One and the Same

The End.

Over, Finished, Done.
Leaving, Good-byeing, Moving on.
Starting, Expecting, Looking ahead.
New, Unseen, Future.

The Beginning.

The end leads to a new beginning, to an end, to a beginning,to an end...

*edit

Living up to her reputation, Mom has once again taken an event, a story, and told her own version of it. I have, once again, fallen prey to this tendency of hers and in turn subjected you, my dear readers, to its fallacy. This gross misinterpretation of the facts surfaced in The Ice Cream Man post made several weeks ago. A reliable source has revealed that it was not acorns that were used by my brothers in an attempt to buy ice cream, but pine cones. May it stand corrected in the Exhale annals.

Before we build the gallows, let me say that my sympathies are with the trespasser, namely mom, in this case. My decision is greatly influenced by the fact that I have subconcsiously acquired this uncanny ability to manipulate events to my own view point. The first step toward recovery is to admit a discrepancy in oneself. We struggle onward toward perfection. I will no doubt pass on to my children the implicit flaws of my human nature. I pray that I will have mercy upon that day.

A Girl Like Me

A Girl Like Me

Thanks to Kelsey I have added the video "A Girl Like Me", which prompted my previous post on The Doll Test, to Exhale for your convenient viewing! As a side note, youtube.com allows you to post videos directly to your blog right from their website. It may be a fun way to spice things up around here anyway.

The Doll Test

In the 1950’s, soon after Brown vs. Board of Education desegregated schools, Dr. Kenneth Clark performed a test on young black children. This test consisted of two dolls, one white and the other black. The children were then asked which doll was pretty and which doll was ugly. The overwhelming answer from these children was that the white doll was the pretty one, while the black doll was the ugly one.

In the 50’s racial segregation and discrimination was still very much alive. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Emmett Till. Nowadays most of us don’t give segregation or discrimination a second thought. We pat ourselves on the back that we have moved past that ugliness, and offer a puzzled expression to the occasional “hate crime” that appears on our college campuses and news headlines. Fifty years isn’t really that long ago. If you were fifty years old, all the major ups and downs on the rollercoaster of race would have happened during your lifetime.

Recently Good Morning America made us aware of a shocking (or maybe not so shocking) truth about the current state of racism in the United States by highlighting Kiri Davis, a young aspiring filmmaker. Kiri made a film called “A Girl Like Me”, which won an award from the Media That Matters Festival. She decided to re-conduct the doll test with young black children. She found a white doll easily, but had an extremely difficult time finding a black doll. Stores simply did not sell them. Once she did find one and performed the test, the results were almost identical to the results 50 years ago. Fifteen out of twenty-one children chose the white doll as the pretty/good doll, while indicating the black doll as ugly/bad. The last little girl shown in the video (which you can download for viewing) was asked which doll looked like her. There was a heart-wrenching pause before she finally pushed the black doll, which she had just indicated as the bad doll, forward.

I was sickened by that image. It shows what our society values as beautiful and good. The black culture is not validated by our media. Just as the media tells a woman that she must be thin and dress a certain way to be beautiful, it says black (unless the features lean toward Caucasian and mainstream English is spoken) is not beautiful. We are concerned about the media effect on gender, so why not color?

I would strongly encourage you to download “A Girl Like Me” and view it, as this post will be much more meaningful if you see it for yourself. If you have dial-up like me it will take some time, but it is well worth it.

Interestingly there is a collection of racial propaganda and memorabilia on the Ferris State campus here in Michigan. It is called The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia and it's purpose is to show how the media has portrayed and still portrays black people. There is a lot there in the link I've offered, but you can see pictures of some of the items in the museum.

My Mom Rocks!

She does. I can tell her anything. She's so proud of me. Sometimes she's so proud that she exagerates about my accomplishments and abilities. Like the time I called home while living in Tx to fill her in on everything going on in my life. I told her about the worship CD I helped with by singing in the choir there, then launched into the big news that I would be touring for two weeks with the Newsboys to promote mission trips to concert goers on their tour. She then went right out and told everyone I was going to be a backup singer for the Newsboys! *sigh* I was so embarrassed. But between her pride in me and obvious confusion about the events I spewed out during a short phone call, I guess I can understand her mistake. I did have a bit of work cut out for me undoing that little misunderstanding once I moved back home though. ("So, wow! you were a backup singer for the Newsboys?!" "No...no. I promoted missions. Missions!)

Still, I couldn't ask for a better mom. She is my friend as well as my mother. That is why I announce with great pride that my mother is a blogger! So for all those times she has exuberantly spread mostly true (it really is her point of view) accounts of my latest accomplishments, I say my mom has the rockinest blog ever and everybody should rush right over there and welcome her to the blogosphere: www.pebblesofsand.blogspot.com

Afterall, everything I know about exaggeration I learned from her.