A Girl Like Me
This one hurt my feelings a little bit. Its a shame but that our children still equate good and pretty with light & white . For sisters of color that have girls, we know how much of a struggle it is to find toys that our daughters can relate to. Toy makers have just started to catch on and are slowly making culturally diverse dolls that are just as pretty as their white counterparts. How many of us hated to get the black Barbie with purple lips and pink eyeshadow?? Still when you sit down and watch the movies with your baby , how many times have you seen the blond princess with the brunette friend or handmaiden. Or the raven haired villain. Subtle as it seems our children are savvy enough to catch on to the underlying message that dark is not good enough and still struggle with the misconception that beauty is tantamount to the shade of their skin.
posted by Nix at
6:35 AM
2 Comments:
This is an amazing piece. Being a mom, I do know what it's like to search high and low for a doll that looks like her. And I'll be damned if I don't remember those purple-lipped black Barbies too. When my daughter was a little kid, she absolutely craved those Barbie bedding sets. I finally relented when she agreed to at least get the version with the black Barbie doll faces on the comforter and pillows. It was the ONLY set we could find that even featured a black character on it. I'd have preferred to skip buying any kind of Barbie crap but we're pretty much stuck with a piss-poor selection to choose from.
After awhile I found the American Girl Doll store in Chicago that has an amazing variety of dolls. There's dark brown, light brown, and white dolls; kinky-haired, curly, and straight-haired dolls; dolls with gapped teeth; dolls with braces; dolls with glasses; dolls in wheelchairs. It's really a great place to find dolls that look like us. There's a catch though.
The dolls cost a hundred dollars a pop. That means they are pretty much prohibitively expensive for a lot of people. It's no wonder so many of us grew up despising how we looked.
Yep bint,
I've seen those American Girl dolls. My baby has been a fan of My Scene Barbie for for years. Now we've settled on the Chicana doll(she doesn't know that) cause that's the one closest to her color. I have secretly boycotted Bratz for her for several reasons like... They perpetuate slutty ghetto persona's, the black one isn't featured on any of their sheets, silverware, lamps, etc. like she doesn't exist, did I mention they are slightly slutty. Even still my baby has revealed to me that she is going to have to get a weave so that her hair can be long. When you are so thoroughly immersed in a culture that doesn't embrace the beauty of your race it can be hard to convince your child of their own gorgeousness regardless of how beautiful your baby is.
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