This will break your heart

Kudos to the young woman who made the video this news report discusses--but ho. lee. shit. Though as Tami says, this shouldn't be surprising at all:

If the black version of Barbie was so damned great, then the little white girls on the commercial would be playing with her, too.

I remember when Pseudonymous Kid was a baby, buying him a waldorf doll with a little baby that snapped onto the mommy dolls breast via a clever snap "nipple." I deliberately chose a doll with dark brown skin and dreds, in part because he already had a doll (that had been his father's as a child) that was a little blond-haired boy (being German and all). Later I found an absolutely gorgeous black doll in a used furniture store for $10--not a cuddly type doll, a display-type doll. Now, I am *not* a doll person, but this particular little girl was absolutely beautiful, so for $10 I bought it, took it home, examined it, found the name of the maker on one of the arms or a leg or something, looked it up, and found out it was a $400 doll.

So for a while PK had two black dolls and one white one. And of course no one ever said anything one way or the other about it, but I was definitely more "aware"--self-conscious about being self-conscious about it, if you know what I mean--that two of the dolls were black than I was of his having dolls at all (being a boy) or about the fact that the two black dolls were also little girls, and he was a boy. Crossing the race line was a much bigger deal, toy-wise, than crossing the gender one.

Those two dolls, by the way, were later sent by Mr. B. to his brother's daughter. Who is mixed-race. He didn't send the little boy doll, probably because that doll is "his" doll and he has an emotional attachment to it the way we all do to our very favorite kids toys, the ones we would never give away even to our most adored niece or nephew. But I, at least, would probably not have thought to send the dolls to my sister's youngest, who is white, even though PK himself never got into any of the dolls--he was (and is) a stuffed animal kid, like I was as a girl.

Now, I did resist sending the dolls to baby E., mostly because I kind of felt sentimental about them myself, but they tended to sit prettily on my dresser every once in a while when I cleaned between long stretches of sitting there under enormous piles of clothes. But I would be lying if I didn't say that aside from the "maybe she will like these dolls that are otherwise being mostly ignored" thought, the fact that she and the dolls were both "black" was a big part of why I agreed that he could send them.

So yeah. The video is absolutely horrifying. But those little girls and boys aren't thinking anything about their dolls that I don't think myself, even though none of us--watch the little girl at 1:30--wants to have to admit it.