Most young girls have owned a Barbie or some type of doll that they cherished and admired. They embody perfection with their porcelain skin, and cute outfits and most of them have a little background story that makes it exciting for little girls to match up and play with other dolls. While it all seems very lighthearted and blameless, there is a much more impressionable message that these dolls seem to be giving off to young girls. The article “How Racism Affects Children: The Doll Test” by Alicia Perez explores the myth that young children are blind to race. However the articles goes on to debunk this idea by performing various "doll-tests" where groups of young black girls were asked to choose between a white doll and a black doll- “The first black girl immediately picks up the white doll, and the next four young black girls choose the same. Of the group, only two picked the darker-skinned doll.” The article continues with the interviewer asking the young girls certain questions such as “why she chose the “bad” doll the way she did, the girl had a surprising answer: “It’s black.” eventually the article comes to a very sad conclusion. Most of these girls have already developed a self-loathing attitude towards themselves and insecure thoughts and feelings that ultimately dealt with internalized racism.
This is completely in contrast to the essay “My First Black Barbie: Transforming the Image” by Sharon Raynor. The author of this story took the image of the black Barbie and didn’t let it negatively reinforce any perceptions about her image. At such a young age she already knew that her “first black Barbie blurred the lines between race, class, and gender because it became a symbol of acceptance, identity, and power. It allowed me, as a young girl, to identify with something that somewhat resembled me and to challenge the perception of others.” As she grew, her love for black Barbie dolls did not waver, in fact she went on to become an avid collector of them while promoting this idea of not falling to the stereotypical image of “white America’s standards of beauty”. Society can have such an affect on young impressionable children, like in the first article, and she wants to communicate to those girls the importance of embracing your uniqueness and seeing beauty in oneself that might not be so evident in the way certain black dolls look. Barbie is still such a magical part of a young girls childhood and it has the “power to transcend them beyond their tiny worlds of being misunderstood and unaccepted.” to hopefully a place of confidence in their self-image.
http://feminspire.com/how-racism-affects-children-the-doll-test/
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