third or fourth grade when my African-American teacher told the class that beauty was high cheekbones, t narrow noses and small lips none t of whic