I recently watched Chris Rock’s feature doc Good Hair, which was apparently prompted into being when his daughter asked, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?”. Well, after being clued in by the excellent Fannie Fierce, I took a look at Kiri Davis’ 2005 award-winning documentary, A Girl Like Me, which feels very much a companion piece to Good Hair.
Through its series of interviews with young black women, A Girl Like Me highlights the perception that black features fall short of society’s standards of beauty, even amongst the black community itself. Davis’ restaging of Kenneth Clark’s black doll/white doll experiment is a particularly troubling example of why this is an issue still in need of positive action.
