‘Someone who looked like me’: the women who Black Barbie

by Susan Smith-Richardson via https://www.theguardian.com/

A new Shonda Rhimes-produced Netflix documentary looks back at diversity within Mattel’s Barbie world and those who fought to improve it

You don’t have to be a Barbie girl to be interested in Black Barbie: A Documentary, the history of the first Black Barbie in 1980 and the doll’s significance for Black girls in a world that still questions their natural beauty. The film is a tribute to the Black women who advocated for and designed the doll and a discourse on representation.

Writer-director Lagueria Davis uses the landmark doll tests from the 1940s to explain why Black Barbie matters and how a blond-haired, blue-eyed Barbie, the embodiment of an unrealistic white beauty smtandard, can strike at the self-image of Black children in America. Drs Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted the doll tests to determine the effects of segregation on Black children’s self-esteem. They gave the children, ages three to seven, white and Black dolls that were identical in every way except skin color. Then, they asked them to attribute positive and negative characteristics to the dolls; most of the children rejected the Black dolls, speaking volumes about their self-regard and shocking US supreme court justices who cited the study in the court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools.

The documentary unfolds through the story of Davis’s aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell, a former employee of Mattel, the toymaker that produced the first Barbie in 1959. Davis, who also narrates the film, confesses that she hates dolls. Still, her interest is piqued by her aunt’s impressive doll collection and long career at Mattel…

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