Breaking the Mold

Even as a small child, I recognized, although I didn’t fully comprehend, the irony of my Indian Barbie. Mattel had released a series of “international” dolls, dressed in stylish ethnic garb that draped beautifully over Barbie’s unrealistically proportioned body. The Indian edition was sari-clad and even came complete with a bindi. The blond-haired, blue-eyed figurine looked like a miniature Michaele Salahi. I recognized her as the wealthy, white American who always got the best table at restaurants in India. She’d stayed at a fancy resort for a week and appropriated my parents’ culture, and she had the red dot to prove it. I distinctly recall my frustration. I wanted my Barbie to look like me. I wonder now if what I really wanted was to look like my Barbie.

Mattel’s first minority doll was released in 1968, marketed as Barbie’s black friend. The company stopped painting white dolls black 12 years later. Instead, as Lisa Jones of The Village Voice wrote, it fashioned a doll made of “brown plastic poured into blond Barbie’s mold.” (Metaphors abound.) Recently, the company broke the mold and released a new line consisting entirely of black dolls. However, in the group of six, five have long, straightened hair, and three have blue or green eyes. These discrepancies compelled The Wall Street Journal’s Ann Zimmerman to ask, “Are Mattel’s New Dolls Black Enough?” It’s a question that many are clamoring to answer. Some of the mothers interviewed had incredibly positive things to say about the line; one said she could now “show her daughter that you don’t have to have a pointed nose to be beautiful.” Another mother complained about the uproar, arguing that a doll with a kinkier hairstyle would have been billed as too afro-centric. “We’re so hard and picky,” she bemoaned.

In an essay titled “Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant,” Gerald Early parses a photograph in which a young, hospitalized African American girl is clutching a white doll, a gift from then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ’48. He held that presenting the child with a black doll would have been insulting, an implication that she was, in some way, not fully integrated into mainstream America. Instead, with the act, Kennedy had declared that “she was worthy of the same kind of doll that a white girl would have.” Yet the image is chilling, a fact duly noted by Early, who describes it as “a black girl hugging a white doll because everyone thinks it is best for her to have it.”

It’s been over a decade since I selected my beloved Indian Barbie from the shelves of the toy store, handed it to my parents, and assured them that, yes, this was the doll I wanted. I still don’t fully comprehend the irony. I would be insulted, I think, if a white person were to present my potentially dark-skinned daughter with an Indian doll, perhaps for the same reasons Early implies. When my white friends proudly inform me of the Indian food they ate recently, I enthusiastically report that I spoke English the other day. “How multicultural am I?” I obnoxiously beam. Giving my theoretical daughter an Indian doll would be a self-congratulatory and degrading gesture. It would not only acknowledge, but emphasize, and perhaps consign me to a realm of, otherness. Such things are not done in polite society.

Yet my discomfort with this idea doesn’t preclude my providing my children with minority dolls, which makes Mattel’s new line personally relevant. To presume that six dolls can encompass an entire race is absurd. Mothers are right to be hard and picky about the images that are exposed to and engage with their daughters. It’s called parenting. And Mattel will likely respond in kind. (The company already plans to introduce a doll with an afro to the line.) In an ideal world, when wandering through the aisles of a toy store stuffed with a rainbow of Barbie dolls, my daughter would be able to point to the one who looks exactly like her, to say “That doll is beautiful. That doll is the one I want.” But this begs the unsettling question: What if she doesn’t?

I pray that my daughter will have that choice to make, if only so that I can tell an annoying parent story. (“Back in my day, we only had blonde Barbies to choose from. Have you seen mommy’s toy from the early ’90s?”) But if she does, and still settles on a white doll, it will be because things haven’t changed as much as we’d like to believe. I can only hope that my daughter won’t need Mattel to tell her that you don’t have to have a pointed nose to be beautiful. The current homogeneity of the doll market is not just a cause of highly racialized conceptions of beauty, but also a reflection of them. Black Barbies may be a step in the right direction, but at the end of the day it’s just plastic.

Silpa Kovvali ’10 is a computer science concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.