In some ways, the discharge of “Black Barbie: A Documentary” was inevitable. Months after “Barbie” hit theaters and melted the minds of white feminists in all places, an examination of the really groundbreaking path of the one Black doll on the periphery of that film appears marginally needed.
That’s partly as a result of popular culture has been in a yearslong “representation” part through which, for instance, a movie that rightfully asserts the existence of Blackness in a stereotypically white area like Barbie’s is typically thought of important for that alone. However is “Black Barbie” good? It sometimes appears like that needs to be much less necessary than what it’s about.
From writer-director Lagueria Davis, “Black Barbie” tells the doll’s origin story, partly by way of the testimonies of the Black girls who helped carry her to fruition. A kind of girls is the filmmaker’s personal aunt: Beulah Mae Mitchell, who in 1955 was one of many first and solely Black workers at Mattel employed as a toy tester.
This affectionate and private spirit is an undercurrent of the documentary, through which Davis can be a personality. By means of voice-over narration, she tells the viewers that she’s anti-doll or, maybe extra precisely, a Barbie skeptic who’s initially unable to see why so many individuals, significantly Black girls like her aunt, would nonetheless right now be captivated by a toy.
Most of “Black Barbie” — the entire first hour of its 90 minutes, to be actual — illuminates that by way of a long-gestating narrative round illustration. Previous to 1980, all Barbies had been white. It wasn’t till Mattel employed its first Black designer — Kitty Black Perkins, who’s interviewed within the documentary — in 1978 that the fact of a Black Barbie was severely thought of.
Earlier than then, it was simply one thing that Mitchell and some others pitched to the in any other case white and noncommittal Mattel workforce. With Perkins main the cost, Black Barbie was born. And subsequently, a era of Black ladies — on the danger of sounding trite, although that will mimic lots of the sentiments repeated in “Black Barbie” — started to see themselves mirrored within the dolls.
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“Crowning this doll as Barbie is telling the world that Black is beautiful, too,” actor Ashley Blaine Featherson says within the movie.
Former Miss Black California Isis Mckenzie Johnson will get emotional fascinated with what the doll meant to her: “There was nothing that I could relate to when I watched television that I could associate with myself and find an escape from the reality that was beating me up because of the way that I looked.”
Monica L. Bailey, a group coordinator and storyteller, recollects placing hair grease on her white Barbie dolls and coloring their eyes brown to attach them to her. “Having that as a standard made me and other Black girls feel inadequate,” she says. “I needed to be them.”
She begins to cry throughout what she says subsequent: “I just remember not feeling like I was beautiful because of my skin and my hair texture, and being around people who didn’t look like me, didn’t accept me. It was very trying.”
There are a number of extra moments like that all through “Black Barbie,” efficiently capturing the doll’s impression on Black ladies particularly. However on the identical time, these really feel heavy-handed and don’t actually problem the narrative or transfer it past what you may count on to see in a narrative like this.
So as to add to that, there are platitudes about Black Barbie from others interviewed — like “it allowed the Black girl to be the heroine of the story,” a line from Patricia A. Turner, a professor within the African American Research Division on the College of California, Los Angeles.
Or this be aware about white Barbie from Shonda Rhimes, an government producer of the movie: “When you’ve gone your whole life and have never seen anything made in your own image, there is damage done.”
“Black Barbie” additionally consists of interviews with numerous Black girls who had been firsts in their very own proper and now have Barbie dolls modeled after them. Nevertheless it feels as if their accomplishments are being likened to the existence of a toy.
Amongst them are Misty Copeland, the primary Black lady to develop into principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre; Ibtihaj Muhammad, the primary lady to put on a hijab whereas competing for the U.S. within the Olympics; and Rhimes, the primary lady to create three hit exhibits with greater than 100 episodes every.
Davis’ obvious effort to have firsts celebrating a primary, whereas as hackneyed as among the earlier moments within the movie, will get the purpose throughout. However “Black Barbie” highlights a much more fascinating assertion in its final act because the movie interrogates the real-world impression of Barbie on racially various youngsters right now, which lastly shakes the desk on this in any other case typical story.
