Mattel has launched a new line of black Barbie dolls with fuller lips, a wider nose and more pronounced cheek bones — a far cry from Christie, Barbie’s black friend who debuted in the 1960s and was essentially a white doll painted brown.
The So In Style line, which hit mass retailers last month, features BFFs Grace, Kara and Trichelle, each with her own style and interests and a little sister she mentors: Courtney, Janessa and Kianna. The dolls reflect varying skin tones — light brown, chocolate, and caramel — and Trichelle and Kianna have curlier hair.
Barbie designer Stacey McBride-Irby, who is black and has a six-year-old daughter, said she wanted to create a line of dolls for young black girls that looked like them and were inspirational and career-minded. For example, Kara is interested in math and music.
“I want them to see themselves within these dolls, and let them know that black is beautiful,” she said.
Many black women are praising Mattel for its efforts — Black Barbie hit the shelves in 1980 with white features shared by many of the dolls following her.
But some say the dolls with long straight hair are not “black enough” and do not address the beauty issues that many black girls struggle with. In the black community, long, straight hair is often considered more beautiful than short kinky hair.
Chris Rock highlights the issue in his Good Hair documentary, which opened in select US cities on Friday and shows black women straightening their tight curls with harsh chemicals and purchasing US$1,000 hair weaves.
“Why are we always pushing this standard of long hair on our girls?” asked Gail Parrish, 60, a playwright in Alexandria, Virginia, and a mother of four grown children. “Why couldn’t one of the dolls have a little short Afro, or shorter braids or something?” McBride-Irby said she originally designed all the dolls with long hair. Combing her Barbie’s long hair when she was a girl was the “highlight of my play experience,” she said. She was advised to create some dolls with curlier hair, so she did.
There is a So In Style hairstyling set so girls can curl, straighten and style their dolls’ hair over and over. (It costs US$24.99, more than a pair of dolls at US$19.99.)
That is troubling to Sheri Parks, an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park, because it actively involves girls in the process of straightening hair. She worries that it reinforces the message that there is something wrong with natural hair.
“Black mothers who want their girls to love their natural hair have an uphill battle and these dolls could make it harder,” Parks said in an e-mail.
Aside from the hair, some black women are concerned about the dolls’ thin frames. Barbie, which celebrated her 50th birthday in March, has for years come under fire for promoting an unrealistic body image, with her long legs, tiny waist and large breasts.
While white girls also deal with body-image issues, Kumea Shorter-Gooden, co-author of Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America, believes Barbie has a more negative impact on black girls. They are already struggling with messages that “black skin isn’t pretty and our hair is too kinky and short,” she said.
Despite those complaints, Mattel seems to have gotten several things right.
Andrea Slaughter, 38, a mom of two in Newnan, Georgia, said she likes how the designer highlighted values that are critical in the black community, such as education and mentoring.
Sheila Adams Gardner, 41, a mother of three in Woodbridge, Virginia, praised the varying skin tones. She said when her daughter was 4, she became very self-conscious about being lighter than everyone else in her family.
“She has always had African-American dolls, but rarely dolls with skin like her own,” she said. “Often the lighter dolls were Hispanic or Indian. It was very heartwarming to look at a series of African-American Barbies and hear my daughter, now 11, exclaim, ‘She looks like me!’” Even Shorter-Gooden acknowledged the facial features “look like real black people.” Mattel doesn’t release sales figures. But Michelle Chidoni of Mattel said the dolls are resonating with girls of all colors and ages.
The line will be expanding next year with Rocawear clothing, new dolls Chandra and her little sister Zahara, and Darren, who will have a little brother he mentors.
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
When Taiwan was battered by storms this summer, the only crumb of comfort I could take was knowing that some advice I’d drafted several weeks earlier had been correct. Regarding the Southern Cross-Island Highway (南橫公路), a spectacular high-elevation route connecting Taiwan’s southwest with the country’s southeast, I’d written: “The precarious existence of this road cannot be overstated; those hoping to drive or ride all the way across should have a backup plan.” As this article was going to press, the middle section of the highway, between Meishankou (梅山口) in Kaohsiung and Siangyang (向陽) in Taitung County, was still closed to outsiders
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
RSS