How many little girls can point to the television or an advertisement and see some sort of representation of themselves?

How many of those girls are Black?

The truth is, today’s beauty ideals are deeply ingrained with the European standard of beauty, and by that I mean the images we perceive as beautiful tend to fall under the characteristic of the White race.

While true, society has made some great leaps to include more ethnically diverse figures in movies and magazines, such as the 2015 DreamWorks movie Home or the 2014 Sony production of Annie, both of which featured little Black girls as the main characters, European beauty dominates the majority of media from TV shows to advertisements to toys aimed at little girls. Even toys that are labeled as "ethnic" often have the same European characteristics found in their counterparts.

With such a heavy bias towards the European standard of beauty, little Black girls are silently being told that the way they look is not beautiful, creating a sense of unworthiness and self disgust.

The easiest way to view the effect of this European beauty standard is to look at the hair industry in the Black female community.

Bertram D. Ashe writes in his essay "Why Don't He Like My Hair" that "While contemporary black women sometimes opt for cosmetic surgery or colored contact lenses, hair alteration (i.e., hair-straightening "permanents," hair weaves, braid extensions, Jheri curls, etc.) remains the most popular way to approximate a white female standard of beauty," meaning the easiest means for Black women to achieve this ideal of beauty, they must alter their hair either chemically or with unnatural add-ons, most of which can cause extreme damage to hair over long periods of time and cost hundreds of dollars.

This is not just a mindset of grown women either; from a young age, little Black girls are told that their natural hair is "nappy" or "kinky" just because it coils instead of curls or isn't straight. They are told that their hair isn't beautiful.

I remember getting teased about my hair from a young age and going to my mother and telling her I wanted to get it relaxed (or a straight perm) so I would look like the other girls. To this day, I am still not comfortable in my own hair and prefer to have it in braids.

I'm not the only little girl who grew up this way. Millions of little Black girls are growing up and seeing these images of long sleek hair on TV and magazines and wondering why theirs doesn't look like that and feeling bad about themselves.

Even toys are perpetuating this stigma. Barbie, created in 1959 by Ruth Handler, to date has become one of the most recognizable icons in the world with the brand consistently reaching annual gross sales exceeding $1 billion since the year 2011 (barbiemedia.com). With hundreds of different versions of the toy, it is no shock that Barbie has even produced a few "Black" Barbies, but instead of including Black characteristics, such as curly/braided hair, the Barbies have long sleek hair that mimics every other White Barbie. There is little to set them apart aside from the darker hue of the skin tone, and even that hardly goes beyond a caramel tan.

These types of toys are damaging in the sense that they are showing little girls that they do not fit the "standard" of beauty and more so because they are born with certain genetic traits. This European beauty standard leads to more than an economical dependency on hair products and chemicals, but causes deep psychological damage.

In the 1940 Kenneth and Mamie Clarke shocked the world with their findings during the "Doll Test." In this experiment, the doctors used 4 dolls that were identical in all way except for the color of skin and asked a group of children between ages 3 and 7 (of mixed race) to identify the race of the dolls and which one they preferred. Most of the children would go on to say they preferred the White doll over the Black one. At the end of their study, "The Clarks concluded that 'prejudice, discrimination, and segregation' created a feeling of inferiority among African-American children and damaged their self-esteem" (NAACPLDF.org). "

In 2012, a similar study was done by CNN and child psychologist Margaret Spencer with a larger group of children (ages 4-5 and 9-10) in eight different schools in New York and Georgia in hopes of recreating the Clarks' Doll Study. The test showed that the White children showed "white bias," or selecting their own race for positive attributes, while Black children showed the same bias but to a lesser degree (CNN.com).

The Clarks' state that "prejudice, discrimination, and segregation" are the causes of this feeling of inferiority found in Black children, and to a degree they were correct. Yet, how it is that nearly 70 years later, with segregation having been legally outlawed (in most ways) and children having been intermingling for 60+ years, the results still show Black children feeling inferior to white children in terms of both beauty and worthiness?

In the Spencer study, one girl states that "I don't like the way brown looks […] it just looks nasty for some reason, but I don't know what reason." This little girl hates her own skin and she doesn't understand why.

That is a clear example that something is wrong with this society. We are holding millions of little girls to this impossible beauty standard that falls solely under the influence of European genetics found, you guessed it, in white European descendents. Little Black girls are growing up ashamed and disgusted by their skin because society has ingrained in them— not taught these girls wholly believe that brown is inferior to white— that they are not what the world thinks is beautiful. They are "nasty" and ugly and rather spend hundreds of dollars on damage inducing chemicals than walk around with the hair they are born with.

As a society we are failing these little girls and that is not okay.