The little girl is looking at two pictures of little girls who are identical except for one thing - one is black, the other is white.
"Which is the pretty girl?" an adult researcher asks.The child doesn't hesitate. She points to the picture of the white girl.
"Can you tell me why?" the researcher wants to know.
"Because she has . . . um . . . she has different skin."
Another example of ongoing racial prejudice in America? Perhaps. But the most startling thing about this scene from ABC News' Black in White America (9 p.m., Ch. 4) is the ethnic background of the little girl who thinks white is beautiful.
She is black.
"I participated in one of those experiments when I was a little girl in Chicago in 1946," reporter Carole Simpson told TV critics in Los Angeles last month. "We were asked to choose a pretty doll, and there was a black doll and a white doll. And of course I picked the white doll. I'd never seen a black doll before.
"We've had many years of black dolls since then, and yet these children in Atlanta in 1989 are still saying that the pretty girl is the white girl and the dirty boy is the black boy."
Says Dr. Margaret Spencer, the researcher who conducts the Atlanta tests: "It means for me that we have not come very far as a people."
That's the general tone of "Black in White America." Produced and presented almost exclusively by black members of the ABC News staff, this powerful hourlong special refuses to waste much time or energy documenting white bigotry. Instead it chooses to focus on blacks and the way many of their own attitudes and expectations work against them.
"There are some thing that will be covered in this documentary that black people don't want to hear," said George Strait, who joined Simpson for the special and for the L.A. press conference.
"We don't want to hear about how we discriminate against each other on color," said executive producer Ray Nunn. "We don't want to hear a black Republican telling us, `Hey guys, wake up. If it's on your back it's not in a bank.'
"We may not want to hear these things. But it's about time that we did."
Which is not to say that the subject of white discrimination doesn't come up during the telecast. "When you're black in white America," Simpson says early in the special, "the top has a ceiling and the bottom has no floor."
But for the most part Simpson, Strait and Charles Thomas aim their reporting on the black community itself - an upper-middle-class family in San Diego, a welfare family in Chicago, a Top Gun fighter pilot in Alabama, a successful Maryland businessman and a host of black scholars and social scientists.
And if what they see doesn't please everyone in that community, that's OK with Strait.
"I certainly hope that somebody gets angry, because until there's some emotion in the country over this issue, no one's going to address it," he said. "It's become in vogue to not worry about these kinds of agendas. But America needs to worry about it, because if America is ever going to fulfill whatever dreams it says that it's been founded on, it's not going to fulfill them until it meets the unfinished civil rights agenda."
-ALSO ON TV TONIGHT: Christopher Reeve hosts The National Driving Test (9 p.m., Ch. 5); CBS presents Police Academy 3: Back in Training (7 p.m., Ch. 5); KSTU previews HBO programs like I, Martin Short, Goes Hollywood (7 p.m., Ch. 13), Sports Illustrated: The Making of the Swimsuit Edition (8 p.m., Ch. 13) and The Best of HBO Boxing (9 p.m., Ch. 13); Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray star in Cabaret (8:15 p.m., TBS); and Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews and Anthony Quinn star in William Wellman's excellent 1943 Western, The Ox-Bow Incident (7:15 p.m., AMC).
-LOOKING TOWARD WEDNESDAY: James Steward and Marlene Dietrich star in the vintage Wester, Destry Rides Again (11:05 a.m., TBS); Lindsay Wagner narrates a special about female lions, Queen of the Beasts (7 p.m., Ch. 5); Timeline (7:30 p.m., Ch. 7) reports on the fall of the Byzantine Empire; Hollywood Legends (8 p.m., Ch. 7) profiles "Cary Grant: The Leading Man"; Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau team up for The Fortune Cookie (8 p.m., Ch. 11); George C. Scott stars as Patton (8:15 p.m., TBS); and NBC's Deborah Norville examines the new wave of female criminals in Bad Girls (9 p.m., Ch. 2).