WWednesday marks June 16, the federal holiday that commemorates the day slaves in Texas learned of their emancipation. It’s a time for Americans to reflect on how much progress has been made since that day in 1865, while also recognizing how much work remains to be done. One area for reflection is to consider how black people are represented in American culture
A Netflix documentary called Black Barbieto be released in June (June 19), hopes to start those conversations in a fun way.
The film examines the creation of the first Black Barbie doll in 1980 and features black celebrities who had Barbie dolls made in their likeness. They include television mogul Shonda Rhimes, the film’s producer, ballet star Misty Copeland, and Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, who talk about what it took to break barriers in their own fields. Psychology experts also weigh in on why it’s so important for black children to be able to choose from a variety of dolls that look like them. The hope is that viewers can see that Black Barbies is just “a lens into what it means to be black in America,” Lagueria Davis, the film’s director, tells TIME.
Davis begins the film by admitting that she never liked playing with dolls while growing up in Fort Worth, Texas. So she moved to Los Angeles and started living with her aunt Beulah Mae Mitchell while trying to survive in Hollywood and found the house covered in dolls. Mitchell has always been a doll fanatic and went from making dolls out of glass jars as a child to working on the Mattel factory line and later as a receptionist from 1955 to 1999.
Sometime in the early 1960s, after the first Barbie was released in 1959, Mitchell met Barbie’s inventor, Ruth Handler. Handler liked to periodically talk to people in the factories and ask for ideas, and Mitchell asked Handler to consider creating the black version of the doll.
A doll factory with Black characteristics
Nothing came of this brave initial suggestion, but in the late 1960s Mattel introduced black “Barbie friends” called Cristina It is Face. Around the same time, Mattel made a doll called Julia inspired by TV star Diahann Carroll, and even helped fund a factory called Shindana Toy Factory, which pioneered the manufacture of black dolls that actually looked like black people.
The mill’s founders, Lou Smith and Robert Hall, witnessed the Watts Rebellion in 1965 and wanted to solve the problem of poverty and rising unemployment in South Los Angeles. In the documentary, Smith’s son said his father’s solution was to make accurate dolls of black people so that black children could have “a positive self-image.”
But none of these dolls carried the Barbie brand until 1980, when Mattel hired a black designer named Kitty Black Perkins. Upon spotting Mitchell, who had risen to the corporate office, Perkins befriended her and they began talking. In the documentary, Mitchell says she remembers Perkins approaching her and saying, “Don’t you think they should be able to make a doll with black features?”
In a touching moment, Perkins and Mitchell reunite in the film, and Perkins explains how she designed Black Barbie to be “the complete opposite” of Blonde Barbie, from a thick necklace to a wraparound skirt that flared out at the side, inspired by the star. of R&B. Dresses by Diana Ross. Perkins explains that she recruited Mellie Phillips, a Mattel doll hairdresser who was also black, to design an afro for Black Barbie. Another Black Mattel employee had the idea of making the doll’s lips fuller and her nose wider.
To explore how black girls view black Barbies compared to white, blonde Barbies, the film features a focus group of children brought together by Amirah Saafir, a developmental psychologist and professor at California State University, Fullerton. When therapist Yeshiva Davis asks the girls to choose the prettiest Barbie from a selection, a black girl chooses the black Barbie named “Brooklyn” and says she is the prettiest “because she has black skin like all of us.”
Davis – who says she now The love is dolls – wants people to leave the documentary knowing that Barbie is the most diverse line of dolls. Mattel’s website says Barbie is available in 35 skin tones with 97 hairstyles and nine body types. By showing how Black employees at Mattel came together to design the first Black Barbie, Davis hopes viewers can literally see what “matter representation” means. As Davis told TIME: “We say ‘representation matters,’ but I feel like that’s just a catchphrase, a buzzword. What our film does is show how it can work.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
