In 1940, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark performed the groundbreaking "doll experiments" study on children's attitudes on race using white and black dolls (the study was repeated in 2005 and documented by Kiri Davis in the film A Girl Like Me). The study showed how minorities view themselves in respect to racial stereotypes.
Recently, the Mexican government released a YouTube video on racism in Mexico - which brought a lot of comments on this thorny question: is Mexico an inherently racist society?
The kids are seated at a table before a white doll and a black doll, and are asked to pick the "good doll" or the doll that most resembled them. The children, mostly brown-skinned, almost uniformly say the white doll was better or most resembled them.
One child in the video with mixed-race features says the white doll resembled him "in the ears."
"Which doll is the good doll?" a woman's voice asks the child.
"I am not afraid of whites," he responds, pointing to the white doll. "I have more trust."
Mexico's National Council to Prevent Discrimination, or Conapred, in mid-December began circulating the video, modeled on the 1940s Clark experiments in the United States. The children who appear in it are mostly mestizos, or half-Spanish, half-Indian, and a message said they were taped with the consent of their parents and told to respond as freely as they could.
Daniel Hernandez of The Los Angeles Times reports: Link
The video in question was actually released by the Mexican government in order to confront the question of racism in Mexico.
In the end robbing people under the threat of violence (taxes) to pay for this commercial is just as bad if not more so than people making preferences based solely on race. Racism doesn't have to be acted out in violence, but the state is predicated on it.