The Power of a Black Barbie

As an army boy who grew up in Germany and then in the white suburbs of the United States, Ebony Oliphant’s Black Barbie was not just a toy, it was destiny.

“Playing with my black Barbies in the ’90s allowed me to feel proud of myself as I envisioned Barbie’s ‘career’ and the lifestyle I created for her,” Oliphant said. for HuffPost. “I didn’t grow up seeing black women in my community as doctors, dentists, business executives, but Barbie could do all that.”

In fact, in Barbie’s 64-year history, the doll has been the last career girl: she’s been an astronaut, a major league baseball player, even a health care worker modeled after a Canadian psychiatry resident who championed systemic racism in the field of health.

Oliphant, who is now a professional clinical consultant in Chicago, said her dolls not only helped fuel her career goals; Barbie also made her feel less alone.

“If there were other black girls at school, I was usually the darkest,” she said. “Barbie Christie looked like my skin tone, so that’s what my parents usually bought.”

“They lived in a dream house that looked like my black house inside, with several other races and ethnicities scattered around,” she added. “I basically built a little Black Barbie empire. Even though the environment away from home rarely looked like me, it was nice to be able to see myself playing.”

Of course, not everyone was so impressed with Black Barbie. Since the first Barbie doll was dyed brown in 1967, the Colorful France doll has been a a figure as much loved as much criticized.

After Francie, there was Julia, a doll based on the titular character from Diahann Carroll’s sitcom. Malibu Christie, Barbie’s best friend, made her debut in 1968. The first black doll named Barbie was released in 1980.

Critics were quick to point out the toy’s limitations: the doll was simply dipped in darker paint, with the same thin body type and long, straw-like hair as its white predecessor.

As black reporter Lisa Jones wrote in The Village Voice in the 1980s, Mattel simply created a doll from a “brown plastic mold in the blonde Barbie mold.”

But even Black Barbie’s detractors couldn’t deny her powers.

“As a little girl who grew up without pictures, I realize that even if they don’t reach the utopian point, they are still useful,” Jones said years later in an interview with MG Lord for the book “Forever Barbie: The Biography” . unauthorized use of a real doll.

In the 1940s, married psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted a series of experiments known colloquially as the “doll tests” to study black children’s attitudes toward race in segregated America.

Given the choice to play with either a black doll or a white doll, the Clarks found that time after time, the children preferred the white doll.

In addition, the children, ages 3 to 7, assigned positive attributes to the white dolls but negative attributes to the black dolls. When asked to describe the doll that most resembled themselves, some of the children were “emotionally distracted by having to identify with the doll they rejected,” the researchers noted.

The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination and segregation” created a sense of inferiority among the children, damaging their self-esteem and racial self-concept.

Despite attempts to address systemic racism, When early childhood education teacher Toni Sturdivant recreated the “doll test” in 2021, preschool girls still held negative views of black dolls.

“When it came time to do the black dolls’ hair, the girls would pretend to be stylists and say, ‘I can’t do that doll’s hair.’ It’s too big’ or ‘It’s too curly,'” Sturdivant recorded of the girls’ track.

However, it may be different for children who grow up surrounded by Black Barbies. It grew in the early 2000s, esthetician Zehira Jirves told him no more she wanted to play with Black Barbies.

“What’s unique about my mom is that she never bought me a Caucasian doll because she knew the effect it would have on me,” Jirves, 25, told HuffPost. “Even if she was a Bratz doll, she was still Sasha. This gave me energy to grow the main character.”

The family home in Queens, New York was Barbie’s home.

“We had black Barbie sheets, black Barbie pajamas,” she said. “For my 8th birthday party, my mom and I baked my pink birthday cake and had a black ballerina Barbie.”

Jirves estimates that she and her sister collected more than 50 Barbie dolls by the end of their collecting days.

“As a Pisces child, my imagination was so wild; I had so much to play with, so many options and stories and houses,” she said.

Jirves’ mother went out of her way to seek out authentic-looking black dolls and counter any negative cultural messages her daughters received about being black.