“I think Barbie is not going to do anything that you have not done,” says Antwann Michael Simpkins, a candidate of philosophy in UCLA’s Sociology Division. “And that’s on the parent end, as well as Mattel’s end. I don’t want to place onto Barbie the work that we should be doing as a society to dismantle.”
Simpkins goes on to counsel that neither Barbie nor Mattel ought to bear the only duty of affirming kids’s self-worth and id.
“The ultimate in-work 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,” Simpkins provides. “Until we are doing that work, we’re just playing with ourselves.”
That is such a mic-drop second that the documentary actually simply strikes on to the following scene fully. However, fortunately, it doesn’t drift away from precise conversations within the classroom and the actual world, making the final half hour of “Black Barbie” essentially the most fulfilling half.
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That’s as a result of it does what the majority of the movie isn’t daring sufficient to do: discover the restrictions and, oftentimes, the futility of illustration, in addition to among the dialogues round it.
For instance, “Black Barbie” re-creates Mamie and Kenneth Clark’s “doll test” from the Nineteen Forties, when the 2 psychologists confirmed youngsters a Black doll and a white doll — an identical in each means besides the colour of their pores and skin — and requested them which they one most well-liked. The outcomes typically concluded that youngsters throughout the racial spectrum had been conditioned to suppose the white doll was higher.
Past its eye-opening roundtable of researchers and educators, led by Amirah Saafir, a professor of kid and adolescent research, “Black Barbie” follows relationship knowledgeable Yeshiva Davis, a licensed marriage and household therapist, as she duplicates the doll check right now. This time, she makes use of dolls spanning the racial and gender spectrum.
The conclusions should not a lot completely different than they had been within the Nineteen Forties.
At one level within the movie, a younger Black boy factors to a white Barbie doll when requested which is prettiest, whereas a number of Black ladies think about a number of of the Black Barbies fairly and take satisfaction in the truth that they affirm their very own magnificence. However when requested which of the Barbies is the actual Barbie, all of them level to the white doll.
It’s a startling reflection of how far we haven’t come, regardless of the primary hour of the movie painstakingly ruminating on the alternative. Or possibly it’s extra that illustration is relative. Actor Gabourey Sidibe, as an example, chides the look of the unique Black Barbie for being “light-skinned,” whereas others level out the dearth of kinks in her Afro.
“I preferred that color,” Perkins says plainly when requested concerning the Barbie’s pores and skin tone.
The beginning of Black Barbie confirmed that change was attainable within the toy world. However how a lot has it really achieved in the actual world, particularly right now when kids, as highlighted in different scenes all through “Black Barbie,” are extra explicit concerning the photos they need to ingest?
It’s not simply concerning the existence of a product, the toy’s booming reputation and even the billions of {dollars} it makes. It’s about how youngsters really feel about themselves, past the power to play with a doll which may appear like them. Whereas their self-affirmation on account of the toy is unsure, the success of the nonetheless largely white and male Mattel has primarily all the time been assured.
In reality, within the years after Perkins and her successor, Stacey McBride-Irby, left Mattel, a white man named Invoice Greening grew to become the designer of Black Barbie. “Black Barbie,” gratefully, doesn’t shrink back from difficult why that’s, together with in interviews with Greening and others at Mattel that tout how far the doll has come whereas sometimes deflecting legitimate criticism.
(Awkwardly, Mattel appears to have thought of the problems raised within the documentary, for the reason that movie’s postscript features a assertion noting examples of progress. These embody the corporate’s Future Leaders Innovating Play initiative, which supplies internships to Black undergrads throughout the nation. It additionally explains that three members in this system have been employed as full-time workers.)
Like with final 12 months’s “Barbie,” the query turns into whether or not commercialized illustration is sufficient to fulfill underserved communities, or if we’re going to do the real-world work of demolishing societal, instructional and familial conditioning that influences self-worth beginning at a younger age.
We will discuss illustration because it pertains to the artwork we devour or the toys that we gleefully play with all day — and we have already got, exhaustively. However past making white companies more cash, it actually does too typically really feel like, to borrow Simpkins’ phrases in “Black Barbie,” we’re simply enjoying with ourselves.
“Black Barbie: A Documentary” hits Netflix on Wednesday, June 19.
