Mya Baker is a Bed-Stuy resident and pre-school teacher who is close to completing a feature-length documentary about black male stereotypes entitled, "Black Men Afraid of Dark."

She says the goal of her film is to begin a process of healing— for black men and for society as a whole. A Chicago native, 38-year-old Baker said she didn't start the film intending to talk about racial stereotypes. Her intention was to deal with sex and relationships. But she soon learned that so much of what guided her subjects' opinions on relationships had to do with how they viewed themselves.

And so much of what informed how they viewed themselves was tied to how society viewed them: brute, oversexed, violent and angry. "Trust me, I didn't want to make this film about race; I want to believe we have gotten beyond all of this, I really do," said Baker "I grew up an alternative queen, listening to rock, Suzie and the Banxies. As a teen, I was always like, 'Love is colorblind; you shouldn't judge people based on race.' And I dated white guys."

Baker insisted the film's changing topic emerged all on its own. However, a closer look at Baker's own life suggests that it wasn't totally by accident. In fact, filming the documentary seems to have served as a catharsis, an outpouring of some unresolved conflicts of her own: "I remember so clearly, when I was 5 years old, my mother, my brother and I were chased out of a Chicago neighborhood called Bridgeport when we were young. A gang of boys were waiting for us as we walked out of this church, and they started chasing us with bats and bricks yelling, 'Nigger go home!'

"We were all so scared. We ran for our lives, all the way back to the car. I was quiet all the way home. But when we got on the elevator in our building, I finally turned to my brother and asked, 'What's a nigger?' And he said, 'Aw man, that's what they call black people.'

"And I said, 'But I'm not black, I'm brown.' I was totally confused. That was my first time really thinking about color.

"My pre-schoolers don't know about race yet. They don't describe people as black or white. They say, that boy over there with the pink shirt hit me. Society teaches kids that there are differences, and I think it's a shame." Still, as a young girl, Baker refused to believe there was a difference between her and the next person of any other race. And why would she? She was surrounded by positive black role models. Her mother had her master's degree and worked for the EPA for 33 years. Her father, an electrical engineer, held a senior position at Amoco. And her older brother, also academic-minded, went on to earn his Ph.D in history.