Given the chance to play with either a Black doll or a white doll, the Clarks found that, time after time, the children preferred the white doll. “I had Black Barbie sheets, Black Barbie pajamas,” she said. To its credit, Mattel has made strides to make its Black Barbie dolls more “ethnically correct”: In the 1980s, for instance, they tasked Kitty Black Perkins, a Black Mattel designer, with conceptualizing a doll that channeled Black popular culture and aesthetics of the time. Mattel’s Shani dolls, also created by Black Perkins, went even further: For the first time at Mattel, Black dolls were stylized with supposedly different molds than white dolls. In 2018, the company faced internet ridicule after posting a photo of a Black Barbie that wore black cornrows on one side of her head and a blond curly weave on the other: “Does anyone black work there,” one commenter asked.

Source: Huffington Post February 28, 2023 04:38 UTC