Dark Girls is a documentary by Bill Dukes with the intended goal of exploring and raising awareness around “the deep-seated biases and attitudes about skin color particularly dark skinned women.” The eye-opening film originally debuted back in 2011 at the Toronto International Film Festival and has been creating quite a buzz ever since.
During an interview with The Root last year, Duke revealed that witnessing the pain endured by little Black girls who wished they look like someone else is what really inspired him to put the project together.
“From observing the unfortunate pain that friends of mine’s children are still going through. Just yesterday we were at the Links. A beautiful dark-skinned woman was at the desk, and she said to me, ‘I’m so glad you’re making this film.’ I said, ‘Thank you.’ She said: ‘You don’t understand. A few days ago, my daughter, who’s as dark as me, came home crying that they were calling her ‘blackie’ and all of these names at the playground at her school.’This is not something that happened 50 years ago; this is happening now.”
Duke went on to say that he hopes his documentary will bring about healing.
“[I hope] to create a discussion, because in discussion there’s healing, and in silence there is suffering. Somehow if you can speak it and get it out, healing starts.”
“I think the deepest part is we learned our own prejudices and we learned our own indoctrinations. We learned where our own standards of beauty came from, what were our preferences and why were we making those decisions in terms of women.”
“You know you think your conscious is right; as you dig deeper in to the core of these issues, it’s a self-discovery process as well. And when you start facing those issues, they are not painless, let’s put it that way. And so this self-discovery process was part of it.”
It was officially announced yesterday that Dark Girls will make its television debut on the Oprah Winfrey Network in June.
Check out a preview of Dark Girls below. Let us know what you think.