According to Margaret Beale Spencer, a child psychologist and professor at the University of Chicago, black parents often have to make a conscious effort to protect their children from prejudice by “reframing the messages children receive from society” about racial preferences.

White parents, Spencer said, “don’t have to engage in that level of parenting.” Jirves’ mother did.

“My mom did such an amazing job of making sure we were proud of our curly hair and beautiful tan skin. Our black Barbies were part of that,” Jirves said.

To its credit, Mattel has taken steps to make its Black Barbie dolls more “ethnically correct”: In the 1980s, for example, they commissioned Kitty Black Perkins, a Black Mattel designer, to conceptualize a doll to channel black culture and popularity. aesthetic. the weather.

As professor Aria S. Halliday writes in “Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture,” while the doll’s skin was lighter than Mattel’s previous attempts at making a black doll, her hair was styled in a afro style. halliday writes:

[Black Perkins] she even accessorized her black Barbie with a “fashion comb/hair comb” and a choice of hoop or drop earrings to match her “disco” outfit. The packaging details how to “puff your hair with a pick” when playing with Black Barbie, and includes an illustration of these instructions for those unfamiliar with the practice. In the absence of a satin bonnet, Mattel is clear in naming, communicating and illustrating how to play with this new addition to the Barbie line, further explaining the difference in play time it represented.

Mattel’s Shani dolls, also created by Black Perkins, went even further: for the first time at Mattel, black dolls were designed with possibly different molds than white dolls.

Eager for advances in representation, black doll manufacturers outside of Mattel worked to fashion their own dolls or modify pre-existing black Barbies to make them less Eurocentric.

In 2011, Karen Byrd created Natural Girls United, a small business that gives Black Barbies the makeover treatment with naturally textured hairstyles: dreadlocks, auburn afros, blonde spiral curls.

Each doll takes three hours to three days to make, and many of the dolls come with long eyelashes, painted nails, and handmade dresses and heels to match their new locks.

Byrd told HuffPost that her daughter’s upbringing inspired her to make the dolls. Browsing black dolls at Toys R Us as a new mom, Byrd was just as overwhelmed by the options as she was when she was young herself.

“With the Black Barbie I had as a child, it looked like they took a white doll and gave her dark brown skin – for me it was a very strange thing to see and it definitely made me wonder why my features were so different. ‘, he said. “When my girls were younger, not much had changed.”

Now in 2023, she’s excited to see Mattel diversify its “different” dolls: In recent years, the toy company has released dolls that pay homage to iconic black figures of the past — aviator Bessie Coleman, writer Maya Angelou — and a number of miscellaneous dolls black: a Barbie Fashionista with Vitiligo and a black doll in a wheelchair.

There are dolls that look like tennis star Naomi Osaka and actor Laverne Cox, the first transgender person to have a Barbie modeled after them. Of course, there’s a Nicki Minaj Barbie, one of the most vocal toy icons.

“I see them making an effort to sell dolls with Afros and braids and more, and that’s a big improvement from when I was younger,” Byrd said.

Jirves, the beautician who grew up surrounded by Barbies, would like to see more hair diversity, but hopes Mattel will consult with a few black hairstylists first so they don’t repeat past mistakes.

In 2018, the company faced internet ridicule after it posted a photo of a black Barbie wearing black strands on one side of her head and a wavy blonde texture on the other: “Someone black works there,” one commenter asked.

“Mattel really needs to follow up by asking what black women would think about certain hairstyles,” Jirves said. “They should be very sensitive about how they represent black women and our hair because our hair is a statement that expresses how we feel and share our stories.”

Courtney Sprewer, another Black Barbie fan who grew up, has no children and is officially off the Mattel market. However, she remembers begging for a Brandy Barbie as a child in the late ’90s and how important it was for the brand to try to get it right aesthetically.

“I still remember the thin nylon threads they used to mimic the micro-braids. She was All for me,” Sprewer told HuffPost.

They are excited that today’s children can experience dolls that look more and more like them.

“It’s important that every child who wants to be friends with Barbie has a chance to see themselves represented in that world of Barbie, the best place, not depressing, in the real world,” she said. “My black beard was representation before I even knew what representation was.”