Diversity in Education-August 3rd

We were discussing in class racial bias and Prof. Lenssen was discussing a study where black children (girls primarily I think) were asked to choose which doll they thought was prettier and better, between a white doll and a black doll, and most of the girls chose the white doll.

This brought to mind an anecdotal experience from my own childhood that I wanted to examine. Growing up I had LOVED the American Girl dolls, I had paged through their catalogs and longed for one of their dolls. After playing a gig with my fiddle band, at the age of 10, I received a pay check large enough for me to purchase one of these dolls. At this point in time there were only five. Each representing an important period of time for America. Felicity, the colonist, Kirsten the immigrant, Samantha, the Victorian, Molly, from WW2, and the most recent addition, Addy the escaped slave from the Civil War. I don't remember my reasoning, and it might have been something simple and unconnected to race, but I bought the black doll. And I LOVED that doll, my grandmother made a trunk of clothes for her (and another doll that I eventually also got, this one made to look like me) and I played with them long after it was socially acceptable for me to play with dolls. The doll did have one issue I was unprepared to deal with, her hair was textured, much like the typical African's hair, and I didn't know how to deal with it, so years of combing resulted in very thing hair and near dreadlocks.

I don't have a lot of analysis for this, I guess. I grew up in a very very white community, I had only one black person in my entire high school. No black friends or family members, no experience with black people outside of seeing them around town or interacting in the most mundane manner. I wonder if perhaps my reasoning for choosing that doll was that she was the newest, or different then all the others (I was very interested in being different at that point in my life), or the fact that she wore a dress that I liked. Perhaps the draw was her straw bonnet. But in retrospect it's a very interesting question. Why did the little white girl choose the black doll?