Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll by Lord; M. G

Author:Lord; M. G
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Antiques & Collectibles, Dolls, Barbie dolls
ISBN: 9780864924094
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2004-05-25T00:34:23+00:00

ROGER WILKINS, A CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST AND ASSISTANT Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson, is probably not the first person one thinks to contact when one is doing a book about Barbie. But I ran into him in the greenroom at Cable News Network in December 1993, and, because I tend to be single-minded about my research, our conversation turned to Barbie. Wilkins told me that his sister, who is in her early forties, had been opposed to Barbie dolls because they coded European standards of beauty. Moreover, to encourage her daughter to take pride in her heritage, she had given the girl a Swahili name. But when Mattel came out with its Shani line, his sister did an about-face. Shani, which means "marvelous" in Swahili, was, in fact, her daughter's name. And the child now has several of the dolls.

"We are living in a moment where 'the other' has a certain kind of commercial value," Ann duCille dryly observes. One reason is, of course, that racial and ethnic minorities have significant disposable income. But other forces had an influence, too.

In 1985, Dr. Darlene Powell Hopson and Dr. Derek S. Hopson, two married psychologists, duplicated Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark's experiments using dolls to explore black children's self-esteem. Their results were shocking: they suggested that in the forty years since the Clarks did their research—despite landmark legal decisions, acts of Congress, and the civil rights movement—little had changed. Sixty-five percent of the black children they interviewed preferred white dolls, and 76 percent said the black dolls "looked bad" to them. "It was so disheartening," Darlene Powell Hopson told me. "I remember sitting at McDonald's—of all places—in Harlem, crying, saying, T don't want to do this. I can change my topic. I can do something different.' " She had begun collecting the data for her dissertation in psychology at Hofstra University. But her husband, who had already earned his Ph.D., urged her to forge on, which she did.

When Powell Hopson and her husband presented their study at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting, it was greeted with "despair around the world." The New York Times published their findings on the front page of its science section, and they were picked up by periodicals ranging from Essence to USA Today. This led in 1990 to the publication of their book, Different and Wonderful: Raising Black Children in a Race-Conscious Society, which not only details their research, but suggests ways that parents of color can help their children develop a healthy sense of self.

Different and Wonderful caught the eye of Mattel, when it was beginning plans for a new line of African-American fashion dolls to be introduced in the fall of 1991. The key in-house players on the project were African-American: Mattel product manager Deborah Mitchell, who has since left the company, and designer Kitty Black Perkins, who clothed the original Black Barbie. Mattel also brought in an African-American publicist, Alberta Morgan Rhodes from Morgan Orchid Rhodes, a firm that specialized in target marketing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.