In many ways, the release of “Black Barbie: A Documentary” was inevitable. Months after “Barbie” hit theaters and melted the minds of white feminists everywhere, an examination of the truly revolutionary journey of the unique black doll on the periphery of that film seems slightly necessary.
Part of the reason is that pop culture is in a years-long phase of “representation” in which, for example, a film that rightly affirms the existence of blackness in a stereotypically white space like that of Barbie is sometimes considered essential for this alone. But is “Black Barbie” any good? Sometimes it feels like it should be less important than what it is.
From screenwriter and director Lagueria Davis, “Black Barbie” tells the doll’s origin story, in part through the testimonies of the black women who contributed to its creation. One of these women is the filmmaker’s own aunt: Beulah Mae Mitchell, who, in 1955, was one of the first and only black employees of Mattel hired as a toy tester.
This loving, personal spirit is an undercurrent of the documentary, in which Davis is also a character. Through voiceover narration, she tells the audience that she is anti-doll or, perhaps more accurately, a Barbie skeptic who is initially unable to understand why so many people, especially black women like her aunt , would still be captivated by a toy today. .
Most of “Black Barbie” — the entire first hour of its 90 minutes, to be exact — illuminates this through a lengthy narrative around representation. Before 1980, all Barbies were white. It wasn’t until Mattel hired its first black designer – Kitty Black Perkins, interviewed in the documentary – in 1978 that the reality of a black Barbie was seriously considered.
Before that, it was just something Mitchell and a few others presented to the otherwise white and noncommittal Mattel team. With Perkins in the lead, Black Barbie was born. And subsequently, a generation of black girls — at the risk of sounding trite, even though it would mimic many of the sentiments repeated in “Black Barbie” — began to see themselves reflected in dolls.
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“To crown this doll as Barbie is to tell the world that Black is beautiful too,” actor Ashley Blaine Featherson says in the film.
Former Miss Black California, Isis Mckenzie Johnson, gets emotional thinking about what the doll meant to her: “There was nothing I could relate to when I watched TV, that I could relate to and find an escape from the reality that beat me down because of the way I looked.
Monica L. Bailey, community coordinator and storyteller, remembers putting hair grease on her white Barbie dolls and coloring their eyes brown to connect them to her. “Having that as a norm made me and other black girls feel inadequate,” she says. “I needed to be them.”
She begins to cry during what she says next: “I just remember not feeling beautiful because of my skin and the texture of my hair, and being around people who didn’t look like me and didn’t didn’t accept me. It was very trying.
There are several other moments like this throughout “Black Barbie,” successfully capturing the doll’s impact on black girls in particular. But at the same time, these feel heavy-handed and don’t really challenge the narrative or push it beyond what you might expect to see in a story like this.
To add to this, there are platitudes about Black Barbie from other interviewees – like “it allowed the black girl to be the heroine of the story,” a phrase from Patricia A . Turner, professor in the university’s African-American studies department. from California, Los Angeles.
Or this note on White Barbie from Shonda Rhimes, executive producer of the film: “When you’ve gone your whole life and you’ve never seen something made in your image, there’s harm. »
“Black Barbie” also includes interviews with various black women who were the first to be themselves and now have Barbie dolls modeled after them. But one gets the impression that their achievements are equated with the existence of a toy.
They include Misty Copeland, the first black woman to become a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater; Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics; and Rhimes, the first woman to create three hit shows with more than 100 episodes each.
Davis’ apparent effort to celebrate a premiere, while as hackneyed as some of the film’s early moments, gets the point across. But “Black Barbie” highlights a much more interesting statement in its final act as the film questions Barbie’s real-world impact on racially diverse children today, which ultimately shakes the table in this story by elsewhere conventional.
“I think Barbie won’t do anything you haven’t done,” says Antwann Michael Simpkins, a philosophy candidate in UCLA’s sociology department. “And that’s on the parents’ side, as well as Mattel’s side. I don’t want to put Barbie in charge of the work we should be doing as a society to dismantle.”
Simpkins goes on to suggest that neither Barbie nor Mattel should bear sole responsibility for affirming children’s self-esteem and identity.
“The ultimate goal of authentic diversity, equity, and inclusion is to disrupt the institutions, the violent structures, the violent dolls, the doll-like worlds that exist because of the long legacy of colonialism” , adds Simpkins. “Until we get this work done, we’re just playing with ourselves.”
It’s such a mic drop moment that the documentary literally cuts to the next scene. But, thankfully, it doesn’t stray far from actual classroom and real-world conversations, which makes the final half hour of “Black Barbie” the most rewarding part.
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That’s because it does what most of the film isn’t bold enough to do: explore the limitations and, often, futility of representation, as well as some of the dialogue surrounding it.
For example, “Black Barbie” recreates Mamie and Kenneth Clark’s “doll test” from the 1940s, when the two psychologists showed children a black doll and a white doll – identical in every way except the color of their skin – and asked them what they preferred. The results often concluded that children across the racial spectrum were conditioned to think the white doll was better.
Beyond its revealing panel discussion of researchers and educators, led by Amirah Saafir, professor of childhood and adolescence studies, “Black Barbie” follows relationship expert Yeshiva Davis, marriage and family therapist approved, while today it reproduces the doll test. This time, she uses dolls spanning the racial and sexual spectrum.
The conclusions are not much different from those of the 1940s.
At one point in the film, a young black boy points to a white Barbie doll when asked which one is prettier, while several black girls view some of the black Barbies as pretty and take pride in the fact that they are assertive. beauty. But when asked which Barbie is the real Barbie, they all point to the white doll.
It’s a striking reflection of how far we have not traveled, despite the first hour of the film where we minutely ruminate to the contrary. Or maybe it’s more that representation is relative. Actor Gabourey Sidibe, for example, criticizes the original black Barbie’s look for being “light-skinned”, while others point out the lack of creases in her afro.
“I preferred that color,” Perkins says plainly when asked about Barbie’s skin tone.
The birth of Black Barbie showed that change was possible in the toy world. But what has it really brought to the real world, especially today where children, as other scenes from “Black Barbie” highlight, are more discerning about the images they wish to ingest?
It’s not just about the existence of a product, the growing popularity of the toy or even the billions of dollars it brings in. It’s about how children feel about themselves, beyond the ability to play with a doll that might look like them. Although their self-affirmation through the toy was uncertain, the success of Mattel, still largely white and male, was always essentially guaranteed.
In fact, in the years after Perkins and his successor, Stacey McBride-Irby, left Mattel, a white man named Bill Greening became the designer of Black Barbie. “Black Barbie,” thankfully, isn’t shy about disputing why, including in interviews with Greening and others at Mattel who tout how far the doll has come while sometimes deflecting valid criticism.
(Unfortunately, Mattel appears to have addressed the issues raised in the documentary, as the film’s postscript includes a statement noting examples of progress. These include the company’s Future Leaders Innovating Play initiative, which offers internships to black undergraduates across the country. He also explains that three program participants have been hired as full-time employees.)
As with last year’s “Barbie,” the question is whether commercialized representation is enough to satisfy underserved communities, or whether we will do the real work of demolishing the societal, educational and familial conditioning that influences self-esteem from the start. young age.
We can talk about representation when it comes to the art we consume or the toys we happily play with all day — and we’ve already done so exhaustively. But beyond making white businesses more money, it too often feels, to borrow Simpkins’ words in “Black Barbie,” that we’re just playing with ourselves.
“Black Barbie: A Documentary” arrives on Netflix on Wednesday, June 19.