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Black Barbie. Found a 1980’s Fashion Black Barbie with “Black is Beautiful” written on it with “She’s Black! She’s Beautiful! She’s Dynamite!” I have mixed feelings about this barbie. Although I agree that Black is beautiful and that Womyn of Color deserve to feel justified in their beauty, the concept of Barbie has haunted me in so many ways with image issues, body insecurities, and standards of “beauty.” Does it take the company of Barbie to create a Black Barbie to make being black beautiful? I know this concept came from the empowerment of Black people and I feel that to commemorate this time period is good but there is so much more than this being an homage to “Black is Beautiful.”
As a child I had tons of barbies… too many actually. I had one Asian Barbie and one Black Barbie and I cut all their hair off and made them wear practically nothing while all my White Barbies wore all the nice new clothes and lived in the house and drove the corvette around with Ken. Now that I look at it further with more depth, I can see internalized racism, self hate, and deeply rooted issue of image that have haunted me into adulthood. As a womyn of color I am always deconstructing how these things have created me into who I am and the issues I face. I am constantly haunted by a need to be beautiful, to look good, to lose weight, to fit some awful illusion of perfection. I am always trying to challenge these notions by looking toward other inspirations of beauty that I cannot find in beauty magazines, mainstream media and on billboards.
It reminds me of an the Clark Experiment, where black children were given a black and a white doll to choose from… I heard that it was redone in Harlem for a short film that explores black girls’ ideals of beauty. Article “A Girl Like Me” or watch a youtube of the short film: A Girl like Me. A majority of the black children picked the white dolls over blacks dolls… it’s so sad.
No woman can look like barbie, whether she is Black or White or Asian or Indian or whatever.. and the majority of the barbies are WHITE. So why do we give our daughters, sisters, and children such things? It has followed me into adulthood, into the deepest part of my mind that I cannot see. I do not blame just barbie, but what she represents in terms of some fake reality or illusion. I cannot wait to see the day when our representations of beauty become universal, holistic, full of color and real to who we are than some idealized wet dream of the mainstream white male.
Notes
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crawphishes reblogged this from diasporichues
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